The new freedom : $b a call for the emancipation of the generous energies of a peopleWilson, Woodrow
History
The new freedom : $b a call for the emancipation of the generous energies of a people
Wilson, Woodrow
United States -- Politics and government -- 1913-1921; United States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1918
It is significant that the spokesman for the plan of adopting monopoly
declares his devoted adherence to the principle of "protection." Only
those duties which are manifestly too high even to serve the interests of
those who are directly "protected" ought in his view to be lowered. He
declares that he is not troubled by the fact that a very large amount of
money is taken out of the pocket of the general taxpayer and put into the
pocket of particular classes of "protected" manufacturers, but that his
concern is that so little of this money gets into the pocket of the
laboring man and so large a proportion of it into the pockets of the
employers. I have searched his program very thoroughly for an indication
of what he expects to do in order to see to it that a larger proportion
of this "prize" money gets into the pay envelope, and have found none. Mr.
Roosevelt, in one of his speeches, proposed that manufacturers who did not
share their profits liberally enough with their workmen should be
penalized by a sharp cut in the "protection" afforded them; but the
platform, so far as I could see, proposed nothing.
Moreover, under the system proposed, most employers,--at any rate,
practically all of the most powerful of them,--would be, to all intents
and purposes, wards and protégés of the government which is the master of
us all; for no part of this program can be discussed intelligently without
remembering that monopoly, as handled by it, is not to be prevented, but
accepted. It is to be accepted and regulated. All attempt to resist it is
to be given up. It is to be accepted as inevitable. The government is to
set up a commission whose duty it will be, not to check or defeat it, but
merely to regulate it under rules which it is itself to frame and develop.
So that the chief employers will have this tremendous authority behind
them: what they do, they will have the license of the federal government
to do.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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