“Stumbling Upon…Calvin Coolidge” by Tad Bennicoff

January 21, 2014January 21, 2014 / gouverneurmorris / Leave a comment

A fascinating, yet brief, jog down an old archival trail. Did the Coolidges see the “unusually large” mammoth specimen from Venice, Florida, donated to the Smithsonian in April 1927? Check this piece out and wonder with us. Notice Coolidge’s big post-presidential offer as well.

Print of the Mammoth skeleton, the jaws and tusks of which were the first to be found in Venice, Florida, 1926. Based on the size of the tusks, it is estimated that the mammoth stood 14 feet high and spanned 20 feet long. Print from The Venice News, picture property of Venice Museum and Archives.

On Thrift

January 16, 2014January 17, 2014 / gouverneurmorris / Leave a comment

Ben Franklin, painted by Joseph S. Duplessis, 1778.

“The third week of January has been designated as a time for considering the advantages of thrift, perhaps in part because it follows the birthday of Benjamin Franklin.

“Thrift does not mean parsimony. It is not to be in any way identified with the miser. The thrifty person is one who does the best that is possible to provide for suitable discharge of the future duties of life. In its essence it is self-control. Industry and judgment are required to achieve it. Contentment and economic freedom are its fruits.

“Most frequently we identify the thought of thrift with various institutions that have been provided to make it effective…But the main principle is saving today something that will be useful tomorrow. The whole theory of conservation is included. Money is only an incident.

“Just at present we need to apply the principle to saving and increasing the strength of our governmental and social structure as well as our economic fabric. We must not squander these precious possessions. And, above all, a wise thrift now calls for the expenditure of money to save people” — Calvin Coolidge, January 17, 1931.

The reader is generally right on board with Mr. Coolidge until that very last sentence. How can the economical “Silent Cal” be advocating “expenditures” to meet the worsening depression? Was he inconsistent? Was he succumbing to contradiction with his own record or what he would write throughout his daily columns about the need for a return to greater economy by government?

As Charles Willis Thompson observed in his book, Presidents I’ve Known and Two Near Presidents, Coolidge possessed an exceptional gift for style as one of very few Presidents who were true literary men (pp. 369, 370-1). Yet, there was something peculiar about the way he expressed his thoughts. While he packed more substance into fewer words than the vast majority of public officials have, there was something more than economy of expression. Thompson, in his quest to understand Coolidge, found that “he never said or wrote anything that did not have a certain peculiarity about it. That peculiarity was that there was always at least one sentence which made you say as you read idly through, ‘Hey, what’s that? Let me read that again.’ It hit you between the eyes. When you read it again you stopped for a while to think about it” (p. 361). The closing thought of his piece on thrift is that kind of sentence. It seems to go against everything he just said. That is what compels us to dig further, think deeper and reach beyond a surface appraisal of the man, his mind and what he is saying to us here.

So, what did he mean? On the very next day, he employs our word “expenditure” yet again. His subject, though, is not government acting through the public Treasury but the American Red Cross. Coolidge had confronted in previous articles and would again nine days later the “delusion” that governments spending money to “revive business” never yields the prosperous results promised to everyone. It requires borrowing money we do not have and expecting “salvation” to come out of deeper debt and increasing waste. It only postpones the very prosperity governments claim will finally arrive if we simply spend more.

Coolidge was not talking about public expenditures when he spoke of thrift on January 17. He was referring to the driving force of the marketplace, you and I, not the government. Recovery begins with us. Government needs to save money and strength at the same that “a comparatively small expenditure made now will avert a possible future calamity.” The notion that emergencies, real or contrived, demand expansive plans and exorbitant costs has failed throughout history, whether it is called the “Square Deal” (Teddy Roosevelt), the “New Deal” (Teddy’s cousin Franklin), the “Fair Deal” (Harry Truman) or the “Great Society” (Lyndon Johnson), the result is the same trail of avoidable destruction to real people’s lives. Coolidge meant private charity, local support by the individuals, civic organizations and institutions we sustain with time and monetary resources. These “expenditures” are what “save people,” not the latest extension of unemployment benefits, another stimulus package or postponing budgetary cuts that hurt dependence but need to be done for a sane, self-sustaining and solvent future.

