clipped from article.nationalreview.com

In the 1880s a Yale philosopher named William Graham Sumner had spoken of another forgotten man. Sumner described his forgotten man algebraically. A, he said, wanted to help X. Nothing wrong with that. B also wanted to help X. The problem occurs when A and B get together and pass a dubious law that coerces C into cofunding their project for X.

C is the forgotten man in this instance. As Sumner wrote: “He works, he votes, generally he prays — but he always pays, yes above all he pays…He keeps the production going on.” C is the man, he also wrote, who is “never thought of.”

During the Depression many people still recalled Sumner’s forgotten man.

politicians debated which forgotten man, C or X, was the true forgotten man. Many believed that Hoover’s and FDR’s efforts on behalf of one forgotten man was creating a second.

Sumner, even before the income tax, the Great Society and Medicare Part D had the foresight to call “jobbery.”