3.As a practical matter, only government action could insure such rights. Even i

Question

3.As a practical matter, only government action could insure such rights. Even if you could figure out how your actions might help the farmer, you would by no means be home free. In Roosevelt's view, everyone has the right to earn a decent income. So in the very act of helping the farmer, you might be hurting someone else. Whenever you buy from A at the expense of B, you help the employees of A at the expense of the employees of B — and vice versa. Indeed, every transaction you make — every act of buying and every act of selling — potentially violates one of Roosevelt's "rights." As a practical matter, therefore, Roosevelt's rights could be observed only if all of us ceded much of our liberty to make economic decisions to the government. And the amount of power that would have to be ceded would be enormous.

4. They imply virtually unlimited government power with respect to the economy. Incredibly vague rights imply incredibly vague obligations, and, if nothing else, all of Roosevelt's rights are very, very vague. Hence if government is to act as the agent for all of us, the potential scope for action would be enormous. In fact, Roosevelt believed that there was no economic decision — no act of buying or selling or producing — that government should not be able to regulate. Thus in implementing Roosevelt's second Bill of Rights one would at the same time be eliminating all of the economic rights that classical liberals thought 8 people had. That is, implementation of Roosevelt's scheme would eliminate the right of every individual to pursue his own happiness — at least in the marketplace.

Question: Discuss the above two points in regards to FDR’s notion of rights.

Explanation / Answer

Roosevelt's model assumed that federal government would take the lead, although this did not prevent states improving their own legislative or constitutional framework beyond the federal minimum. President Franklin Roosevelt used his 1944 State of the Union address to advance his “Second Bill of Rights”: a broad vision of the role of government in making lives more secure through expanded government programs. The recurring theme throughout is “security” and the necessary action called for is unrelenting war against the enemies of the New Deal, both foreign and domestic. “Necessitous men are not free men,” FDR proclaims. Since “true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence,” the original Bill of Rights must be supplemented by eight rights that “spell security.” The proposed rights include the “right to a useful and remunerative job”—not the right to work, but the right to demand a job, and a well-paying one at that. “Farmers have the right to obtain “a decent living” from their toil, and businessmen have the right to be free of “unfair competition and domination by monopolies.” There are as well rights to “adequate medical care,” education, and the “right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation.”

The original Bill of Rights supposed that self-government required certain civic traits and freedoms, so it declared these activities, such as the freedom of speech, to be protected from federal government interference. By contrast, Roosevelt’s rights require ever-expanding federal government programs for them to exist. The right to “adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment” is a right to be free of an anxiety. Yet, if one is free of fear of unemployment, will one ever want work? How much does one need to earn to enjoy “adequate…recreation”? What is a right to “a good education,” a “decent home,” or “good health”? The questions never end, because the standards of what is “good,” “adequate,” or “decent” constantly rise. Moreover, the new Bill of Rights requires a redistributionist state that demands an ever-expanding bureaucracy with increasing budgets. The wealth of some pays for others’ newly coined rights. The new conception of rights diminishes the older notion, in particular an individual’s claim on his own property and even his own conscience and intellect, as life becomes more socialized in all its spheres.

Basically, classical liberalism is based on a belief in liberty. Even today, one of the clearest statements of this philosophy is found in the Declaration of Independence. In 1776, most people believed that rights came from government. People thought they had only such rights as government elected to give them. But following British philosopher John Locke, Jefferson argued that it’s the other way around. People have rights apart from government, as part of their nature. Further, people can both form governments and dissolve them. The only legitimate purpose of government is to protect these rights.This is in contrast with Roosevelt’s notion of rights who visualized rights as a tremendous increase in government power and giving up of individual freedoms.

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