25 October 2015

Four freedoms and progressive taxes

State of the Union addresses used to be serious speeches, not the mawkish, partisan spectacles that today's Presidents inflict on Congress and the nation. One of the greatest was Franklin D. Roosevelt's address of 1941, delivered before a somber Congress as our nation was arming, becoming the arsenal of democracy, for the war already raging in Europe. Best known as the Four Freedoms Speech, it also contained a call for personal sacrifice, including higher taxes:

I have called for personal sacrifice. I am assured of the willingness of almost all Americans to respond to that call.

A part of the sacrifice means the payment of more money in taxes. In my Budget Message I shall recommend that a greater portion of this great defense program be paid for from taxation than we are paying today. No person should try, or be allowed, to get rich out of this program; and the principle of tax payments in accordance with ability to pay should be constantly before our eyes to guide our legislation.

If the Congress maintains these principles, the voters, putting patriotism ahead of pocketbooks, will give you their applause.

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way — everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want — which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants-everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear — which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor — anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

All Americans eligible to vote for President next year, in primaries and the general election, should consider reading and discussing FDR’s speech with their families and friends.

How the speech was written is explained by Marist University, which also makes available for download a PDF of the typewritten pages of FDR’s reading copy. The text also is available at The American Presidency Project at the University of California at Santa Barbara. And for your convenience I’ve typeset the speech in a PDF for printing.