by Tom Woods, Lew Rockwell:
From the Tom Woods Letter:
The New York Times just ran this headline:
“Poll Ranks Biden as 14th Best President, with Trump Last.”
Oh, really? Trump last, huh? What a surprise!
(I guess the silver lining here is that now they have to admit, at least comparatively, that Grover Cleveland and Franklin Pierce had at least some merits.)
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
These rankings of the presidents by historians are worthless and stupid. That’s the nicest thing I can say about them.
On what possible basis could these historians be judging the presidents? Whether someone was a good president or not is a value judgment. If in a president you are looking for someone who will humbly execute the laws, you are going to rank the presidents very differently from someone who wants the president to oversee the ideological transformation of society.
The sorry lot we call our historians love presidents who did bold things, even (or especially) when those bold things were idiotic and destructive. By any reasonable standard Calvin Coolidge was a vastly better president than Franklin D. Roosevelt, and it isn’t close. Even poor Warren Harding, whom we are taught to despise, understood economic issues, including monetary policy, on a higher level than virtually any of the talking heads we have to endure nowadays.
(Just read his acceptance speech for the Republican nomination, or his inaugural address, neither of which any teacher ever showed you.)
It makes no difference at all what modern historians, whose ideological commitments are in general the opposite of your own, think about who was a great president and who wasn’t. Their opinions are of zero value.
They, just like their dumb, woke conferences, should be ignored.
