Here’s an absolutely horrifying video of President Franklin Roosevelt promoting a “Second Bill of Rights” based on coercive redistribution.
At first, I was going to post it and contrast it with this superb Reagan video and compare how one President’s policies kept America mired in a depression while the other implemented policies that triggered an American renaissance.
But there’s a much more important question, one that also applies to modern leftists. Do they actually believe this nonsense?
In other words, are people who push for bad policy misguided or malicious?
In the case of FDR, did he really think that the government could guarantee “rights” to jobs, recreation, housing, good health, and security?
If so, he was horribly misguided and blindly ignorant to the realities of economics.
But if he didn’t believe that government magically could provide all these things, then would it be fair to say he was maliciously lying in order to delude people and get their votes?
I don’t know Roosevelt’s motives, Like most politicians, he probably listened to both the angel (however misguided) on one shoulder and the devil on the other shoulder.
But if he was listening to the angel and trying to do what he thought was best, at least FDR had an excuse. Communism had not yet collapsed. Socialism had not yet collapsed. And Greek-style redistributionism had not yet collapsed.
So it was possible seventy years ago for a well-intentioned person to believe that government was some sort of perpetual motion machine of prosperity.
I’m not sure there is a similarly charitable interpretation for the motives of modern-day statists.
