At long last, Salient Cal’s America: Reappraising the Harding & Coolidge Era is available in hardcover and paperback on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and other major booksellers. Enjoy rediscovering some of the central participants in an Era long neglected, and often caricatured rather than understood. Silenced by narrow minds and prejudiced hearts for decades, their voices and perspectives are included here to reacquaint ourselves with a past more salient and more insightful than is usually assumed. As Cal put it, “We review the past not in order that we may return to it, but that we may find in what direction, straight and clear, it points into the future.” Order your copy today!
The Importance of the Obvious 
Good evening Daniel, Milton Friedman notes in his book Free to Choose that the trigger for the depression was the failure of the Federal Reserve to follow the rules of the Gold Standard and monetarily inflate the dollar after the 1929 market crash. I think it was the Mises Institute which has stated that during the 1920’s, the Fed incorrectly kept its eye on the prices of goods and services and not on the money supply which did increase significantly. The increase in the prices of goods and services was tame during the 20’s because of the great increases in productivity and innovation caused by the huge and simultaneous reduction in government spending and taxes implemented by presidents Harding and Coolidge. On the subject of tariffs, if you take the position of a free market purist and say that tariffs are bad then you set up a system whereby a country like China for example that employs slave labor, can drain all the manufacturing jobs from another country such as the United States. I think that President Coolidge would not have gone long with Hoover’s Smoot-Hawley tariff because Coolidge knew that you have to be careful and selective in increasing tariffs when the economy is faltering. In addition, I am convinced that Coolidge would not have increased taxes like Hoover did to balance the budget in a faltering economy. Bruce GabrielMarlborough, MA