Maybe two or three more words?
From the link:
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
While it doesn’t succeed in making Franklin Roosevelt into a constitutional innovator, this disheveled book does bring into focus FDR’s forgotten effort to address domestic “security,” as WWII neared its climax. Roosevelt’s inaugural address of January 11, 1944, asked Congress to adopt a “second Bill of Rights”: guarantees of work, adequate housing and income, medical care and education, among others—promises designed to extend the New Deal (and thwart the appeal of communism). The indefatigable Sunstein (Why Societies Need Dissent, etc.) sketches Roosevelt’s domestic policies and the logistics of the inaugural address (included in full in an appendix), then debates the never-adopted bill’s merits, historically as its ideas kicked around in the post WWII-era, and as it might be taken up today. He tends to be scanty on the bill’s potential budgetary toll and on the responsibility for one’s own welfare that FDR thought the bill’s beneficiaries ought to bear. Sunstein roams widely over legal history and precedent, but is focused and clear in showing how FDR sowed the seeds of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (in whose 1948 drafting Eleanor Roosevelt played a crucial role) and energetic in discussing this proposal’s further possible legacy.
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Well, there was the link to Amazon where the following is found in the review by Stephen J. Jaros.
What hasn't become law, and what Sunstein really wants, is a welfare state that provides expanded housing, food, shelter and medical care for the poor, and not just at a bare minimum, but including enough spending money so that they can participate in the broader culture via purchase of consumer goods, too. Sunstein rejects the notion that people require only the "bare minimum for survival", saying that poverty is "relative", and in our affluent society people will not feel like "whole citizens" unless they have a lot of what they see others enjoying on television.
On pages 205-206, Sunstein addresses "my" point about the morality of "taking from the rich to give to the poor" by arguing that if one is to say that taking from the 'haves' to give to the 'have-nots' violates the rights of the 'haves', one would have to agree that "people have a right to their current holdings, and any dimunition amounts to a rights violation". Sunstein says that this position is implausible, because it is only the existence of laws and public institutions that make those holdings possible. He says "without public support, wealthy people could not possibly have what they own.... those who denounce government largesse as a violation of rights disregard the extent to which their own rights are a product of government".
That's it! That's his reply. In my opinion, it is totally inadequate, because if we take Sunstein's argument seriously, government can diminish any of our rights at any time for any reason, simply because it is government that protects them. If GW Bush wants to enact a law that allows the FBI to wire-tap anyone without a warrant at any time they please, or shut down newspapers that criticize the war in Iraq, one couldn't cry foul about one's rights being violated by an intrusive government, because by gosh it's only by the grace of government that we have any rights at all!