Presidents' Day 2016: Who Was Best? Who Was Worst?
Today's Presidents' Day edition of the Liberty Report returns to Ivan Eland's excellent book Recarving Rushmore, where he ranks all the presidents according to whether their policies promoted peace, prosperity, and freedom. Who was best? Who was worst? What is a "great" president? Tune in!!
Be sure to visit http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com for more libertarian commentary.
Today's Presidents' Day edition of the Liberty Report returns to Ivan Eland's excellent book Recarving Rushmore, where he ranks all the presidents according to whether their policies promoted peace, prosperity, and freedom. Who was best? Who was worst? What is a "great" president? Tune in!!
Be sure to visit http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com for more libertarian commentary.
Today's Presidents' Day edition of the Liberty Report returns to Ivan Eland's excellent book Recarving Rushmore, where he ranks all the presidents according to whether their policies promoted peace, prosperity, and freedom. Who was best? Who was worst? What is a "great" president? Tune in!!
Be sure to visit http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com for more libertarian commentary.
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams, co-host.
Daniel, good to see you.
Hello, Dr. Paul.
This is President's Day.
Let's pick our best president and find out who's the next president going to be.
Well, I don't think we have that much wisdom or foreknowledge.
But we want to talk about presidents in general because it's president day.
And a book that you and I both have referred to on occasion is Recarving Rushmore.
And that's Ivan Eland's book.
And he's a good friend.
He happens to have libertarian instincts.
So he wrote a book that we found fascinating.
And we've talked about this before.
And that is that maybe there's a different way of evaluating our presidents because libertarians can get pretty annoyed about the pick, you know, that we hear about from grade school on up, who the great presidents are.
And the one thing that finally dawned on me after a few years is they're always the ones that got us into war and fought a lot of wars and saved the country and saved the world by having these wars until you understand what war is all about.
So this book is interesting because he judges it on peace and on prosperity and liberty.
That sounds good.
Yeah, and not warmongering and how much you spent in the DOD budget and how many civil liberties we lost.
So what did you find in particular that fascinated you with this book?
Did you find out something that totally surprised you?
Well, the book is great because it's not only easy reading, it's fun reading.
It's almost like trading cards.
You go to each president and you look at all the different categories and give it away.
And it's not a new book, but we keep going back to it.
But not to give it away, but John Tyler was the best president according to the criteria established by Ivan Eland.
And people would say, a lot of people would say, John who?
Who's he?
Yeah, we don't know who he is.
But, you know, there are a couple of criteria.
Dramatic Change Ahead00:12:55
There are a couple of reasons why he picked Ivan.
He ended the Indian Wars.
Good thing.
He exercised restraint on an internal rebellion.
You know, the Ruby Ridge and the Waco could learn something from that.
He used dialogue when there were some international disputes with Britain at the time.
And he limited the money supply and resisted high tariffs.
Well, that's pretty good.
But now that we've picked out the good guy, who gets the credit, the Republicans or the Democrats?
It turns out, neither.
Neither party.
He was one of the last Whigs that were in office and before the duopoly took hold of our system.
Well, one thing I wanted to recheck on and I did was seeing that we've, in my lifetime, in your lifetime, we've had Republicans and Democrats.
I wonder how long it's been since we had an independent because, you know, when Trump runs against Bloomberg, who knows?
One of them might be an independent.
Maybe they'll break the mold.
But right now, it looks like it's locked in step.
And those that identify, you know, either as a Republican or a Democrat, they've been in charge since 1850 and before Lincoln ran as a Republican.
But the odds aren't, the odds aren't all that great.
But how much difference do you think it makes if we had, how much difference do you think it makes between the Republicans and the Democrats?
And you know, there's a lot of fuss.
There's a lot of excitement about whether we get the right-wing authoritarian or a left-wing authoritarian right now.
But so they place so much emphasis on the election.
And it's a horse race.
And just think of the millions of hours and billions of dollars being spent on the horse race.
