The 40 days of the Dog Days of Summer – which began on July 3 and will run through Aug. 11 – are upon us.
And given that public policy pronouncements tend to be few and far between this time of the year, it’s an opportune time to recount the classic public policy observations of Garet Garrett.
Who?
Garrett (1878-1954), long forgotten by most contemporary public policy makers, was, according to one observer, “a case study in a forgotten genius.” A reporter by trade, he wrote for The New York Sun, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Saturday Evening Post.
He is perhaps the best known (and, to some, the most reviled) critic of Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal.”
As “modern” government continues its never sated desire to expand and command at all levels, we commend for your summer reading attention a few classic Garet Garrett quotes:
- “If the great government of the United States were a private corporation, no bank would take its name on a piece of paper because it has cynically repudiated the words engrave upon its bonds.”
- “No government can provide social security. It is not in the nature of government to be able to provide anything. Government itself is not self-supporting. It lives by taxation. Therefore, since it cannot provide for itself but by taking toll of what the people produce, how can it provide social security for the people?”
- “Never was [capitalism] imposed on life as a system or at all. It grew out of life, not all at once but gradually, and is therefore one of the great natural designs. When it was found and identified by such men as Adam Smith, who wrote its bible, and Karl Marx, who wrote its obituary too soon, it was already working.”
- “There is in government a living impulse to extend itself indefinitely; and there is in freedom a necessity to resist that impulse.”
- “We have crossed the boundary that lies between republic and empire. If you ask when, the answer is that you cannot make a single stroke between day and night: the precise moment does not matter. There was no painted sign to say: ‘You are not entering Imperium.’ Yet it was a very old road and the voice of history was saying: ‘Whether you know it or not, the act of crossing may be irreversible.’ And now, not far ahead, is a sign that reads: ‘No U-turns.’”
- “If people cannot limit government they will not long be free.”
- “There is a long history of monetary experience. It tells us that government is at heart a counterfeiter and therefore cannot be trusted to control money, and that is true of both autocratic and popular government.”
- “Formerly government was the responsibility of the people; now people were the responsibility of government.”
- “The New Deal was going to redistribute the national income according to the ideals of social and economic justice.”
That last quotation, from 1944, is frighteningly contemporary, is it not? Everything old – and failed — is “new” again and we continue to fail to heed the lessons of history.
If you’d like to read more of Garet Garrett, we recommend two compendiums edited by Bruce Ramsey – “Insatiable Government” and “Salvos Against the New Deal” (Caxton Press).
Each volume is a quite-accessible read. And each should offer you sufficient intellectual ammunition to fire back when the summer wanes and today’s public policy makers wax poetic anew about the manifest “beneficence” of government.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
