Sunday, March 25, 2012

America's First Socialist: TR

Recall that TR made the following in Osawatomie, Kansas on August 31, 1910:

Nothing is more true than that excess of every kind is followed by reaction; a fact which should be pondered by reformer and reactionary alike. We are face to face with new conceptions of the relations of property to human welfare, chiefly because certain advocates of the rights of property as against the rights of men have been pushing their claims too far. The man who wrongly holds that every human right is secondary to his profit must now give way to the advocate of human welfare, who rightly maintains that every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it. 

The New Nationalism, inspired by Croly, a founder of the Progressive The New Republic, assisted TR in this speech.  TR truly believed that property rights were no longer there, they were destroyed by his contention that the community can regulate them, whoever the "community" is, and for TR it was him and his followers. This was a decade before Lenin, before Stalin, this was the basis of the election of 1912.

Now a hundred years later we reflect on the same issues as the case before the Supreme Court in many ways resonates with the philosophy of TR. Just a thought!