The Other Side of the Ledger

Auburn, AL

February 18,  2021

Among the criticisms of government skeptics is that they emit lots of heat, but little light. 

We hear the complaints. It’s all well and good to lambast leaders and condemn their faults. We did plenty of that over the course of the last week. But who would we prefer to replace them? Were any presidents up to our sanctimonious standards?

It’s a fair question. 

To answer it, we have crossed state lines and changed time zones. It’s as if we needed to move to another dimension to find more commendable presidents. Most importantly, we are here for a brief visit with our college son. This morning, he’s in class, so we’ll resume our lecture.

We began Presidents’ Day week by cataloguing the creeps, and went deep into the debits. This morning we begin balancing the scales, and compiling the credits.

All we ask of a president is that he defend his oath of office, to do his best to preserve freedom and not squander wealth. Maintain money and avoid war. That’s it. And it doesn’t seem too much to ask. The rest…like the weather, wokism, and Washington clown shows…are mere distractions to facilitate force, farce, and fraud.

As an extreme example of what we are after, we bring to the podium William Henry Harrison. He started inauspiciously, with the longest inaugural address in history. Windy speeches often portend busybody do-gooders and activist administrations. But fate intervened, and restored Harrison’s reputation. 

He spoke under a cold rain, and caught pneumonia. He had promised not to serve more than one term, and fulfilled his pledge. With interest. So far as we know, he did no violence to his oath, then let loose this mortal coil before his welcome was worn. And, when he did, he left the chair to a man who may have been the best president of them all.

But Harrison’s sacrifice is a lot to ask of anyone. So we set him aside, and our sights a little lower. A president need not die in office to make our list, tho’ one of them did – and four got the job because someone else did.

We turn to simpler times, of leaders whose names adorn no buildings, whose faces grace no bills, and who schoolboys forget when they recall the presidents between Jackson and Lincoln, or Lincoln and Roosevelt.

Unlike our discussions of the degenerates, this task is not a tall one. There aren’t many of these guys and, almost by definition…and the grace of God…they didn’t do much.

But we start with a president who breaks our rule. He is as well known as any man of his millennium. His features are on money and monuments, tho’ they are rapidly being stripped from both. Yet try as they might, the vandals and vulgarians will have a hard time making people forget the name of…

Thomas Jefferson. Here was perhaps the most remarkable man to serve as president, an accomplishment he considered unworthy to include among his most noteworthy achievements. 

Reading dispatches of the Convention from his post in Paris, Jefferson was skeptical of the new Constitution. He saw no reason to abandon the Articles of Confederation. But as it became apparent the Constitution would be ratified, he accommodated himself to it, on one condition: it must include a Bill of Rights. 

After the first ten amendments were added, Jefferson accepted the document, and firmly advocated that it be interpreted narrowly, in accordance with the intentions of the framers and (most importantly) the understanding of the state ratifying conventions. During his first term, that is what he did.

He told Congress to lead, and they did. He gave recommendations to reduce debt, eliminate taxes, rein in the judiciary, and repeal, replace or let expire odious federal legislation. The legislature passed bills along these lines, and he signed them. 

Upon taking office, the noxious Alien and let Sedition Acts were repealed or allowed to expire. Jefferson eliminated almost all taxes, including those on property, excise, and carriage. Only a small revenue tariff remained. 

Jefferson advised that appropriations be authorized only for specific purposes. These type allocations are now denigrated as “earmarks.” To Thomas Jefferson, they represented accountability in spending, which is probably why Congress resents them today.

As taxes vanished, the debt disappeared. Internal spending was almost non-existent. Jefferson considered himself constitutionally prohibited from signing most recommended outlays, even if he personally approved of their intended results.

Military spending was drastically reduced, leaving the smallest peacetime army in US history. Jefferson resisted “entangling alliances”, while advising “peace and honest friendship“ with all nations. For such a humble and reasonable foreign policy, state militias and Navy gunboats would suffice.

But Jefferson recognized the value of an officer class. He established an Army Corp of Engineers and the Military Academy at West Point. His appreciation for these institutions was doubtless enhanced by his purchase of the Louisiana territory. 

Jefferson’s enemies claimed the Louisiana Purchase was unconstitutional. The president himself shared those concerns, and probably to a greater degree. Before agreeing to terms, he even began drafting a constitutional amendment that would authorize the sale.

The thought of a modern president even taking the Constitution into consideration, much less writing an amendment to address its constraints, is unfathomable. The amendment wasn’t needed, as the Senate ratified a treaty that provided sufficient grist for the constitutional mill.

Most of the better presidents served fewer than two terms, and sometimes not even one. Thomas Jefferson probably wished he had as well. The embargo was the largest blemish on his second administration. Tho’ it avoided a war that would doubtless have been worse, from conception to enforcement, the embargo strained…and in some cases breached…constitutional limits.

The Jeffersonians who followed him, and the Jacksonians on their heels, each continued to extend the frontiers of constitutional constraint. Little by little, power moved to the center and resistance dissolved, until the election of…

Martin Van Buren. The responsibility of a president is to tend primarily to foreign affairs and only incidentally to domestic ones. Internal matters are the province of the states. “History” usually forgets or denigrates those leaders who limit themselves to these humble objectives.

Few pundits invoke Martin Van Buren as one who knew how to pass a law or “get things done.”  He knew that passing laws was not his job. Getting things done meant negotiating treaties, avoiding wars, and vetoing unconstitutional legislation that passed under his pen.

Van Buren viewed his job as simple, tho’ not necessarily easy. It was to adhere strictly to the “letter and spirit of Constitution as it was designed by those who framed it.” As he put it, the Constitution limited his purview to broad objectives, leaving to the people and states “all power not explicitly parted with”. Beyond these limits “[he would] never pass.”

Even overseas, he was humble. Van Buren disclaimed all right to “meddle in disputes, whether internal or foreign, that may molest other countries”…and asserted he’d “observe a strict neutrality in all their controversies”. He declined all “alliances as adverse to our peace.” 

I wanted to capture these quotes, because otherwise people would think I was making them up. Plus, we’re unlikely to hear them from the White House ever again.

Van Buren’s greatest challenge was the deep Panic of 1837. The modern remedy would be to drop interest rates, print money, then funnel it to big banks, like police payoffs to a mob boss. But fake money caused this problem, and Van Buren wisely resisted giving the patient more of the germ that caused the disease. 

Andrew Jackson had forced Treasury Secretary Roger Taney to withdraw funds from Bank of US and deposit in state banks. These came to be called Jackson’s “Pet Banks”. They started printing money, and binging on inflation. By the time Van Buren succeeded Jackson, the hangover hit. 

As Van Buren inherited the illness, he bequeathed the cure. He advocated a hard money standard, and created an independent Treasury to manage government funds. Excepting under Lincoln, the US would be unburdened by a central bank till the advent of the Federal Reserve. 

The scales reset, liquidity drained, and the economy sought its equilibrium. But that takes time, and Van Buren’s ran out. His term ended, and he was ushered from office with insufficient accolades for the ground he had cleared and the foundation he’d laid.

The same could be said of the man who came to office a month later, and who was probably the best president we’ve ever had. 

We’ll meet him tomorrow. Today, as the morning moves on, we drop the pen and go see our son.

JD