Wednesday, May 14, 2008

"THE MORE THINGS CHANGE"

The platform of the Democratic Party, in a past election stated, "We believe that a party platform is a covenant with the people to be faithfully kept by the party entrusted with power." It called for a 25-percent reduction in federal spending, a balanced federal budget, a sound gold currency "to be preserved at all hazards," the removal of government from areas that belonged more appropriately to private enterprise, and an end to the "extravagance" of Hoover’s farm programs. This is what the candidate promised.
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From
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http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=4019
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Hearing those Ideas I would of thought they were from some crazy Right wing whacko. A 25% cut in federal spending? Getting government out of the private sector. Good conservative principles. They were however uttered by FDR as a candidate against Hoover. Needless to say once elected FDR did the opposite. The above article quotes an FDR aid as saying
[Commenting decades later on Hoover’s administration, Rexford Guy Tugwell, one of the architects of Franklin Roosevelt’s policies of the 1930s, explained, "We didn’t admit it at the time, but practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started."[13]]
Seems like common practice since then for Dems to run on conservative issues then once elected make liberal policy.
-------Back to the article by Mr. Reed. The following quote shows how fast the campaign promises were changed.

[Frustrated and angered that Roosevelt had so quickly and thoroughly abandoned the platform on which he was elected, Director of the Bureau of the Budget Lewis W. Douglas resigned after only one year on the job. At Harvard University in May 1935, Douglas made it plain that America was facing a momentous choice:
Will we choose to subject ourselves — this great country — to the despotism of bureaucracy, controlling our every act, destroying what equality we have attained, reducing us eventually to the condition of impoverished slaves of the state? Or will we cling to the liberties for which man has struggled for more than a thousand years? It is important to understand the magnitude of the issue before us . . . . If we do not elect to have a tyrannical, oppressive bureaucracy controlling our lives, destroying progress, depressing the standard of living . . . then should it not be the function of the Federal government under a democracy to limit its activities to those which a democracy may adequately deal, such for example as national defense, maintaining law and order, protecting life and property, preventing dishonesty, and . . . guarding the public against . . . vested special interests?[18]]

Well we made the choice in favor of the “despotism of bureaucracy” and we’ve been living with it ever since, and constantly becoming more and more like the “impoverished slaves of the state”

Now we stand at a nexus of history. The technology of this age stands ready for us to enhance our freedom or be used to finally shut us (we the people) out of the game for good.
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Regards, one of the many , WE THE PEOPLE
Live Dangerously Be A Conservative

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