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March 27, 2023 - Doug Collins Podcast
58:28
A Conversation with Amity Shlaes
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You want to listen to a podcast?
By who?
Georgia GOP Congressman Doug Collins.
How is it?
The greatest thing I have ever heard in my whole life.
I could not believe my ears.
In this house, wherever the rules are disregarded, chaos and mob rule.
It has been said today, where is bravery?
I'll tell you where bravery is found and courage is found.
It's found in this minority who has lived through the last year of nothing but rules being broken, people being put down, questions not being answered, and this majority say, be damned with anything else.
We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do.
Why?
Because we won an election.
I guarantee you, one day you'll be back in the minority and it ain't gonna be that fun.
Hey, everybody.
Today, you are not going to miss this episode.
Glad you're with us.
Start right now.
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Today on the podcast, Amity Slays.
Amity is one of the best conservative writers out there.
She's written books like the biography of President Coolidge.
She's written the book called The Unforgettable Man or The Forgotten Man.
If you've never read The Forgotten Man, you need to get it.
It is powerful stuff about the Depression It made it worse in many ways, and the forgotten man was you and me.
The Coolidge biography, another amazing.
How many times have we talked about on this podcast, folks, that we learn from history and this idea that we go back and erase our history or only talk about the history that we like?
Leads us down bad pathways.
Today we discussed history and Amity has such a great discussion about this where you can actually look at what happened in the 20s, 30s and earlier in the 60s and how it affects us today.
Great conversation.
You don't want to miss this.
Folks, we got all kinds of stuff going on.
I know the weekend was crazy.
Trump week this week, it looks like if something's going to happen in New York on the Trump indictment.
Lots of things going on.
So why don't you get grounded today with me here on the podcast with Amity Slays.
You're not going to want to miss this one.
This one is a good one.
So we've got a few things to handle first, but in just a moment, my conversation with Amity Slays.
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And it's so great to have you on the podcast today.
This is one that when I first started this podcast a year or so ago, a year and a half ago, I was looking at people, and we've interviewed politicians, majority leaders, speakers, everybody.
But when I got to my authors, you were one of the names that, everywhere I went, I said, do you know somebody that knows how I can get to Amity Slays?
And John Barlow from Competitive Enterprise Institute said, I know her real well.
I said, can you help me make this connection?
I'm so glad to have you on the podcast today.
Your writing is...
One, I think it opens up a lot of things for a lot of people, especially in today's society.
So one, thanks for being on the podcast.
We appreciate it.
And, you know, I'm excited to have you on.
Glad to be here.
Glad to be with someone who's in the arena.
It is good stuff.
I'll have to admit that I read, and we're going to get into a lot of stuff here in the next little bit, but I read the Coolidge biography, which really got me into it.
I had read your stuff before in The Forgotten Man and others, but the Coolidge biography gripped me.
It was one, I read it back right after you had put out, right after I got to Congress.
And I had a breakfast one morning about, I guess it's probably...
Maybe a year or so in after the book had been written.
And I was having a breakfast with Paul Ryan.
And we began this conversation and I said, Paul, have you read this book?
And he went on to say, yes, I know her well.
And we ended up having like 20 minutes of conversation was about you and the book.
First off, let's start with, if we can, the Coolidge book and bring us up today, because I do want to have a juxtaposition of where your writings, because I believe the Coolidge biography and what was going on in the 20s, and then the Forgotten Man, and then on into what we're seeing today have a lot of similarities.
And I think there's a lot of things we could learn.
So going back, and I heard you in other interviews call the Coolidge book the prequel to The Forgotten Man.
Why would you call it that?
Well, just first of all, Doug, chronologically, because it's about the 20s, a president who served in the 20s.
But it's a prequel.
And of course, The Forgotten Man is about the 1930s.
But I wrote The Forgotten Man first.
So I went back in time as an author, as I'm now looking at the period before World War I and the Gilded Age.
I went backwards in time.
But another reason Coolidge is the prequel to The Forgotten Man is that...
I realized I need to write Coolidge when I wrote The Forgotten Men, because when you encounter the 30s, you learn about all the things a government can do wrong, even a very well-meaning government, even in a disaster.
And then you say, well, They broke it.
And then you ask, what is it that they broke?
What was right?
And what was government's role in that?
And so I had to figure out what they broke.
And that was the 20s economy, which was a fine economy.
And Coolidge enabled that economy, facilitated it, understood it.
And so I went backwards to Calvin Coolidge.
I love it.
Well, and I brought that up, and you just explained it like I thought you would, is that so many times it seems to be disjointed in the sense of, we talk about history today, the Roosevelt era of the Great Depression and all the programs which a forgotten man did speak to in the problems there.
But going back is that there was a juxtaposition here.
It could have been a little different going in Coolidge and what he was actually proposing as to then what we actually had.
