Even Normality - Reassessing Warren G. Harding

Harding got out the way. The recession that followed The Great War was turned around quickly by the free market, not by Government interference and meddling. Tax rates dropped, markets were opened, no government experiments were encouraged and Reds were not welcome.

He also didn't trust people in Government.

“In this job I am not worried about my enemies,” President Warren G. Harding once famously quipped. “It is my friends that keep me awake at nights.”

Reassessing Warren G. Harding - National Review Online

RYAN COLE & AMITY SHLAES

In his 1920 campaign, Harding ran as the anti-revolutionary: He sought “a return to normalcy.” His choice of Calvin Coolidge as his running mate underscored his commitment to that concept. Coolidge stood for caution and for drawing the line at extremism. It was Coolidge who had pulled a pre-PATCO and, Reaganesque, fired the Boston police force for leaving the city to looters when they went out on strike in 1919.

One of our problems today is that politicians are unwilling to concede certain truths about the economy. One is that housing prices may fall more. Another is that government intervention will inevitably force upon us a period of inflation. Yet another is that wages may not go as high as we like until the economy sorts itself out. Instead of skirting those issues, Harding spelled them all out, trusting voters to accept the truth.

While government would do all it could, there were imbalances it could not rectify, Harding allowed. “Perhaps,” he said, “we never shall know the old level of wages again.” To assume that life might be instantly reordered was also to overreach: “There is no instant step from disorder to order. We must face a condition of a grim reality, charge off our losses and start afresh.”

Next Harding turned to the topic of change. “Any wild experiment,” the new president said, “will only add to the confusion.” He went on: “Our supreme task is the resumption of our onward, normal way. Reconstruction, readjustment, restoration, all these must follow. I would like to hasten them.”

Harding went on to lay out what he thought normalcy should be like: “I speak for administrative efficiency, for lightened tax burdens, for sound commercial practices, for adequate credit facilities . . . for the omission of unnecessary interference of Government with business, for an end to Government’s experiment in business, and for more efficient business in Government administration.”

If Americans could accept all these realities, the new president argued, “We can reduce the abnormal expenditures, and we will. We can strike at war taxation, and we must.”

Harding was right. The decade began with a recession. But soon enough, and while Harding was still living, those other things he predicted did follow.

[Read more at he above link.]