The Worst American President In History

[Myrhaf]

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Since Jimmy Carter said, “I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history,” a remark he has since backed away from (but not retracted), calling it “careless,” there has been some opining among the right that Carter is in fact the worst president in history.

Carter was not the worst president in history, not even close. Being a typical Democrat, he was just incompetent, and mere incompetence cannot get really bad things done. For real, competent evil, one must turn to the Republicans. The worst president in history is Richard Nixon.

I’m not referring to his most famous failure, Watergate, which was just your average political dirty trick blown out of proportion by the left. Watergate is significant only as the high water mark of the liberal media. The media destroyed a Republican president and for the last three decades aging liberal baby boomers have been desperately trying to repeat the great victory of their youth without success. It has not happened again and with the growth of alternative media, it will never happen again.

A comprehensive account of Nixon’s failings would require a book, not a blog post. Here are just a few of his worst moments.

What liberals count as Nixon’s best moment, his going to China, was a terrible sell-out of communism’s victims. Nixon spat on the tens of millions of Mao’s victims by treating Mao as morally worthy of meeting instead of as the monster he was.

At home Nixon imposed wage and price controls, a purely socialistic intervention in the economy that bumbling Jimmy Carter never could have attempted. He created the Environmental Protection Agency and Occupational Health and Safety Administration, two assaults on liberty that to this day create anti-capitalist regulations that violate rights and hamper the economy. He expanded the welfare state, creating Supplemental Security Income and indexing Social Security to inflation. He created the Drug Enforcement Agency, probably the biggest move in America’s idiotic war on drugs.

But none of these evils is Nixon’s worst moment. He is responsible for the single most destructive act in the history of the American presidency, an act that has destroyed more wealth and worsened more lives than anything before or since. In 1971, as Wikipedia puts it, he “eradicated the last remnants of the gold standard.” This created the inflation crises of the 1970’s and affects us with “moderate” inflation to this day. The high interest rates that Republicans blame Carter for are actually the result of Nixon’s policies.

Henry Hazlitt explained inflation thus:

…inflation is nothing but a great swindle…. This swindle erodes the purchasing power of everybody's income and the purchasing power of everybody's savings. It is a concealed tax, and the most vicious of all taxes. It taxes the incomes and savings of the poor by the same percentage as the incomes and savings of the rich. It falls with greatest force precisely on the thrifty, on the aged, on those who cannot protect themselves by speculation or by demanding and getting higher money incomes to compensate for the depreciation of the monetary unit.

Why does this swindle go on? It goes on because governrnents wish to spend, partly for armaments and in most cases preponderantly for subsidies and handouts to various pressure groups, but lack the courage to tax as much as they spend. It goes on, in other words, because governments wish to buy the votes of some of us while concealing from the rest of us that those votes are being bought with our own money. It goes on because politicians (partly through the second- or third-hand influence of the theories of the late Lord Keynes) think that this is the way, and the only way, to maintain "full employment," the present-day fetish of the self-styled progressives. It goes on because the international gold standard has been abandoned, because the world's currencies are essentially paper currencies, adrift without an anchor, blown about by every political wind, and at the mercy of every

bureaucratic caprice. And the very governments that are inflating profess solemnly to be "fighting" inflation. Through cheap-money policies, or the printing press, or both, they increase the supply of money and credit and affect to deplore the inevitable result.

Watergate was a misdemeanor compared to this enormity. By taking the final step of detaching the dollar from gold, Richard Nixon made the great swindle possible. Government spending will continue to grow as long as politicians know they can get away with this hidden tax while at the same time lecturing petroleum companies and other corporations about rising prices -- and then using the high prices that the state caused with inflation to further expand the power of the state! Jimmy Carter is a street corner hoodlum compared to Nixon, the Al Capone of American presidents.

View the full article

[khaight]

In his "First History for Adults" history course, Objectivist history teacher Scott Powell makes an interesting case for Theodore Roosevelt as the worst President in history. He argues that TR is to the American presidency what Kant was to philosophy -- a figure who came onto the scene at a critical moment of confusion over conflicting basic principles, who decisively resolved the conflict in favor of the bad ones. As such, a share of the blame for all the bad consequences that follow from those now-entrenched bad principles redounds to his discredit.

Let's take a specific example.

The abandonment of the gold standard, on this argument, was an inevitable consequence of the existence of the Federal Reserve. The basic principle of government control over the money supply was established; the actual formal rejection of the gold standard flows from the bad principle. And the principle of government control over the money supply was rooted substantially in the desire to break the so-called "Money Trust" of the large banks and financial houses. And who established trust-busting as a major and legitimate function of the federal government? Theodore Roosevelt.

This is kind of a counter-intuitive standard of determining the worst president. After all, most of the really bad stuff didn't happen until after TR left office. But if you believe, as Objectivist historiography argues, that ideas are the fundamental motor of history, then we must look to ideological inflection points as being more fundamental and significant than the existential consequences which eventually flow from them.

[The Wrath]

I disagree strongly with this assessment of Jimmy Carter. His foreign policy wasn't incompetent. He acted on principal...the principal of always avoiding violent confrontation and of appeasing dictators to acheive this end. Cases in point: Iranian hostage crisis, North Korea, Hugo Chavez recall election, Palestinian parliamentary elections.

[Scott_Connery]

I think as bad as Carter was that he doesn't rank among the worst presidents ever. He never met a dictator he didn't like, and ruined the US economy, but I don't think he did much lasting damage.