In looking at that, And I've heard you talk about this before, but I'd love to get your comment on it because you saw it in prequel.
Coolidge died rather early in the 1930s.
He didn't have a sense of the whole, you know, set up.
But if he was to say had lived another 15 years and was looking at the 30s from, say, the perspective of the 40s maybe, or at least a little bit...
What would you say, because he was, and I've heard you say this really funnily in some other interviews, how do you think he would have approached or looked at what happened in the end of, beginning through Roosevelt in particular, the government interaction with the economy?
You're posing a counterfactual, but it's a great question, sir, because The thesis of my Forgotten Man book, the truth is the government made it worse.
In Coolidge's own lifetime, there have been a number of crashes.
Serious panics of Wall Street worse than what we're seeing this week, as bad as 2008 in terms of the market going down.
Those responses were different to the response of the government under Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt, more importantly.
So you probably want to say Coolidge would have reacted as his predecessors and authorities preceding him would have done.
A good example there is, and remember, there was no SEC. And there was no Fed up until the mid-teens, right?
So first of all, he would have said, I'm not sure that that's Washington's job.
You hear the lawmakers today talking about the banks that are scrambling about signature, you know, and so on, and Credit Suisse.
They would have said, well, that's happening, but it's not our job.
But there were many, many crashes.
What was the collective, if you ask all the institutions that did exist and evaluate them, what was the collective leader response to a rough depression in the early 20s?
Well, one, they doubled interest rates.
That's interesting.
Wait, you're not supposed to double interest rates in a downturn.
That's what we're hearing on the radio this morning.
Here we are in March 2023. And they cut the government back farther.
Two things.
So they spent less.
That would be considered pro-cyclical.
And they raised interest rates.
That's considered pro-cyclical.
And everyone learns nowadays you have to go against the cycle.
Be anti-cyclical to manage the economy.
That wasn't their view.
That downturn of the early 20s was a very rough downturn, but it was mercifully short.
Nobody even remembers it.
It's called the Forgotten Depression.
My friend Jim Grant even wrote a book with that title to describe the very different government response to a crisis in the early 20s.
They had their reasons, and the policy probably worked.
Why would it work?
Well, if you raise interest rates, you do kill inflation.
And we had an inflationary problem coming out of World War I. But more importantly, cutting the government back leaves the economy room to recover on its own.
All things being equal, the economy will recover.
If it's allowed to, the economy doesn't need perfect policy environment to recover.
It needs an okay policy environment, and it did get one in that instance.
And that's interesting today, and you brought up today, and yes, we're going through the banking issues, and do we intervene, do we not intervene?
Of course, the Biden administration is definitely an intervention.
And frankly, though, some Republicans, frankly, are as well.
I mean, we're seeing this along the way.
One interesting issue that I, in reading and preparing to talk with you today and talking about Coolidge, is Your opinion of scale, the 20s, 30s economies compared to, say, the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, even up until today's economy, is the scale economically still viable?
As you said, Coolidge would have followed the past precedents, whereas Roosevelt, Hoover, even to an extent, followed a new precedent of bigger involvement in government.
Can that still work today?
Many of us, like myself, believe it can.
But is that a valid criticism?
Can a free market work in a very large economy such as we have today?
That's what you're asking?
Yeah, because we've heard it the last couple weeks.
Oh, well, we've got to protect these investors.
Government has to step in.
That's related, but of course it can.
Think of the European Union.
It used to be individual countries.
It got together.
Its policy isn't, frankly, that much different than the policy, the EU of the individual countries.
I think with the banks, you know, in a little economy like Iceland suffers as much as a big economy when it's caught in a policy storm or a wild downturn.
I think it's more, we have a fatherly state, a patriarchal or matriarchal, it's not a gender state, and we've trained voters to believe government must always step in.
So our real problem is education in America.
We've undermined Americans by giving them the impression they need a permanent babysitter.
Or you can have another term.
And, of course, the recent reaction to the banks is similar.
Well, the FDIC has serious deposit insurance.
Everyone who has money in a bank is told how much the government and bank insure them for.
Well, it's important to know that the money above the amount currently, $250,000, well, that might not be insured.
So you might take other measures to insure that money.
We wrecked that up by saying in the instance of these new banks, oh, they're too big to fail.
The current doctrine for 2023 is medium is too big to fail.
Everything's too big to fail, and that's just not true.
I don't know about you, but when I go back to 2008 and I was a columnist then, I regret that I caught some of the alarm and did not write more skeptical columns about the bank rescues of the autumn of 2008. I do regret that.
But this concept, moral hazard, is a scary concept.
And young people don't like the word moral at all.
But that's the problem with the banks.
So I sometimes explain it to them this way.
I mean, in kindergarten language, there's a swing set, it's dangerous.
You tell every kid, or a pool, you tell every kid you're going to catch them when they jump in and they'll never get wet, a pool.
