With all legislative power vested in the house of representatives which is elected by the people, all judges elected by the people and the United States supreme court shorn of its usurped power to declare laws unconstitutional, it is difficult to see how the government could become tyrannical. It is still more difficult when it is considered that, under the Socialist government, the people would have these additional powers:
The power to recall, at any time, any official.
The power to enact, by direct vote, any laws that their legislative bodies might refuse to enact.
The power, by direct vote, to repeal any law that their legislative bodies had enacted.
And the power, by direct vote, to amend their constitutions, both federal and state, any time they wished to do so.
If there could be any tyranny or despotism under such a form of government, gentlemen who profess to believe so are entitled to make the most of it.
Many good persons believe, however, that if Socialism were to come, all individual liberty would be lost. Such persons lack, not only a knowledge of Socialist plans, but a sense of humor. They assume that we now have individual liberty. They do not seem to realize that the average boy, as soon as he is old enough to work, if not before, is grabbed off by necessity and chucked into the nearest job at hand. The boy may have preferred to work at something else; perhaps even he is better fitted for something else. But the pinch of necessity both compels him to work and to take what he can find. He may rattle around in two or three occupations before he finds one in which he stays for life, but the other occupations, like the first one, are not of his choosing. He takes each of them simply because he must have work.
If Socialism would enable the head of every family to earn as good a living as the $5,000–a-year man now gets, the head of no family would be compelled to send his children out to work until they had completed, at least, the high school course. If boys were not compelled to go to work so young, does it not seem likely that, with added years, they would be better able to choose an occupation that would be more nearly suited both to their tastes and their abilities? And if we should destroy the power of poverty to push boys into the occupation nearest to them, should we be justly subject to the charge that we had destroyed, or even impaired, the boys’ individual liberty?
Persons who derive their knowledge of Socialism from capitalist sources have strange, and sometimes awful, ideas of what Socialism is setting out to do. They are told, and many of them believe, that under Socialism, the individual would be a mere puppet in the hands of the government, not arising in the morning until the ringing of the governmental alarm clock, doing during the day whatever odd jobs might be assigned to him by a governmental boss, and going to bed at night when the boss told him to.
Suppose we shake up this trash and let the wind blow through it.