Free Liars by Glenn Beck Page B

socialism.” “The thesis of the state socialist,” he wrote, “is that no line can be drawn between private and public affairs which the State may not cross at will; that omnipotence of legislation is the first postulateof all just political theory.”
    Wilsonian progressive thinking leaves no room for protection from the state, however. “Communities are supreme over men as individuals,” Wilson said. “Limits of wisdom and convenience to the public control there may be: limits of principle there are,upon strict analysis, none.”
    Wilson is perhaps best known for urging America to make the world “safe for democracy.” Yet his core values—his core progressive values—drove him to undermine the very essence of American democracy in favor of state socialism:
    Democracy is bound by no principle of its own nature to say itself nay as to the exercise of any power. Here, then, lies the point. The difference between democracy and socialism is not an essential difference, but only a practical difference— [ it ] is a difference of organization and policy,not a difference of primary motive.
    Let’s pause for a moment and consider the gravity of this statement, one made by a revered American president. He is saying that there is nothing exceptional about American democracy because, with just a few “practical” tweaks to “organization and policy,” it can be transformed into socialism.
    And people wonder why I have the front page of the newspaper declaring “Woodrow Wilson Is Dead” hanging in my office.
FIRST BLOOD: THE SIXTEENTH AMENDMENT
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    Wilson—who once referred to paying taxes as a “glorious privilege”—was instrumental in passing the Sixteenth Amendment, which authorized the previously unconstitutional iii federal income tax: “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”
    The amendment, which took effect just a few weeks before his inauguration, was one of his “practical” tweaks that would erase the “essential difference” between America’s capitalist, democratic system and the state socialism Wilson so admired.
    Once in office, he embraced the amendment with alacrity, summoning a special session of Congress to pass the Revenue Act of 1913, which by our current standards seems pretty innocuous. Its lowest rate was a mere one percent. Its highest rate at the time was just seven percent, and that was only on annual incomes of more than five hundred thousand dollars.
    SOCIALISM: AN AMERICAN MASS MOVEMENT
    A merican socialism flourished in the early 1900s. The Socialist Party elected dozens of mayors (including the mayor of Milwaukee) and state legislators. In the 1912 presidential election, Socialist Eugene V. Debs garnered six percent of the vote. While that’s a small percentage, it still amounted to more than nine hundred thousand American voters supporting the overt Socialist banner.
    Despite personal differences between Debs and Wilson—Debs was actually sentenced to ten years in prison under Wilson’s Sedition Act for speaking out against the World War I draft—many socialists saw a fellow traveler in Wilson (and supported his reelection in 1916), and more and more radical leftists were drawn to an increasingly extremist Democratic Party.
    In 1934, author Upton Sinclair, a prominent ex-Socialist then running for governor of California as a Democrat, theorized about how this continued leftward drift would play out in America:
    The American people will take Socialism, but they won’t take the label. . . . I certainly proved it. . . . Running on the Socialist ticket [in 1932] I got 60,000 votes, and running [two years later as a Democrat] on the slogan to “End Poverty in California” I got