Defend the Separation of Business and State

It really doesn't take much life experience to notice that Georges Santayana was right, that history does have a tendency to repeat itself, especially if we fail to learn the lessons the first time. For anyone who is paying attention, the lesson today is that our current economic troubles have a clear and recent precedent.

The social upheaval of the 1920s, the stock market crash of October 1929 and the Great Depression that followed are often explained as reactions to the horrors and expenses of World War I, but there was more to it than that. The disillusionment resulting from a bitter and protracted war was an add-on to the temptations of easy credit fanned into flame by exciting technological advances. Airmail, Ford's assembly line, radio, recorded sound, "talking pictures," and installment credit plans were all new in the 1920s, and all changed the way ordinary Americans conducted their lives. It would be silly to argue that such changes led to the downfall of civilization, but linked to the cynicism the War engendered, the result was the rejection of traditional restraints both moral and financial, a record-breaking level of personal debt, a pervasive, "easy come, easy go" philosophy, and a sense of class envy that sowed poisonous seeds in U.S. society. The only place the boom could go was directly into bust.

This is when many discovered that the "easy go" part wasn't so easy when it meant the loss of savings, businesses and homes. Many in their shock and disillusion at the crash looked for a complete change in our form of government. Some were Communists and some were Socialists and some were Fascists, but all were determined that they would overthrow the evils of Capitalism and usher in a Utopian ideal under their radical and often anarchistic plans. The dirty little secret is that as much as they hated and railed against each other, they all wanted to pursue their revolutionary goals by the same draconian methods--by nationalizing key industries, raising taxes on and seizing the property of "the rich" (that means anyone who has more money than whomever they were talking to at the moment), and finding a scapegoat that the majority of voters could resent and eventually hate. It was an agenda with a lot of appeal for some Americans, just as it was for many Germans, Italians and Spaniards. In fact, in the 1930s we came nearer to the overthrow of our democratic republic than at any time in our history to date.

Perhaps the best example from that perilous period was Huey Long, Governor of and Senator from Louisiana. Long knew two important truths about politics--that power can be had by promising people the things they don't have, and that you really don't have to give the people what you promised, as long as you show that you're taking something away from the rich who already have too much anyway. And so he promised the people of Louisiana roads and education and health care, and that's what they got--minus the huge graft payments that went into the pockets of Long and his cronies, a legacy the state continues to try to purge to this day--financed by "taxing the rich," which made it all acceptable.

The poor weren't actually getting anything of significance, but they could be happy knowing that the rich were being punished for their success. Long's "Share Our Wealth" plan (notice the "our" which actually begins the appropriation of private property) included a cap on the salaries and fortunes of businessmen, a progressive tax up to 100% of the earnings of the most prosperous, severe government regulation of major industries and a guaranteed minimum annual salary for the working man. Does any of this sound familiar to you?

Huey Long's popular support was so intense and radical that Franklin Roosevelt, certainly no conservative himself, considered Long "one of the two most dangerous men in America," and the New York Times worried that he had established the country's first Fascist State.

Our own era is every bit as dangerous as the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the call for a change in government just as radical. The proposals to cap salaries and tax earnings up to 100% we have already heard. The takeover of the automobile manufacturing industry by the Obama Administration and the Democrat Congress, and their heavy-handed intervention in the banking, investment and now the insurance industries, have been historic precursors to nationalization. The proposed establishment of a national health care system by the Administration will be, by definition, a seizure of that industry as well. What Long dreamed and Roosevelt feared, and the 1930s Fascists of Germany, Italy and Spain enforced, President Obama is pursuing headlong, and achieving.

Observing in 1938 the same radical political measures we are seeing today, Professor Halford E. Luccock of Yale Divinity School warned, "When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled 'made in Germany;' it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, 'Americanism.'" Consider that the next time Vice President Biden tells us how patriotic it is to pay more taxes.