Tuesday is “We Built This” night at the Republican National Convention. “The GOP is turning what some see as a presidential slight aimed at business owners and entrepreneurs into a theme,” reports Fox News.
That slight, of course, was contained in some off-the-prompter remarks President Obama made during aspeech in Roanoke, Virginia, last month:
Obama’s comments are hardly new, however. They merely channel another self-proclaimed progressive from more than a century ago.
“The absence of effective state, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power,” Theodore Roosevelt announced in Osawatomie, Kansas in 1910. The anniversary of that speech is Friday—coincidentally, right between this year’s conventions.
Roosevelt, aka TR, added that it was acceptable to earn lots of money—as long as the earner would put that money to use in ways the government approved of. “The prime need is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which it is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise. We grudge no man a fortune which represents his own power and sagacity, when exercised with entire regard to the welfare of his fellows.”
