George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

By April 15, Bush had been informed that there were some 33 million Americans living
in poverty, to which he replied: "I cannot see how draping a socialistic medi-care
program around the sagging neck of our social security program will be a blow to
poverty. And I can see only one answer to [the problem of poverty]: Let us turn our free
enterprise system loose from government control." Otherwise, Bush held it "the
responsibility of the local government first to assume the burden of relieving poverty
wherever its exists, and I know of many communities that are more than capable of
working with this problem."
Bush's approach to farm policy was along similar lines, combining the rhetoric of Adam
Smith with intransigent defense of the food cartels. his campaign brochure he opined that
"Agriculture...must be restored to a free market economy, subject to the basic laws of
supply and demand." On April 9 in Waco, Bush assailed the Wheat-Cotton subsidy bill
which had just received the approval of the House. "If I am elected to the Senate," said
Bush, I will judge each agricultural measure on the basis of whether it gets the
Government further into, or out of, private business." Bush added that farm subsidies are
among "our most expensive federal programs."
Another of Bush's recurrent obsessions was his desire to break the labor movement.
During the 1960's, he expressed this in the context of campaigns to prevent the repeal of
section 14 (b) of the Taft-Hartley law, which permitted the states to outlaw the closed
shop and union shop, and thus to protect state laws guaranteeing the so- called open shop
or "right to work," a device which in practice prevented the organization of large sectors
of the working population of these states into unions. Bush's editorializing takes him back
to the era when the Sherman Anti-trust Act was still being used against labor unions.
"I believe in the right-to-work laws," said Bush to a group of prominent Austin
businessmen at a luncheon in the Commodore Perry Hotel on March 5. "At every
opportunity, I urge union members to resist payment of political assessments. If there's
only one in 100 who thinks for himself and votes for himself, then he should not be
assessed by COPE."
On March 19 Bush asserted that "labor's blatant attack on right-to- work laws is open
admission that labor does have a monopoly and will take any step to make this monopoly.
Union demands are a direct cause of the inflationary spiral lowering the real income of
workers and increasing the costs of production." This is, from the point of scientific
economics, an absurdity. But four days later Bush returned to the topic, attacking United
Auto Workers President Walter Reuther, a figure whom Bush repeatedly sought ot
identify with Yarborough, for demands which "will only cause the extinction of free
enterprise in America. A perfect example of labor's pricing a product out of existence is
found in West Virginia. John L. Lewis' excessive demands on the coal industry raised the
price of coal, forced the consumer to use a substitute cheaper product, killed the coal
industry and now West Virginia has an excessive rate of unemployment."
On Labor Day, Bush spoke to a rally in the court house square of Quanah, and called for
"protection of the rights of the individual laborer through the state rather than the federal