The 'Progressive' Legacy

[philunderwood]

The 'Progressive' Legacy

By Thomas Sowell

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

Although Barack Obama is the first black President of the United States, he is by no means unique, except for his complexion. He follows in the footsteps of other presidents with a similar vision, the vision at the heart of the Progressive movement that flourished a hundred years ago.

Many of the trends, problems and disasters of our time are a legacy of that era. We can only imagine how many future generations will be paying the price — and not just in money — for the bright ideas and clever rhetoric of our current administration.

The two giants of the Progressive era — Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson — clashed a century ago, in the three-way election of 1912. With the Republican vote split between William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt's newly created Progressive Party, Woodrow Wilson was elected president, so that the Democrats' version of Progressivism became dominant for eight years.

What Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had in common, and what attracts some of today's Republicans and Democrats, respectively, who claim to be following in their footsteps, was a vision of an expanded role of the federal government in the economy and a reduced role for the Constitution of the United States.

Like other Progressives, Theodore Roosevelt was a critic and foe of big business. In this he was not inhibited by any knowledge of economics, and his own business ventures lost money.

Rhetoric was TR's strong suit. He denounced "the mighty industrial overlords" and "the tyranny of mere wealth."

Just what specifically this "tyranny" consisted of was not spelled out. This was indeed an era of the rise of businesses to unprecedented size in industry after industry — and of prices falling rapidly, as a result of economies of scale that cut production costs and allowed larger profits to be made from lower prices that attracted more customers.

It was easy to stir up hysteria over a rapidly changing economic landscape and the rise of new businessmen like John D. Rockefeller to wealth and prominence. They were called "robber barons," but those who put this label on them failed to specify just who they robbed.

Like other Progressives, TR wanted an income tax to siphon off some of the earnings of the rich. Since the Constitution of the United States forbad such a tax, to the Progressives that simply meant that the Constitution should be changed.

After the 16th Amendment was passed, a very low income-tax rate was levied, as an entering wedge for rates that rapidly escalated up to 73 percent on the highest incomes during the Woodrow Wilson administration.

One of the criticisms of the Constitution by the Progressives, and one still heard today, is that the Constitution is so hard to amend that judges have to loosen its restrictions on the power of the federal government by judicial reinterpretations. Judicial activism is one of the enduring legacies of the Progressive era.

In reality, the Constitution was amended four times in eight years during the Progressive era. But facts carried no more weight with crusading Progressives then than they do today.

Theodore Roosevelt interpreted the Constitution to mean that the President of the United States could exercise any powers not explicitly forbidden to him. This stood the 10th Amendment on its head, for that Amendment explicitly gave the federal government only the powers specifically spelled out, and reserved all other powers to the states or to the people.

Woodrow Wilson attacked the Constitution in his writings as an academic before he became president. Once in power, his administration so restricted freedom of speech that this led to landmark Supreme Court decisions restoring that fundamental right.

Whatever the vision or rhetoric of the Progressive era, its practice was a never-ending expansion of the arbitrary powers of the federal government. The problems they created so discredited Progressives that they started calling themselves "liberals" — and after they discredited themselves again, they went back to calling themselves "Progressives," now that people no longer remembered how Progressives had discredited themselves before.

Barack Obama's rhetoric of "change" is in fact a restoration of discredited ideas that originated a hundred years ago.

[philunderwood]

Extremism in Defense of the Welfare State

By Mona Charen

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

The theme song of a popular TV show from the last decade featured the lyric "I worry all the time. If you paid attention, you'd be worried, too." It's a wise posture when analyzing the slow-motion crisis that is Europe.

European governments are toppling like clock towers in an earthquake. The Dutch government fell on April 23, when it failed to agree with the opposition on an austerity plan. On May 6, Socialist Francois Hollande defeated France's Nicolas Sarkozy. Greece's ruling coalition has been shattered — the vote splintered among dozens of small parties.

Turning the rascals out is a normal and healthy thing in a democracy. Who in China or Cuba wouldn't love the same opportunity? But the European elections are signaling something disquieting — the rise of radicals of both right and left.

In the first round of presidential balloting, nearly a third of France's voters chose either a Trotskyite, Jean-Luc Melenchon (who campaigned to confiscate the incomes of the wealthy) or Marine Le Pen, of the National Front, whose protectionist party fuses anti-immigration fervor with a grab bag of nationalist sentiments. Hollande himself campaigned on raising tax rates on the wealthy to 75 percent, boosting the minimum wage, breaking up large banks, reversing the Sarkozy retirement age reform (Sarkozy had increased it from age 60 to 62 for younger workers), and instituting huge new Keynesian stimulus programs.

France is choosing unwisely, but perhaps the twin guardrails of the bond markets and Angela Merkel will limit Hollande's options.

Greece, on the other hand, seems to be feverish and unhinged. For decades, Greek governments have promised ever more lavish benefits to voters with the costs put off into the indefinite future. That future is now arriving in the form of bankruptcy or because Greece is part of the Eurozone, externally imposed austerity. Violence has flared repeatedly over the past several years, as a spoiled population has chafed under the combined effects of recession and government cuts. Now more than 60 percent of Greek voters have chosen small left- and right-wing parties over the ruling Pasok and New Democracy parties.

The Golden Dawn, whose symbol bears a close resemblance to the swastika, won 7 percent of the vote and will send 19 delegates to the 300-member parliament. Golden Dawn opposes not just the austerity plan, but also the "so-called Enlightenment" and the Industrial Revolution. As firecracker-wielding young toughs with shaven heads demonstrated outside, Golden Dawn leader Nikos Michaloliakos announced from an Athens hotel that "the time for fear has come." Warning, "Greece is only the beginning," Michaloliakos promised to make war on "world usurers," referring perhaps to the International Monetary Fund, which has imposed strictures on Greece as part of a multibillion-euro bailout package.

On the same end of the spectrum (the political spectrum is a circle, not an axis), Syriza, or the Coalition of the Radical Left, won16.4 percent of the vote and 51 seats in parliament — triple its previous total. Like Golden Dawn, Syriza trafficks in implied and sometimes actual violence. The names of its component parties pretty much tell its story: Synaspismos (Coalition of the Left of Movements and Ecology); AKOA (Renewing Communist Ecological Left); KOE (Communist Organization of Greece); DEA (Internationalist Workers' Left); Ecosocialists Greece; DIKKI (Democratic Social Movement), and so on.

Greece may be the loose thread that unravels the garment. Economist Desmond Lachman, formerly of the IMF and now at the American Enterprise Institute, is concerned that if Greece does not comply with its obligations, the sovereign debt crisis in Europe will be dramatically deepened, with contagion dragging the continent into another financial crisis from which the U.S. would not be shielded.

Unlike floods and earthquakes, this disaster is entirely manmade and utterly avoidable. Europe is tremendously wealthy and productive, but Europeans sabotaged themselves by embracing the foolish idea that they could have an economic union without a political union. They are also paying the price for failing to come to terms with actuarial realities; their populations are graying. Without reforms of pension and other benefits, they cannot sustain their standard of living. Rather than face their own corruption, the Greeks principally, but also other Europeans, are disintegrating into raging extremists blaming anyone and everyone else.

That's the object lesson for us. Here, Barack Obama and the Democratic Party are promising Americans more of this fool's gold — limitless government benefits with costs imposed on someone else ("the rich" or future generations). It's an engraved invitation to Athens.