I know it’s old but this is great stuff. Pelosi actually terminates the interview because she can’t get her way. People in Congress really believe they are above the rank and file, that they are not accountable. She ends the interview by calling the guard to remove this guy. He isn’t even raising his voice.
Check out more videos by Helfeld at his site. Great stuff.
Ronald Reagan on socialized medicine in 1961:
“Although I believe that the Iraqi people are ultimately better off without the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, I also believe that events in Iraq have reminded America of the need to use diplomacy and build international consensus to resolve our problems whenever possible.
(APPLAUSE)
Indeed, we can recall the words of Thomas Jefferson, who said, I hope that our wisdom will grow with our power and teach us that the less we use our power, the greater it will be. Today America has a dual responsibility to help Iraq forge a better future and to leave Iraq to Iraqis.”
Well, that’s probably about as much credit as George Bush will get from this generation for the work his administration performed in Iraq. History perhaps will tell a different story.
I think this was a great speech. It’s a much improved tone from the “please forgive us” stance that the administration seemed to take at the beginning of his presidency. Neither John McCain nor Hillary Clinton could have delivered such an address. It remains to be seen what effect these words will really have. Some of the partnering actions he suggests are rather trite in view of the scope of the challenge this President has chosen to tackle. Ironically, the Muslim community has many of the same criticisms for this President that Americans do - long on talk, short on action.
Still, you have to start somewhere. Here is President Obama meeting this challenge head on. It is significant that these words are coming from the President himself and not simply someone in his cabinet. Maybe he can change some opinions on both sides of the fence. There are moments in history that call for great speeches and speeches that become great moments in history. I think the entire planet earnestly hopes that this will be an example of the latter. Whether that hope can be fulfilled remains to be seen:
I haven’t got much to say about this excerpt from John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. It speaks for itself. Some will claim him for the left, others for the right. It really doesn’t matter. For one thing, the mind and work of John Steinbeck are far too deep and complex to be contained by the simplicity of some ideological label. His art is the product of precisely what he expounds upon in this excerpt - free, boundless creative spirit. What strikes me about this passage is that it goes beyond the usual artistic instinct towards non-conformity (which usually winds up being its own version of conformity). He eloquently captures the rarity, power and inestimable value of individual human ingenuity. There is no greater cause I know of than what Steinbeck articulates here:
“Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deepdrawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then - the glory - so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree he is not diminished. And I guess a man’s importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.
I don’t know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniofrm. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused.
At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?
Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.
And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man. By disparagement, by starvation, by repressions, forced direction, and the stunning hammerblows of conditioning, the free, roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted, drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species seems to have taken.
And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.
Speaking of Friedman, here’s a short but brilliant clip that was emailed to me recently. The fact that he made this point to Phil Donahue’s face on his show is just priceless. This is the essence of conservatism today. If you listen to conventional wisdom it’s always about greed, self interest, letting the rich guy step on the small guy, etc. In fact, the exact opposite is true of the modern conservative (classical liberal) tradition of great minds like George Will, FA Hayek, Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan.
Conservatism today has nothing to do with stepping on the little guy. It’s about unleashing the intellectual power and protecting the freedom of the individual. It’s about protecting the individual from aggregate and consolidated power. There has never been - nor will there ever be - a greater cause for humanity as a whole. Friedman understood and articulated this better than most:
Here’s the original source where I discovered the clip:
Powerlineblog
Two more clips of this brilliant economist that are extraordinarily relevant today. He mentions true liberalism addressed in a previous post on this site. He also points out at the end of the second clip one of the most significant and overlooked benefits of government: inefficiency - especially in a democracy. I’ve said many times on this site, efficient government is tyranny. Friedman explains it beautifully here. Everyone who cares about this country and freedom should watch these clips - especially in today’s political climate of class envy and socialism:
A familiar refrain from the “liberal” community today is objection to the stench that surrounds the term. No political candidate wants to be called a liberal. Those who align themselves closely with conventional liberalsim hate this. The tragedy though is not that liberal candidates are unable to be honest about their beliefs. Actually, the tragedy is that the term “liberal” has been plundered from its honorable intellectual roots and twisted to mean the very opposite of what it once was.
Milton Friedman, a name every American should be familiar with in these difficult economic times, discusses the commandeering of the term in the introduction to his classic work Capitalism and Freedom. In this excerpt, Friedman explains his use of the word in the book.
