The Best and Worst of the Presidency

[Augustine2004]

Curtmudgeon!? Wherefore art thou?

Anyway, Thomas DiLorenzo said that by the time Lincoln made his first inaugural address he had no objection to making slavery’s constitutionality permanent: "no objection to making it express and irrevocable."

[Augustine2004]

Joe Sobran makes clear what Lincoln had accomplished:

What if the Federal Government grossly violated the Constitution? Could states withdraw from the Union? Lincoln said no. The Union was “indissoluble” unless all the states agreed to dissolve it. As a practical matter, the Civil War settled that. The United States, plural, were really a single enormous state, as witness the new habit of speaking of “it” rather than “them.”

So the people are bound to obey the government even when the rulers betray their oath to uphold the Constitution. The door to escape is barred. Lincoln in effect claimed that it is not our rights but the state that is “unalienable.” And he made it stick by force of arms. No transgression of the Constitution can impair the Union’s inherited legitimacy. Once established on specific and limited terms, the U.S. Government is forever, even if it refuses to abide by those terms.

http://www.sobran.com/reluctant.shtml

[Firelung]

I've seen a lot of people saying Jefferson was the best
ex:

Best, I'll go with Jefferson for the obvious reasons. His respect for liberty was not been matched. He believed in non-interventionist foreign policy, free markets, and weak government. He is the example of what our nation was supposed to be.

and this is baffling to me. What Jefferson believed and what he did were two very different things. When he was elected, he considered it a huge win for the anti-federalists; in fact, he called it a 2nd revolution. However, upon entering office, he allowed the federalist policies sported by Alexander Hamilton to continue. He allowed the navy to grow weak, spending a lot of money on smaller boats which did little good in warfare, and embarassingly had to pay $60,000 to Tripoli for the release of American hostages after 4 years of fighting. Worst of all was Jefferson's embargo act, banning exportation of goods to any country. This was absolutely devastating to the US economy and failed to accomplish its original goal of causing Britain and France to respect the rights of US citizens. The best thing he did was clearly the Louisiana Purchase, and comically, he believed it to be Unconstitutional, as it was a great display of the power of the Federal Gov (something he was personally against).

I agree with Jefferson philosophically on a lot of issues and think he was a brilliant man, but I'd hardly consider his presidency to be good, let alone the best...

My best:
Washington, Lincoln, TR

My Worst (no particular order):
Dubya, Carter, Jackson, Johnson, Harding.

[Augustine2004]

Welcome to TWeb, Firelung!

Sorry, but no real libertarian would rank Washington, Lincoln, and TR as the best; and Harding as among the worst.

[Firelung]

You're right, I'm not really a libertarian anymore. And thanks for the welcome.

[Augustine2004]

One of the reasons why libertarians do not deify Lincoln:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewr...es/027607.html

[Zero Tolerance]

One of the reasons why libertarians do not deify Lincoln:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewr...es/027607.html

Yeah, Lincoln is the most widely written-about president to date, particularly because of what appears on the surface to be an abolitionist attitude. That could not be further from the truth, and after reading three or four books on the guy, I feel that his decisions were practically the result of a coin flip.

It is quite profound considering what happens in the fallout, such as "The Party of Lincoln," where blacks (who could vote) would vote almost exclusively for that party (and would so for decades), back when republicanism was synonymous with liberalism.

Obviously, times have changed, with perhaps the exception of the tendency for the black demographic to vote overwhelmingly for one party.