Grace Coolidge in “First Ladies: Influence and Image”
C-Span’s informative feature on Mrs. Coolidge and the Coolidge White House. Well worth checking out!
economy
On Shutting Down Opportunity
“If the Federal Government should go out of existence, the common run of people would not detect the difference in the affairs of their daily life for a considerable length of time” — President Calvin Coolidge, “States Rights and National Unity,” given at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, May 15, 1926.
As a perverse enthusiasm for the “Government Shutdown” pervades mainstream media coverage, the total mischaracterization of the issue is propagating confusion and fear, not clarity and sound information. The press, having long ago shed the veneer of objective journalism, is no longer upholding its obligation to arm people with accurate and honest information.
The issue is skewed from the outset as a picture of vast human suffering all caused by a callous, unfeeling opposition to the President and his Party’s agenda. Disagreement with that agenda, instead of the agenda itself, is blamed as the problem. In actuality, the problem is never connected to its real cause: the President’s own policies. The cause is never attributed to a Government that has overgrown its very limited and specific Constitutional role. The problem is those lousy Republicans who want Government to shut down and people to die because they want to see “Obamacare,” the law of the land, undone, or so goes the absurd mantra.
Temporarily furloughing those the Government already deems “non-essential” while keeping Congressional and Executive offices open is not a shutdown. Suspending the online stream of the National Zoo’s “Panda Cam” is not a shutdown. Closing the gates of a few parks is not a shutdown. It makes it appear all those indispensably wonderful services Government provides us are going away permanently. It is political manipulation designed to force people yet again to justify a vast, all-encompassing Government in their lives. To believe an apocalypse awaits via Government “shutdown” demands the ultimate credulity. Threatening to withhold military checks while entitlement programs still keep the checks mailing out does not even begin to approach the genuine shutdown this economy is already experiencing directly because of this President’s decisions.
Playing a game of smoke and mirrors, the President and Senate leadership would rather provoke more suffering especially as it helps advance their permanent campaign against Republicans. The focus is never on the 90 million Americans no longer in the work force because of this President’s agenda. The concern is only ever how does the latest Labor statistics make the President look?
The attention is never on the creation of one “unprecedented” crisis after another to force by legislation what would never be passed if calmly and deliberately vetted. The angst is only ever on how can we survive without Government?
The entire emphasis is turned on its head. The priority is not upon removing the obstacles to ingenuity, opportunity and individual freedom. The priority is ever only on keeping Government alive and growing by “revenue neutral” tax schemes, continuing resolutions, and an endless debt, $17 trillion and counting, which our great grandchildren will still be paying! Add to this “Obamacare” exemptions for Congress ordered by President Obama, the reaffirmation of “quantitative easing” by Chairman Bernanke and now even “shutdowns” are tools to threaten any attempt to restraint this Administration and its agenda for the rest of the country. It is the transfer of authority from a self-governing people to subjects serving an autocratic elite. The focus is all in the wrong direction. The questions should be: How is liberty faring? Are the people being served? How does life look for the people with inflation, massive unemployment and generational indebtedness? Can we survive with Government as it is now, unlimited and absolute?
While Government was significantly smaller in Coolidge’s time, the temptation to encroach on people’s lives was no less alluring. It was leadership that made the difference. Moral character, humble perspective and faith in the institutions and ideals that make America have no substitute when it comes to our leaders. There is nothing that can possibly replace the lack of these qualities in order to lead and lead responsibly. But there is also a fundamental, even natural limitation to any Government which tries to do too much. Opportunity’s door invariably closes whenever and wherever Government gets involved. Consequently, nature itself will rebel against this offense. That is what we are seeing in our time. This is why there remains cause for renewed confidence in our ideals not a lazy and pessimistic resignation to circumstances. The status quo in Washington has already lost. Not living in reality, however, the establishment led by President Obama, does not realize it…yet.
Speaking to those who came to honor their fellow, fallen veterans of the heroic First Division in the American Expeditionary Forces, President Coolidge reflected on the cause for which they fought, saying,
…I cannot let this occasion pass without expressing my most strong and emphatic commendation for the reverence which your words and actions constantly express for the liberty-giving provisions of the fundamental law of our land. You have supported the Constitution and the Flag which is its symbol, not only because it represents to you the homeland, but because you know it is the sole source of American freedom. You want your rights protected by the impartial judicial decisions of the courts where you will have a right to be heard and not be exposed to the irresponsible determination of partisan political action. You want to have your earnings and your property secure. You want a free and fair opportunity to conduct your own business and make your way in the world without danger of being overcome by a Government monopoly.
