{"id":36985,"date":"2018-11-25T01:00:04","date_gmt":"2018-11-25T06:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=36985"},"modified":"2018-11-25T09:29:28","modified_gmt":"2018-11-25T14:29:28","slug":"qotd-calvin-coolidge-master-of-inactivity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/11\/25\/qotd-calvin-coolidge-master-of-inactivity\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Calvin Coolidge, master of inactivity"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>When asked to summarize the record of his administration, Coolidge replied, \u201cPerhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business.\u201d The point wasn\u2019t that he was lazy, the point was that it takes work to stop government from doing stupid things. \u201cIt is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones,\u201d he once remarked.<\/p>\n<p>When Coolidge said, \u201cWhen you see ten problems rolling down the road, if you don\u2019t do anything, nine of them will roll into a ditch before they get to you.\u201d Again, the point wasn\u2019t laziness, it was confidence in the ability of society \u2014 a.k.a. the people \u2014 to figure things out for themselves. For every ten big problems our society faces, nine of them aren\u2019t the government\u2019s problem. Liberals think not only that all ten are the government\u2019s problem, but that ten is an insanely low tally of the big problems the government is supposed to be dealing with. And fewer and fewer conservatives would endorse the Coolidge Ratio.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m increasingly convinced we\u2019ll never have another one like him. My point isn\u2019t that we don\u2019t produce people like Coolidge anymore \u2014 though that\u2019s more than a little true, too. It\u2019s not that a Coolidge couldn\u2019t get elected today either, though who could argue with that? It\u2019s that even if we somehow produced a Coolidge and got him or her elected, the nature of the state is such that even Coolidge couldn\u2019t really be Coolidge.<\/p>\n<p>Jonah Goldberg, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/g-file\/donald-trump-inauguration-calvin-coolidge-unwisdom-crowds\/\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;The Unwisdom of Crowds&#8221;, <em>National Review<\/em><\/a>, 2017-01-21.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When asked to summarize the record of his administration, Coolidge replied, \u201cPerhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business.\u201d The point wasn\u2019t that he was lazy, the point was that it takes work to stop government from doing stupid things. \u201cIt is much more important to kill [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,41,13],"tags":[883],"class_list":["post-36985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-calvincoolidge"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9Cx","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36985"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36985\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45946,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36985\/revisions\/45946"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}