State of the Union AddressesRoosevelt, Franklin D. (Franklin Delano)
History
State of the Union Addresses
Roosevelt, Franklin D. (Franklin Delano)
Presidents -- United States -- Messages; United States -- Politics and government -- Sources
Fluctuations in employment are tied to all other wasteful fluctuations in
our mechanism of production and distribution. One of these wastes is
speculation. In securities or commodities, the larger the volume of
speculation, the wider become the upward and downward swings and the more
certain the result that in the long run there will be more losses than
gains in the underlying wealth of the community.
And, as is now well known to all of us, the same net loss to society comes
from reckless overproduction and monopolistic underproduction of natural
and manufactured commodities.
Overproduction, underproduction and speculation are three evil sisters who
distill the troubles of unsound inflation and disastrous deflation. It is
to the interest of the Nation to have Government help private enterprise to
gain sound general price levels and to protect those levels from wide
perilous fluctuations. We know now that if early in 1931 Government had
taken the steps which were taken two and three years later, the depression
would never have reached the depths of the beginning of 1933.
Sober second thought confirms most of us in the belief that the broad
objectives of the National Recovery Act were sound. We know now that its
difficulties arose from the fact that it tried to do too much. For example,
it was unwise to expect the same agency to regulate the length of working
hours, minimum wages, child labor and collective bargaining on the one hand
and the complicated questions of unfair trade practices and business
controls on the other.
The statute of N.R.A. has been outlawed. The problems have not. They are
still with us.
That decent conditions and adequate pay for labor, and just return for
agriculture, can be secured through parallel and simultaneous action by
forty-eight States is a proven impossibility. It is equally impossible to
obtain curbs on monopoly, unfair trade practices and speculation by State
action alone. There are those who, sincerely or insincerely, still cling to
State action as a theoretical hope. But experience with actualities makes
it clear that Federal laws supplementing State laws are needed to help
solve the problems which result from modern invention applied in an
industrialized Nation which conducts its business with scant regard to
State lines.
During the past year there has been a growing belief that there is little
fault to be found with the Constitution of the United States as it stands
today. The vital need is not an alteration of our fundamental law, but an
increasingly enlightened view with reference to it. Difficulties have grown
out of its interpretation; but rightly considered, it can be used as an
instrument of progress, and not as a device for prevention of action.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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