Such freedom is what we now desire and expect. Government fails when it assumes the life of the individual can best be managed from its halls and corridors. Coolidge went on to explain what happens when Government ventures into the people’s business,
When the Government goes into business it lays a tax on everybody else in that business, and uses the money that it collects from its competitors to establish a monopoly and drive them out of business. No one can compete. When the Government really starts into a line of business that door of opportunity is closed to the people. It has always been an American ideal that the door of opportunity should remain open.
Coolidge saw the road Government takes every time it asserts itself in people’s choices. Opportunity closes. Freedom contracts. It is this road we are now on, with destinations including a single-payer scheme for American healthcare promised by the Government and paid by the rest of us, including generations not yet born. This latest frenzy over “shutting down” the Government is but the latest attempt to distract with fear and obtain by coercion the desired result of greater control and more of the same from an autocratic few. If people will simply stop opposing this Administration then the crisis will evaporate and all our pain will go away, they claim. This President is counting on both ignorance and addiction to the need for Government.
Coolidge reminds us to distinguish between what seems essential from what actually is. When we view it this way, it becomes obvious that the Federal Government needs us, not we it. If Washington ceased to be tomorrow, we would survive. We would even do better than we think. The importance rests with the individual and then his local and state authorities. The Federal Government would not leave a gaping hole which none could fill. The people, exercising their own judgment and creative abilities, would fill that hole. In fact, we would witness the return of choices, opportunity and freedom to our lives impossible when Government tries to “help” us.
Coolidge kept his faith in the ultimate triumph of the people to retain their liberties. The truly intimidating challenges faced by Americans of every time, place and background vindicates his faith. The confidence he had bore no time constraints, it was a faith firmly placed in the strength of ideals we share even now. The assurance of their truth and power for good rests on the conviction not only treasured by Coolidge but by millions of those who build, from nothing, lives of success and quiet excellence without a Washington subsidy. It is the solemn charge of our generation to ensure that door of opportunity remains open.
On Bureaucracy and Functional Government
When President Coolidge spoke to those gathered at the illustrious College of William and Mary in 1926, he reminded his listeners of what makes government function. For government to work, it must be local and accountable. Established by the earliest arrivals from the Old World, the experiences with bureaucratic authority taught the colonists that government centralized (and thereby removed from the problems it attempts to fix) never works. For this reason, as government advanced from colonial to state forms, bureaucracies had no part in the drafting, passage or implementation of state constitutions, laws and standards.
It was up to the towns, cities, counties and ultimately states to make government function. It is the cradle of true states’ rights and the basis for a genuine national unity. The one-size-fits-all approach always succumbs to its own inherent weaknesses. In the process of forming their own governments, Americans learned how liberty is only possible when the ability to make decisions is preserved at the local and personal level. Anything more and government, even in the name of compassion and efficiency, becomes inhuman, destructive and incompetent — the murderer of what Coolidge earlier called an individual’s “self-direction,” known also as freedom.
Experience has actually proven, so that Coolidge could truthfully say, “No method of procedure has ever been devised by which liberty could be divorced from local self-government. No plan of centralization has ever been adopted which did not result in bureaucracy, tyranny, inflexibility, reaction, and decline.” Liberty and local self-government cannot be separated as with a clinical incision to the body politic. This is why transforming government into the expansive, all-encompassing State it is today, whatever the intentions, always kills the liberty exercised by the individual.
The most adept planners fail not because someone disrupts the plan from its certain success nor because the plan can only work with the right kind of people in charge. The plan fails because it is inherently flawed. It attempts to liberate humanity by denying its humanness. Forced to conform to an unrealistic set of approved behaviors, government is stripped of any human quality, turning what is supposed to be the humane agency of free individuals, the “expression of the life” by a sovereign people, into “a cold, impersonal machine.” No longer the personal involvement of individuals deciding their own affairs, government perverts to infinite layers of “expert practitioners.” An unaccountable and reckless bureaucracy takes the place of local self-determination, giving and taking away freedom with the draft of every new form and the sweep of every expert’s pen.
