Ameritopia_ The Unmaking of America - Mark R. Levin [82]
In fact, Locke anticipated and rejected the tyranny of radical egalitarianism. “God gave the world to men in common, but since He gave it them for their benefit and the greatest conveniences of life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed He meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational … not to the fancy or covetousness of the quarrelsome and contentious. He that has as good left for his improvement as was already taken up needed not to complain, ought not to meddle with what was already improved by another’s labor. If he did, it is plain he desired the benefit of another’s pains, which he had no right to, and not the ground which God had given him, in common with others, to labor on, and whereof there was as good left as that already possessed, and more than he knew what to do with, or his industry could reach to” (5, 33). Moreover, Locke argued that not only does the individual have the right to preserve his property in the state of nature, but the primary purpose of the commonwealth is to protect his property against transgressors—which is linked inextricably to “his life, liberty, and estate” (7, 87–88).
In his Second Bill of Rights, Roosevelt succinctly described the societal and economic mission to which he had committed the federal government during the course of his presidency, and which he strived to make eternal. He said, “In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed. Among these are: The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation; to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation; of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living; of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad; of every family to a decent home; to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment; to a good education.”23
These are not rights. These are tyranny’s disguise. By dominating the individual’s property, the utopian dominates the individual’s labor; by dominating the individual’s labor, he dominates the individual. There is little space between Roosevelt’s premise and the distorted historical views of Marx and Engels. They insisted that “[t]he selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property—historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production—the misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you. What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your bourgeois form of property” (The Communist Manifesto, 39). They insisted that all ties must be severed with the past. “In bourgeois society … the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past.… [I]n Communist society accumulated labor is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the laborer” (36).
Indeed, Roosevelt’s worldview harks back to Thomas More’s Utopia, a precursor to Marx’s workers’ paradise, where the individual’s labor and property are ultimately possessions of the masterminds and subject to their egalitarian designs. More wrote, “Thither the works of every family be brought into houses, and every kind of thing is laid up several in barns or storehouses. From hence the father of every family or