Government Regulation Quotes
March 4, 1933 was the date that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had assumed the Presidency from Herbert Hoover and used government to combat the Great Depression whereas Hoover would not take any of these steps as the conservative wing of his party and he regarded anything that government did was “creeping socialism”. Historically, it is useful to recall what steps Roosevelt took that were described as socialism. These include Social Security, Federal Deposit Insurance for bank accounts, aid to farmers, the Civilian Conservation Corps, Regulation of the stock market, regulation of banks and many other things that are key elements of modern capitalism which virtually every capitalistic nations has in one form or another. Long after Truman was out of office, the most conservative elements of the Republican Party have accused every Democratic President of “creeping socialism” when they were actually quite opposed to socialism. Even when their career before their presidency was full of criticisms of socialism and policies that are opposite, as in the case of President Obama, the President has been accused of being a socialist. However, it started with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S Truman.
When Secretary of State, Jefferson ran the first American Patent Office. The Patent system was originally and educational program, not an intellectual property program. Inventors would keep all their technological secrets to themselves. The idea behind the original patent system was to give an inventor a limited monopoly on profiting from his invention in exchange for sharing his information and techniques with his countrymen—thus improving the technological competency of the entire society. The very first patents were available for public inspection for that reason. And even today, copies of patents are available easily for almost no cost. And few American ideas worked as well as our early patent system. Through its educational role and technology transfer, America came from technological nowhere to being the pre-eminent inventing nation of the world. The balance between public access to invention and innovation and preservation of some rights to the creator of intellectual property is key to modern development.
The mantra was not heard much after the collapse of the ‘smart’ markets in 2008 and the ‘dumb’ governments had to come to the rescue of the economy all over the industrialized world.
See also Gerald R. Ford for a later similar expression.
That was certainly true at that time in the United States. Marijuana was illegal, but alcohol and nicotine—cigarettes—were legal. Yet, over 350,000 deaths a year were caused by nicotine, over 100,000 alcohol related death the epidemiologists had found. But the number of marijuana caused death was just a handful, although there were hunreds of deaths of drug dealers fighting for territory, Nicotine an alcohol science had proved was addicting. Not so for marijuana which for some people was habituating, but marijuana never met the scientific criteria for addiction.
