Ecos da "Old Right" (I)

(ou os "extra-terrestres" que precederam Ron Paul)

De todos os autores da "Old Right" (anti-new-deal-anti-intervencionistas republicanos e muitos democratas), como H. L. Mencken, Albert Jay Nock, Rose Wilder Lane, Garet Garrett, este último é o meu preferido, embora todos estes (e mais alguns) sejam de leitura obrigatória.

No seu livro THE PEOPLE'S POTTAGE (de 1953, a reunião de 3 textos começando em 1938), analisa como Cícero os desenvolvimentos da República, e como a estrutura social e política vai consolidando e centralizando o poder de forma decidida. E é esse livro que vou aos poucos seleccionar algumas passagens.

No Foreward começa por analisar o New Deal:

"(...)What the people did in fact surrender was control of government. They did not intend to do that. For a long time they did not realize they had done it, and when at last it came to them they were already deeply infected with a virus that devours the copy book virtues, creates habits of dependence and destroys the valiant love of self-responsibility.

The crisis was moral.

Happily for their designs, the New Deal physicians found the patient in a state of economic pain, extreme but not fatal, and proceeded to administer imported narcotics, all habit forming, such as:

(1) Repudiation of the United States Treasury's promises to pay.
(2) Confiscation of the people's gold by trickery.
(3) Debasement of the currency.
(4) Deliberate inflation.
(5) Spoilation of the savers, whose little rainy day hoards melted away.
(6) Deficit spending to create buying power by con- jury.
(7) Monetization of debt.
(8) The doctrine of a planned economy.
(9) A scheme of taxation, class subsidies and Fed-eral grants-in-aid designed ostensibly to redistribute the national wealth for social justice, but calculated in fact to reduce millions of citizens to subservience, to bring forty-eight sovereign states to the status of provinces and to create in the executive principle a supreme government with extensive new powers, including the power to make its own laws by simply publishing from its bureaus rules and regulations having the force of law, disobedience punishable by fine or imprisonment.(...)

Thus the Welfare State was built. The facade was magnificent; the cornerstone rested on quicksand".

Mais à frente, no primeiro texto (1938) com um magnifico título "The Revolution Was" começa poéticamente com:

There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom."