This is the Citizen Reagan podcast and I need to get in the habit of doing a few things with every episode, like asking you to rate and review the podcast with whatever services you use. Like asking you to share us with your friends, family, complete strangers and your worst enemies, I don't care really, just as long as you share it. Like telling you that you can find past episodes, transcripts, research and more on a wiki on my webspace. The address for the wiki is
www.poorrichardsprintshop.com/wiki but if you just visit
poorrichardsprintshop.com, I have a variety of other projects there. I sell digitally restored books, magazines and pamphlets. I have constructed an archive of old pulp short stories. I accept donations through
Ko-fi, if you're willing help out. It’s all there on the website. Now, with that out of the way, let's get to Reagan.
Who is the best person to make decisions in your life? For sure, it’s not you. You can’t possibly be trusted to know what you want, you’re not smart enough... This has been a theme of politics around the globe for a long time.
This was a big deal to Reagan and during the time of his radio show, there were numerous attempts to pass legislation to curtail people’s freedom of choice. Ralph Nader was busy lobbying Congress to create some kind of stand alone consumer advocacy program. Senator Hubert Humphrey had multiple bills in Congress that would institute central planning without coming right out and saying it. One specific iteration of the bill Reagan speaks about is called "The Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act."
Back in January, I did a podcast episode about Reagan's first broadcast talking about the Consumer Protection Agency Act. It’s entitled Reagan’s Basket of Kittens and I encourage you to go back and listen to it if you have the opportunity, if for no other reason than to understand what Reagan is doing with a basket of kittens. We're going to focus more on centralized planning today, but you can't talk centralized planning without the concept of consumer advocacy coming up. Actually, this concept weaves throughout my episodes in one way or another.
What is centralized planning? Well, pretty much what it sounds like. It is the idea that a federal government would make the majority of decisions and it usually ties in to the economic structure of the country, the idea being that in a world where life moves quickly, a country can react quicker to changes if the decisions can be made from that central location. I played audio about this from President Joe Biden in a recent podcast episode, talking about democracies vs autocracies. If you think that will make the trains run on time…
Reagan discusses this kind of thing in part one of a two part radio broadcast about the Humphery-Hawkins bill, which I mentioned earlier under its stated name, the Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act.
Sometimes in the halls of Congress it seems as if "old bills" unlike old soldiers neither die nor fade away. They just live on under different titles. I'll be right back.
Congress has before it Senate Bill 50 House Resolution 50 entitled, "The Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act." We first knew of this as the Humphrey-Javits bill. Fortunately it didn't get far under that title but now unfortunately it's back renamed the Humphrey-Hawkins bill.
It is as persuasive and grandiloquent in its promise as the label on a bottle of patent medicine. It declares that every adult American has the right to, quote, "opportunities for useful paid employment at fair rates of compensation." Unquote. Surely no one wants to quarrel with that. But it sets a goal of 3 percent adult unemployment to be reached by 1980 which is better than full employment.
During times of peak employment the percentage of workers temporarily and voluntarily between jobs and those looking for a first job total more than three percent.
Humphrey-Hawkins as it's called requires the president to submit a complete plan every year for achieving full employment and balance growth. Now that too sounds all right. He's supposed to use fiscal and monetary policy, tax revision and other tools. Here there seems to be some fuzziness, because Washington estimates the cost of the bill at anywhere from 16 billion a year to 44 billion.
But that phrase "other tools" is the one we should watch out for. To begin with Congress has to approve the president's plan or presumably come up with one of its own. Then if joblessness isn't reduced to the magic figure all sorts of employment and grant programs go into effect including public service employment and job training. We already have about 50 government agencies charged with training and assisting the unemployed. Make that 51. The bill calls for a new "Full Employment Office" in the Labor Department to administer a reservoir of last resort federal jobs.
The bill makes sure that these make work jobs pay equivalent to wage scales in private industry. Now this means a built in inducement for some to quit their present jobs for the guaranteed public job because it would mean a raise in pay.
In our experience so far with these emergency public job programs we've learned that they actually decrease employment because in many instances government entities only use the program to hire those they already intended to hire.
But there's much much more to fear in Humphrey-Hawkins. Actually it follows a pattern once used in Italy by a fellow named Mussolini and then it was called fascism.
The annual plan would involve the government allocating resources including labor. It creates government machinery for planning virtually every aspect of American life, projecting national goals for production, purchasing power and so forth.