They come to accept that instead of learning to get wet, and they jump more wildly.
If they know they're going to be caught or if they're in the playground and they know that there's two inches of rubber on the floor of the playground, they have the assumption they'll never get hurt and they act even wilder.
That's what happened in the S&L crisis right after the early 90s.
The banks were held harmless and the depositors in a way, and therefore banks were more irresponsible.
Life is about responsibility, just as in driving a car.
And what the erratic behavior of the federal government suggests is sometimes you'll get rescued and you've got to hope for that.
Almost like a lottery response, don't you think?
I don't know if I'm getting at what you want.
I used to be a journalist, Doug, and the older I get, I turn to a very boring trade, which is not exciting and does not feed the ego, which is education.
You're teaching little kids who don't really necessarily know what you're talking about.
Why?
Because citizens grow up without knowing about their responsibilities.
The only hope we can have is if we develop schools where kids learn a bit about responsibility and where families feel responsibility.
So the answer to a bank failure is better high school education.
That is such a boring response.
You couldn't say that on the floor of the Congress, but it's actually true.
It's just an indirect trail.
It is.
I want to read something.
We're going to jump from Coolers to the Forgotten Man.
If anybody wants it, you need to pick this up.
It's a great, it's still this moment to read.
But in part of your writing early on in the book, you write something that I was going to get to a little bit later, but you've hit it now on education.
And it was a writing, and we were talking about the teach college.
And there was a part that says, the educational progressives believe that the competition among individuals in schools, just as Tugwell's economy, was wrong.
Instead, it was time to look...
For a model for the collective school for the new society, families mattered less than such a model.
The family was an old agricultural unit after all.
And the factory mattered more.
Long before this trip, Dewey and Counts had argued the best models might be found abroad.
Dewey had also argued in a new mass society, schools must propagate social change, not respond to it.
I think we've arrived there in many ways in our educational system today.
I like teachers and I don't like the teacher bashing culture that comes with conservatism.
Teachers have a hard job because the parents second-guess them.
Every second, parents have a kind of apocalyptic sense of their own child's importance, of course.
He's upset!
Well, you know, and then the parents call the head.
You know, that's the way that goes.
And sometimes the parents are right and sometimes they're wrong.
And sometimes they're just perpetuating their family pathology at the expense of the teacher, by the way.
Right.
But yes, the family and school are really important.
I believe in school, too.
I just believe teachers have been given the wrong incentives.
And that's our fault.
If your incentive is to pay...
We actually underpay teachers.
It's just if they're public schools, our state can't afford to pay them more, but they are underpaid.
For the value they give society and that we've got to find a different way to pay them, maybe in private schools, maybe through work after school, I don't know.
But when you think of the responsibility a teacher has and how important they are, and we actually fail to recognize parents and their contribution.
I'm not saying pay them, I'm not for the child credit, but I'm saying some of our values are misplaced.
Exactly.
Well, as a husband of a 31-year teacher who retired a couple of years ago, I see that.
In fact, just last week in the podcast, I did an episode on really where liberals or Democrats are saying the quiet stuff out loud, and you had a representative in the state of Georgia talking about school choice who said that They didn't want to give money to these lower income people who never finished high school, they were poor, basically saying they make bad choices.
And yet, no liberal order called her out for basically saying, we think poor people are too stupid to take care of their own education, their kids' education.
It's that governmental side of what you said is incentivizing what we're teaching to move forward that we don't understand the basics of some of this anymore.
Well, yeah.
And, you know, I mean, we're talking about the 30s or the 20s.
Right now we just got the day, but we can go back to then.
And it was progressive that we saw starting.
Maybe I have a different question.
Let's frame it differently.
Do you see the progressive nature of the 30s in the educational system fruition in the last 30 years coming into fruition to where we get the educational system we have now?
Yeah.
Not so much, but because the characters in Forgotten Man, who are the progressives who joined the Roosevelt administration, education was not the centerpiece of the New Deal, really.
We had management of the economy.
We created the TVA, which should be fun to talk about.
We created the SEC. We created housing loans and we supplied liquidity for that.
But definitely, I have a newer book called Great Society, which is a history of the 60s.
And we definitely established the education problems we have now on so many levels.
Great Society looks...
Also the sense of entitlement.
But we spent so much on the wrong kind of education, if you look at the numbers.
Nixon, too, after President Johnson.
And we kind of...
Cemented in the public sector, public school teacher union model in the 60s, which gave teachers wrong incentives, at least public school teachers.
And what else did we do?
We created NPR, which is teachers' constant companion.
When a teacher gets up in the morning, he turns on public radio.
While he's in the bathroom shaving, he's listening to public radio.
NPR is a very high quality product, but it's got a kind of mono line.
So that's all they hear.
I remember once talking about teacher unions on the radio, and it's I think about how Coolidge fired the public sector policeman whom he loved, but who had breached their contract as the same situation that happened to Ronald Reagan in PACCO. And the teacher was like, I've never heard this.
