Leave it to Liz “Faux-a-hontas” Warren to get fundamental facts about virtually anything embarrassingly wrong.
Evidently not satisfied by making a fool of herself for claiming to be an American Indian when applying for a plum position at Harvard, then for years resisting calls to prove it, only to finally release a blood test that showed she had less “ancient American” heritage (heritage testers use an approximation based on Meso-American genetics) than the average American Caucasian, “Wonderbread Warren” has decided to make things worse by channeling the ghost of one of the worst American Presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and his obnoxious, upside-down, anti-intellectual list of the “Second Bill of Rights”.
You remember that one, right? It’s the one a lot of collectivist teachers applaud like trained seals because they, too, don’t understand the definition of rights…
On January 11, Warren took time out of opening beers in her kitchen to Tweet a just peachy video clip of the former Prez and a partial list of his “Second Bill of Rights”, and one wonders whether she had the faintest clue that this FDR proposal was based on Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto”.
See, it's the 75th anniversary of Roosevelt’s servile bow to Marx, and Warren is so divorced from any understanding of rights or economics that she thought it would be a great idea to promote it.
Like the approach of Warren and other collectivists, the overall vector FDR took was one completely dislocated from the idea of natural rights. As I’ve noted before, the term rights is derived from Old English and Old Germanic, and was connected to “right-handedness”. Back then, many people thought left-handedness was improper, and so the idea of doing what was “proper” was associated with “right”. This is also where the idea of “property” comes from. It’s a principle of “mutual hands-offedness”, or mutual respect for the person and belongings of others. “You have a right to be left alone by me, and I have a right to be left alone by you.”
There is no such thing as a “positive right” to something -- a right which is “posited” by the state -- because that assumes you have a claim on the body, time, energy, property, skills, or interests of another.
So Lizzy lists some of Frankie’s childish “Rights To”, while showing video of him and contemporary “America”, and laying ponderous “American heritage” style music beneath it all, and we get to see and hear a feast of:
One. A “right” to a “useful and remunerative job…” Which, of course, implies that the worker has a right to the government forcing consumers to support him, regardless of how good or bad he or she is, or whether the consumer might prefer to do something else with his cash. It also implies that the job is “useful”, but since all market valuation – in fact, all human valuation – is subjective, the idea that a statute will determine whether someone’s offering is “useful” not only runs contrary to market calculation, it’s contrary to the very ability of people to determine what’s useful at all. Needless to say, this was a big, big plank of Marx’s “Communist Manifesto”. And, needless to say, nations that adopted some or all of his ideas destroyed their economies.
Two. The “right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation…” Well, Franklin… Well, Elizabeth… Who defines “adequate”? Who pays these glorious "earners"?
Three. The “right of every farmer to earn a decent living.” Hence we see FDR's insane farm subsidies that have carried on for decades, creating a feedback loop wherein some of the biggest agri-corporations on the planet get subsidized by US taxpayers. And, hey, Franklin, Elizabeth, if consumers don’t want what a farmer is selling, does the farmer have a “right” to their money? Simple question. Of course, you’ll answer that by pushing for indirect, taxpayer-supplied, payments to go to the farmer, not forcing the taxpayer to hand it to the farmer directly. Subtle, and ultra-classy – oh, and... Marxist in sentiment, like the first two.
Four. A “right to a decent home”. Who defines “decent”, Franklin? Who pays for that home? If one has a “right” to a home, does that mean he or she can simply walk into a home and live there, or is there a strange, vestigial memory some of us might have of this bizarre concept called “private property rights”, which means, hands-off? And will you try to get around that by taking other forms of our property, say, our monetary earnings or savings, and handing them to people so, rather than invade a home to let others live there, you invade our bank accounts to hand the cash to others so they can “have a decent home”? Strangely, US Presidents and Congress-cats for years have promoted policies to encourage “the ownership society”, in the words of George W. Bush, creating bogus home mortgage dealers like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (created by FDR and Johnson, respectively), and pushing banks to hand out below-market rate mortgages, which helped lead to... the Depression of 2008-2011.
Five. The “right to adequate medical care”. Well, not only is there not a “right to medical care”, having the government define “adequate” is even more problematic. See, Franklin, and Liz, if one believes that there is a “right to medical care”, and therefore the government should force people to pay taxes to support a government-run medical system that would employ doctors, what “we’re” really doing is enslaving a taxpayer to pay for another person’s health care, and if “we” can do that, and make him work for X number of hours per day to pay, why not remove the middle man and force doctors and nurses to do the work directly? If there’s a “right”, then, surely, this is acceptable. Right? Sorry, but there is no “right” to the fruits of another person’s labor. Ever. This, also, buys into an idea Marx pushed: that there is no such thing is private property – even over oneself.
Six. The “right to protection from the economic fears of old age.” Ahh, yes, like that unconstitutional Social Security Ponzi scheme you passed, Franklin? Not only is this Marxist, it’s patently obvious that neither FDR nor Liz Warren cared or care about inflation of the money supply that degrades the buying power of our money. If they truly cared about old people being able to handle their economic affairs, they’d stop the runaway government spending, lower taxes on businesses and investment, shut down the fed and get the federal government out of supplying money as well, and allow people to escape their insane Social Security extortion racket so they can put their money where they want.
And the list goes on, she and FDR go on about the right to be free of the fear of “sickness, accident, and unemployment” – all Marxist concepts.
Also, the “right to a good education”. So don’t just enslave all the doctors, enslave all the teachers. After all, there’s a “right” to their labor and expertise. By the way, not only is “good” subjective, and best left to the market to define for quality and resource allocation. The government-run education system in the US is routinely beaten by private schools and home-schools, despite the fact that the government system is many times the cost. Oh, and just a reminder, not only did Marx want total state control of education, he wanted to force kids to work (can you say, "mandatory volunteerism" that exists in many US schools?) Classy.
It’s all class with Liz Warren. So, pop a beer, raise a toast to Marxism, and watch as she plays Senator in DC, and does so as a person more inclined to uphold the Communist Manifesto than the US Constitution.
Cheers!