Many who call themselves liberals today are not really liberals at all. The term “liberal” in the classical sense centered around freedom and individuality. This is the liberal tradition that the Founding generation drew heavily from leading up to the American Revolution. Today, liberalism commonly means statism; government rationing “freedom” (IE: wealth) to individuals through empowerment as a positive right vs. government protecting the inherent freedom of the individual to act as he/she sees fit. In short, it means Al Franken liberals not Adam Smith liberals.
As with any label, it is foolish to suggest that all liberals today are statists or that all conservtives or libertarians share the same intellectual roots with classical liberals. True liberals in the classical sense are hard to find anywhere in modern America. While conservatives for example generally favor free markets, less government and lower taxes they also tend to favor such things as government intervention in television and radio programming, or restrictions on civil unions or the curbing of civil liberties in the name of causes such as the War on Terror or the War on Drugs.
The central difference however between liberals of today and classical liberals of a bygone generation lies in how they interpret the word freedom. Another great economist, FA Hayek, explains:
“To the great apostles of political freedom the word had meant freedom from coercion, freedom from the arbitrary power of other men, release from the ties which left the individual no choice but obedience to the orders of a superior to whom he was attached. The new freedom promised, however, was to be freedom from necessity, release from the compulsion of the circumstances which inevitably limit the range of choice of all of us, although for some very much more than for others. Before man could be truly free, the ‘despotism of physical want’ had to be broken, the ‘restraints of the economic system’ relaxed. Freedom in this sense is, of course, merely another name for power or wealth.”
Freedom means that you have the liberty to live your life as you see fit - whatever the circumstances of your birth may be. It is likely for example that a person born to a wealthy family has certain advantages over someone born to a poor faimly. Current liberals will argue that the poor man is less free and that the state should perhaps intervene on his behalf (Barack Obama calls this “neighborly”). Classical liberals were wise enough to understand that a government attempting to level those inequalities was just as dangerous as one trying to preserve them. It should do neither. Freedom should be protected - not granted - by government. Liberty not endowed at birth but bestowed by government is not liberty at all. It is slavery.
“It is extremely convenient to have a label for the political and economic viewpoint elaborated in this book. The rightful and proper label is liberalism. Unfortunately, ‘As a supreme, if unintended compliment, the enemies of the system of private enterprise have thought it wise to appropriate its label*’, so that liberalism has, in the United States, come to have a very different meaning than it did in the neneteenth century or does today over much of the Continent of Europe.
As it developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the intellectual movement that went under the name of liberalism emphasized freedom as the ultimate goal and the individual as the ultimate entity in the society. It supported laissez faire at home as a means of reducing the role of the state in economic affairs and thereby enlarging the role of the individual; it supported free trade abroad as a means of linking the nations of the world together peacefully and democratically. In political matters, it supported the development of representative government and of parliamentary insitutions, reduction in the arbitrary power of the state, and protection of the civil freedoms of individuals.
Beginning in the late neneteenth century,and especially after 1930 in the United States, the term liberalism came to be associated with a very different emphasis, particularly in economic policy. It came to be associated with a readiness to rely primarily on the state rather than on private voluntary arrangements to achieve objectives regarded as deisrable. The catchwords became welfare and equality rather than freedom. In the name of welfare and equality, the twentieth-century liberal has come to favor a revival of the very policies of state intervention and paternalism against which classical liberalism fought. In the very act of turning the clock back to seventeenth-century mercantilism, he is fond of castigating true liberals as reactionary!
The change in the meaning attached to the term liberalism is more striking in econmic matters than in political. The twentieth-century liberal, like the nineteenth-century liberal, favors parliamentary institutions, representative government, civil rights, and so on. Yet even in political matters, there is a notable difference. Jealous of liberty, and hence fearful of centralized power, whether in governmental or private hands, the nineteenth-century liberal favored political decentralization. Committed to action and confident of the beneficence of power so long as it is in the hands of a government ostensibly controlled by the electorate, the twentieth-century liberal favors centralized government. He will resolve any doubt about where power should be located in favor of the state instead of the city, of the federal government instead of the state, and a wolrd organization instead of a national government.
