RNS Quote of the Day: Mega Quote

Since it is Friday, I’ll be posting up a mondo-sized quote to give folks something to think about over the weekend.

This one involves the Democratic Party platform of 1960. When I read it, I had to think about the line I hear every now and then about “if JFK were alive today he’d be a Republican�. After reading their platform from the year he was elected President, I have to wonder about that.

It also takes away my surprise at the junk that LBJ helped stick us with.

So read and absorb, I’ll have the follow up to it on Monday.

A collectivist tyranny dare not enslave a country by an outright confiscation of its values, material or moral. It has to be done by a process of internal corruption. Just as in the material realm the plundering of a country’s wealth is accomplished by inflating the currency – so today’s one may witness the process of inflation being applied to the realm of rights. The process entails such a growth of newly promulgated “Rights� that people do not notice the fact that the meaning of the concept is being reversed. Just as bad money drives out good money, so these “Printing Press Rights� negate authentic rights.

Consider the curious fact that never has there been such a proliferation, all over the world, of two contradictory phenomena: of alleged new ‘rights’ and of slave labor camps.

The ‘gimmick’ was the switch of the concept of rights from the political to the economic realm.

The Democratic Party platform of 1960 summarizes the switch boldly and explicitly. It declares that a Democratic Administration “Will reaffirm the economic bill of rights which Franklin Roosevelt wrote into out national conscience sixteen years ago�.

Bear clearly in mind the meaning of the concept of ‘Rights’ when you read the list which that platform offers:

1. The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation.
2. The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation.
3. The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living.
4. The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home and abroad.
5. The right of every family to a decent home.
6. The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.
7. The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accidents and unemployment.
8. The right to a good education.

A single question added to each of the above eight clauses would make the issue clear: At whose expense?

Jobs, food, clothing, recreation (!), homes, medical care, education, etc., do not grow in nature. These are man-made values – goods and services produced by men. Who is to provide them?

If some are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those other are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor.

Any alleged ‘right’ of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right.

No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation, an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man. There can be no such thing as “The Right to Enslave