
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, November 29, 1995                   TAG: 9511300004
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: CAL THOMAS
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

PROPERTY AND PROFIT

BRITISH HISTORIAN Paul Johnson was in Washington at the beginning of the month to address a gathering at the Library of Congress on the subject ``Calvin Coolidge and the Last Arcadia.'' Sounds dry, doesn't it? Not something you'd choose over, say, the Beatles reunion.

But Johnson's visit was timely, coming as it did in the heat of the war between the Clinton administration and the Republican Congress over whether and how to balance the budget.

``We have too much legislation by clamor, by tumult and by pressure,'' said Coolidge more than seven decades ago. Who could disagree?

In normal times, Coolidge believed, minimal government must be the norm. He spoke of ``restoring Lincoln's principles'' by insisting on government of the people, for and by the people. ``The chief task before us,'' he said, ``is to repossess the people of their government and their property.''

Property and profit, he believed, were keys to national prosperity. When government attacked such things, it weakened the nation and government itself. ``Don't expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong,'' he said in his 1914 inaugural address as president of the Massachusetts State Senate. It remains a powerful rebuke to the current welfare state, which believes in punishing ``the rich'' by ever-higher taxation in order to subsidize the poor and thus perpetuate their poverty.

``The normal must take care of themselves,'' Coolidge believed. ``Self-government means self-support. Ultimately, property rights and personal rights are the same thing. History reveals no civilized people among whom there is not a highly educated class and large aggregation of wealth. Large profits mean large payrolls.'' It was essential, he believed, to judge political morality not by its intentions, but by its effects. By that standard, the welfare state and big government are dismal failures.

In his 1925 Inaugural Address as president, Coolidge said, ``Economy is idealism in its most practical form.'' Later that year, in an address to the New York Chamber of Commerce, he said, ``Government and business should remain independent and separate; one directed from Washington, the other from New York.'' Business was the pursuit of gain, Johnson said Coolidge believed, but it also had a moral purpose.

Coolidge held the line against encroaching government, while it expanded nearly everywhere else. Of those who came to power at the same time as Coolidge, said Johnson, all of the most notable were dedicated to expanding the role of the state. Mussolini, ``supreme in Italy from 1922, put it bluntly: `Everything within the state; nothing outside the state; nothing against the state.' Stalin, in power from 1924, began his great series of five-year plans for the entire country.'' From Turkey to China and Saudi Arabia, said Johnson, ``all of them took government into corners of their countries it had never before penetrated. Even France and Belgium were rampant interventionists.''

To those who slight the Coolidge era as an early version of looking out for No. 1, Johnson has a rebuke: ``This new material advance [was not] gross and Philistine as the popular historiography of the 1920s has it. ... Middle-class intellectuals are a little too inclined against poor people acquiring for the first time material possessions, and especially luxuries, of a kind they themselves have always taken for granted. Experience shows that in a democratic and self-improving society like the United States, when more money becomes available, the first priority for both local governments and for families is to spend it on more and better education. That is certainly what happened in the 1920s. Total education spending in the United States rose fourfold. ... Illiteracy fell from 7.7 percent to 4 percent.'' Book clubs started. Americans voted for the top 10 greatest men in history. They included Shakespeare, Longfellow, Tennyson and Dickens.

Coolidge's final rebuke to modern times, noted Johnson, was this: ``He was not exactly popular, but he was hugely respected.'' How out of joint is our day when popularity is everything and respect is an Aretha Franklin song.

America could do a lot worse than recalling the wisdom of Calvin Coolidge, and politicians of all stripes might consider this pithy thought: ``The things I never say never get me in trouble.''

- Los Angeles Times Syndicate

by CNB