Read Hostile Takeover: Resisting Centralized Government's Stranglehold on America for Free Online Page A

apparently, a redistribution of wealth from each according to ability, to each according to need. But there’s nothing new here. Crowdsourced or not, Van Jones’s progressive agenda strikes a remarkably familiar note. We’ve heard this tune before. In his book Liberal Fascism , required reading for anyone that wants to understand the roots of progressivism in America, Jonah Goldberg listed a few of the planks of the radical progressive Father Coughlin, the radio demagogue and vociferous advocate of FDR’s agenda of expanded government power and executive branch control. 33 Goldberg argues that Coughlin’s leftist rants often “sounded like he’s borrowed Mussolini’s talking points,” but the radio evangelist eventually became disenchanted with the Roosevelt administration for not going far enough, fast enough down the Road to Serfdom. “Finally, on November 11, 1934, he announced he was forming a new ‘lobby of the people,’ the National Union for Social Justice, or NUSJ.” The sixteen principles of “social justice” included:
That every citizen willing to work and capable of working shall receive a just and living annual wage which will enable him to maintain and educate his family . . .
I believe in nationalizing those public necessities which by their very nature are too important to be held in the control of private individuals.
I believe in upholding the right of private property yet of controlling it for the public good.
I believe not only in the right of the laboring man to organize in unions but also in the duty of the Government which that laboring man supports to protect these organizations against the vested interests of wealth and of intellect.
I believe in the event of a war and for the defense of our nation and its liberties, if there shall be a conscription of men let there be a conscription of wealth.
I believe in preferring the sanctity of human rights to the sanctity of property rights. I believe that the chief concern of government shall be for the poor, because, as is witnessed, the rich have ample means of their own to care for themselves. 34
    If, circa 2012, all these government-will-solve-all-your-problems platitudes seem tired, recycled, that’s because they are. And they were even when Father Coughlin pitched them in 1934. Van Jones, like Father Coughlin and a countless line of political snake oil salesmen before him, is like the salesman CEO of that failing corporation described by Apple’s Steve Jobs. He’s trying to repackage and resell a product that no one wants to buy. 35 What is needed is a better product based on better ideas, not a slicker sales pitch. Jones’s Contract for the American Dream, I predict, will work about as well as the distribution of scarce resources at Zuccotti Park among the infinite demands of the entitled.
    There will be no leftist, progressive imitation of the Tea Party. There can be no real sense of cooperation, no sense of community, without respect for an individual’s life, liberty, and property. You don’t say “please” or “excuse me” to someone who is trying to hurt you or take your stuff.

CHAPTER 11
L OSING P ATIENTS
    R OBERT R EICH IS RILED UP. “W E CANNOT, SOME PEOPLE SAY, ANY longer afford as a nation to provide the safety nets for the poor and the infirm or for the people who fall down for no fault of their own,” he declares, incensed. “But how can that be true if we are now richer than we have ever been before?” 1 His audience clearly agrees with the sentiment, cheering and applauding. It is November 15, 2011, and Reich is addressing an Occupy Cal protest on the Mario Savio steps at the University of California, Berkeley. “We are losing the moral foundation stone on which this country and our democracy are built,” he continues. Applause.
    A key member of the Obama campaign’s policy transition team, and labor secretary in the Clinton administration, Reich is now a tenured public policy professor at UC Berkeley. He