Great post.
Here is the “sub-title” of the LA Times editorial.
“The GOP candidate’s positions are not a vision of the future for the U.S. but of a discredited past.”
Your post made the case (among other things) that it is the discredited past - BIG BLINKING NEON SOCIALIST “crumbs” — rolling them back is our template for going forward.
George Bernard Shaw, a socialist echoed Edison with this quote, "Two percent of the people think; three percent of the people think they think; and ninety-five percent of the people would rather die than think."
Here are some quotes from the annals of history by people who could think:
Plutarch, (46-119AD)
“The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits.”
Benjamin Franklin, July 4, 1776:
"A republic if you can keep it....When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic."
John Adams, most influential member of the Continental Congress, Second President:
"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."
Thomas Jefferson, Third President:
I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.
James Madison, the acknowledged father of the Constitution, Fourth President, 1792:
"I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents."
Congressman Davy Crockett, Alamo hero, 1830 in the House of Representatives:
"Mr. Speaker, I have as much respect for the memory of the deceased, and as much sympathy for the sufferings of the living, as any man in this House. But we must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for a part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not go into an argument to prove that Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. We have the right, as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right to so appropriate a dollar of the public money."
Frederick Bastiat, The Law 1850:
"It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder."
Franklin Pierce, 14th President 1854:
"[I must question] the constitutionality and propriety of the Federal Government assuming to enter into a novel and vast field of legislation, namely, that of providing for the care and support of all those … who by any form of calamity become fit objects of public philanthropy ... I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for making the Federal Government the great almoner of public charity throughout the United States. To do so would, in my judgment, be contrary to the letter and spirit of the Constitution and subversive of the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded."
Grover Cleveland, 22nd President 1887:
"I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit."
Mark Twain:
"The mania for giving the Government power to meddle with the private affairs of cities or citizens is likely to cause endless trouble, through the rivalry of schools and creeds that are anxious to obtain official recognition, and there is great danger that our people will lose our independence of thought and action which is the cause of much of our greatness, and sink into the helplessness of the Frenchman or German who expects his government to feed him when hungry, clothe him when naked, to prescribe when his child may be born and when he may die, and, in time, to regulate every act of humanity from the cradle to the tomb, including the manner in which he may seek future admission to paradise."
Frederick von Hayek, 1974 Nobel Laureate in Economics:
"When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself."
Nikita Khrushchev:
"We can't expect the American People to jump from Capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving them small doses of Socialism, until they awaken one day to find that they have Communism."