For those of us who prefer a stable economy, one that's running slow but steady, instead of going regularly from boom to the inevitable bust, everything's just fine, thank you. The process of Creative Destruction--or is it Destructive Creation?--goes merrily on. Some investors prosper, others fail. All on their own as the free market continues to determine their fate. All the while inflation remains low, the dollar stable, and prospects fair-to-middlin'. We've survived a lot worse.
Yet there will always be those planners whose plans have a way of going awry. They insist on giving the economy a push in one direction or another. Instead of just leaving well enough alone. They bring to mind the nervous driver who can't resist giving the gas pedal another little push, and succeeds only in flooding the engine. Much like those international bankers who just want to give the world's economy a little push. ("Inflation Lows Vex International Bankers"--Wall Street Journal, Page 1, January 22.) Even as the stock market rebounds on its own, giving the Dow its first weekly gain of the year. Our planners seem able to do anything but just wait.
Some of our presidents did have the patience--and wisdom--to do nothing at all, and do it particularly well. Think of Silent Cal ("Keep Cool With Coolidge") in the otherwise Roaring Twenties, who just stood aside and let the economy recover on its own after the chaos of the First World War, and sure enough it did.
Think of Dwight Eisenhower, who was called a Do-Nothing president because he resisted the mounting pressure to do something dramatic as his two terms ran out and the 1960 presidential election approached. A bright young newcomer named John Fitzgerald Kennedy took center stage with his demand that Ike and his dull old crowd get this country Moving Again.
Action was supposed to be good for its own sake, not because of any results it might produce. Ike preferred a different policy: Just wait.
Think of Ronald Reagan, who may have been the strongest and most successful president of modern times. Because he and his partner in stability at the Federal Reserve refused to panic as the economy had to cope with the aftermath of the disastrous Carter Years--runaway inflation combined with stagnant growth. Stagflation, it was called. Yet the Reagan and Volcker team stood fast, preferring to wait the crisis out despite all the voices demanding that they do something, for goshsake. Till the skies turned sunny at last and the country was launched on one of the greatest economic expansions in its history over the next decade and beyond.
All good things do come to those who wait, and one reason old sayings become old sayings is that they have a way of turning out to be true.
If there is one constant about this administration, it is its inconstancy. It seems to prefer an ad-hoc, off-the-cuff response to every crisis that comes along to planning ahead--and sticking to that plan. And so sacrifices the initiative to every adversary or just chance. If it ever does demonstrate the wisdom to do nothing, it may be only by accident, not on purpose.
Calvin Coolidge. Dwight Eisen-hower. Those historical figures were despised in the politically correct history I was taught as a graduate student at Columbia University, that hotbed of orthodox liberalism in the 1960s. The same liberals tended to forget that Herbert Hoover, the "Great Engineer" himself, was also a master planner. Till all his plans went kaplooey and he was reduced to an embittered old man riding to the presidential inauguration of his always smiling, charming, and flexible successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt. If happy days weren't here again, he always acted like it.
FDR had such a variety of policies and programs on offer, not all of them consistent, that it is impossible to pigeonhole him as one presidential type or another. But this much he always had: charm. And charm still counts for much. if not everything on occasion.
As for our current chief executive, the adjective that best sums him up now, after his star has fallen, is charmless. For his appeal faded years ago. And self-promotion is not a policy but only an inadequate substitute for one. Strength. January 20, 2017, is still on the calendar, and we live in hope.
Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial on 02/07/2016