Because of the corruption of the term liberalism, the views that formerly went under the name are now often labeled conservatism. But this is not a satisfactory alternative. The nineteenth-century liberal was a radical, both in the etymological sense of going to the root of the matter, and in the political sense of favoring major changes in social institutions. So too must be his modern heir. We do not wish to conserve the state interventions that have interfered so greatly with our freedom, though, of course, we do wish to conserve those that have promoted it. Moreover, in practice, the term conservatism has come to cover so wide a range of views, and views so incompatible with one another, that we shall no doubt see the growth of hyphenated designations, such as libertarian-conservative and artistocratic-conservative.
Partly because of my reluctance to surrender the term to proponents of measures that would destroy liberty, partly because I cannot find a better alernative, I shall resolve these difficulties by using the word liberalism in its original sense - as the doctrinse pertaining to a free man.”
* This quotation is attributed to Joseph Schumpeter in his work History of Economic Analysis.
If that wasn’t the title of Rudy Giuliani’s speech to the 2008 Republican Convention this week, it should have been. If you haven’t seen it, you certainly need to. You will not find a more clearly articulated evaluation of the choices facing the country in this year’s Presidential election:
The final litmus test of a solid Republican performance of course is when the AP dreams up imaginary news events and then pretends they have some sort of real life bearing on actual events. Voila:
“Republicans may have been betrayed by the giant video screen that has been an effective backdrop for convention speakers. Giuliani spoke in front of a New York City skyline rising out of the water, but in close-up shots it seemed he was backed by a wall of undulating mud.”
Also, Giuliani’s shoes were untied. Maybe Bauder was one of those kids in school that, when assigned a book report on Treasure Island wrote, “I really liked all the pretty pictures.”
To his credit as this article points out, Obama was opposed to the catastrophic idea of slavery reparations long before his Presidential campaign. Great. However, he’s flip flopped on so many issues since he clinched the pennant and he’s surrounded with so many aids and supporters who think this is a good idea, can we really trust him? The same goes for McCain of course and his “i’m not raising taxes” … “Oh yes I am” stances, but I digress. All of these politicians are the same.
Slavery reparations is one of the worst ideas ever to confront this country. And as usual, this is not the first time in history that crooks and villains have suggested leveraging the guilt of past generations to pillage the current generation in an effort to aggrandize their own personal wealth and prestige. Guilt is a powerful tool and we are overloaded with it in this country. For example:
One reparations advocate, Vernellia Randall, a law professor at the University of Dayton, bluntly responded: “I think he’s dead wrong.”
She said aid to the poor in general won’t close the gaps — poor blacks would still trail poor whites, and middle-class blacks would still lag behind middle-class whites. Instead, assistance must be aimed directly at the people facing the after-effects of slavery and Jim Crow laws, she said.
“People say he can’t run and get elected if he says those kinds of things,” Randall said. “I’m like, well does that mean we’re really not ready for a black president?”
When I read that, I was like “Dude, is this chick like seriously a law professor? No way!” Never mind.
In essence, Vernellia Randall says that maybe we’re not ready for a black President because we’re not ready to shake down the taxpayers for an influx of cash that will somehow be distributed to make the collective wealth of blacks equal to the collective wealth of whites. It’s OK because we’re redressing past discriminations (IE: retribution).
Notice most importantly though that she says “aid to the poor in general won’t close the gaps”. She does not mention the source of the aid. If you’re going to specifically target the beneficiaries, shouldn’t you also single out the contributers? So, my question then is this: where will this money come from? Taxes on the public in general include taxing black people the last time I checked. All blacks must be facing these after-effects of Jim Crow laws and slavery. Will black taxpayers be absolved from contributing to this fund? If not, aren’t they being doubly exploited?
Very similar nonsense confronted Edmund Burke’s generation in Revolutionary France. The Catholic Church was chopped up and parcelled out to the highest government bidder to settle the corrupt debts of a bankrupt and villainous majority. According to Burke, the leadership roused the mob over crimes committed by the clergy in the past to fuel anger in the present. Individuals who had nothing to do with crimes committed in a different generation were held responsible and destroyed because the people in power at the time saw the opportunity to exploit the guilt of the existing generation to their own personal advantage. The results in France were devastating and appalling.
Burke here shows the absurdity of exploiting the past for the purpose of allowing certain individuals or groups in the present to revel in confiscated wealth. He goes on to show how ill motives morph with the times. In other words, 60 years ago the black community was exploited, abused and virtually enslaved in this country. Now, the very banner of that community is taken up in an effort to exploit a new generation of taxpayers and citizens: “It is thus with all those, who, attending only to the shell and husk of history, think they are waging war with intolerance, pride and curelty, are authorizing and feeding the same odious vices in different factions, and perhaps in worse.”