When Coolidge spoke of spending to save, he was not succumbing to a politician’s obfuscation of language, he was reminding us of what he had been saying from his earliest days in public service, “Government cannot relieve from toil…The normal must care for themselves. Self-government means self-support.” It is by spending ourselves and our resources in the service of others locally as free men and women that saves lives, not merely consenting to a government as it confiscates the means of “someone else less deserving” in order to redistribute to those it deems “more deserving.” If we are to remain free, we are called upon to exercise the obligations which accompany that freedom. It is in the practice of thrift, manifested by individuals in both saving and spending, that we and those who most need help receive it without recourse to government expenditures.

On Unemployment Benefits

January 9, 2014January 9, 2014 / gouverneurmorris / Leave a comment

Back when unemployment insurance came with built-in incentives to get off the dole, compensation not to work was something to be overcome rather than expanded and extended indefinitely. Now in its fifth year of “temporary emergency benefits,” the administration is asking us yet again to equate economic growth with more money to those who are not working. Some who know better, like Senator Durbin and President Obama, expect us to believe that job creation does not lead to growth, prosperity and plenty for ourselves, our children and even the poorest among us. Instead, they want us to accept the notion that the engine of economic recovery resides in government redistributing money to whom it wishes. Equating unemployment benefits with economic growth is not only patently absurd but willfully ignorant, understanding neither how prosperity happens nor who works to earn it. It is not government who creates wealth but industrious people who make a profit through the work they do. The more profitable the enterprise, the greater the opportunity to employ more people and improve everyone’s lot. Calvin Coolidge identified the source of real benefits to all when he said, “It is the number at work, not the number out of work, that measures our business prosperity.”

To tell America that recovery occurs by enhancing the number of those not working is dishonest. It is a failure to inform people of the fundamental truths of economics. By obfuscation and distraction the Democrat leadership continues hurting the very people it claims to advocate. The truth could be easily understood but to explain it honestly would liberate those who rely on others, especially Washington, rather than themselves for better lives. “The problem of the wage earner,” as Coolidge explained it, “would be simplified by remembering he works not for money but for goods and services. Wages come out of production. The employer cannot get them permanently out of any other source. Wages are raised or lowered with production.” President Obama hopes we fail to see why taking from the wages of those who work to provide “benefits” to those who do not is never going to create jobs or increase opportunity.

Coolidge knew that a sound system of meeting unemployment is not so easily solved by the Democrat method of throwing money at the problem. “If unemployment insurance were like life and accident insurance the problem would be simple,” he observed. “Each would take what he wanted and pay for it. But it is generally proposed that the employer and the public treasury should pay part of the cost as in workmen’s compensation. If when unemployed he is to receive something he did not pay for, no one can say how that would affect the will of the wage earner to hold his place by doing his best. Evidently, the morale would be lowered.” Coolidge identified local institutions as the ones to assist the individual return to what he, on another occasion, called “normal,” the freedom of self-support. He rejected the falsehood that without National Government “help,” no help would be given to those in true need. “The duty,” at the local level, “to relieve unemployment is plain, but not even the unemployed have a right to what they do not earn. Charity is self-existent. Employer and employee are on a business, not a charitable relationship.” Remaining such enables greater opportunity for everyone, especially in depression.

Coolidge understood that what was ultimately being considered was not actually helping those who needed, it was about “government ownership,” exercising the power to make the decisions and direct the material means of life, death, prosperity and poverty as political considerations dictated. In contrast, the free enterprise makes opportunity for everyone with the industry and perseverance to improve one’s lot, bettering the lives of those around him or her. It is the means to feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and raising life’s standards. “Healthy and normal employment consists of serving another for his personal satisfaction or profit. As the government is not personal, its proper business would be for those serving for its profit…If it is assumed that payment of wages will go on without work, that is not employment, but relief. Then no one should work. The government has never shown much aptitude for real business…The most free, progressive and satisfactory method ever devised for the equitable distribution of property is to permit the people to care for themselves by conducting their own business. They have more wisdom than any government.”

The eternal truth of that statement remains in force even now. The genuinely unprecedented success of the Coolidge Era was not something for which he ever took credit. He did not boast of contributing to the latest stellar job creation numbers because individual Americans accomplished them. Free individuals build prosperity. He simply “minded his own business,” removing the hindrances to the full and just reward for one’s labor neither resorting to the public treasury — the income of our neighbors — nor funding redistribution schemes rooted, then as now, in vague and destructive conceptions of equality.