No wonder one of President Obama’s first official acts was to return a bust of Winston Churchill to the Brits. No doubt he’d like everyone to forget the words of this great man. Apparently, Churchill wasn’t all that impressed with the massive welfare state FDR created. Smart man.
A great admirer of America, Churchill especially praised our founding document: “The Declaration is not only an American document. It follows on the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights as the third great title deed on which the liberties of the English-speaking peoples are founded.” Though Britain and America were two separate nations with different forms of governments, they were united in principle: “I believe that our differences are more apparent than real, and are the result of geographical and other physical conditions rather than any true division of principle.” As Justin Lyons explains in “Winston Churchill’s Constitutionalism: A Critique of Socialism in America,” Churchill’s ideas about individual liberty, constitutionalism, and limited government “stemmed from his explicit agreement with the crucial statements of these principles by the American Founders.”
When Churchill saw America’s principles of liberty, constitutionalism, and limited government, threatened with the rise of the welfare state, he admonished America to resist this soft despotism. In “Roosevelt from Afar,” Churchill admits that the American economy was suffering when FDR took office, but FDR used this crisis as an opportunity to centralize his political authority rather than to bolster the free market through decentralized alternatives. Churchill commends Roosevelt’s desire to improve the economic well-being for poorer Americans, but he critiques Roosevelt’s policies toward trade unionism and attacks on wealthy Americans as harmful to the free enterprise system. Drawing on Britain’s experience with trade unions, Churchill understood that unions can cripple an economy: “when one sees an attempt made within the space of a few months to lift American trade unionism by great heaves and bounds [to equal that of Great Britain],” one worries that result could be “a general crippling of that enterprise and flexibility upon which not only the wealth, but the happiness of modern communities depends.” Similarly, redistribution of wealth through penalties on the rich harms the economy: “far from depriving ordinary people of their earnings, [the millionaire] launches enterprise and carries it through, raises values, and he expands that credit without which on a vast scale no fuller economic life can be opened to the millions. To hunt wealth is not to capture commonwealth.” Ultimately, attacks on the wealthy only serve as a distraction from other economic issues.
Something tells me Winston Churchill wouldn’t have been all that impressed with Barack Obama. Just sayin’.
H/T Instapundit
This is just a rhetorical question, right LC…?
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“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”
“If you have ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law.”
“An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last” “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”
“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things. ”
“Do not let spacious plans for a new world divert your energies from saving what is left of the old.”
“To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.”
“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.”
“There is no such thing as a good tax.”
http://reaganiterepublicanresistance.blogspot.com/2009/11/what-would-churchill-say.html
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Churchill would size Dear Leader up as a man of no vision for individualism and the human spirit. A weak man of many dubious faces, a façade of freedom’s trusted keeper. An incompetent shame on the world stage that would sadden Sir Winston.
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