Walter Lippman On The Warfare Between The Obama Admin & Big Business

History repeats itself, again.

The reason is that there are in fact two main tendencies inside the New Deal, and . . . the President is never able finally to make his choice for the one or the other. Between the conciliatory and irreconcilable New Dealers the crucial difference is . . . that the one group is interested primarily in social reform and the other is interested primarily in the control of the economic system.

Thus the reformers wish to provide relief, to practice conservation, to establish social security, and by law to impose social standards upon business and finance. But in order to do these things, they know that there must be money available, and so . . . they would like to promote recovery, not only for its own sake, but in order to finance the reforms. When they are convinced that a certain tax is "deterrent" to enterprise and investment, they would like to modify it.

The radicals, on the other hand, are . . . primarily interested in reducing the power of corporate business men, and the heart of their program is . . . precisely those deterrent taxes and those restrictive regulations which limit private initiative. . . . they would rather not have recovery if the revival of private initiative means a resumption of private control in the management of corporate business.

Among the radical New Dealers the essence of the New Deal is the reduction of private corporate control by collective bargaining and labor legislation, on the one side, and by restrictive, competitive and deterrent government action on the other side. Thus they cling to taxes which do not come anywhere near to yielding enough revenue to balance the budget because those particular taxes paralyze the financial power of the rich and well-to-do. . . .

This is the issue between the reformers and the radicals. Both believe in spending. . . . [But] [t]he reformers regard the spending as an instrument of recovery and a means for improving the condition of the people. The radicals regard the spending as a substitute for recovery and as a means of altering the balance of social policy.

Throughout history, there have always been people who thought they were better, smarter, & more benevolent than the rest of society and as a result, ought to be running things.

We've called them different things, progressives, New Dealers, liberals, progressives again, and sometimes post-partisans.

They always adopt these new names because gradually, the old names took on a negative connotation as people saw them as they really were: self-righteous, condescending, & power-hungry.

'Leave it to us,' they say, with their positivist understanding of the world, 'and we'll solve the world's ills with our social science.'

Looking for another sign you're about to be, in the words of one friend, "shaboozled" by a liberal Nietzschean Übermensch? Humility is not a defining feature.


If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

FDR: Not An Economic Genius

And if, (like the liberal academics I listened to last night at a lecture on the 2008 Presidential election at UCL) you think Obama is going to be the second coming of FDR or JFK (BHO, anyone?), maybe this will give you pause.

UCLA economists concluded that FDR's policies exacerbated and lengthened the duration of the Great Depression. That's certainly not what my history teachers taught me.

Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

After scrutinizing Roosevelt's record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.

"Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump," said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA's Department of Economics. "We found that a relapse isn't likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies."

Liberal Democrats in Congress are hoping for a New New Deal with BHO and they just may get one.

Whether he's the one (The One) who actually pushes it through or it's the abominationional (Obamanational?) love child of Harry Reid (who's nuts) and Nancy Pelosi, it doesn't really matter.


If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

Weekly One Cosmos

Bob, at One Cosmos, does the intellectual heavy lifting for conservatism, tracing it through history and religion and philosophy and psychology and doing it all in an incredibly approachable fashion. Here's a selection from one of his latest posts.

One’s political philosophy, whether one acknowledges it or not, is going to depend upon one’s conception of human nature. And if your conception of human nature is wrong, then your philosophy is going to be warped and your system of governance is going to be dysfunctional. I believe leftism is rooted in a naive and faulty conception of human nature, which is why it does not work and can never work. It is not just wrong, but a cosmic error. It is literally an insult to existence.

A while back, Dennis Prager noted that socialist countries are in the process of dying precisely because, within a couple of generations, they produce a new kind of man: indolent, dependent upon the government, spiritually empty, essentially nihilistic. Eventually a tipping point will be reached in which there will not be enough productive people to support the unproductive ones, and that will be the end of Europe as we know it. [...]

Now, not only is your political philosophy dependent upon your explicit -- or more likely, implicit -- conception of human nature, but once in place, your philosophy will produce radically different kinds of human beings. We don’t have to look very far to see how this has played out in the United States, for example, with respect to all of the Oh, Great! Society programs that had the cumulative effect of taking a wrecking ball to the black family, leaving it much worse off than before government got involved. One of the last great liberals, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, saw this coming in the 1960s, writing about the “tangle of pathology” that afflicted urban culture. In fact, the liberal meme of “blaming the victim” was first applied to Moynihan.

[...]

It's not just leftists, as most human beings do not actually crave liberty, so leftism is really a kind of default setting on our human nature, which must be transcended. As a matter of fact, history will demonstrate the opposite -- that human beings by and large find liberty to be repellant [sic], and much prefer security. This is the difference between classical liberals and modern liberals, and it is also the difference between Europe and America.

The modern liberal, in his descent into nihilism, values security over liberty, equality over freedom, “truths” over Truth. FDR, that patron saint of modern liberalism, unveiled a host of new “self-evident truths” that had somehow eluded our founders in a famous speech.

Roosevelt argued for a new definition of "security," that is, "economic security, social security, moral security." Classical liberalism, which had always been associated with negative liberties -- i.e., the right to be left alone by the government -- was to be replaced by a new vision of positive liberty that now forms the essence of modern liberalism. It is no longer real liberty, because now it is dispensed by the state and no longer abides in the individual. The government's job was now to even keep us free of fear, and “Freedom from fear is eternally linked with freedom from want." But since “want” is literally infinite, this sets up the need for a government that is infinite in its powers. For as the adage goes, any time the government does something for you, it does something to you. Since it now proposes to do everything for you...

Look at the current economic crisis. Liberals wanted to do something for people who could not qualify for home loans. Now comes part 2, in which they decide this week what to do to the rest of us.

In effectuating this new promise of security to all American citizens, Roosevelt argued for a new tax policy "which will tax all unreasonable profits, both individual and corporate." Unreasonable profits. Obviously we are still having that debate today, only under Obama's guise of "economic justice." What is an unreasonable profit, and why is it unreasonable? Here you see how the anti-libertarian, pseudo-religious language of Marxism has insinuated itself into our discourse, further accelerating the Fall of liberal man: we "cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people -- whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth -- is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.”

As Bob explains, modern liberalism essentially promises utopia as a positive right. This is what Barack Obama is talking about when he says "hope" and "unity" and "change" and "hopeful change" and "changing unification" and "unifying hope."


If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.