link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/18/AR2008061801173.html
These paragraphs caught my eye ...
Luke Russert said that whenever he did well on a school assignment, his father would yell, "Yahoo! You smoked 'em, buddy!"
He asked the crowd to imagine a special edition of "Meet the Press" this Sunday in heaven, perhaps with a debate between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, or John F. Kennedy and Barry Goldwater. He even suggested a talk on the need for a new political party involving Teddy Roosevelt, the former president who later ran unsuccessfully for president as a member of the Bull Moose party.
What was the platform of that party? You might be surprised, both by its timeliness and by its similarity to the ideas of Henry George, who came in #2 in the 1886 NYC mayoral election in which TR was #3. (Tammany Hall won, and the circumstances would not surprise most people troubled by some of our recent national elections.)
See http://www.wealthandwant.com/themes/Roosevelt_T.html and http://www.wealthandwant.com/docs/TR_and_lvt.htm
a few excerpts:
There can be no more important question than the high cost of living necessities. The main purpose of the Progressive movement is to place the American people in possession of their birthright, to secure for all the American people unobstructed access to the fountains of measureless prosperity which their Creator offers them. We in this country are blessed with great natural resources, and our men and women have a very high standard of intelligence and of industrial capacity. Surely such being the case, we cannot permanently support conditions under which each family finds it increasingly difficult to secure the necessaries of life and a fair share of its comforts through the earnings of its members. The cost of living in this country has risen during the last few years out of all proportion to the increase in the rate of most salaries and wages; the same situation confronts alike the majority of wage-workers, small business men, small professional men, the clerks, the doctors, clergymen. ...
The welfare of the tiller of the soil is as important as the welfare of the wage worker himself, and we must sedulously guard both. The farmer, the producer of the necessities of life, can himself live only if he raises these necessities for a profit. On the other hand, the consumer who must have that farmer's product in order to live, must be allowed to purchase it at the lowest cost that can give the farmer his profit, and everything possible must be done to eliminate any middleman whose function does not tend to increase the cheapness of distribution of the product; and, moreover, everything must be done to stop all speculating, all gambling with the bread-basket which has even the slightest deleterious effect upon the producer and consumer. ...
... By such action we shall certainly be able to remove the element of contributory causation on the part of the trusts and the tariff towards the high cost of living. There will remain many other elements. Wrong taxation, including failure to tax swollen inheritances and unused land and other natural resources held for speculative purposes, is one of these elements. ...
National extravagance — that is, the expenditure of money which is not warranted — we can ourselves control, and to some degree we can help in doing away with the extravagance caused by international rivalries. ...
CONSERVATION
There can be no greater issue than that of Conservation in this country. Just as we must conserve our men, women, and children, so we must conserve the resources of the land on which they live. We must conserve the soil so that our children shall have a land that is more and not less fertile than that our fathers dwelt in. We must conserve the forests, not by disuse but by use, making them more valuable at the same time that we use them. We must conserve the mines. Moreover, we must insure so far as possible the use of certain types of great natural resources for the benefit of the people as a whole. The public should not alienate its fee in the water power which will be of incalculable consequence as a source of power in the immediate future. The Nation and the States within their several spheres should by immediate legislation keep the fee of the water power, leasing its use only for a reasonable length of time on terms that will secure the interests of the public. ...
We do not intend that our natural resources shall be exploited by the few against the interests of the many, nor do we intend to turn them over to any man who will wastefully use them by destruction, and leave to those who come after us a heritage damaged by just so much. The man in whose interests we are working is the small farmer and settler, the man who works with his own hands, who is working not only for himself but for his children, and who wishes to leave to them the fruits of his labor.
Six weeks ago, here in Chicago, I spoke to the honest representatives of a Convention which was not dominated by honest men; a Convention wherein sat, alas! a majority of men who, with sneering indifference to every principle of right, so acted as to bring to a shameful end a party which had been founded over half a century ago by men in whose souls burned the fire of lofty endeavor. Now to you men, who, in your turn, have come together to spend and be spent in the endless crusade against wrong, to you who face the future resolute and confident, to you who strive in a spirit of brotherhood for the betterment of our Nation, to you who gird yourselves for this great new fight in the never-ending warfare for the good of humankind, I say in closing what in that speech I said in closing: We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.
Comments