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Join Date: Feb 2009
Posts: 7,688
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Gruber is just another in the long line of progressive "reformers" who have twisted and tortured our language, logic, and laws to achieve ends which they could not have done with truth or "transparency." The earliest progressives openly admitted and proclaimed how they would transform America, and explained why it was, according to them, needed. But they could only succeed, with such honesty, in influencing academic minds. They did, however, institute some, important political machinery such as the progressive income tax, the Federal Reserve, and the direct popular election of federal Senators. These were powerful instruments for future progressive change. But their transparent approach made it difficult to maintain the progressive traction, running into some SCOTUS roadblocks as well as the historical American culture with its roots in individual freedom and rule of constitutional law--until their resort to the tricky and less than honest maneuvers of FDR and the New Deal.
One of the most influential of FDR's first braintrust was Rexford Tugwell. He was the personification of progressivism on steroids. And he set a pattern of manipulation that has marked the passage of progressive legislation ever since. He was also the quintessence of the progressive mind with its belief in the necessity of an all powerful central government run by experts in order to achieve the harmonious utopia of an ordered, peaceful, secure, certain, predictive, and egalitarian society. A society which could only be achieved by central planners. And one which could only be achieved by undoing the previous century of laissez faire economy and the abolition of business as individual endeavor for individual profit. A society where capital was a social purpose and industry was a social function--achieved when, as he put it, "industry is government and government is industry."
His brain overflowed with ideas on how a new world could or would be planned. And planned it must be. The great and important aspects of society could not just happen, as he said for example, "new industries will not just happen as the automobile industry did, they will have to be foreseen, to be argued for, to seem probably desirable features of the whole economy before they can be entered upon." He even wrote a whole new constitution which would be the governing blueprint for the "New States of America."
At the time, the early 1930's, the progressives saw the Soviet Union as more a model of a successful society than the old American constitutional order. And Tugwell no less saw it the same way. He claimed that "the future is becoming visible in Russia."
But the future would require "the laying of rough, unholy hands on many a sacred precedent, doubtless calling on an enlarged and nationalized police power for enforcement." And only the federal government could be the effective "instrument of control." So "planning will necessarily become a function of the federal government; either that or the planning agency will supersede that government." And he helped create some of the first such federal planning agencies for The New Deal. And the federal government has expanded them to well over 300 such regulatory agencies today (EPA, FDA, etc., etc.), and they supersede much of our government.
He foresaw a lengthy road to the transformation into utopia which would require two series of changes. The second involved the elimination of business or its disappearance from industry. The guidance of capital uses, adjusting production to consumption, controlling prices and profit margins, insurance of purchasing power (for example, today, the constant call for minimum wages and the call for raising them).
The first series of changes "would have to do with statutes, with constitutions, and with government." And so, through those series of changes, " a civil service loyalty and fervor will need to grow gradually . . . little by little that road will begin to suggest itself as the way to a civilized industry . . . years of gradual modification accompanied by agonies and recriminations, . . . without much visible gain, then . . . the last link will . . . find its place and suddenly we shall discover that we have a new world . . ."
So the "laying of those rough hands" would necessarily be placed on the Constitution, American culture and rule of law, and on the economic system which fostered and was fueled by individual initiative. And the road to transformation progressed from FDR and the New Deals, to LBJ and the great society, and now to Obama and the ACA (the hoped for progressive "last link"?). And the federal government has expanded its scope and size nearing that to which Tugwell aspired. And individual initiative is squeezed into smaller spaces and numbers, into a society where "you didn't build that." Society did.
Tugwell admitted that the legislative schemes he helped promote for the New Deal were "tortured interpretations of a document [the Constitution] intended to prevent them." And now Gruber admits to tortured language and lack of transparency (lies) to get the ACA passed. And the Great Society was built on the utopian fiction of a war on poverty.
Of course, poverty has not been defeated but has expanded. Tugwell's vision of planned economy visible in the Soviet Union of the 1930's has evaporated. And, if the ACA is not eliminated, we will eventually go through the tortured phases of transforming private health insurance into single payer universal health care administered by the federal government.
Hayek would have called all this a road to serfdom. Tugwell, FDR, LBJ, Obama, all the progressives would call it a road to a new world. Huxley might have seen it progress into a Brave New World. Take your pick.
But the important thing, as Spence says, is not the tortured, lying, verbiage. The important thing is something good for the country. So if you pick the progressive road, and if it is necessary to say untrue things or make impossible promises to do good for the country, you have to understand that most people are not smart enough to understand what the good is. The qualified experts do know what the good is. And, whatever means, including lying, are necessary to give the ignorant or stupid people the good, then . . . that is good.
Last edited by detbuch; 11-21-2014 at 01:27 AM..
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