English: Photo of Thomas Hill Green. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Similar political reforms were adopted in Sweden at the behest of the Social Democratic Party and in the other Scandinavian countries by the early part of the Twentieth Century.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, the British Liberal Party - inspired by Thomas Hill Green's critique of classical liberalism - gradually abandoned its commitment to laissez-faire government and became a staunch proponent of political reform. The party argued for toleration toward non-conformists, agitated for factory legislation to improve the working conditions of the British laborer, revised the poor-laws to eliminate their more onerous effects upon the down- and-out, improved education, and passed laws to include rural workers within the protective powers of government list.
Upon becoming Prime Minister in 1908, Herbert Henry Asquith - who as a student had studied under Green at Oxford - and his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lloyd George - devised a program of social legislation that was sweeping in its scope. The program included provisions for public labor exchanges, minimum wages, housing, town-planning and a National Insurance Program to provide protection against sickness and unemployment. The bulk of the program - which far exceeded anything later proposed by Roosevelt's New Deal - was designed to improve the conditions of life for the average citizen in the United Kingdom and the program was financed through a sharply-increased progressive income tax, inheritance taxes, and levies upon incremental land.
Here in the United States, Green's idea that government should act "as a positive instrument for the public good" has been bitterly resisted by the 1% and their enablers for the past one hundred years. Through their calculated efforts, the words "liberal" and "socialist" have become pejoratives. Hence, the media, echoing the conventional wisdom , endlessly tells us that Bernie Sanders, as a self-declared social democrat, is too radical to be elected president.
What would happen if every American voter were to ignore propaganda, the one-upmanship, and the inside-the-beltway punditry and actually paid attention to the issues as Senator Sanders has defined them on his website?
* "The issue of wealth and income inequality is the great moral issue of our time, it is the great economic issue of our time, and it is the great political issue of our time."
* "Today, we live in the richest country in the history of the world, but that reality means little because much of that wealth is controlled by a tiny handful of individuals."
* "Freedom of speech does not mean the freedom to buy the United States government. Oil companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers, Wall Street bankers and other powerful special interests have poured money into our political system for years. In 2010, a bad situation turned worse. In a 5-4 decision in the Citizens United case, the Supreme Court opened the floodgates for corporations and the wealthy to spend unlimited and undisclosed money to buy our elected officials. The Supreme Court essentially declared that corporations have the same rights as natural-born human beings."
* "The real unemployment rate is much higher than the 'official' figure typically reported in the newspapers. When you include workers who have given up looking for jobs, or those who are working part time when they want to work full time, the real number is much higher than official figures would suggest.
"It's even worse for young people. A recent study found that over 50 percent of young African-Americans and more than one-third of white and Hispanic youth are looking for full-time work.
"We are in the midst of an ongoing unemployment crisis, and we must take bold action to address it."
* "When my Republican colleagues mention 'family values,' they're usually talking about opposition to contraception, denying a woman's right to choose, or opposition to gay rights.
"Real family values strengthen the bonds of family and improve the lives of our families. When it comes to these values, our country deserves better.
"We are the only major nation in the world that doesn't guarantee paid time off for new parents. Of 182 nations that do provide paid leave for this purpose, more than half guarantee at least 14 weeks off.
"We are the only one of 22 wealthy nations that does not guarantee some type of paid sick leave, and the only one that does not provide paid sick leave for a worker undergoing a 50-day cancer treatment.
"We are the only advanced economy, and one of only 13 nations in the entire world, that doesn't guarantee workers a paid vacation.
* "Unless we take bold action to address climate change, our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are going to look back on this period in history and ask a very simple question: Where were they? Why didn't the United States of America, the most powerful nation on earth, lead the international community in cutting greenhouse gas emissions and preventing the devastating damage that the scientific community told us would surely come?
* "Wall Street cannot continue to be an island unto itself, gambling trillions in risky financial instruments while expecting the public to bail it out.
"It is time to break up the largest financial institutions in the country. The six largest financial institutions in this country today hold assets equal to about 60% of the nation's gross domestic product. These six banks issue more than two-thirds of all credit cards and over 35 percent of all mortgages. They control 95 percent of all derivatives and hold more than 40 percent of all bank deposits in the United States.
"We must break up too-big-to-fail financial institutions. Those institutions received a $700 billion bailout from the US taxpayer, and more than $16 trillion in virtually zero interest loans from the Federal Reserve. Despite that, financial institutions made over $152 billion in profit in 2014 - the most profitable year on record, and three of the four largest financial institutions are 80 percent bigger today than they were before we bailed them out ?
"Our banking system must be part of the productive, job-creating productive economy. The Federal Reserve, a government entity which serves as the engine of the banking industry, must eliminate its internal conflicts of interest, provide stricter oversight, and insist that the banks its supports serve the economy in a way that works for everyone, not just a few.
"If a bank is too big to fail, it is too big to exist. These institutions have acquired too much economic and political power, endangering our economy and our political process."
Do those issues seem too radical to resonate with ordinary Americans? If the answer still is yes, perhaps Erasmus's observation provides a clue: "In the land of the blind, the one eyed-man is king."