Well, like you said before the show, we should almost go back to Jefferson times where you were a Democratic-Republican.
Then they could all be in the same party.
All one party.
But you know, it's not.
been perfect in the past, but there was somewhat of a pattern of third parties arising and getting prominence and other parties falling by the wayside.
But as you point out, we haven't had that in 160-some years.
Right.
And so the odds aren't real good that there'll be an independent that wins.
It's not impossible, but the cards are against it, mainly because of the process.
And I've complained about this many times, because if you are a truly independent thinker and you're challenging the status quo and the status quo is established and endorsed by Republicans and Democrats, you know, the war policy really doesn't change.
I mean, do you think Hillary, I know what you think, but is Hillary really going to give us a peaceful foreign policy?
And here, Obama was supposed to, but didn't do it.
Will they change the Federal Reserve?
Will they change the welfare mentality?
You know, it doesn't happen.
So, but yeah, we can go out and run our candidates, sure.
What if you don't qualify?
Then the parties aren't going to accept you.
And what if you had a Green Party candidate or a Libertarian that's doing well and theoretically could win?
Oh boy, this is going to be exciting.
We'll have four people in the debate this year.
It's not going to happen because in our democracy, it is controlled by these two parties that are really loggerheads, which is not true.
I mean, there are two parties who have the same goals.
I mean, it's Boehner's party and Pelosi's party.
So this is the discouraging thing that I think, and they're not going to be thinking about what Ivan has pointed out in this book.
And even the peace candidate of 2016, Bernie Sanders, he said in the Democratic debate last week that he wants to put more troops on the Russian border.
We need to have more troops over there.
And he's also, he voted in favor of all the funding for the wars.
He voted for Clinton's war on Kosovo.
So even the peace candidates are in the pro-war.
Well, he can point out, I voted against the war, but I voted to fund the war, this sort of thing.
So, no, that is the problem, and the people can get fooled into this.
And unfortunately, nothing changes.
So, that's why I think that the only thing that does change is when the people change their attitudes.
And regardless of the party, the goal isn't to work and mold the party as it is, is to get the people to have a consensus on maybe the foreign policy is wrong.
Like, the war should end like they did in the 60s.
But what was the cost of all that?
60,000 Americans died.
10,000 have died here in the last 10, 15 years with these Middle Eastern wars.
You know, if you had all the Americans that have died over it, plus hundreds of thousands, if not millions, have died at our hand.
So that's why the attitudes have to change.
And of course, it'd be good to have a strong president that might resist, but he's considered a Peachnik.
He's considered unpatriotic.
If you say, well, no, I don't want to send troops over there.
Oh, that means you don't care.
And this is where the real problem is, is that people get locked into what patriotism is all about.
And you're unpatriotic if you don't support it.
And you're putting the country at great danger.
This is really what someday the American people have to overcome.
I remember back on the campaign trail of yours, more than once at least, the issue came up of the great presidents and now they're considered to be Lincoln, FDR, and Wilson, the war presidents.
But you pointed out on more than one occasion that it takes a lot more strength to exercise restraint in the face of all the pressures to intervene, whether in the economy or overseas.
And this is really a strong president.
Yeah, it's different.
It isn't the strength that if somebody's annoying you that you have the strength and determination to govern Sockham in the jaw.
The strength is to resist, actually it's public pressure in many ways.
You know, when I can remember I didn't have to deliberate too much about voting against war.
I set my standards and I knew where I was going.
But what about some of those other people who finally came around and they said, well, I've listened to the testimony, I go back home, now military people saying that.
And boy, to stand up against the political pressure, some people would say, well, strength means you go along with it and you send the troops off to war.
Or does strength mean that you have strength of conviction and you understand that you can at least present the case and resist the pressure that is frequently put on by not the average person, but put on and orchestrated by the special interests like the military-industrial complex and the banking people.
These are the people that can put tremendous pressure on you.
And unfortunately, a lot of people yield to it.
I'm reminded of our friend John Duncan from Tennessee, the representative from Tennessee, who you remember told the story many times about his run-up to the vote on the Iraq war.
