In a 1912 speech, Teddy Roosevelt set the American progressive tenet: There is nowhere statism cannot go.
Heartland’s Director of Research Sam Karnick, the proprietor of the excellent The American Culture blog, expands there on the public comment he offered on our behalf. Sam offered today at his blog his usual insightful and historical perspective.
Leave it to Sam to use an exactly 100-year-old quote by Teddy Roosevelt to help make his point:
When Theodore Roosevelt made his statement of the foundations for progressivism in his “A Charter for Democracy” address before the Ohio Constitutional Convention at Columbus on February 21, 1912, he stated quite clearly what democracy is all about:
We stand for the rights of property, but we stand even more for the rights of man. We will protect the rights of the wealthy man, but we maintain that he holds his wealth subject to the general right of the community to regulate its business use as the public welfare requires. . . .
Make it perfectly clear that on every point of this kind it is your intention that the people shall decide for themselves how far the laws to achieve their purposes shall go, and that their decision shall be binding upon every citizen in the State, official or non-official, unless, of course, the Supreme Court of the nation in any given case decides otherwise.
As Roosevelt freely acknowledged, there is nowhere statism cannot go. This political philosophy, which might well be dubbed Confiscatory Democracy, has been the common parlance of U.S. politics for the past century, and the central force for its implementation was the Sixteenth Amendment.
Read the rest of this excellent post here.
