The Anti-Mamdani

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New York City’s Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, the first communist Twelver Shi’ite to occupy Gracie Mansion, has announced his plans to raise city taxes to confiscatory levels. Mamdani naively believes that enough of New York City’s productive people will consent to this government-by-robbery to finance his free-stuff schemes, and so the city, and the world, will have to be treated to yet another object lesson in why socialism doesn’t work and never will work. If there were more awareness today of the presidency and political philosophy of America’s thirtieth president, Calvin Coolidge, all the suffering that is sure to come might have been avoided.

Andrew W. Mellon, secretary of the treasury in the administrations of President Warren G. Harding and his successor, Coolidge, as well as in the subsequent Hoover administration, advocated lowering taxes to increase revenues. The idea was that allowing people to keep more of their own money, rather than confiscating it for taxes, would encourage individual initiative which would increase incomes, since the taxpayer would be able to keep the extra money he earned by working harder, rather than see it all taken by the tax collector. Lowering taxes would therefore increase the amount of money the government collected from a wealthier populace.

As Rating America’s Presidents explains, Coolidge followed this advice. On January 25, 1925, speaking at the American Association of Newspaper Editors’ annual convention, he enunciated what became his most famous adage: “The chief business of the American people is business.” This didn’t mean just big business, but everyone’s ability to engage in enterprise and benefit from the proceeds. He explained in another address five months later: “We are seeking to let those who earn money keep more of it for themselves and give less of it to the Government. This means better business, more of the comforts of life, general economic improvement, larger opportunity for education, and a greater freedom for all the people. It is in essence restoring our country to the people of our country. It reendows them not only with increased material but with increased spiritual values.”

The Revenue Act of 1926 cut taxes substantially, and these cuts were not the left’s proverbial Republican “tax cuts for the rich”: by 1928, Coolidge’s last full year in office, only the wealthiest two percent of the population paid any income tax at all.

Coolidge also moved decisively to reduce the national debt and federal spending. He cut a good bit of fat from federal spending: it fell from $3.14 billion in 1923 to $2.96 billion in 1928. At the same time, under Harding and Coolidge, the national debt went from $23.9 billion in 1921 to $17.3 billion in 1929.

Coolidge was, meanwhile, a lifelong opponent of the now-fashionable idea that it is the government’s responsibility to ensure not just equality of access to services and opportunities, but equality of outcomes despite differences in individual interests, abilities, and aptitudes. He would have opposed his successor Barack Obama’s claim that “when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” Said Coolidge, “Don’t expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong.”

Indeed. The history of totalitarian regimes throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries shows Coolidge to have been correct: state-enforced egalitarianism is not actually good for everybody, or anybody; it only makes everyone poor, with the exception of the elites that hold political power, and creates a gargantuan government that oppresses its own people.

On August 2, 1927, the fourth anniversary of his becoming president, Coolidge called a press conference. Slips of paper were distributed, reading, “I do not choose to run for President in nineteen twenty eight.” The man known as “Silent Cal” declined to comment further, although he explained on other occasions that if he ran again, he would be president for nearly ten years, and that was too long for any man and bad for the republic. Another statement circulated, attributed to Coolidge’s wife Grace: “Papa says there’s going to be a depression,” although some dismiss this as apocryphal.

Whether or not she said it, and whether or not he said it, it was true, and that depression became the occasion for a massive upheaval in American politics. Those who benefited politically from the depression frequently blamed it on Coolidge, when the responsibility for it can be much more accurately attributed to the policies of his two immediate successors, Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Had either or both followed Coolidge’s fiscal policies, the Great Depression would not have lasted nearly as long as it ultimately did.