Here’s the excerpt in full:
“If there had been any just cause for this new religious persecution, the atheistic libellers, who act as trumpeters to animate the populace to plunder, do not love any body so much as not to dwell with complacence on the vices of the existing clergy. This they have not done. They find themselves obliged to rake into the histories of former ages (which they have ransacked with a malignant and profligate industry) for every instance of oppression and persecution which has been made by that body or in its favour, in order to justify, upon very iniquitous, because very illogical, principles of retaliation, their own persecutions, and their own cruelties. After destroying all other genealogies and family distinctions, they invent a sort of pedigree of other crimes. It is not very just to chastise men for the offences of their natural ancestors: but to take the fiction of ancestry in a corporate succession, as a ground for punishing men who have no relation to guilty acts, except in names and general descriptions, is a sort of refinement in injustice belonging to the philosophy of this enlightened age. The Assembly punishes men, many, if not most, of whom abhor the violent conduct of eccliesiastics in as loud and as as strong in the expression of that sense, if they were not well aware of the purposes for which all this declamation is employed.
Corporate bodies are imomortal for the good of the members, but not fo their punishment. Nations themselves are such corporations. As well might we in England think of waging inexpiable war upon all Frenchmen for the evils which they have brought upon us in the several periods of our mutual hostilities. You might, on your part, think yourselvs justified in falling upon all Englishmen on account of the unparalleled calamaties brought on the people of France by the unjust invasions of our Henries and our Edwards. indeed we should be mutually justified in this exterminatory war upon each other, full as much as you are in the unprovoked persecution of your present countrymen, on account of the conduct of men of the same name in other times.
We do not draw the moral lessons we might from history. On the contrary, without care it may be used to vitiate our minds and to destroy our happiness. In history a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind. It may, in the perversion, serve for a magazine, furnishing offensive and defensive weapons for parties in church and state, and supplying the means of keeping alive, or reviving, dissesions and animosities, and adding fuel to civil fury. History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the rain of disorderly appetites, which shake the public with the same
-troublous storms that toss
The private state, and render life unsweet.
These vices are the causes of those storms. Religion, morals, laws, prerogatives, pirvileges, liberties, rights of men, are the pretexts. The pretexts are always found in some specious appearance of a real good. You would not secure men from tyranny and sedition, by rooting out of the mind the principles to which these fraudulent pretexts apply? If you did, you would root out everything that is valuable in the human breast. As these are the pretexts, so the ordinary actors and instruments in great public evils are kings, priests, magistrates, senates, parliaments, national assemblies, judges, and captains. You would not cure the evil by resolving, that there should be no more monarchs, nor ministers of state, nor of the gospel; no interpreters of law; no general officers; no public councils. You might change the names. The things in some shape must remain. A certain quantum of power must always exist in the community, in some hands, and under some appelation. Wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names; to the causes of evil which are permanent, not to the occasionial organs by which they act, and the transitory modes in which they appear. Otherwise you will be wise historically, a fool in practice. Seldom have two ages the same fashion in their pretexts and the same modes of mischief. Wickedness is a little more inventive. Whilst you are discussing fashion, the fashion is gone by. The very same vice assumes a new body. The spirit transmigrates; and far from losing its principle of life by the change of its appearance, it is renovated in its new organs with a fresh vigrour of juvenile activity. It walks abroad, it continues its ravages, whilst you are gibbeting the carcase, or demolishing the tomb. You are terrifying yourselves with ghosts and apparitions, whilst your house is the haunt of robbers. It is thus with all those, who, attending only to the shell and husk of hisotry, think they are waging war with intolerance, pride and curelty, are authorizing and feeding the same odious vices in different factions, and perhaps in worse.”
…
“If there was in France, as in other countries there visibly is, a great abatement, rather than any increase of these vices, instead of loading the present clergy wiht the crimes of other men, and the odious character of other times, in common equity they ought to be praised, encouraged, and supported, in their departure from a spirit which disgraced their predecessors, and for having assumed a temper of mind and manners more suitable to their sacred function.”