And he framed it in terms of this is not a conservative war.
Spending all this money, going overseas, doing all this is not conservative.
But he was very concerned, and he said this many times, very concerned because he came from a very conservative district, and he was worried that he would look unpatriotic.
But you remember, he said a couple years later, that turned out to be the most popular vote I ever did.
Well, this is one thing the book is helpful to sorting this out because if you're a popular conservative president like Ronald Reagan and says a lot of great things, but then ends up spending more money than the previous Democrats, you know, run up huge deficits and builds up a military machine that really, now you look back, wasn't necessary.
You know, we weren't being attacked.
Like right now, all the candidates are saying, you know, we have to rebuild the military.
When did we destroy our military?
It is so strong and so powerful.
That's one thing that we've been very capable of doing.
We are so capable with our military.
If it were used for defense, we could do it with a fraction of the amount of money because of our efficiency.
But no, still, the pressures come.
But I think some of these people get a free ride, you know, even from the conservative viewpoint that, you know, Bush is still, you know, not as popular as he once was.
But Reagan is still almost, they have to cite Reagan.
But his budgets, they were terrible.
And it didn't solve our problems.
You know, it's fun looking back over the years at the past presidencies and the things that they did.
But, you know, we do turn and think about what we have now, which is the unitary executive, ruling with an iron fist, executive orders, not going to even bother to talk to Congress before I go to war.
And it seems like we've gone so far that this book almost seems like a museum piece.
And I was thinking about asking you before we started the show, you know, we've gone so far in this bad direction, even worse than the worst presidents in some ways.
What do you think we could do to bring this back in and make the executive just one among the three branches?
I'm an optimist in one sense, a pessimist in another.
And I'm a pessimist into thinking that what we need are just more elections and we're going to build our strength and we're going to get a majority and we're going to resist and cut spending and do it.
That's not going to happen.
But I think there's going to be a dramatic change in our ability or the government's ability to rule over us.
They're going to not be able to.
The debt will finally eat our lunch and then we won't really be the kingpin and we won't be able to afford it.
And the economic system will have to collapse and be remade, just like the economic system of the communists collapsed and they had to revamp.
And of course, they didn't come out.
They came out a lot better than it used to be, but still haven't had the answers.
So I think on economic policy and the Federal Reserve and foreign policy, they will have to stop.
And that's where I think the grassroots and our efforts and the efforts of many other libertarian groups are being very successful in educating people to rebuild.
But I just am not expecting that there's going to be a gradual logical transition.
The big danger that I see is when a major crisis hit, you know, just think of how many of us are concerned about our loss of civil liberties here at home.
Well, they could be a lot worse.
What if there's a lot of strife in our inner cities?
People are going to say, yeah, put them in a concentration camp, round them up, and they're going to do that.
So it could get a lot worse before it gets better.
But people have to have the strength to stand up and listen to the people and not pay attention to somebody who comes along with these rash promises.
One guy says, you know, I can give you this ABCD, education, medical care, and food in an apartment for free.
It's for free.
And never blink an eye.
And the people say, well, I need that.
I need that.
And they go with them.
And somebody else say, I'm going to make everything okay.
And I will be the government.
And I know what is best.
None of them talk about how am I going to give individual their liberty and have a circumstance where people feel good about taking care of themselves and realizing that's the only way you can get taken care of is by your own efforts and not by pretending that government debt and government printing press money can do the job.
So we've got more work to do then.
We have a lot more work to do.
We should recognize how dangerous it is.
But we should have fun trying and working and converting people to our viewpoints because we don't have a lot of other choices.
And it's not like this is the first time the human race has faced some major problems, but I do believe we face some heavy ones.
But I am convinced that today there's a better understanding how liberty solves all our problems than ever before.
So understanding what true personal liberty is all about and why peace and prosperity should be our goal, that, to me, would provide our answers.
And hopefully we can celebrate the President's Day and say, now there's the kind of guy that will take us in the right direction.