Rand Paul said the following about what he believes are President Obama’s real political ambitions:

“I think the President understands the Constitution enough to know that he would prefer a different type of constitution. [Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader] Ginsberg said she admired the South African Constitution. So, I think that’s more of where the President is coming from.”

I checked to see what the economic conditions are like in South Africa. “According to official estimates, a quarter of the population is unemployed; however, unofficial estimates put the real unemployment rate as high as 40%. A quarter of South Africans live on less than $1.25 a day.” The people of SA are becoming more equal, equally poor.

Former Obama administration regulatory czar Cass Sunstein published an opinion piece following the inauguration. He is calling for a “second Bill of Rights” first proposed by Franklin Roosevelt.

Sunstein claims that this Second Bill of Rights would emphasize “the importance of free enterprise” while firmly rejecting “equality of result” while simultaneously being “committed to ensuring both fair opportunity and decent security for all.”

This can’t be done unless more power and authority are given to the State. Such a Bill of Rights will produce an “equality of result.” Everybody will eventually be impoverished.

Sunstein harkened back to FDR’s 1944 State of the Union address where the four-time president argued “that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.” He insisted that that “these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race or creed.”

Who would determine what this “new basis of security and prosperity” consisted of? How would the implementation take place?

Here are FDR’s proposals:

• The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation.
• The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation.
• The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living.
• The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad.
• The right of every family to a decent home.
• The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.
• The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment.
• The right to a good education.

“All of these rights,” Roosevelt said, “spell security.”

Sunstein knows that these proposals are the bedrock of socialist and Marxist political theory. That’s why he had to write that FDR “had no interest in socialism.” FDR was all about socialism. His Social Security program was modeled after Germany’s socialistic social security system that went back to proposals made by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898). It was his policies that gradually made the German people “value security over political freedom and caused them to see in the State, however conservative, a benefactor and a protector.”1 Between 1883 and 1889 Bismarck put through a program for social security far beyond anything known in other countries at the time. It included compulsory insurance for workers against old age, sickness, accident and incapacity, and though it was organized by the State it was financed by employers and employees. Sound familiar? This is American-style Social Security!

Adolf Hitler took full advantage of the German state of mind and Bismarck’s progress in turning the nation into a model of socialist reform. Hitler wrote the following in Mein Kampf: “I studied Bismarck’s socialist legislation in its intention, struggle and success.”2

FDR followed Bismarck’s socialist agenda. Bismarck said that “the State must take the matter in hand, since the State can most easily supply the requisite funds. It must provide them not as alms but in fulfillment of the workers’ right to look to the State where their own good will can achieve nothing more.”3

Roosevelt and his supporters agreed. P. J. O’Brien, writing in Forward with Roosevelt, links Bismarck’s social policies with those of Roosevelt. The above quotation by Bismarck “might have been lifted out of a speech by President Roosevelt in 1936, but the Iron Chancellor uttered it in 1871.”4

Sunstein is counting on the fact that a majority of Americans are not aware of this history. Actually, it doesn’t matter. The people will trade their freedom for the promise of security.

1. William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), 96, note. [↩]
2. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 96, note. [↩]
3. Quoted in P. J. O’Brien, Forward with Roosevelt (Chicago: John C. Winston Co., 1936), 84. [↩]
4. O’Brien, Forward with Roosevelt, 85. [↩]