Jim Powell looks more deeply at the similarities between Barack Obama and Theodore Roosevelt:
President Obama is a smart man who believes great wealth is a social problem, and ordinary people would be better off if wealth were substantially taxed away. Recently he drew inspiration from Theodore Roosevelt, another smart man who had a similar view, completely misinterpreted what was happening in the economy, and actively disrupted it.
Theodore Roosevelt was the man who, in 1906, encouraged progressives to promote a federal income tax after it was struck down by the Supreme Court and given up for dead. He declared that “too much cannot be said against the men of great wealth.” He vowed to “punish certain malefactors of great wealth.”
Perhaps TR’s view was rooted in an earlier era when the greatest fortunes were made by providing luxuries for kings, like fine furniture, tapestries, porcelains and works of silver, gold and jewels. Since the rise of industrial capitalism, however, the greatest fortunes generally have been made by serving millions of ordinary people. One thinks of the Wrigley chewing gum fortune, the Heinz pickle fortune, the Havemeyer sugar fortune, the Shields shaving cream fortune, the Colgate toothpaste fortune, the Ford automobile fortune and, more recently, the Jobs Apple fortune. TR inherited money from his family’s glass-importing and banking businesses, and maybe his hostility to capitalist wealth was driven by guilt.
Like Obama, TR was a passionate believer in big government — actually the first president to promote it since the Civil War. He said, “I believe in power … I did greatly broaden the use of executive power … The biggest matters I managed without consultation with anyone, for when a matter is of capital importance, it is well to have it handled by one man only … I don’t think that any harm comes from the concentration of power in one man’s hands.”
