Spreading The Wealth Around In 1934

Some weeks ago, OTR decided to take a break from domestic politics as a core theme for his blog. Political discourse is everywhere on the Internet and, if you have enough years in the American experience to remember the better times, most of that discourse is painful if not downright frightening. But ignoring pain seldom leads to a better outcome, especially when the learned physician, history, renders such a clear diagnosis.

In 1934, most Americans were adjusting to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's year old administration as it introduced a government-directed economy as a means of overcoming the Great Depression. That same year, in Louisiana the populism of the previous generation merged with the Marxist zeitgeist sweeping Europe. The personification of that movement was Huey Long.

Dave Blount, posting at Moonbattery, has this to say about Long:

To this day the name Huey Long rightly fills freedom-loving Americans with dread, because he personified the threat of the same collectivist totalitarianism that produced Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Soviet Russia taking root on our soil.

Blount's post also links to Long's Share the Wealth plan, a scheme bearing a scary resemblance to the hope and change proposed by Barack Hussein Obama. Blount continues:

The mentality represented by Obama and the Occupy Wall Street crowd isn’t new. Neither is the economic peril that makes us vulnerable to it. What would be new is the sufficient lack of character for Americans to succumb to it.

We have been there before. This is a wake up call we cannot ignore.