04-29-2020, 06:18 PM
(04-29-2020, 11:27 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: Nitpick. The United States didn’t originally have a federal power to regulate the economy. They didn’t need it early. To some extent in the Gilded Age, the major rich bankers tried to intercede. By the time FDR came around, the problems with the boom and bust economy got too big. The federals were the only ones with enough power and certainly there was a need to regulate the economy.
FDR decided that gaining this power by constitutional amendment would take too long and might never happen. Thus, there was an argument with the Supreme Court that he eventually mostly won. The government assumed a power to regulate the economy. The president, court, Congress, robber barons and people approved of the result. A change in how the government worked was necessary, but they got it though legislation from the bench rather than constitutional amendment.
In the 1930's the Robber Barons were wise enough to know that if things got appreciably worse there might be a revolution of the sort that had happened a few years earlier in Russia. Unlike the situation in Germany, where Nazis ended up doing the bidding of German tycoons, financiers, and big land owners America had no powerful fascist group (it is a good thing that the 1915 Klan disintegrated when it did!) to overthrow a weak democratic government and install a totalitarian right-wing regime. Note well that the 1915 Klan had much the same hatreds as the German Nazi Party and a similar proclivity to violence -- and genteel support until a prominent Klan leader disgraced himself with a murder.
What good is property if the Commies take it away?
Quote:We perhaps paid for it when various courts went wild with legislation from the bench, but that always seemed to happen. Note how the Jim Crow court nullified the Bill of Rights.
America was then a terribly-flawed country with at best an inchoate democracy. It was democratic in some places fairly reliably and democratic for whites and (in accordance with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo), Mexican-Americans. Blacks? Asians? Native Americans? Forget it!
Human rights exist as a rule only where people have a meaningful vote. That rules out single-Party systems like Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Ba'athist Iraq and Syria, Apartheid-era South Africa, or the Jim Crow South -- let alone places such as Pinochet's Chile, Libya under Qaddafi, or contemporary Saudi Arabia. The state that gives you no meaningful choice in voting can murder you.
Quote:I agree that changing the imbalance of rural against urban is hard. It would be extremely difficult to get rid of the slavery compromises from the bench, even assuming a progressive court, which isn’t likely in the short term.
Rural America has been better shielded from the nastiness of economic reality of exorbitant rents, cost of government through high taxes, and high commute costs from distant suburbs than has urban America. One might live better as a farm laborer in rural Michigan than as a barber in New York City or Los Angeles -- such is an expression of the costs. (Of course one would be better off as a barber than as a farm laborer in rural Michigan -- at least before COVID-19 messed up so much).
The most rapacious and demanding interests in America have put off necessary reforms to our economic system almost as long as they can. To protect themselves against such reforms they will need to find people to impose a fascistic regime upon America, the sort of regime that makes America a place that wise people leave if they can --- a nightmare of brutal management, abysmal wages, and economic insecurity; a mindless world that will steadily debase any mind, and in which conscience or being part of the wrong religion can be a ticket to an all-American version of a gulag or a KZ-lager, if not summary execution or murder following torture.
Given a choice, our privileged elites will sacrifice the rights of everyone else to protect their sybaritic indulgence. Such is the character of every materialistic elite that has ever existed.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.