In 2018, Amity Shlaes had an impressive essay in the City Journal. I’ve read it only now because it was published on the City Journal’s website. That is quite apropos, given the controversy surrounding US history at the moment.
Shlaes’s thesis is outlined in the very first lines:
Free marketeers may sometimes win elections, but they are not winning U.S. history. In recent years, the consensus regarding the American past has slipped leftward, and then leftward again.” Freedom is under appreciated in academia, equality is over appreciated: this is building a narrative that emphasizes political fights for equality at the expense of the springs of economic opportunity.
Shlaes focuses on top political figures. Her hero, to whom she devoted a splendid biography, is Calvin Coolidge, Coolidge is described in the article as a staunch fighter for economic freedom, who put “markets first,” understanding their power in creating prosperity. He reversed the quite inauspicious beginning of the 1920s through tax cuts which worked as they are supposed to, according to the supply-side playbook. A sort of anti-hero is Herbert Hoover (“Hoover thoroughly intimidated business and markets, blaming them for hogging too much of the money”) and an even bigger anti-hero is Lyndon Johnson, who simply “assumed growth”, thinking that free enterprise would produce its marvels whatever the incentives.
The essay finishes with a plea to “fostering of new institutions that will, in turn, nurture economics thinkers who dare to acknowledge the merits of markets.” I’d be interested in Shlaes’s view, two years after her piece, about how we are doing toady. Has the pandemic weakened or strengthened those institutions? Can the intellectual movement for free enterprise flourish after Covid19? Or is it substantially more feeble and less cogent now, both in the fields of history and economics?
Editor’s Note: Shlaes recorded a podcast with Law & Liberty focused on her Coolidge biography.
READER COMMENTS
marcus nunes
Feb 15 2021 at 6:23pm
Shlaes (and Johnson) want to keep the “Coolidge Myth” alive!
https://thefaintofheart.wordpress.com/2013/02/19/president-coolidge-in-vogue/
Thomas Hutcheson
Feb 16 2021 at 6:47am
Coolidges’ admiration for markets did not extend to Prohibition and immigration. If your belief in freedom applies only to marginal income tax rates, maybe it’s not really about freedom at all.
Alan Goldhammer
Feb 16 2021 at 8:32am
This is correct and remember that following Harding, Coolidge had such a low bar to surpass that anyone would have looked good by doing nothing.
Mark Brophy
Feb 17 2021 at 7:28pm
Harding was the greatest President because he cut the federal budget more than any other. In fact, I don’t think any President has cut the budget since Harding.
Tom D
Feb 17 2021 at 7:14am
Looking at 2021, many non-market institutions – i.e. the WHO, FDA, CDC, the power grid, public education, vaccine distribution, US Capitol security – are being exposed as being sclerotic or in some stage of systemic failure. Other than some dissatisfaction with public schools being closed, these institutions have retained their credibility with most of the public. It’s been announced that vaccine distribution will be (further) delayed by poor weather, a theme reminiscent of Soviet agriculture. The free market that will deliver packages from across the country to my door within 24 hours seems to not even be an option. Even in the face of some spectacular failures by public institution, the merits of markets don’t seem to be recognized.
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