These words may not sound frightening but think of their meaning and application. Government not the customers would decide how much of what should be produced. You may think you want a new car but if government decided refrigerators were more important steel and other materials would be denied the automaker. That of course would mean layoffs which also means government would begin telling free Americans where they would work and what kind of work they do. Maybe it's a full employment program-but so was slavery.
This is Ronald Reagan.
Thanks for listening.
In part 2, he goes into more depth about the unemployment issue. I won’t play the audio, I suppose I could save it for another broadcast. I will say that the situation then was not unlike what it is now, government unemployment benefits being generous enough that workers didn’t want to take jobs.
During the 1970s, with inflation and unemployment disrupting the American economy, the first reaction of the politicians was to make themselves the solution, just as it is today and Reagan frames it in that matter. However, this reallocation of labor or raw materials would be just as easy to justify by… a war or some other national crisis, like a global pandemic! Never let that crisis go to waste!
However, there is a more... paternalistic aspect to this. Reagan spoke of it a couple times, once on the radio show and at
CPAC in 1974. I'll play the CPAC version for you:
For the second time in this century capitalism and the free enterprise system on under assault. Privately owned business is blamed for despoiling the environment, exploiting the worker and seducing if not outright raping the customer. Those who make the charge have the solution of course, government regulation and control. They never get around to explaining how citizens who are so gullible that they can be suckered into buying breakfast cereal or soap that they don't need and it wouldn't be good for them can at the very same time be astute enough to choose representatives in government in which they would entrust the running of their lives.
They don't trust you. Not with your food, your health, your retirement, your driving, your outdoor activities, your purchases, need I go on? That’s why we need to prevent real kinder eggs from entering the United States. That's why we ended up with Obamacare, Social Security and driver's tests. That's why we were told we couldn't have our businesses open, that we couldn't get within 6 feet of one another, that we must wear masks, but only after we were told not to wear masks. Then we were told 2, or 3 masks would be preferable. Now, we're told that we need to vaccinate AND wear a mask, while we're alone, outside. Sorry, not sure what came over me there.
This paternalism, however, is growing to some dangerous places. The concept of the ESG score is something, if you've not heard of, you should be horrified by. ESG stands for Environmental-Social-Governance. Do you work for an oil company? Does the board of directors have minority representation equivalent to the percentages of the population? Are they following all the proper regulations? If you answered no to any of these, your company’s ESG score may be low. What does that mean to you though? Well, banks may hesitate to give them loans because they are not good for society.
Then, there’s the next step of this: Do you own stock in a company with a low ESG score? Do you buy products from a company with a low ESG? YOU might be unable to get a loan because you’re doing business with the wrong people. And on top of it there is, as of the time I’m writing this up, a bill in Congress called the National Credit Reporting Agency Act which will create a government-run public credit reporting system to provide a free option to the for-profit national credit bureaus. Let’s be honest, how long before the three existing credit bureaus are out of business? The government does things so well, let’s give it more responsibilities over important aspects of our lives.
What is more dangerous is where this is all coming from and some of the other plans being put in motion. Maybe, maybe, maybe, you’d consider that, if things got really bad in the United States, you could just move someplace else. Unfortunately, many of these central planning initiatives are coming from the United Nations and the World Economic Forum.
This is not a new push. The United Nations has been trying to do this stuff for decades. Reagan actually had a couple broadcasts, neither of which I have audio to present, in which he talks about UN conferences and resolutions with goals that contradict the American way of life.
One broadcast, entitled United Nations, is from 1976 and discusses a recent conference in Vancouver called, at the time, the United Nations Conference on Human Settlements. There have been two subsequent similar conferences, so it is also called Habitat I. Reagan pulls a few nuggets from the finished report. To begin with, the report makes concerning statements about wealth inequality, pollution and, generally speaking, societal ills which they seem to always complain about. But then, we get to the meat of the report. They warn against “controlled urbanization”, “rural backwardness” and “rural dispersion,” which they hope member nations can correct through “massive shifts in population into specifically designed habitats.”
Another quote that disturbs Reagan is as follows: “Every state has the right to take the necessary steps to maintain under public control the use, possession, disposal and reservation of land. Every state has the right to play and regulate use of land, which is one of its most important resources, in such a way that the growth of population centers both urban and rural are based on a comprehensive land use plan.”
That doesn’t sound so bad, right? Here’s another goal Reagan quotes, though the source is a little different: “the gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country by a more equitable distribution of population over the country.” That’s point 9 of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto.
Sounds like central planning to me, and more specifically the UN’s Agenda 21, now called Agenda 2030, though it actually had the opposite goal in mind. Force as many people as possible into the urban centers so that nature could reclaim control of everything else.