And I'm like, I bet you didn't.
Because if you listen to NPR alone for 20 years and read nothing, that's where you're going to be.
And NPR was created in the early Nixon period.
It came out of the great society impulse.
So that's when we did it.
That was a new deal, too.
I love this Great Society book because it's a bit closer.
One of the things it explained to me was the damage of unions, generally, but also, let's see what else.
I never understood why the South opposed pre-K. I never understood, you know, why would you be, and that probably includes Georgia, why would you be opposed to nursery school funding, you know, pre-K funding?
What's wrong with that?
Come on, guys.
And when I got into it, though, I saw that the southern governors and so on thought that massive Funding for pre-K, for nursery school aid, basically.
And little nursery schools, they saw that as a foot in the door, a wedge in the door to federal control of their state's education.
And they were absolutely right.
They were absolutely right.
But, gosh, before I looked into how the governors of the South handled the Great Society, I didn't understand as well the South's response.
Interesting you should bring that up because it was back in the early 90s that a Democrat governor, Zell Miller at the time, instituted the lottery in Georgia, and it was a two-pronged lottery funding.
It is the only lottery in the country that is purely educational.
There's nothing else, and it's why it actually succeeded in a very conservative state.
But the two prongs were higher ed, scholarships to go to college, and pre-K. And it's a fully state-funded pre-K program that's been around now for almost 30 years.
Interestingly enough, that was part of this issue taking the federal side out of it because it's a fully state-funded program.
But it also goes back to these issues of Understanding where the control was coming from.
I'd like you to elaborate a little bit more on that because I think it fits Coolidge as well because Coolidge basically broke off.
We saw it increase more in the Forgotten Man.
Now the Great Society actually blossoms this, the Johnson administration.
In looking at that, have we went to the point now where people will not accept A smaller role for our government.
I'm not sure.
I think it has to be reinvented.
There's a local movement, right?
There are locavores who eat only town vegetables and who want to do everything.
Small is good.
And that's another way of saying we want control of our lives.
Not all of us share their rather extreme environmentalism.
Some locavores won't eat anything that has to be grown at home and no pesticides.
But people understand about the value of the local.
Particularly with little kids.
Little kids aren't on the phone until age five, so that's five years.
They have to live in the reality they are physically in.
People understand that.
There's a website called Strong Towns that I subscribe to, and I don't subscribe to many feeds.
It's basically city managers talking about the perils of debt, of big bonds for their town, for specific projects.
But yes, of course we're in an odd situation.
I mean, when there's a flood, People say the government must come, and they conflate.
The state government, the county government, and the federal government.
They don't see any value in making distinctions, and there are huge distinctions as to Who rescues and where?
That's what Coolidge was about.
His time was the great flood of the Mississippi, and they likewise had a flood in Vermont, where he was born.
To neither place would he send a federal representative himself.
I'm sorry, he sent Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, but the President did not go, just as President Bush did not go to Katrina.
That's not just because they're sleepy or lazy.
Presidents who have been governors understand that you have to pause before you jump into a governor's state from Washington.
And that's still there, but you're right, people don't understand it, particularly not in an emergency.
Oh, exactly.
Well, I remember one of my first, when I was in state legislation, I moved...
Back in 2011, 2010, I remember, and even up into a little bit later, I remember going to very conservative Tea Party meetings, Republican meetings, and actually, you know, they were talking about how the government was too big.
But yet, in the same audience, you would have people with signs that says, don't touch my Social Security, don't touch my Medicare, don't touch the government program.
And I thought to myself, and I actually asked, I said, do you not see a contradiction Yes, and the Social Security contract...
Even now, and we've been talking about this for, I've been writing editorials about it for 20 years, even now you could fix Social Security in an afternoon if the lawmakers got together.
And President Bush, to his credit, did try and others have tried.
It's not that hard.
Medicare is hard because it's sort of an endless entitlement, I mean, in the numbers.
One thing I studied about Coolidge, which came to mind this week in the banking crisis and so on, was Coolidge gave this speech, Social Security operates on actuarial principles, at least theoretically.
Supposedly, yeah.
That's what people think.
He gave this compelling speech, I think when he was Vice President at Coolidge, to insurance executives and he said, you have the capacity through your actuarial pool to deal with American pensions.
The unsaid part of the speech is we don't need a government program because we have such a vast pool.
The suggestion, to me at least, was optimal demographics.
A lot of people are young and they'll pay into private insurance and then we don't have very many old people and they'll take some of the money out and the numbers work and you'll make money.
As an insurance company, he saw the power of the actuarial pool and said, it's on you, insurance industry, to get going on this and help more Americans so the deluge of Social Security doesn't come.
He's suggesting far more than he said, but you can read it.
He said, insurance is the means by which we make the uncertain less uncertain.
