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Archive of posts published in the tag: Teddy Roosevelt

The General Will

Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson turned this upside down, contending that property rights should be determined according its ability to serve the greater good, the general will. This shift of the Progressive Era from the primacy of minority rights to a majoritarian will defines the progressive shift in American politics.  The question is who or what determines the will of the majority. For Wilson it was the president as the sole official elected by all the people.

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Andrew Jackson and the Modern Presidency    

Historians can debate if Jackson moved us further away from the vision of the Constitution and its framers, as so many of his critics contended, or was a step in the evolution or the practical clarification of the vision to address the issues of his day.   There is much less agreement that his term was one of the most pivotal in the direction of our history.

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The Progressive Fallacy and Donald Trump

Andrew Cline at National Review reminds us of one of the side benefits of a Trump presidency – that the left will rediscover the genius of the constitutional  limits on executive power -in The Real Hero of the Trump Resistance? James

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Progressives, Libertarians, and Conservatives

by Henry Oliner The Libertarian believes that fundamentally man is driven by economic self-interest.  Ironically, socialists are driven by the same belief in the fundamental motivation of man. Progressives and Libertarians are driven to quite different responses to this belief.

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Failure to Accept Victory

by Henry Oliner The first Progressive Era from Teddy Roosevelt through Woodrow Wilson established the regulatory and administrative state and changed the nature of our government. It was tainted by an elitist view of race that used the science of

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The Misleading and the Irrelevant

Wise investors learn to ignore the daily fluctuations and the daily stock market news. I am amused at the market reports at the end of the day explaining why the market went up or down.  It would have been much

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The Consequences of Jawboning

Jawboning American industries to comply with political wishes has been with us at least as long as Teddy Roosevelt negotiated an end  to the Pennsylvania coal strikes.  John F Kennedy pressured the steel industry to settle a labor strike. Bailouts

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A Wasteful System

“Nothing could be more repugnant to (Woodrow) Wilson and (Louis) Brandeis than the idea of accepting the great trusts and then using government to regulate them. To the evil of monopoly would be added the evil of big government controlling

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