We see states are no longer allowed to diverge from total conformity to Federal specifications, however mundane the state matter. This administration has made clear it will sue any state refusing to march in step with the arbitrary and selective enforcement of law it exemplifies. We watch as counties, boroughs and parishes are threatened to accept designated “Federal” money or else be cut off from future “favor.” We look while cities, towns, and villages are told to adopt a complete overhaul of zoning regulations by the Housing and Urban Development Department in Washington. We then stand aghast as Washington invades our most personal decisions of child-raising, employment, education, health care, retirement, and, through the institutionalization of political correctness, what we are allowed to say in political opposition and believe in religious conviction.
Coolidge, addressing the issues of housing, food, wages, hours, conditions, justice and opportunity, placed the power for addressing all these with the welfare of all the people in his state squarely where it belonged, where the laws properly placed them — with the people themselves. It is they who bear the burdens of government, who pay its costs and activate its provisions. It was for the people of Massachusetts to decide these details of their lives because they comprised its government from little Monroe to Beacon Hill. What Coolidge said of Massachusetts could be said of governments everywhere across this Union, “Our government belongs to the people. Our property belongs to the people. It is distributed. They own it. The taxes are paid by the people. They bear the burden. The benefits of government must accrue to the people. Not to one class, but to all classes, to all the people. The functions, the power, the sovereignty of the government, must be kept where they have been placed by the Constitution and laws of the people.”
The power of these truths, the “rules of action” originating from the people from whom governments are constituted, are what make bureaucracies such an affront to civilization everywhere. Lifting power out of the hands of the people directly concerned with a given issue, bureaucracies clog the proper function of government by setting up “the pretense of having authority over everybody and being responsible to nobody.” It is the assumption of control without an equal measure of responsibility that makes a bureaucracy so destructive of local self-government and, inseparably, individual freedom. Coolidge put it in even clearer terms, “Of all forms of government, those administered by bureaus are about the least satisfactory to an enlightened and progressive people. Being irresponsible they become autocratic, and being autocratic they resist all development. Unless bureaucracy is constantly resisted it breaks down representative government and overwhelms democracy.”
There are definite issues the Federal government is simply, even at its best, not equipped to handle, being “too far away to be informed of local needs, too inaccessible to be responsive to local conditions.” It has proven unworthy of few things, yet it is still given many more to manage. As Coolidge said, “It does not follow that because something ought to be done the National Government ought to do it.” Liberty diminishes in proportion to increasingly centralized control. Where freedom is concerned, it actually is a zero-sum game.
The solution, as Coolidge analyzed this problem, remains the same now. The states can help end or irreversibly enable the dysfunction of government by bureaucracy. The rights held by states are not given them to never use just as they are not given to abuse those to whom they are accountable, the people of each state. If they are unfaithful in the exercise of delegated powers, the Federal Government is thereby invited to step in and get involved. The willing weakness of local and state government only encourages the intrusion of Federal controls.
This danger provoked President Coolidge not to absorb power, but to restore the correct balance between the people, the states and national government. He did so consistently. By vetoing the double attempts to socialize American agriculture, chopping down the Federal outlay for flood aid, cutting and cutting again the size of the Federal budget, paying down the nation’s $20 billion debt, reducing tax rates across the board and fighting the Congressional urge to spend each year’s growing surplus, Coolidge left the recipe that works when Washington is governed responsibly. It remained for the states and local decision-makers to follow that constructive lead. Far too often they did not do so, working instead against Coolidge’s program.
Local self-government cannot afford, fiscally, politically, morally, to shirk its duty a moment longer. The states cannot emulate the direction they took in the 1920s and 30s. It must be the sovereign people, through their municipal, county and state governments, who stand when no one else seems willing to stand. The alternative will hasten only more of the same disastrous consequences ahead for us already.
The way lit by Coolidge forward, back toward progress and justice, requires courage but it is the only way. It means robustly asserting local and state authority, dragging Washington back to its limited and lawful sphere of responsibilities. “I want to see the policy adopted by the States of discharging their public functions so faithfully that instead of an extension on the part of the Federal Government there can be a contraction.” The march back toward a government of the people and away from central bureaucracy starts where all good governance begins — at the local level.
The Importance of the Obvious 