And every man who takes an insurance policy has more independence.
Yep.
So he really appealed.
Of course, that wasn't heard.
And there was a lawmaker, Bennett Champ Clark, who tried to get, when Social Security was written in 35, a little amendment that said companies can opt out of this.
But the other lawmakers wouldn't let him.
And therefore, we didn't have an experiment in Social Security the way we do in Right to Work.
Right.
Right to work shows that heavy labor law can be anti-growth and kill jobs.
We have this nice experiment among states, but with Social Security, we don't have that experiment.
Nearly every American is in Social Security.
It is, and especially when you go back now to just look at Michigan, which just went back to a, you know, the right to work state issue, you know, repealing it.
Let's go to Coolidge for a second, because there's something fascinating about me, and I've heard this about him and many other, you know, Johnson, others, but the hardscrabble background, the upcoming, you know, where he came from.
But you made a comment, and I heard you describe him one time, is no spin.
He was, you know, the comment was no spin.
It was, you know, in the sense of under-promise over-perform.
And I think in today's political society, that's just an anathema to what we see.
As someone who's had to run for office and others, you know, people want the grandiose promise.
They're willing to believe the gold ring as opposed to the steps that will get you there.
Yeah.
And we've failed to show them the merits of the other side.
Yes, sir.
One of the constitutional amendments I think I would have some doubts about and I think Coolidge was ambivalent about.
What was the 17th Amendment?
Because the 17th Amendment changed the way we picked senators.
It used to be senators were picked by their state legislatures, not by direct election.
So the Senate was more different from Congress, and that made an old boys club for sure, right?
But it was also interesting, again, as an experiment with two different models.
Usually, senators were not someone selected because they looked good in the first meeting, because they had a great elevator pitch, because they had a great 1900s equivalent of a commercial.
They were picked by people who knew them pretty well.
Just like a used car dealer, you know one who's better than the others.
You have multiple experiences with someone and then you decide that he's worthy of being US Senator.
I think that was a good counterbalance.
It wasn't the first impression tyranny that we have now.
Yeah.
Because a lot of people look better on the second meeting, right?
Or the third.
Who do you love?
Which kindergarten teacher do you love?
And, you know, in many areas of our life, we still take a while to form impression.
You know, over the years, this kindergarten teacher seemed a little mean, but the kids like her better by the end of the year.
Maybe I'll go in that class.
We think of consumer purchases.
We do often return to institutions because of our better experience with them.
But somehow we have disallowed that in politics.
In politics, it's all about who's good-looking and so on.
Well, that's very tiring, you know, for you and for us.
Maybe a four-year term for Congress would be another solution.
Well, I'd be interested to see your point on that.
As someone who's been in office, the problem I have with that is the executive doesn't have term limits.
And the bureaucracy is such today that the bureaucratic machine ignored.
And I think Congress has done this to themselves.
And when I was a part of it, we've done it to ourselves.
We've abdicated authority, given it to the executive branch and executive agencies.
Executive agencies don't care.
And I'll use the state of Florida, which is an interesting example.
Governor DeSantis is doing a very good job as an executive down there.
But if you go to the legislative branch there, it is run by staff, non-elected people, because they know they're only going to be there a certain amount of time.
And it doesn't work.
But can I go back to something you said there that really is interesting?
Because I've looked at this, and you mentioned it earlier in this podcast.
Coolidge was brought to the national attention through a police strike, the Boston police strike, in which he had to act.
And he was very much sympathetic to the police officer, but acted in a decisive way.
That catapulted him as a catapult to Wilson, put him on the ticket earlier.
And then if you look at that, has that become more of what we're seeing in our politics?
The Obama speech in the Democratic National Convention, all of a sudden he's now presidential material.
We see, you know, the ones he chooses.
How many times do we hear people say, well, he's a presidential candidate simply because they win one election?
I think it goes back to what you're talking about.
Have we gotten that far?
And was that Coolidge's moment?
Was that actually a Coolidge moment that took him from where to there?
You mean, does a single event...
We're accustomed to a single event...
Are we too dependent on it?
I don't think so.
I never thought about maybe.
I don't know what...
Coolidge was in one of those moments where the federal government wasn't showing leadership on an important issue, which is labor turmoil.
After World War I, we had under-acknowledged inflation, just as now.
We also had a plague, just as now, the influenza.
There was a lot of turmoil, and President Wilson didn't quite know what to do.
Whenever there's inflation, there's labor unrest, because the workers are right, organized or not.
They're not paid enough.
And so Wilson was back and forth about what to do.
And then a governor that happened to be Coolidge of Massachusetts stepped forward and said, if it's not in their contract, they can't strike.
And we're going to draw the line there, even though we like, in this instance, the policemen very much.
And by the way, they had voted for Coolidge.
Coolidge was famous for getting the Irish and German vote.
So he said, you know, you just can't strike.
