What's Wrong: Things That Can't Be Said Today

Modern American politics, at least at the national level, is mostly about electing people who are gonna help me get mine, and about defeating people who are trying to help you get mine. There's a little wiggle room in that principle, of course. The rich can be taxed extra without excessive fallout, provided that the threshold for "rich" is shown to be high enough. But you can't even say you're prepared to raise taxes on the rich without showing most folks they'll be getting a share of the proceeds, unless the beneficiaries are in a few tiny categories of sacred cattle, like seniors, the military, law enforcement and firefighters. The general idea of using government resources to help anybody else is now considered so un-American that most politicians shy away from ever suggesting any such thing.

That wasn't always the case, though. American politicians used to be able to say that government needed to do more for some subsection of the population. To calibrate just how far we've come from that direction, imagine a modern candidate for president or U.S. Senate saying any of the following:

1. "I stand for the square deal. But when I say that I am for the square deal, I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the games, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service."

2. "We grudge no man a fortune in civil life if it is honorably obtained and well used. It is not even enough that it should have gained without doing damage to the community. We should permit it to be gained only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community. This, I know, implies a policy of a far more active governmental interference with social and economic conditions in this country than we have yet had, but I think we have got to face the fact that such an increase in governmental control is now necessary."

3. "The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means. Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective - a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate."

4. "The man who wrongly holds that every human right is secondary to his profit must now give way to the advocate of human welfare, who rightly maintains that every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it."

5. “A strict application, let us say, of economic theory, at least as taught by Adam Smith, would be, ‘Let these people take care of themselves; during their active life they are supposed to save enough to take care of themselves.’ In this modern industry, dependent as we are on mass production, and so on, we create conditions where that is no longer possible for everybody. So the active part of the population has to take care of all the population, and if they haven’t been able during the course of their active life to save up enough money, we have these systems.”

The speakers--

Quotes 1-4:




Quote 5:




Those sentiments are pretty moderate, though, compared to another comment so lengthy and so shockingly out of line with currently accepted expression that it deserves its own entry . . .