Tommy Douglas Quotes
We agree with the statement contained in the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, written by Pope Leo XIII, that "anything which dominates the life of the community should be owned by the community." That is the basis upon which we believe there should be government ownership of monopolistic enterprises.
Douglas, T.C. House of Commons Debates, 15 Feb. 1943.
The Catholic view on the subject varied from time to time, even with the same Pope. See {638558} for another quote from this Pope that gives a different point of view.
Ironically the far right wing Fascists and the far left wing Communists agreed on this point: nationalization.
The founder was Charles E. Coughlin, 1891-1979, a demagogic Catholic Priest who drafted the principles and invited others to join him. Hundreds of thousands did in this organization which began in idealism, and ended in scandal and hate mongering, so much so that Father Coughlin was ordered off the radio and out of politics by the Catholic Church. The National Union in 1936 had morphed into the Union Party which ran Presidential candidates in the 1936 election. The Coughlin and the Union were a mixture of Fascist and Socialist principles. The prohibition of private ownership of banks and utilities was one of the radical socialist notions.
Churchill and Labor Leader Clement Attlee found themselves at adjoining urinals during a break in a political event.
Churchill detested Attlee both personally and for his political philosophy which was left wing especially favoring government nationalization of all large industry and business. Churchill walked into the very large men’s room and saw Attlee at a urinal and one end. Churchill, setting Attlee up, walked all the way to the other end of the row of urinals and began to use one there. Attlee commented that Churchill was appearing very standoffish to be urinating so far away. Churchill, then let loose with this repartee. See {620650} for another put down of Attlee.
At the time extreme socialist doctrine was that the state should own the factories and the other means of industrial production. The socialists believed that the people through their government had to be able to control the economy and the private owners’ greed would always drive the economy for themselves and not for the society in general. Deal was one of the first who argued that there were other, less draconian modes of economic control like government regulation and central banks. Deat turned traitor during WWII and served in the Vichy Nazi cabinet of Pierre Laval. He was sentenced to death for treason but escaped to Italy where he assumed a new identity and then was sheltered by a right-wing Catholic religious order in the convent of San Vito, near Turin, where he wrote his memoirs and lived undiscovered until his death.
Thomas Clement Douglas PC CC SOM was a Scottish Canadian politician who served as Premier of Saskatchewan from 1944 to 1961 and Leader of the New Democratic Party from 1961 to 1971. A Baptist minister, he was elected to the House of Commons of Canada in 1935 as a member of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). He left federal politics to become Leader of the Saskatchewan Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and then the seventh Premier of Saskatchewan. His cabinet was the first democratic socialist government in North America and it introduced the continent's first single-payer, universal health care program.