There's no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time, is what Coolidge said.
A categoric no.
And Wilson, who had been vacillating, was like, oh, yeah.
Yeah, somebody's establishing law and order, and a governor, through his good work, can, in fact, lead the nation.
And when he upstages a sitting president through leadership, well, that's a valuable signal.
Maybe he is national material.
Sometimes it's just a silly thing, and then it's kind of, well, he got there because of what?
But in Coolidge's case, the other point that one has to make about the 19—there was a success in the 1920s.
The GOP did fantastically in delivering to its constituents what it had promised, notwithstanding scandal, which is interesting, and why.
Because in 1919, they didn't say, I like Ron DeSantis.
I like President Trump.
I like, let's see, Vivek.
I like Nikki Haley.
I like that conversation was more suppressed.
Instead, they said, what is our platform?
Because they were a riven party as today.
They were really split, the GOP. In fact, they did split before 1920 and after.
And they said, okay, we're the management of this party, which is subject to entropy right now.
Those of us who are still here, we are for law and order.
Okay, write that down, law and order.
And we are for less government and less debt, certainly, and trying to do something about the high wartime taxes.
And you go back and look at the 1920 platform, which is a serious document.
If you put it on a table, it's about as high as two double stuffed Oreos.
It's about an inch or so.
And then they said, what candidates can execute on this controversial platform?
A platform we've unified on that our own colleagues don't even like.
It's too right-wing.
We'll debate.
They took Harding and they took Coolidge.
The execution on the platform was more important than the personality of the president.
So Harding did a fairly good job.
He's kind of like Bill Clinton.
He was a smart guy who loved policy but made personal errors.
But he wiped out because he had a scandal and Coolidge became president when Harding died, an accidental president, but he didn't have accidental policy.
It was all written down in the 1920 book and Coolidge vowed to execute what he and Harding were elected on to perfection.
He didn't say, I'm different, new start.
He didn't use the excuse of the scandals to change all up.
He left most of the cabinet in place, in particular, the Treasury Secretary.
Finally, a couple of them who had been too close to the scandal left the Harding cabinet members, but, or were out.
But Coolidge said, I know what my job is, is to serve what you elected me in Harding for, and therefore Coolidge won a stunning victory in 1924, taking an absolute majority.
His party was divided, so two other parties, one, the ex-Republican progressives and then the Democrats.
Coolidge beat the pair, had more votes than they had combined, because of his commitment to a document and principles rather than vainglory.
Two points there that I think are interesting because I want to get to one, that is tariffs, which were a big part of that 1920 platform, which is probably the anathema of free market if you look at it from a perspective.
But also, and we'll get to that because it was interesting that President Trump brought that back up in his term.
But one of the things you mentioned there, and I'd love to get your thoughts further on that.
The document, we talked about the non-election of senators at the time through the state legislatures.
But also there, were we still dealing, and we were still dealing at a time then in which the candidates for the parties were still internally picked.
This idea that we have today of starting in Iowa a year and a half out didn't really exist.
That was not a platform.
When do you feel like we lost that?
And is there a way to maybe, as you said, from the perspective of looking at people to a platform, to a condition, getting back to that?
Or are we just in a new era now where that is not as applicable?
Oh, I think that's possible.
But you have to build respect for the party first, and that's missing.
So, you know, I'm just teasing because, you know, this period of the Senate That's being picked by state senators before the 17th Amendment.
That's universally trashed in high school textbooks, which say, oh, that was the smoke-filled room, right?
Or candidates picked in the smoke-filled room.
Harding was picked in the smoke-filled room at the Blackstone Hotel, and it's true, he was.
In fact, in Coolidge's situation, what happened was there was a kind of mutiny on the floor of the convention, and they said, it's too much smoke-filled room, this Harding choice.
Harding was not the first choice, but he was definitely a party choice.
We want to have a free election here among us delegates.
For at least the Vice President, and someone got up and even allegedly stood on a chair, Wallace McCammon, and said, I'm for Coolidge because I read his book.
He got to me through the media, not the party.
And that is how Coolidge became the Vice Presidential candidate.
So these, I mean, these are always trade-offs.
But yes, it's possible to get back if you start with the principles.
And not all principles are good.
But I did see that, you know, the Republican Party is always worried and the Democratic about scandal.
How do you withstand scandal?
By being a perfect man.
Well, no one is, by the way.
But two, by having principles so strong that even if you are sidelined, someone else will implement them.
With the mandate from the public, I think it's quite possible.
You're asking when did we really get more to—there are various reforms, of course, in primaries, and I'm not an expert on that, that have made them more important.
But another example was Wendell Wilkie, who was a total outsider businessman who spoke truth to power on the Tennessee Valley Authority and all of the New Deal, and therefore became the Republican candidate.
And there he has some similarities to President Trump, right?
He's a businessman from outside who's known to the people for another reason.
