“I watched as he opened the sixth seal. There was a great earthquake” ─ so goes the graphic description in the Biblical Book of Revelation of the judgments of God against the Roman Empire in bringing about its ultimate collapse. So too, the sixth “seal” in my seven “seals” that have “sealed” the fate of our republic, along with our freedom and liberties, was a great earthquake, better known as “The Great Society”, created by president Lyndon B. Johnson in the mid-1960s’.
With the ascension of LBJ to the presidency, the fascist tentacles of the central government, first extended into the lives of free Americans by Woodrow Wilson and then extended further by FDR, expanded and multiplied in all directions, attaching its suckers to the very core of what being American stood for, until today its stranglehold threatens to choke the very last drop of our founding principles from our nation. As with all progressive (or fascist) programs the professed aim is for the “good of society.” Thus LBJ, like all good fascists who use the war imagery (see my previous essay on Woodrow Wilson, The Death of Our Beloved American Republic (1788 – 2010) – XIII Pivotal Events in Its Demise), declared his “war on poverty” program that would usher in a utopia in which all poverty would be eliminated, and in the words of the prophets of old Israel in their depiction of paradise, every man would “sit under his vine and fig tree.” That this was LBJ’s aim was clearly set forth in the commencement address which he delivered on May 22, 1964 at the University of Michigan:
“The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning…The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.”
He couched this panorama of paradise against the backdrop of “liberty”, but it is not the liberty of the founders, the liberty of the individual to pursue happiness as spoken of in the Declaration of Independence, but rather of the liberty from fear, wants, and all needs ─ everything that a citizen should need provided for by the community, i.e., the state. That, my friends, is pure socialism, which can only be realized when the state becomes supreme in the lives of the individual, which, according to Benito Mussolini, the father of Fascism, is at the very heart of a Fascist government. To create this utopian paradise by the central government, it would obviously require agencies, legislation, and regulations to carry the “battle” to these societal enemies. And so came into existence the Department of Health and Urban Development (HUD) whose mission was to eradicate homelessness and poor housing conditions among the citizenry; Medicare and Medicaid, to eliminate the danger of the elderly not having adequate medical care; food stamps so that everyone would be fed; welfare payments so that other needs could be met; and on and on it went ─ the great cornucopia of the central government providing to everyone according to his needs. What should have raised an alarm greater than it did, especially during the height of the “cold war” and the war being fought in the jungles of Vietnam (purportedly to stop the advance of Communism), is that such a principle was a brick in the very foundation of Communism, as expressed by none other than Karl Marx himself: “From each according to his ability to each according to his needs.” It is not my intent to cover all the faults of the welfare state in this essay, as there have been books upon books written by eminent men in the field of economics on this topic, but rather to touch just briefly on the matter of how this system has served to destroy our Republic.
To begin with, the very title of LBJ’s grand and ambitious drive to remake American society has its roots in radical socialism. The phrase actually came from a book written in 1914 by the co-founder of Fabian Socialism (which has become the Labour Party in Great Britain), Graham Wallas, titled The Great Society. Hence, it should not come as any great shock that the programs that grew out of Johnson’s Great Society would be aimed at transforming America into a truly socialist state though the fascist centralization of power in the hands of the “federal” government. The justification for this assault on our system of constitutional, federal, representative republicanism was the assertion that these needs to be supplied by the government though its various new agencies were “rights” and not “privileges”. Indeed, as Jonah Goldberg points out in his book Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of The American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Change,
“Michael Harrington, whose ‘The Other America’ laid the moral groundwork for the War on Poverty, led a group of thirty-five left-wing intellectuals, grandiosely dubbed the ‘Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution,’ which proclaimed that the state should provide ‘every individual and every family with an adequate income as a matter of right‘” [emphasis added].
Compare these asserted “rights” of these “Progressives” with those in the Declaration of Independence and see if you think they reach that high bar set forth by Thomas Jefferson. Are these “rights” “certain and unalienable”, “endowed upon us by our Creator”? The answer is clearly that they do not (see my essay The Concepts of “Freedom”, “Liberty” and “Rights”).
If you will permit another Biblical reference, the phrase that bests applies to all of these programs is “by their fruits you shall know them.” And just what are the fruits of LBJ’s “Great Society”? Allow me to share with you some observations cataloged by a couple of Nobel Prize-winning Economists – Milton Freidman and F. A. Hayek.
To begin with, since LBJ styled his remodeling of America on a war-facade footing, what say you – are we winning the war ─ have we won it yet? After trillions of dollars spent, has poverty decreased, housing improved, homelessness decreased, etc? Hardly! In fact, things have actually worsened and made the future of all Americans more bleak. During the 1960s protestors ranged across the streets and campuses of this nation in protest of the Vietnam War because we were waist-deep in a quagmire with no foreseeable way out. Today, we see the same thing from these same-minded leaders of the democrat party towards the war against terrorism, yet they keep throwing more and more money at their societal war with even less progress to show for it than these actual “wars”! The reason we don’t see the protests against these programs like we do the military conflicts just mentioned is that there are protests against not enlarging these insatiable pits of freedom-eating Minotaurs even more than they have already been enlarged! Through these programs their power over greater areas of our lives can be continuously expanded, making the continuation of this never-ending “war” acceptable to the Fascists. The abject failure of public assistance was set forth by Friedman in his book, Free to Choose, in the chapter titled “Cradle to Grave”:
“Once people get on relief, it is hard to get off. The country is increasingly divided into two classes of citizens, one receiving relief and the other paying for it. Those on relief have little incentive to earn income.”
