The View From 1776

--------------------
It was in Germany that the world’s first welfare state was inaugurated.  The history of socialistic welfare systems makes clear that, while for public relations purposes intended to benefit the people, they are in fact merely power instruments for the collectivized National State.

Tom G. Palmer, a Fellow at the Cato Institute, noted in his February 3, 2000, letter to the editors of the Wall Street Journal:

“Bismarck considered the creation of Germany’s social security system his greatest accomplishment..... He defended compulsory social security in 1881 on the grounds that it made people dependent on the state: “Whoever has a pension for his old age is far more content and far easier to handle than one who has no such prospect...”

Bertrand Russell, one of the world’s most prominent socialist theoreticians, much earlier had made the same point.  In “German Social Democracy,” his 1896 study of socialism in Germany, Lord Russell wrote:

“.... Bismarck’s measures of ‘social reform.’ These measures, which provided insurance against accident, sickness, and old age, were, so far as they went, socialistic.  It was Bismarck’s aim, first to muzzle the official Social Democrats [socialists], and then, by a series of small bribes, to wean the proletariat from their adherence to revolutionary principles.  Bismarck’s State Socialism has excited the admiration of many critics, and it is often supposed that the Socialists have been ungrateful in not supporting it more cordially.  But in reality the name is very misleading, for there is much more State than Socialism in his policy.  This policy may be briefly described as military and bureaucratic despotism, tempered by almsgiving.”

Lord Russell’s depiction is completely in congruence with Alexis de Tocqueville’s descriptions, in his 1835 “Democracy in America,” and in his 1856 “The Old Regime and the French Revolution,” of the effects of socialism on the French citizenry.  Tocqueville’s summation was that Frenchmen became largely self-centered, concerned only about their share of government largesse and indifferent to their neighbors or to the greater national interests.  So long as they received their benefits and the rulers gave lip service to the Revolutionary slogan of Liberty, Equality, and Brotherhood, French citizens were prepared to accept any degree of political despotism.

This picture obviously applies to the welfare-dependent populations in New Orleans and most of our other cities.  The effect of dependency is servility and indifference, coupled with resentment that benefits are not larger, boiling over into aggressive hostility at any provocation, as we have seen in repeated riots, burning, and looting across the nation since enactment of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

Parallels between German and American history are suggestive.  Socialism in both countries arose out of the effects of industrialization and economic depression.

Just as the United States came into being as a federation of formerly independent states in 1789, the German Empire of 1867 represented an amalgamation of innumerable independent duchies, kingdoms, principalities, and independent cities that had been the seats of government in medieval times.  The national governments that ensued, however, were quite different. 

In effecting the consolidation of the German Empire, in some cases by military force against independent German states, Bismarck relied upon the dominance of the Prussian army to install the Prussian Kaiser as head of state.  In many cases, Bismarck simply ignored the constitution and ruled by arbitrary fiat, as well as by political and diplomatic cunning.  His imposition of Social Security programs in the 1880s was an answer to the unrest arising from the 1873 economic recession and the resulting increase of socialist party representation in the Reichstag.

In the same way, President Franklin Roosevelt used the unrest and hardship of our own 1930s Depression as the pretext for instituting a fully socialized and collectivized government here, in direct contravention of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments of the Bill of Rights. 

Whatever the President, a C-minus playboy student at Harvard, may have understood about the nature of socialism, his advisors were clearly aware that the aim was to replace our Constitution and our economic and social systems with a collectivized National State conforming to the ivory-tower, abstract designs of French philosophical perfection.

As I wrote in Judicial Activism: Part IV:

Mr. [Edmund] Wilson’s expression of liberal-socialist views in the 1930s was actually quite restrained, compared to the views expressed by economist and writer Stuart Chase, the originator of the term New Deal, adopted by Franklin Roosevelt for his 1932 campaign and his subsequent administration.

Mr. Chase said regarding the Depression, “…the cycle is a direct product of that specialization which appeared with the industrial revolution.  It is a product of laissez-faire, and the neglect to inquire what an economic system is for…There never has been control from the top, and that is the only point from which the cycle may be steadied.…I suspect it is the end of the economic system as we have known it – and suffered with it – in the past…a new deal is in order.” Mr. Roosevelt repeated this theme during his campaign and again in his first inaugural address.

What remedies did Mr. Stuart Chase propose?  “The drive of collectivism leads toward control from the top. … At bottom the conception of economic planning is science supervising a people’s housekeeping. … And so the final idea of a National Planning Board emerges; …a group which knows the past, can give capable advice as to the present, and sees into the future, especially the technological future. …The real work, the real thought, the real action must come from the technicians: that class most able, most clear-headed of all in American life, hitherto only half utilized in technical detail and in college class rooms. …This is a long-swing project we are starting, longer than the secular trend; longer than the industrial revolution itself.  Errors will be made; methods will be tried out and discarded; but the principle of control from the top must go on.”

It is also instructive to note the New Deal thesis about the relationship of the individual to the state, from which emerges the limitless penchant for agencies to regulate every action of every individual.  When direct regulatory action via executive orders or legislative acts of Congress can’t be had, liberal-socialists like the ACLU turn to judicial activism as the ploy of last resort.

Mr. Chase describes this activist paradigm: “The state is the embodiment of the whole community, and its rule of action, in theory at least, ‘the public interest.’ If your corporation is busily dynamiting the public interest, the state has the right to close you up. …To tell an American that he cannot invest his money in this project, or even to suggest that it is thrown away in that, is a bold and unheard-of step to the left; …But how else can the obsolescence rate be steadied, excess capacity and overproduction kept within bounds of market requirements, thoroughly vicious and wasteful enterprises be checked, the non-speculative investor be protected? …One of the most interesting tasks of the Planning Board will be an attempt to draw the line between those economic areas where competition is still useful and those where it has outlived its usefulness, and either is already supplanted or should be supplanted by some form of collectivism. …The balancing and regulating of man hours will, like minimum wages, operate to weed out parasitic enterprises, establishments so inefficient that they can make their margin only by driving workers through a ten or twelve hour day. …This is the program of the third road.  It is not an attempt to bolster up capitalism, it is frankly aimed at the destruction of capitalism, specifically in its most evil sense of ruthless expansion.  The redistribution of national income, the sequestration of excess profits, the control of new investments, are all designed to that end. …And woe to Supreme Courts, antiquated rights of property, checks and balances and democratic dogmas which stand in its path.”

The foundation of the Declaration of Independence was the centuries-old English understanding that gaining and holding individual political liberties against arbitrary exercise of power by the crown depended upon the sanctity of private property and the right of citizens in Parliament to resist government encroachments thereupon.  The effect of the New Deal was to reverse those centuries of political liberty and to reduce individual persons to Social Security numbers within bureaucratically determined social classes, while roughly quadrupling taxes and imposing economic controls modeled on Mussolini’s Fascist State Corporatism.

Visit MoveOff Network Members