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Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his "Commonwealth Club Address" (1932), articulated his desire for a government of expansive economic powers, used to hold back "economic oligarchy" and assure positive "economic rights." Roosevelt considered public welfare considerations to overshadow individual sovereignty in importance; he was ready to use government power to force individuals to behave in the "public interest." Ronald Reagan, unlike Roosevelt, recognized that government was the problem, not the solution, in economic crises, and that its authority over the economy must be curtailed to secure the freedom of entrepreneurs and all hard-working, self-directed Americans. In his First Inaugural Address (1981), Reagan represented the American heritage, arguing against restraints on free enterprise and defending individual sovereignty, natural rights, and limited government.

Roosevelt saw government as a social contract between the rulers and the governed; under it, "rulers were accorded power, and the people consented to that power on consideration that they be accorded certain rights." But Roosevelt did not consider the rights granted under such a contract to be eternal and immutable: "The task of statesmanship [is] redefinition of these rights in terms of a changing and growing social order. New conditions impose new requirements upon government and those who conduct [it]." To Roosevelt, the very principles on which government is based ought to change with the times.

Roosevelt claimed that an older equality of opportunity had been eroded; he asserted that "equality of opportunity as we have known it no longer exists" and that "we are steering a steady course toward economic oligarchy..." For Roosevelt, government was the solution to this problem; "the task of government in its relation to business is to assist the development of an economic declaration of rights, an economic constitutional order." Government ought to equalize opportunity where financial oligarchs' activities had given some people tremendous advantages over others. Roosevelt hence advocated redefining rights to encompass positive "economic rights." Rather than adhere to the older definition of the right to life as a negative right to be free of active violations of one's physical integrity, Roosevelt believed that every man "has also a right to make a comfortable living... Our government... owes to everyone an avenue to possess himself of a portion of that plenty sufficient for his needs..." Rather

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