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By Root 326 0

of civil society and constitutionalism as obstructing individual and societal progress. “If, then, we realize that the days in which we live present great problems wholly new, we may adopt one of two attitudes. Some among us would stop the clock, call a halt in all this change, and then in some well-thought-out way bring back an orderly, defined method of life. Old standards and customs would revive to meet the new conditions, classic dicta would again govern—the ‘good old days’ restored. It is an attractive picture, but it is a painting of the imagination—not a photograph of the living facts. The other method—but let us wait till we look into the days to come.… I have spoken of the up-and-down curves of history—or rather of the periods of quiescence followed by rushing, active progress. We are in the midst of one of the latter now. Are we at the end of it? Are we about to slow up, to begin to digest in comparative quiet the huge meal of new activities given to the human race in the past fifty years? I think not. On the contrary. I believe that more new and startling developments will take place in the immediate future than in the immediate past. With these will come other great changes in the lives and doings and thoughts of the average man and woman. Can we, by artificial means, call a halt? Obviously not.”19

As president, Roosevelt undertook a wholehearted and thoroughgoing makeover of the nation. No more uneven progress of which he had complained a decade or so earlier. Since I,20 and others, have written extensively about the New Deal’s details, there is no purpose in rehashing them here. However, it is well summed up by Roosevelt’s manifesto—his 1944 State of the Union speech, delivered near the end of his presidency, in which he proposes his Second Bill of Rights.21

Roosevelt told the nation, “This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty. As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness. We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. Necessitous men are not free men. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”22

Here Roosevelt cleverly but deceptively deviated from the Declaration of Independence. Inalienable rights belong to every individual and are not political but God-given and natural. The phrase “inalienable political rights,” as Roosevelt labeled them, is not unlike Wilson’s use of the word privilege, for they both imply the government has the authority to grant or deny the individual “the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Therefore, the individual has no real rights independent of those recognized by the government. Furthermore, Roosevelt argued that “true individual freedom” requires “economic security.” By this he did not mean the protection of the individual’s private property but its antithesis—that is, the dispossession of the individual’s property as the government sees fit. Of course, if individuals do not produce goods and services, there is nothing that even a mastermind can redistribute. As Locke explained, “I think it will be but a very modest computation to say, that of the products of the earth useful to the life of man, nine-tenths are the effects of labor. Nay, if we will rightly estimate things as they come to our use, and cast up the several expenses about them—what in them is purely owing to Nature and what to labor—we shall find that in most of them ninety-nine hundredths are wholly to be put on the account of labor” (5, 40). No government can re-create let alone improve upon man’s nature, where he is free to invent, create, and produce; pursue, acquire, and maintain