Monday, March 02, 2020
Skill-based socialism again
The standard Shared Lie about American economic history is that everything was pure laissez faire until FDR turned us into a Red Marxist Commie Dictatorship. R and D agree on this; R hates it, D claims to like it.
Not true. I've already quoted Harding's approach, which is remarkably similar to Natural Law.
Here's part of a speech from Pennsylvania governor Brumbaugh in 1915. He clearly followed the same social economics tradition as Harding. Brumbaugh was talking here to a meeting of the state association for the blind, and he was mainly discussing vocational education.
I've edited down some of his excess verbosity.
We need to turn ourselves seriously to the matter of training our people to a proper code in industry. Did you ever think about that? And to do that we have to lay aside one of the aspects of our economic and political life which has been the source of more trouble than any other thing with which we have to do. We have somehow gone on the assumption that there is war in this country between labor on the one hand and capital on the other hand, and that the State is the umpire that settles the game when the fight is on; and that when the umpire decides in favor of capital, labor loses, and when it decides in favor of labor, capital loses. This fact asserts itself upon legislative bodies all over the country, whether municipal, county. state or national, each, on the part of these two groups of institutions, trying to obtain something in its behalf at the expense of the other. Now, I want to say to you the American State cannot survive as, and never should have been regarded, as an umpire in the contentions between labor and capital. The State is a party to the game, and has its own rights on both sides of that controversy. When it gets into the game it must put the ethics, the conscience, the creed and the soul of all the people into the rules of industry, and then we shall have the fair play and the square deal and the decency in our whole economic outlook which is essential to the growth of the Commonwealth itself. I wanted to say that to you because, while I am not in any sense a prophet, I make the positive declaration that we shall have to lay aside that foolish adage of different interests in industry and educate the people all over America to see that the government, which is the whole people, has a vital and essential right and part in every interest, whether it be political, educational, commercial, social or industrial, with which any group in society has to do; and the State is not a mere dispenser of good to some favored group. It is a great fraternal brother — if I may use that phrase — to every man and every woman and every child that either has a part in the concrete life of the community or is an heir to participation in that life, because, particularly and finally, I am interested, as I think those who are gathered here are interested, in trying to do something, whatever in the providence of God we can, to make easier, purer, sweeter, the lives of those that have been committed to the community and the Commonwealth and those that are the sacred wards of all of us, that were here this afternoon.This is the same attitude that both Harding and FDR expressed. In the modern world this attitude is carried by real populists like Putin and AMLO and Evo. You won't hear it from any American politician. All of our politicians are Libertarians. Zero tax, zero borders, zero interest, zero real economy, infinite debt, infinite war, infinite Dow. The government's role is to kill Christians here, kill Muslims elsewhere, and make Bezos and Soros infinitely rich. Everyone agrees.
Labels: Experiential education, Shared Lie, skill-estate
¶ 11:56 PM