Edmund Burke here describes the combination of monied interests and what we might call the intelligentsia in an effort to overthrow the existing power structure composed of the king, the nobility and the clergy in France. They were brutally successful. There are some scholars who will argue that the horrifying brutality of the French Revolution was a necessary precursor to modern democracies - badge of pride that they apparently are. Perhaps there is some truth to that. Nevertheless, when studying the period, one seems to come across a great deal of sympathy and apology for the horrors that occurred simply because they reflected “the will of the people” and because they brought about “change.”
Burke was certainly not one of the apologists. I find this particular passage relevant today because like other excerpts on this site, it seems eerily familiar. It is indeed true (and visible today) that “to command the opinion, the first step is to establish a dominion over those who direct it.” Many arrogant, wealthy people of learning in this country today, “fond of distinguishing themselves,” can often be found “endeavouring to confine the reputation of sense, learning and taste to themselves or their followers.” If you are not sensitive (read: partial) to their way of thinking, well then you just aren’t intellectual. Intelligence leaves no room for dissent dont’ you know.
Burke also speaks of the religious zeal with which irreligious aims are pursued, the unification of “obnoxious wealth and restless, desperate poverty,” and the Machiavellian indifference to the means in favor of presumably desirable ends (”To them it was indifferent whether these changes were to be accomplished by the thunderbolt of despotism, or by the earthquake of popular commotion”). All of these evils can be seen in various manifestations across the political spectrum today, from the relentless and fanatical pursuit of global warming policies at all costs to the instigation of the poor and unfortunate against the “rich.” The tools of class envy, mass propoganda, fanatical and immoderate zeal, and the arrogance of status, education and wealth are as present today as they were in revolutionary France.
I will not argue here that any members of the modern intelligentsia are trying to foment violent rebellion in this country - though it is not hard to find people who would argue otherwise. There is no doubt however that the modern cause of “change” is an object dear to the hearts of many “intellectuals” who generally regard the values and standards of the past with great contempt - and that really is the point of Burke’s Reflections. Change in a country, while often a good thing, should be carefully considered. He who seeks to fundamentally alter the work of the state should go about it “as to the wounds of a father, with pious awe and trembling solicitude.” In other words, with all due respect to those who came before you.
The great flaw of statesmanship - in every age - is a propensity to get so caught up in “new” ideas and modes of thinking that one is wont to callously disregard the work of great minds that came before him. This has proven (France is but one of many examples) to usually have disastrous consequences. We bandy about terms like progress, advancement, evolution. The Supreme Court once referred to it as “the progress of a maturing society.” Progress is fine but not all change is good and not all maturity is desirable. For example, Nazi Germany could be described as the maturity of the Weimar Republic. An extreme example to be sure but perhaps a lesson that mankind continues to disregard in its myopic focus on progress and change.
George Will, speaking about baseball with his usual eloquence, recently opined “The problem is, progress always goes on too long, leaving us waist deep in unintended consequences. Soon we are saying ‘adios’ to cherished familiarities.”
Arrogance after all is not the belief that you know more than the next guy. Nor is it even the belief that we now know better as a society than those who preceded us. No, arrogance is the certainty with which one thinks that he knows anything at all. As Thomas Edison once wrote, “It’s obvious that we dont’ know one millionth of one percent about anything.” That is the wisdom that is too often cast aside in the name of progress. The past is not always better, but neither is it always worse.
“Along with the monied interest, a new description of men had grown up, with whom that interest soon formed a close and marked union; I mean the political men of letters. Men of letters, fond of distinguishing themselves, are rarely averse to innovation. Since the decline of the life and greatness of Louis the Fourteenth, they were not so much cultivated either by him, or by the regent, or the successors to the crown; nor were they engaged to the court by favours and emoluments so systematically as during the splendid period of that ostentatious and not impolitic reign. What they lost in the old court protection, they endeavoured to make up by joining in a sort of incorporation of their own; to which the two academies of France, and afterwards the vast undertaking of the Encyclopaedia, carried on by a society of these gentlemen, did not a little to contribute.
