Yesterday evening I was watching Ed Schultz’ segment, included, on Obama’s plan to invest $53 billion in high speed rail to create jobs while modernizing our nations infrastructure to catch up with other industrialized nations. The Republican response can be summarized, as usual, in one word: NO! Ed was discussing this with Robert Reich, who said Republican economic policy is unchanged from the last Republican to trash our economy, Herbert Hoover. That intrigued me, so I did a little research, and Reich is right.

The following is part of Hoover’s speech to the Republican National Convention on July 8, 1952.

…And there have been other assassins of freedom.

Within 8 years since victory, we will have seen tax-and-tax-spend-and-spend reach a fantastic total greater than in all the previous 170 years of our Republic.

Behind this plush curtain of tax and spend, three sinister spooks or ghosts are mixing poison for the American people. They are the shades of Mussolini, with his bureaucratic fascism; of Karl Marx, and his socialism; and of Lord Keynes, with his perpetual government spending, deficits and inflation. And we added a new ideology of our own. That is government give-away programs.

I will in a few moments measure for you the blight of inflation from this mixture that has poured into every American home.

By way of the bureaucracy part of the mixture, within 20 years we have seen it grow from under 600,000 Federal officials under Republican Administration to over 2,300,000 officials today-with the addition of almost a thousand of government agencies. In fascist fashion, they dictate and give orders and favors to our citizens. Still worse, they do have a real inherent power. Their inherent power is that of all bureaucracy to lay its paralyzing hand more and more heavily upon free men. They rush headlong into its phantasies of the millennium and send the bills to the Treasury.

If you want to see pure fascism mixed with give-away programs, take a look into the Brannan Plan.

If you want to see pure socialism mixed with give-away programs, take a look at socialized medicine and socialized electrical power.

These things do not make for free men.

Man was created somewhat lower than the angels, but to him the Creator gave the right to plan his own life, to dare his own adventure, to earn his own reward so long as he does no harm to his fellows.

Either we shall have a society based upon ordered liberty and the creative energy of free men or we shall have a dictated society.

I have said before now that there are immutable principles which neither the rigors of depression, nor the tricks of inherent powers, nor lost statesmanship, nor wars, nor New Dealers, nor militarists can change. These immutable principles came into the universe along with the shooting stars of which worlds are made, and they have always been and ever will be true. Such are the presence of God, the laws of gravitation, and the ceaseless struggle of mankind to be free.

Shall we keep the faith? Must we condemn unborn generation to fight again and die for the right to be free?…