Ranking presidents is something of a cottage industry among the intellectual elite. The whole thing started in 1948, when Arthur Schlesinger conducted a survey of a small but carefully chosen sample of historians to demonstrate that FDR belonged in the Pantheon. FULL ARTICLE by Clifford F. Thies
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/13487/the-making-up-of-a-president/
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I hesitate to even offer my snarl, since ranking presidents is as analytically sound as ranking rock stars or first ladies’ dresses.
However, if “luck” were one of the criteria by which a ranking is derived, then what’s required is not another “best” list, but a new definition of “intellectual.”
So apparently if you lengthen an economic depression by a decade due to central planning, extreme corporatism, and war – and then that stagnation only relents when you die – you can get rated the president with the best economic policies!
Clearly, if we’d had a worse president during that economic hardship, it’d have been much worse. Just imagine if we had nobody interfering with the market recovery, then it’d have been terrible! (not)
They would attribute anything good that happened undder Reagan as Luck.
Ah, I see.
He was lucky to have followed in FDR’s footsteps. If being power mad and getting that power can be considered “lucky.”
These “intellectuals” consistenly rate Lincoln and FDR in the top 5, with Wilson not far behind. That these tyrants gave our country the three most destructive and deadly wars in our history tells you all you need to know.
If people insist on ranking presidents, then I would recommend the rankings from the MacArthur Institute (www.macarthur-institute.org). Their publication, Foundations of Liberty, divides U.S. history into different eras, and then ranks the presidents within each era on liberty-related subjects. Then, there is an overall ranking across all eras. The website appears to have not been updated for a few years, but they are still publishing paper copies of their journal.
Wow, the last time that site was updated looks like the same year that GeoCities was all the rage in web publishing. Someone is obviously paying the registration fee since it hasn’t been squatted yet.
There also seems to be a fair amount of state worship mixed into their “Freedom Series.”
Another example of Presidents becoming bigger than they were ever suppose to be.
http://whyeverypresidentsucked.com/
HT2 Norman Horn
I fully expect that if the Republicans lose big in Nov, and I think they stand a good chance given how poor their leadership is, that Obama should be able to pass just about any legislation his egalitarian heart desires. If this happens, I have no doubt that he’ll be ranked #2 or even #1, right next to FDR. I think its key to understand that if you want to be tops on this list, its not about superior diplomacy, presiding over a robust economy or superior management of government operations, its about the willingness to pursue egalitarian goals at any and all costs.
But Frank, this guy couldn’t shine FDR’s slime covered boots (I hope this is taken in the spirit of our post racial era). You don’t think come 2013 Hillary will be the next war salesman in chief? (Or is that war “salesmyn”?)
Grover Cleveland and WHH are the only Presidents who shouldn’t go be spit upon as fascists.
The root of this attitude is that the liberal elites fear that without a massive government, their personal income would fall to zero, and in the long run they would never regain the status they enjoyed under big government. They are simply projecting their personal loss of money and prestige on the whole world.
Here’s another way to look at it. The worst and most disastrous presidents need a chorus to sing their praises, because those who truly enjoy success have no need for anyone to state the obvious. Likewise, the liberal elite would not benefit from praising the truly praiseworthy, because anyone with no pretensions to wisdom can recognize and praise success. If the liberal elites are to distinguish themselves as having mysterious knowledge and powers of perception, they must be able to detect and praise something which on the surface has no merit – such as a president who lost millions of jobs and wasted millions of lives. By pretending to find merit where none is apparent they confirm their elite status as wise and perspicacious. Bad presidents need the praise of elites, and elites need bad presidents to praise.
Lincoln comes to mind…
Eric-
By your logic just about anyone is a fascist. I think libertarianism is great and all, but is willfully ignorant about the world around us. In other words, they are idealistic in a bad way.
This always makes me chuckle. On any given day, libertarianism is flawed because its premise is either:
(1) People are basically bad,
or
(2) People are basically good.
And so it goes.
That’s backwards reasoning. That dichotomy shows that it is the state that is unnecessary. If people are inherently good, the state does not need to protect or provide as inherent humanity will perform the job on its own. If people are inherently bad, then the state MUST not be permitted to exist as giving absolute power to a bad person leads to evil. Either philosophy showdown the state at best getting in the way of efficient goodness or at worst a vehicle of death, destruction, and despair.
Reality is that both good and bad exists (saying one or the other exists as the main state is illogical as it would preclude the other from ever forming). This is shown ny the fact that all governments in human history have ranged between the unnecessary curiosities that have no use in existence to vuolent, destructive organisms. It merely depends on who makes up that state. However, no matter who leads, the state has never resulted in a positive end.
Such was my point, J. And you elucidate it nicely.
Cheers.
Since when is California America’s largest state?
I think since the 1960s, in population, you know.
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