The literary cabal had some years ago formed something like a regular plan for the destruction of the Christian religion. This object they pursued with a degree of zeal which hitherto had been discovered only in the propogators of some system of piety. They were possessed with a spirit of proselytism in the most fanatical degree; and from thence, by an easy progress, with the spirit of persecution according to their means. What was not to be done towards their great end by any direct or immediate act, might be wrought by a longer process through the medium of opinion. To command the opinion, the first step is to establish a dominion over those who direct it. They contrived to possess themselves, with great method and perseverance, of all the avenues to literary fame. Many of them indeed stood high in the ranks of literature and science. The world had done them justice; and in favour of general talents forgave the evil tendency of their peculiar pirinciples. This was true liberality; which they returned by endeavouring to confine the reputation of sense, learning, and taste to themselves or their followers. I will venture to say that this narrow, exclusive spirit has not been less prejudicial to literaure and to taste, than to morals and true philosophy. These atheistical fathers have a bigotry of theri own; and they have learnt to talk against monks with the spirit of a monk. But in some things they are men of the world. The resources of intrigue are called in to supply the defects of argument and wit. To this system of literary monopoly was joined an unremitting industry to blacken and discredit in every way, and by every means, all those who did not hold to their faction. To those who have observed the spirit of their conduct, it has long been clear that nothing was wanted but the power of carrying the intolerance of the tongue and of the pen into a persecution which would strike at property, liberty and life.
The desultory and faint persecution carried on against them, more from compliance with form and decency, than with serious resentment, neither weakened their strength, nor relaxed their efforts. The issue of the whole was, that, what with opposition, and what with success, a violent and malignant zeal, of a kind hitherto unkown in the world, had taken an entire possession of their miinds, and rendered their whole conversation, which otherwise would have been pleasing and instructive, perfectly disgusting. A spirit of cabal, intrigue and proselytism, pervaded all their thoughts, words, and actions. And, as controversial zeal soon turns its thoughts on force, they began to insinuate themselves into a correspondence with foreign princes; in hopes, through their authority, which at first they flattered, they might bring about the changes they had in view. To them it was indifferent whether these changes were to be accomplished by the thunderbolt of despotism, or by the earthquake of popular commotion. The corresondence between this cabal and the late king of Prussia will throw no small light upon the spirit of all their proceedings. For the same purpose for which they intrigued with princes, they cultivated, in a distinguished manner, the monied interest of France; and partly though the means funrished by those whose peculiar offices gave them the most extensive and certain means of communication, they carefully occupied all the avenues to opinion.
Writers, especially when they act in a body, and with one direction, have great influence on the public mind; the alliance, therefore, of these writers with the monied interest had no small effect in removing the popular odium and envy which attended that species of wealth. These writers, like the propogators of all novelties, pretended to a great zeal for the poor, and the lower orders, whislt in their satires they rendered hateful, by every exaggeration, the faults of courts, of nobility, and of priesthood. They became a sort of demagogues. They served as a link to unite, in favour of one object, obnoxious wealth to restless and desperate poverty.”
Perhaps the greatest man ever to occupy the White House, Theodore Roosevelt possessed a multitude of qualities. He was almost like all of the greatest Founding Fathers embodied in a single person. Jefferson’s vision and extraordinary breadth of knowledge; Washington’s leadership, courage and ability to command his peers; Adams’ voracious appetite for reading, writing, learning and pointed, honest commentary; Madison’s wisdom and profound knowedge of Constitutional principles; Henry’s eloquence and powers of oratory; Hamilton’s energy and enthusiasm for details and Franklin’s wit and personal magnetism - Theodore Roosevelt combined them all. Many great leaders are defined by their conduct in handling significant historic events. Roosevelt himself was a significant historic event.
These remarks, delivered in a speech to a banquet in Milwaukee on April 3, 1903 address issues that continue to confront Americans even today. Unlike so many leaders, Roosevelt was able to straddle the divide between the extremes of class envy on one side and corporate greed and exploitation of the public on the other.
The most significant lesson from this excerpt is Roosevelt’s articulation of the necessity of enforcing the law without interfering with private industry. Government’s role in his view is not to injure corporations, villify profit-making or even to redistribute wealth - a theme often found in today’s conception of government regulation. Rather, its role is to protect the individual and to see that business and corporations co-exist peacefully and productively with government and society.
