Obama, FDR and the myth of 'permanent plenty'

A few readers took umbrage to my column last week in which I quoted some newspaper articles from the 1960s that found fault with Social Security.

Readers seem to have assumed that I was against Social Security because I quoted some folks who thought that the program was tantamount to socialism.

They were wrong. I was not against it. Far be it from me to bite the hand that will clothe and feed me when I retire. I was just worried about the fact that it seemed doomed to eventually fail — possibly before I retire!

But because of the challenge of my readers, I went back and researched the start of Social Security in the New Deal, and what I found scared me enough that I may now have to change my mind — maybe I AM against Social Security. (Folks, if you want to remain stuck in your current thinking, I strongly recommend that you not pursue an issue with an open mind — it CAN be dangerous.)

Indeed, as several readers have pointed out to me, I may have fallen short of my real goal in looking for “where we went wrong” when I focused on the 1950s and ’60s as the point where America stopped fighting communism and decided to embrace socialism.

Reader Rick Spencer, in particular, challenged me to look to the New Deal for the real answers with this pithy comment:

“I have always declared this national march [to socialism] to have begun here in the U.S. during the 1930s with the advent of Social Security when every citizen would henceforth be considered and did become a financial liability rather than an asset to the country.”

It is hard for people such as myself who will depend on Social Security for our retirement to imagine that the program is not in the country’s best interests. Nonetheless, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that is the case. It is also hard to argue with the historical record that the New Deal was a form of homegrown “share the wealth” socialism that conflicts with our core American principles.

Beginning this week, therefore, I am going to push my historical research further into the past, back even before Social Security was passed by the Congress in 1935.

As a starting point, let’s turn to the commentaries of an “insider,” the author of “The New Dealers,” a 1934 book written anonymously by John Franklin Carter, a journalist who later headed a secret White House intelligence unit for FDR. A copy of this book was provided to me by Inter Lake reader Mike Horn, who noticed that it might contain significant parallels to our current administration.

Carter unapologetically wrote about the New Deal as a “fundamental transformation” of the United States — to borrow the phrase more closely associated with President Obama’s election in 2008.

“We are having a revolution and the revolutionary process will take from ten to twenty years,” he wrote, adding somewhat cavalierly, “Nobody knows what it will lead to and nobody seems to care.”

This reminds me of Speaker Pelosi’s infamous declaration that “we have to pass the [Obama health care] bill so you can find out what is in it.” But perhaps that is no accident. Carter also provides a description of Franklin Roosevelt at the beginning of his book that may fit our current president and his agenda as well.

“Franklin Delano Roosevelt did not invent the New Deal; he does not own it; it is only by chance that he administers it; it would have come without him and it will go on even if he should cease to be its greatest advertisement.”

Could the same be said of Obamacare? Net neutrality? Stimulus money? Bank bailouts? Cap and trade? Amnesty for illegal immigrants? Aren’t all of these revolutionary programs merely coincidentally associated with President Obama? Does anyone really think he is the architect of the New World Order that has been sculpted in the first two years of his administration?

Let’s be honest. George W. Bush was party to much of the “fundamental transformation” that is under way today, and John McCain would have embraced much of it too, if he had been elected president. Ultimately, the “fundamental transformation” promised by Barack Obama was just a candid admission that “the revolutionary process” cited by John Franklin Carter in 1934 had not been completed in 10 or 20 years, as he anticipated, but was still in full swing.

But most importantly, Franklin — a confidante of FDR — confirms that the New Deal was not just a “cunningly contrived brainstorm” in response to the stock market crash or the Great Depression.

“Its measures are the result of neither spontaneous combustion nor immaculate conception. Its roots, like those of Roosevelt, go back rather far into our unwritten history.”

“Unwritten history” is an interesting phrase, and an ominous one. Generally, history is understood to be “all recorded events of the past,” as Webster’s puts it. So, what kind of history is “unwritten”? What has happened that we don’t know about? And who did it? And why?

It suggests almost a conspiratorial view of history, as though powers and principalities were working behind the scenes to influence the direction of human affairs without being seen. But if that were true, then everything we know would be a lie. We would be living in a political equivalent of “The Matrix,” where everything that is obvious is false, and everything that is true is hidden.

Do I propose such a theory?

Not yet, but listen to John Carter’s explanation for why the New Deal took place. It didn’t have anything to do with the Great Depression — it was wired to the closing of the frontier 35 years before!

“The New Deal was necessary. When the American frontier disappeared in the 1890’s, it was conceived. The growth of industrial power, of mass production, the fall of the birth-rate, and the end of mass-immigration were signs that it was coming. Theodore Roosevelt, who knew little or nothing of economics, sensed it; Woodrow Wilson, who knew little or nothing of finance, strove to anticipate it... It was caused by one very simple fact: that we can produce more than enough for everybody in this country... The Roosevelt election of 1932 was simply one of a series of psychological explosions involved in adjusting our civilization to the fact of permanent plenty.”

Oh my God. There it is — out in the open — undisguised by rhetoric or subterfuge. The liberal mindset which has hijacked our country for the last hundred years is based not on power, not on greed, but on the staggeringly wrong-headed assumption that we live in a world of “permanent plenty.”

No wonder socialism seems like a reasonable alternative to capitalism to those who buy into it. Why work so hard when we can just “share the wealth” instead? Indeed, if there really were a source of “permanent plenty,” we would be fools not to take advantage of it. However, I have to ask: At what point does reality intrude and get us to admit that “permanent plenty” is a fairy tale akin to Aladdin’s magic lamp and the goose that laid the golden egg?

It is unfortunate that we may not hear the truth in our lifetimes. The stimulus package; the endless bailouts for banks, mortgages, even foreign countries; the sweet succor of free health care — these are but the latest manifestations of “adjusting our civilization” to the big lie of “permanent plenty.”

Apparently we have not learned a thing since 1934. Because if the New Deal was NOT a “cunningly contrived” response to the Great Depression,” then neither was the Obama stimulus bill a “cunningly contrived” response to the Great Recession. And just as John Franklin Carter assures us that Roosevelt “invented nothing in the New Deal,” I think we can safely say that Barack Obama did not invent the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, even though he signed it and took credit for it.

That bill, the massive raid on the future wealth of the American people, was not invented in a few brief weeks by the Obama administration. It was largely the work of the non-profit Apollo Alliance — “a project of the Tides Center,” whose chairman is the founder of ACORN. You can follow the connections yourself, but what you will clearly see is that Obama and the Democratic Congress were beholden to outside influences that wanted to create a new economy in the United States and used the stimulus bill to do it. The Apollo Alliance even brags about this on its website. Indeed, they quote Democratic Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid giving credit to the Apollo Alliance for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, with its emphasis on clean energy and green jobs:

“This legislation is the first step in building a clean energy economy that creates jobs and moves us closer to solving our enormous energy and environmental challenges,” Reid said. “We’ve talked about moving forward on these ideas for decades. The Apollo Alliance has been an important factor in helping us develop and execute a strategy that makes great progress on these goals and in motivating the public to support them.”

For emphasis, let’s repeat: “We’ve talked about moving forward on these ideas for decades.” Or to quote John Carter Franklin: “Its roots... go back rather far into our unwritten history.”

Of course, it is not really unwritten history; it is just untaught and unacknowledged — the history of how, in Carter’s words, “generations of idealistic young men [were sent] to Yale, Harvard and Princeton to prepare themselves as the moral aristocracy of the then distant future.”

We ARE that distant future, and if we hope ever to find out how we got here — on the brink of bankruptcy in a world of “permanent plenty” — we had better be prepared to decipher the “unwritten history” that holds the answers.