Franklin Roosevelt's and Lyndon Johnson's Assault on the U. S. Constitution and Limited Government

During the New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt tried to promote the "progressive" view of the individual, freedom, and government's role; in his Democratic Convention Address, Roosevelt argued that "necessitous men are not free men" and that freedom therefore entailed the opportunity to make "a living decent according to the standards of the time," a definition that necessarily changes as the standards of the time change. To achieve this "freedom" in the new sense, Roosevelt wishes to wage a new "war" against the "economic royalists who allegedly jeopardize the progressive vision of freedom. In his State of the Union address, FDR more explicitly discusses the kinds of positive rights he advances: rights which "connect freedom with economic security," such as the right to a useful job, adequate earnings, decent housing, adequate medical care, and a good education.

This is a view of rights which fundamentally conflicts with the idea of negative natural rights expressed by John Locke in his Second Treatise on Civil Government. For Locke and for the Framers of the U. S. Constitution, individual rights meant that every individual should be let alone in his life, liberty, health, and possessions without positive interference by others. Furthermore, for Locke and the Framers, any claim to "positive economic rights" of the sort Roosevelt advocates amounts to positive intervention with the liberties of some men so as to provide the goods and services which are forcibly redistributed to others under the pretext that those others have a "right" to such goods and services. FDR's "positive rights" can only be implemented at the expense of Lockean negative rights.