Monday, June 4, 2012

Something I Just Read

Looking at current affairs, he expounded on the need for party realignment in order to come to grips with such pressing issues as the tariff and monetary standards, and he claimed that "the difference between democracy and socialism is not an essential difference, but only a practice difference."  In using government to address social and economic problems, socialists rushed in where democrats trod warily, but with the growth of huge corporations, he asked, "(M)ust not government lay aside all timid scruple and boldly make itself an agency for social reform as well as for political control?"  He went further in his lectures at Johns Hopkins in 1888: "Government does not stop with the protection of life, liberty, and property, as some have suggested; it goes on to serve every convenience of society ...    The state is not a body corporate,---it is a body politic; and rules of good business are not always rules of good politics ... Businesslike the administration of government should be---but it is not business.  It is organic life."

Anybody want to guess whose biography I'm reading?

7 comments:

  1. Fredrick Douglas, or, John Dewey who taught at many universitites and also set up Republican clubs at some.

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  2. notacynic:

    "Rules of good business are not always rules of good politics...."

    Let's keep that in mind when we vote in November.

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  3. NAC, "Never mind!" Roseanne Roseanne Daana.

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    Replies
    1. Yeah, that was Emily Latella, actually. (Also Gilda at work.)

      Roseanne Rosannadanna used to say, "It just goes to show you, Jane, it's always something. If it's not one thing it's another."

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