Modern opposing views are so extreme and divided that it is difficult to discern the Rule of Law. The middle ground of moderation has been abandoned for the extreme grounds of either envy or greed. The right takes opposition to any regulation or government authority over business almost to the level of religious creed. The left on the other hand generally take the view that government should have the arbitrary authority to plan the economy and re-distribute wealth. Roosevelt understood what F. A. Hayek would later articulate regarding The Rule of Law in a capitalist system:
“The distinction we have drawn before between the creation of a permanent framework of laws within which the productive activity is guided by individual decisions , and the direction of economic activity by a central authority, is thus really a particular case of the more general distinction between the Rule of Law and arbitrary government. Under the first the government confines itself to fixing rules determining the conditions under which the available resources may be used, leaving to the individuals the decision for what ends they are to be used. Under the second the government directs the use of the means of production to particular ends.
Government should be an objective guide post. It does not exist to encourage, influence or modify behavior. Nor does it exist to create equality of conditions or to re-distribute wealth based on the arbitrary morals and opinions of those who happen to be in power - or in the majority. Government is both a restraint and in need of restraint. Roosevelt recognized that corporations with too much power are perfectly capable of destroying the freedom central to our Republic. However… he also recognized that government with too much power could be just as destructive.
“Today I wish to speak to you on the question of the control of corporations which are popularly, although rather vaguely, known as trusts; dealing mostly with what has actually been accomplished in the way of legislation and in the way of enforcement of legislation during the past eighteen months, the period covering the two sessions of the fifty-seventh Congress. At the outset I shall ask you to remember that I do not approach the subject either from the standpoint of those who speak for themselves as anti-trust or anti-corporation people, nor yet from the standpoint of those who are fond of denying the existence of evils in the trusts, or who apparently proceed upon the assumption that if a corporation is large enough it can do no wrong.
I think I speak for the great majority of the American people when I say that we are not in the least against wealth as such, whether individual or corporate; that we merely desire to see any abuse of corporate or combined wealth corrected and remedied; that we do not desire the abolition or destruction of big corporations, but, on the contrary, recognize them as being in many cases efficient economic instruments, the results of an inevitable process of economic evolution, and only deisre to see them regulated and conrolled so far as may be necessary to subserve the public good. We should be false to the historic principles of our government if we discriminated, either by legislation or administration, either for or against a man because of either his wealth or his poverty. There is no proper place in our society either for the rich man who uses the power conferred by his riches to enable him to oppress and wrong his neighbors, nor yet for the demagogic agitator who, instead of attacking abuses as all abuses should be attacked wherever found, attacks property, attacks prosperity, attacks men of wealth, as such, whether they be good or bad, attacks corporations whether they do well or ill, and seeks, in a spirit of ignorant rancor, to overthrow the very foundations upon which rests our national well-being.
In consequence of the extraordinary industrial changes of the last half century, and notably of the last two or three decades, changes due mainly to the rapidity and complexity of our industrial growth, we are confronted with problems which in their present shape were unkown to our forefathers. Our great prosperity, with its accompanying concentration of population and of wealth, and its extreme specialization of faculties, and its development of giant industrial leaders, has brought much good and some evil, and it is as foolish to ignore the good as willfully to blind ourselves to the evil.
The evil has been partly the inevitable accompaniment of the social changes, and where this is the case it can be cured neither by law nor by the administration of the law, the only remedy lying in the slow change of character and of economic environment. But for a portion of the evil, at least, we think that remedies can be found. We know well the danger of false remedies, and we are against all violent, radical, and unwise change. But we believe that by proceeding slowly, yet resolutely, with good sense and moderation, and also with a firm determination not to be swerved from our course either by foolsih clamor or by any base or sinister influence, we can accomplish much for the betterment of conditions.
Nearly two years ago speaking at the State Fair in Minnesota I said:
‘It is probably true that the large majority of the fortunes that now exist in this country have been amassed, not by injuring our people, but as an incident to the conferring of great benefits upon the community, and this no matter what may have been the conscious purpose of those amassing them. There is but the scantiest justification for most of the outcry against the men of wealth as such; and it ought to be unnecessary to state that any appeal which directly or indirectly leads to suspicion and hatred among ourselves, which tends to limit opportunity, and therefore to shut the door of success against poor men of talent, and, finally, which entails the possibility of lawlessness and violence, is an attack upon the fundamental properties of American citizenship. Our interest are at bottom common; in the long run we go up or go down together. Yet more and more it is evident that the State, and if necessary the Nation, has got to possess the right of supervision and control as regards the great corporations which are its creatures; particularly as regards the great business combinations which derive a portion of their importance from the existence of some monopolistic tendency. The right should be exercised with caution and self-restraint; but it should exist, so that it may be invoked if the need arises.’”