Ping
Resurecting this old thread from time to time as each ObamaDeal follows in the NewDeal fashion: From an old thread with a booklet from 1939 about FDR and the New Deal. This is a “brief” excerpt I thought was applicable to Obama’s Healthcare Nationalization Plan.:
PROBLEM SIX THE DOMESTICATION OF THE INDIVIDUAL
This was not a specific problem. It was rather a line of principle to which the solution of every other probem was referred. As was said before, in no problem to be acted upon by the New Deal was it true that one solution and one only was imperative. In every case there was some alternative.
But it was as if in every ease the question was, “Which course of action will tend more to increase the dependence of the individual upon the Federal government?” — and as if invariably the action resolved upon was that which would appeal rather to the weakness than to the strength of the individual.....
Which was only one more way of saying a hard truth that was implicit in the American way of thinking, namely, that when people support the government they control government, but when the government supports the people it will control them.
Well, what could be done with a people like that? The answer was propaganda. The unique American tradition of individualism was systematically attacked by propaganda in three ways, as follows:
Firstly, by attack that was direct, save only for the fact that the word individualism was qualified by the uncouth adjective rugged; and rugged individualism was made the symbol of such hateful human qualities as greed, utter selfishness, and ruthless disregard of the sufferings and hardships of one’s neighbors;
Secondly, by suggestion that in the modern environment the individual, through no fault or weakness of hie own, had become helpless and was no longer able to cope with the adversities of circumstances. In one of his Fireside Chats, after the first six months, the President said: “Long before Inauguration Day I became convinced that individual effort and local effort and even disjointed Federal effort had failed and of necessity would fail, and, therefore, that a rounded leadership by the Federal Government had become a necessity both of theory and of fact.” And,
Thirdly, true to the technic of revolutionary propaganda, which is to offer positive substitute symbols, there was held out to the people in place of all the old symbols of individualism the one great new symbol of security.......
After the acts that were necessary to gain economic power the New Deal created no magnificent new agency that had not the effect of making people dependent upon the Federal government for security, income, livelihood, material satisfactions, or welfare......
No individual life escaped, unless it was that of a desert rat or cave dweller.
It was thus that the hand of paternal government, leaving first seized economic power, traced the indelible outlines of the American Welfare State.
In the welfare state the government undertakes to see to it that the individual shall be housed and clothed and fed according to a statistical social standard, and that he shall be properly employed and entertained, and in consideration for this security the individual accepts in place of entire freedom a status and a number and submits his life to be minded and directed by an all-responsible government.
When New Dealers speak in one breath of a welfare economy and with the next breath bitterly denounce pressure groups it may seem that they involve themselves in an ironical dilemma. It is easy to say: “What would you expect, since you have made division of the national income a matter of political bargaining where before it had been always a matter of economic bargaining?”
Yet they are right, the New Dealers. In the welfare state pressure groups, representing willful political action, cannot be tolerated. They will have to be suppressed at last, because in the welfare state the government cannot really guarantee social security until it goes to the logical end, which is to ration the national income in time of peace just as all goods and satisfactions are rationed in time of war.