Yep.
You brought up TVA a couple of times now, and as someone who lives in North Georgia, my district had a few TVA. I had some TVA lakes up in the northern end of my district.
A very hard institution to deal with, very closed institution to deal with.
Does it surprise, and I'm going to probably just say the rhetorical no, but it does to me in some ways is why the staying power of TVA and the almost mythical power Sentiment among especially those in rural North Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, of how that actually developed.
Does it surprise you?
And does things like TVA and others among generational aspects perpetrate the more government approach to solving some of these problems?
Well, you think about Huey Long.
Yep.
Another state, but where were the jobs during the Great Depression for people in Louisiana?
They were in the Huey Long machine or they were in the electric company, whatever the utility was.
There weren't any other jobs.
And with farming difficult and commodity prices not high, that was it.
So it was sort of a one-company town or a two-company town in the state.
I recently watched a great Ken Burns' documentary about Huey Long, which has lots of footage, which I'd never seen.
I'd only read about Huey Long.
But that's true.
If the only person with a good job for you is the TVA, you like the TVA. Or the only place to work in town is the Air Force Base, you like it too.
Again, you're forced into counterfactual.
But the failure was...
That we were unable to develop a more diverse economy with things to offer people beyond the TVA or the farm.
Right.
You know, or at that time, right?
Exactly.
We failed.
Maybe Georgia failed.
Maybe the federal government failed.
Or maybe it just would take a little bit longer.
Georgia certainly is not the state it was in the 30s.
And there's this residual affection for the TVA. Would I... The creepy thing about the TVA is it's not Tennessee Valley Department or State of Georgia, Tennessee Valley.
It's Tennessee Valley Authority.
Again, people don't think about jurisdictions.
That's complicated.
Jurisdictional conflict, that's graduate school stuff.
But what it is, is Roosevelt created a power base for government that was hard to assail from the point of view of Congress and from the point of view of the state.
And one thing that I really used to teach and learned in studying for the forgotten men was The government systematically made states and towns addicted to money.
It gave them heroin or OxyContin on a feed.
When you're starving and you get federal money to build a town structure, That you, by the way, like, and maybe even you get to pick the architecture.
It's free money for the mayor.
Free money for, whoa, it's very easy to become addicted.
And we saw that same thing replayed, by the way, in urban renewal, right?
Or in highway building.
Dear governor, I'm going to pay for 90% of your road, and you're going to have some say of where the road goes, and you're not going to have to ask your state for more tax money.
Well, to a governor, that's a trade that's worthy of considering, right?
So when the federal government comes with its largesse and bribes the polity, of course the polity is vulnerable to the bribe.
The question is, is this bribe and what you get for ceding authority worth it in the long run?
Often not.
Right.
Dealing with TVA, I found you made an interesting comment there just a second ago.
TVA was always kind to our office.
I'll put it that way.
They would respond to questions that we had, but made it very clear that That if they disagreed with us, we weren't changing their mind.
And I think when you compare that, and I think one of the large problems we have now is as many members, you compare something like the TVA to the Corps of Engineers, in which you have very similar jobs in lakes and rivers that are literally 50 miles apart, run so differently.
That, you know, it is interesting to see how that, but TVA, the authority part of it, they have the authority and they know it.
And And what do we need?
So this is a feature of progressivism that you create authorities.
So you see in urban renewal, you have the Chicago Housing Authority or the St. Louis Housing Authority.
It's not state, it's not county, it's not federal, though it gets money from various, and sometimes they make a big mess.
But the thing that is so hard to imagine as a counterfactual that Wendell Wilkie pointed out, so just backing up, who was Wendell Wilkie?
He was a power company executive.
His company was called Commonwealth and Southern.
Remember, the Southern part meant something.
And where had been electrified?
The North.
Where had been insufficiently electrified?
Rural South.
But At the rate electrification was going, it looked like Commonwealth and Southern and other countries would get there.
It's more expensive per yard to lay wire in a rural place and you have to lay a lot more wire because of the lack of density.
There are a lot of reasons it's expensive.
For companies to invest in wiring rural spots, but there was money for it, and it just wasn't there yet.
And Wilkie said, wait, we're going to light up the South.
We just have to do it more slowly, or us or someone else, and pretty soon there'll be a technological change.
It'll be cheaper for us to do it, or a change in the access to capital.
And Roosevelt came along and said, It's too expensive for the private sector to ever want to wire this out.
Ergo, we need Rural Electrification Administration, we need TVA, because the economic numbers don't add up, which actually wasn't true.
What was true was At that minute, in 1932, it was expensive, capital-intensive industry, utilities for, at the start at least, it was expensive to wire this out.
That doesn't mean it would never happen.
And then what was very creepy, and I don't think That any of us is aware of it anymore was Roosevelt not only competed with and squeezed out private sector utilities, but also prosecuted private sector utility leaders and read their mail and seized their telegrams from Western Union and wrote a law that made it very difficult for them To raise capital, so they could wire the South.
