Thursday, August 11, 2011
FDR's "2nd Bill of Rights"
After watching Michael Moore's "Capitalism: A Love Story" yesterday, I learned President Franklin Roosevelt actually proposed a "2nd Bill of Rights" in 1944, a year before his death.
Would that we would have gotten these things. It was a brief speech but here's what he called for.
You can either click on the link below or go watch and listen to the speech online, of course, but he basically laid out a plan calling for 8 "rights" we should all have, as Americans. They were:
The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
The right of every family to a decent home;
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
The right to a good education.
He ended by saying this: For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world."
FDR was brilliant on so many issues and situations. He wasn't perfect or flawless by any means but he was correct about the Great Depression and what we needed to do in most cases and he was certainly, absolutely correct on this. And we'll apparently never have them.
Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Bill_of_Rights
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5 comments:
If you believe in this, you either don't know the same people I do, or you are trivializing the concept of rights.
If someone has a 'right' to a job, but nobody will give them one--who is violating their rights and how does it get fixed? What if they are useless, or insist on showing up for work intoxicated? Or insist that the second amendment means they can carry a gun at work? If you think people with a 'right' to employment wont severely abuse the system, you've never worked in a union plant.
What if a farmer is growing things that hardly anyone wants, or is lazy, or merely incompetent? What happens as technology improves, and we no longer need as many farmers to produce enough food? Who gets to be a farmer?
Amazon can sell books cheaper than the local independent bookstore. Is that unfair?
To begin, I'm sure I don't know the same people you do, if only because of distance, but additionally, no one, from FDR to me and everyone in between, thinks anyone should be "given" a job and the requisite paycheck, if they aren't willing to work for it. No one's suggesting that or that some sort of free market shouldn't exist, albeit a regulated one so greed isn't allowed to run rampant as it clearly has from Wall Street, out, in the country the last few years, at minimum.
And no, I'm not "trivializing the concept of rights." If we weren't, at the time FDR spoke, one of the wealthiest nations on the planet, I might be but since we were and actually, still are, I'm not. We just choose to give far too much to the wealthiest 1 or 2 percent of the nation's population, that's all, instead of spreading the wealth around, by letting them steal it from the rest of us.
In plain practical terms, how would a 'right to a job' work--how would it be different than what we have now?
Great question. I like the way you're thinking here. (kidding, of course).
First, who knows? Maybe a WPA type program or something. It would have to be something simple and something NOT remotely like Communist Russia or some such. A works program, maybe, to fix roads and highways and sewage, etc., across the country. I don't know. What I do know is that we're paying far too much for wars, first and prisons and the corrections industry, second. That money, partly saved and the rest plowed into something like this would make far more sense than what we're doing now.
If, for instance, we cut the defense budget by half--more than billion dollars--and spent one-half on this kind of work and saved the other half (never going to happen), we'd be far stronger as a nation, in a lot of ways.
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