Quote of the Day: War Equals Presidential Greatness

Our data analysis suggests that wars in which a large percentage of the U.S. population is killed will, all other things equal, cause historians to judge as great a president on whose watch those wars occurred. Certainly, this was the perception of presidents Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. It was probably also the perception of other presidents.

This conclusion is troubling. Most presidents, after all, probably want to be thought of as great. When they spend resources on war, they are spending almost entirely other peoples money and lives. They get little credit for avoiding war. Martin Van Buren, for example, effectively avoided a war on the northern border of the United States. How many people know that today?
Indeed, how many people have even heard of Martin Van Buren?

Woodrow Wilson, by contrast, inserted the United States into World War I. That was a war that the United States could easily have avoided. Moreover, had the U.S. government avoided World War I, the treaty that ended the war would not likely have been so lopsided. The Versailles Treaty`s punitive terms on Germany, as Keynes predicted in 1919, helped set the stage for WorldWar II.

So it is reasonable to think that had the United States not entered World War I, there might not have been a World War II. Yet, despite his major blunder and more likely, because of his major blunder, which caused over 100,000 Americans to die in World War I, Wilson is often thought of as a great president.

The danger is that modern presidents understand these incentives. Those who want peace should take historians` ratings of presidents seriously. Beyond that, we should stop celebrating, and try to persuade historians to stop celebrating, presidents who made unnecessary wars. One way to do so is to remember the unseen: the war that didn`t happen, the war that was avoided, and the peace and prosperity that resulted. If we applied this standard, then presidents Martin van Buren, John Tyler, Warren G. Harding, and Calvin Coolidge, to name four, would get a substantially higher rating than they are usually given.

That’s from a paper by Professors David Henderson and Zachary Gochenour.

Seeing greatness in war or destruction is an example of the public’s misconceived glorification of the state, which has mostly been a product of indoctrination and political propaganda.

War, according to writer Randolph Bourne, is the health of the state.

Wars are the ramifications of societies that worship the state, where the gullible public are misled to exalt the illusions of the supposed virtues of nationalism by ignoring the destructive real effects of such political actions.

Wars will always be a recourse or an option of any society that depends on political redistribution of resources.