That law was the Public Utilities Holding Company Act of 1935, I believe.
Counterfactuals are hard to teach or take seriously, but there's every evidence.
If you asked today, would the South ever get electricity without the TVA? We're sure it would, right?
Well, it would.
And I think Roosevelt's instilling in Georgia played such a role in that Georgia, you know, going to Warm Springs, seeing very rural Georgia, the electrification issues.
I mean, I think that all played into it.
I want to go back to something, though, that away from economics for a second, because it's something that Coolidge also dealt with.
He was very concerned about, at least appeared to be, very concerned about individual rights, individual, the government rights.
Assailing those rights, wiretapping, things like that.
Although he did, I think, eventually J. Edgar Hoover put in.
But how did that play into this sort of conservative thinking of Coolidge?
Well, what is economics at heart?
It's freedom for the individual to make decisions.
That's what economics is.
Or the opposite.
Freedom in the name of some kind of efficiency and we treat people in the aggregate, right?
So Coolidge understood that and he had a very old-fashioned view of econ.
Coolidge was not Arthur Laffer.
He was not even Ronald Reagan.
But he said, inflation is repudiation.
Isn't that interesting?
He didn't say inflation is bad and it's hard for the housewife, though he understood that.
He said, inflation is repudiation of government obligation.
Why does that matter?
Because the government has to be a model of trust for citizens so they can learn about trust and honor contract themselves.
It's the repudiation of the value of the currency.
And he believed in the moral component of economics.
It's about your responsibility, getting back to that insurance point.
You should insure yourself.
The government shouldn't insure you.
It's up to you.
And citizens respond to that.
So it's different from post-war.
It's less behavioralist than post-war econ.
Right.
I can see that.
Summing all this up and looking at these, and again, folks, if you're out there listening to this podcast and you want more, you need to read The Forgotten Man.
You need to read The Coolidge Biography.
And I've got to go now and get the Great Society book.
Greed, you talk about taxes, you wrote on that.
There was just so many things out there that you have brought to light.
I leave with this question.
For those of us who do long for a government And I'm going to say, and maybe this is not the right word, but I say in control.
One that is not driven by the whims of the emotional argument that you made earlier in this podcast.
Have we passed that?
Do you have the hope that we, as you talked about these groups, these organizations, local, we're moving that way.
Do you believe that there will become at least a more push toward that in a federal level, having our states empowered, but also looking at it from the fact that there is more freedom when you have more freedom?
I think if you're asking, is it possible to live in a freer America?
The answer is yes, and it will come through a new medium.
I mean, in a way, the internet is and can be freedom.
Right.
It's certainly freedom for education.
And that, as much as any COVID, has changed our understanding of how schools operate.
When we see how much we can learn on the internet, of course it's possible.
I think when the dollar is challenged, That will change our whole worldview.
Well, cryptocurrency didn't do it yet, but it's possible any day now for the dollar to be challenged.
The obstacles to a competing currency are gone.
Now, technologically, we can create money.
You know, now we can own commodities privately.
Now other governments want to compete with the dollar.
So one day, pretty soon, the dollar will be challenged and that will Give an opportunity for a reset.
Reagan never would have become president if the economy of the 70s hadn't been so subpar.
People got tired of subpar, right?
They were inventing things that weren't going to market.
Like what we think of as, you know, the forerunners to cell phones, the forerunners to the internet, all these things just weren't being commercialized because the market was so poor, capital gains taxes were so high and so on.
So some change will occur that will give us opportunity to reset and may even force a reset.
I want to say one other thing about Coolidge as we close.
What is so valuable about Coolidge economics is not that it works with arithmetic.
Oh yeah, you cut the rate and you get more revenue or something like that.
It's also that Coolidge understood that you pull government back for something, to leave space for something.
One of those things is, of course, business, but another was what he called things of the spirit.
The autonomy to run my family or my school as I see fit.
We recede the government in order to create space for things of the spirit.
I think that's a more compelling argument than just the arithmetic argument about taxation.
Well, I can see that as another title for a book there, The Things of the Spirit.
That is a great way to put that.
As we go, look, you're an amazing individual who's done a lot of things, and we didn't even get the chance to talk about the George W. Bush issues and apologies, but I wanted to go back, and maybe, again, we can come back on at a later time and do that, but I wanted to do today exactly what you've done, and that is Thai history.
I believe We're not reading enough of our history.
We're not understanding enough of our history.
We believe that last week is our history.
And it's not.
And what you provide the commentary is invaluable.
And I so appreciate you, Amy, for being on this podcast.
It has been a blessing for me.
I've learned even more today than I do even reading your books.
And so thank you for being a part of this podcast.
And it has been a joy.
Well, thank you.
Nothing is new, it's just forgotten.
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