Thus, instead of uniting the country, the citizens are divided, one group against the other, with one continuing to support the Fascists and their agenda (since they benefit from it) while the others, who are the producers in society, come to resent the other group and those in power who cater to them. The sad part is, those who live off of the public dole will eventually learn, as the gingerbread man who accepted a ride across the stream on the back of the fox, that eventually their freedom and liberties will be swallowed in whole by their Fascist benefactors!
An obvious by-product of these programs has been the proliferation of agencies which produce their regulations without answerability to the people as they are guided by unelected bureaucrats. This can mean but one thing, and that is a loss of freedom and liberties. I will, however, leave the discussion of the insidious growth in this area and its subsequent failure to deliver on the promises made by the architects of “the Great Society” for a later series of essays. Let us instead return to the matter of the assault of the welfare state upon the foundational principles of our Republic.
Returning once more to Dr. Friedman’s work, he summed up the danger with these words:
“…spending tends also to corrupt the people involved. All such programs put some people in a position to decide what is good for other people. The effect is to instill in the one group a feeling of almost God-like power; in the other, a feeling of childlike dependence. The capacity of the beneficiaries for independence, for making their own decisions, atrophies through disuse. In addition to the waste of money, in addition to the failure to achieve the intended objectives, the end result is to rot the moral fabric that holds a decent society together….Voluntary gifts aside, you can spend someone else’s money only by taking it away as the government does. The use of force is therefore at the very heart of the welfare state ─ a bad means that tends to corrupt the good ends. That is also the reason why the welfare state threatens our freedom so seriously” [emphasis added].
To Dr. Friedman’s words on the threat of the “Great Society” on our freedom and liberties Dr. Hayek added his concurrence in his voluminous work, The Constitution of Liberty. So that you may feel the full impact of his words, I offer to you the following quotes without any interruptive commentary on my part.
“…we must realize that, as a service agency, it” [i.e., the state] “may assist without harm in the achievement of desirable aims which perhaps could not be achieved otherwise. The reason why many of the new welfare activities of government are a threat to freedom, then, is that though they are presented as mere service activities, they really constitute an exercise of the coercive powers of government and rest on its claiming exclusive rights in certain fields….
What goes under that name” [i.e., the welfare state] “is a conglomerate of so many diverse and even contradictory elements that, while some of them may make a free society more attractive, others are incompatible with it or may at least constitute potential threat to its existence….
The distinction, then, is that between the security of an equal minimum income for all and the security of a particular income that a person is thought to deserve. The latter is closely related to the third main ambition that inspires the welfare state: the desire to use the powers of government to insure a more even or more just distribution of goods. Insofar as this means that the coercive powers of government are to be used to insure that particular people get particular things, it requires a kind of discrimination between, and an unequal treatment of, different people which is irreconcilable with a free society. This is the kind of welfare state that aims at ‘social justice’ and becomes ‘primarily a redistributor of income.’ It is bound to lead back to socialism and its coercive and essentially arbitrary methods….
The chief danger today is that, once an aim of government is accepted as legitimate, it is then assumed that even means contrary to the principles of freedom may be legitimately employed….
If government wants not merely to facilitate the attainment of certain standards by the individuals but to make certain that everybody attains them it can do so only by depriving individuals of any choice in the matter. Thus the welfare state becomes a household state in which a paternalistic power controls most of the income of the community and allocates it to individuals in the forms and quantities which it thinks they need or deserve….
It is sheer illusion to think that when certain needs of the citizen have become the exclusive concern of a single bureaucratic machine, democratic control of that machine can then effectively guard the liberty of the citizen. So far as the preservation of personal liberty is concerned, the division of labor between a legislature which merely says that this or that should be done and an administrative apparatus which is given exclusive power to carry out these instructions is the most dangerous arrangement possible. All experience confirms what is ‘clear enough from American as well as from English experience, that the zeal of the administrative agencies to achieve the immediate ends they see before them leads them to see their function out of focus and to assume that constitutional limitations and guaranteed individual rights must give way before their zealous efforts to achieve what they see as paramount purpose of government.’
It would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that the greatest danger to liberty today comes from the men who are most needed and most powerful in modern government, namely, the efficient expert administrators exclusively concerned with what they regard as the public good….It is inevitable that this sort of administration of the welfare of the people would become a self-willed and uncontrollable apparatus before which the individual is helpless, and which becomes increasingly invested with all the mystique of sovereign authority…” [emphasis added].
As you have read through these gems of wisdom enunciated by Hayek, I think it clear that there is certainly no need for me to even attempt to add to them. The “Great Society” thus is anything but “Great”; instead it is the “Great Enslavement” of our individualism which was the heart and soul of our forefathers view of what made Americans “exceptional.”
In the final installment of this series we will wrap up with the final seal that has sealed the fate of our once free republic, the elections of the Fascists on the radical left of the democrat party in 2006 and the follow up election of the most leftist driven anti-American ideologue to the office of president in 2008. Until then, I leave you with one final quote from Dr. Hayek’s previously referenced work:
“Many of the policies intended to combat particular evils have actually made them worse. And some of the more recent developments have created greater potentialities for a direct control by authority of the private life of the individual than may be seen in any other field of policy” [emphasis added].
-Epaminondas