This may be coming from the UN, but our own local, state and federal bureaucrats may look at this and think this is all a good idea. I know in my area there’s a loose affiliation among the cities that seem to be following parts of Agenda 21.
The second broadcast about the UN is called “Treaties” and came around about 15 months later. This time, Reagan’s concerned about two documents, referred to as covenants, which the UN had written and presented to its member nations. The first is the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The second is the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Reagan argues against the ratification of both because they both omit the right to property ownership and the protection of said property owners from arbitrary seizure of that property without just compensation. Attempts to amend one or the other covenant to include property rights had been voted down.
Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford had chosen not to sign. Jimmy Carter signed both, passing them on to the Senate for ratification. It would take 20 years, but the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights was ratified in 1992, but it was done so “with reservations” which basically made it non-applicable in the United States.
Now, I also mentioned the World Economic Forum. They are an International Non Government Organization, or NGO, which seeks to, in their own words, improve “the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic, and other leaders of society to shape global, regional, and industry agendas.” Well, sure, who doesn’t want to improve society?? Who, however, decides what is considered an improvement? Reagan once quoted Lenin as saying, “It would not matter if three-quarters of the human race perished, the important thing is that the remaining one-quarter be Communist.” I have never seen any confirmation as to whether this was actually said, but I use it as an example of what one man and his followers believed would be an improvement to society.
Now, I’m not suggesting that the World Economic Forum is interested in mass murder. The ideas that have been discussed by them for the past year or so are commonly lumped together under the title of ‘The Great Reset’ and it has some concerning language.
First off, they are hoping to create, “a better kind of capitalism.” But what exactly does that mean? Well...“A company is more than an economic unit generating wealth. It fulfills human and societal aspirations as part of the broader social system. Performance must be measured not only on the return to shareholders, but also on how it achieves its environmental, social and good governance objectives.” Wait, Environmental, Social and Governance? ESG? Yes, it’s here too. These are quotes from an article from MSN Money and there will be a link on the wiki.
So, what has to happen for this to come about? It’s already happened. People in power saw the pandemic as the crisis that must not go to waste, giving them the opportunity to reorder society. Don’t believe me? Let’s hear it from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada:
“This pandemic has provided an opportunity for a reset. This is our chance to accelerate our pre-pandemic efforts, to reimagine economic systems that actually address global challenges like extreme poverty, inequality and climate change.”
Oh, but, that’s just Canada. We’re not going to do that here in the United States, are we? Politicians will try. I started off by talking about American legislators trying to take more control of our lives through centralized planning, it’s the same deal. The World Economic Forum doesn’t have the power to implement anything, but it has the ideas and the clout to get others to act on the ideas. In some respects, it doesn’t even have to convince government. If it can get businesses to implement things, that gives them a way to circumvent the Constitution.
Oh, and there’s another phrase that may be tied to this effort to bring about the Great Reset. It was first uttered by Prime Minister Boris Johnson according to England’s Telegraph, but we’ve heard it from President Biden, Tony Blair, Greta Thunberg, Andrew Cuomo, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates, Trudeau and more. The phrase is the awkward sounding “Build Back Better.”
All these movements are about top-down control. Government thinking they know better and are willing to use whatever means, push, prod, threaten, to assert their ideas over us average people.
Tell you what, if you’re interested in “a better kind of capitalism” then take a step back, get rid of laws and regulations that interfere in the economy. Capitalism, or maybe I should call it the Free Market, takes place in the absence of an overarching system. If government would get out of the way, maybe the free market could work the way it is supposed to.
In a post-recording addendum to this episode, I have an announcement.
I have fun with the podcast, learning new things and sharing them with all of you, but I find myself at a point where I feel its best to slow down, and I do this for a few reasons:
First, I need to focus more of my energies on the job search. And, when I do find a new job, I will likely not have as much time as I’d like for the podcast.
Second, I started a large ebook project. Another 50 volume set, this time from the Yale University Press. It’s a book series called The Chronicles of America. In the past, I’ve tried to do both the ebooks and the podcast, but it did not go so well. I have found it difficult to split my time between them.
Finally, I feel like I’ve hit something of a wall with my podcast scripts. I have 5 or 6 right now that I started, wrote a couple paragraphs, then stopped because I wasn’t sure where to go with the discussion.
I have no doubt there will be more to come in the future, but I am not sure I can keep up with my previous pace of 1 per week.
I will continue to work on the Wiki, to post raw Reagan audio on Youtube and share on Facebook. I hope you'll continue to follow.