I think the one that wins the tital is FDR. He transformed a mostly free country into a hard left one, and we are still feeling the damage today.

[kufa]

I think the one that wins the tital is FDR. He transformed a mostly free country into a hard left one, and we are still feeling the damage today.

Agreed. I'm doing a report on how the US is heading towards socialism for my English class. I plan on, as a joke, adding him and a communist flag to Mt. Rushmore and dating it 2100.

[Galileo Blogs]

This is kind of a counter-intuitive standard of determining the worst president. After all, most of the really bad stuff didn't happen until after TR left office. But if you believe, as Objectivist historiography argues, that ideas are the fundamental motor of history, then we must look to ideological inflection points as being more fundamental and significant than the existential consequences which eventually flow from them.

That is compelling. By that standard, one might be able to argue that Ronald Reagan was a very bad President, because he brought the Religious Right into the Republican Party. So, although some relatively good economic things happened in his presidency, such as a cut in income tax rates, and a slowing of the growth of regulation, his enduring legacy was... George Bush. Specifically, Reagan's ultimate legacy was George Bush, the explicitly religious Christian fundamentalist who puts anti-abortionists on the Supreme Court, and who presides over a Republican Party where secular Republicanism has almost been eradicated.

I am playing Devil's Advocate a little bit here, because I have not thought through this issue, and I am not a historian. I also admire many aspects of Reagan's Presidency, including his stance toward the Soviet Union. At the same time, the rise of the Religious Right is so pernicious as to ultimately undercut any economic good that Reagan or "Reagan Republicans" achieved. The nearly complete gutting of the good economic policies of Reagan is represented by George Bush's "Compassionate Conservatism" with its bloated government spending, expansion of welfare programs, and regulatory attacks on business. Reagan's Revolution has morphed into a Christian-Republican morass, due to the empowerment of the Christian Right that began with Reagan.

[Inspector]

Theodore Roosevelt.

That is rather compelling. I recall when studying TR that he was also responsible for entrenching the "principle" of "the will of the people" as a mandate, not to mention the idea of pointless involvement in foreign wars. ("great moral adventure" was not Wilson's original idea, but TR's)

[aequalsa]

I would argue that Wilson was the worst. Federal reserve act, income tax amendment, and antitrust. World War I and its aftermath which created WW II. Those seem to be the four horseman of the socialist apocalypse we are currently experiencing.

[khaight]

I would argue that Wilson was the worst. Federal reserve act, income tax amendment, and antitrust. World War I and its aftermath which created WW II. Those seem to be the four horseman of the socialist apocalypse we are currently experiencing.

Wilson was my choice prior to listening to Powell's argument. I still waver between the two. The question in my mind is to what extent Wilson's bad policies were made both possible and inevitable by the changes that TR's presidency put into place.

Galileo Blog's observation about Reagan is an interesting one, which I may ask Scott about at the next class. Like GB, I have a bit of a soft spot for Reagan, and some good things did come out of his administration, but to the extent that he tied the defense of freedom to a religious foundation he did a very bad thing. We may still be a bit too close to Reagan in time for a comprehensive historical assessment.

[Miles White]

Woodrow Wilson is the worst president EVER!!! It's all his fault for creating the 16 amendment and allowing our government to initiate a progressive income tax were as prior to his rein of terror, our government was only allowed to initiate a flat income tax should they even deecide to initiate a tax at all.

[Robert J. Kolker]

Woodrow Wilson is the worst president EVER!!! It's all his fault for creating the 16 amendment and allowing our government to initiate a progressive income tax were as prior to his rein of terror, our government was only allowed to initiate a flat income tax should they even deecide to initiate a tax at all.

I think Congress and 3/4 of the State legislatures had something to do with the 16-th amendment.

Bob Kolker

[khaight]

I think Congress and 3/4 of the State legislatures had something to do with the 16-th amendment.

Indeed. I tend to blame Wilson more for the complete botch he made of foreign policy, both in getting the United States involved in WWI and in the nature of the "peace" he brokered afterwards. He also loses major points for his truly vile personal racism. (Wilson introduced racial segregation into federal government service for the first time, and was a big fan of the KKK.)

[Robert J. Kolker]

Indeed. I tend to blame Wilson more for the complete botch he made of foreign policy, both in getting the United States involved in WWI and in the nature of the "peace" he brokered afterwards. He also loses major points for his truly vile personal racism. (Wilson introduced racial segregation into federal government service for the first time, and was a big fan of the KKK.)

Woodrow Wilson was also a Statist and very inclined to socialism. During the Wilson Administration the railroads were taken over by the government and not returned to private ownership until 1920. Wilson saw eventual ownership/control of the major industries by government as inevitable.

Bob Kolker

[softwareNerd]

Reviving an old thread instead of starting a new one... ...

FDR definitely has to be up there (down there) among the worst few Presidents.

Presidents ought to be judged within the context of contemporary voter opinion. Presidents exist in a context of U.S. as a Democracy with voter opinion forcing many of their actions, and with Congress and SCOTUS acting as a check on Presidential power. Though voters -- in aggregate -- are ultimately responsible for their government, Presidents can also lead. As leaders, Presidents can do things a little outside the average opinion, and voters will usually go along.

For instance, FDR's context was a time when many intellectuals thought that the U.S. would ultimately lose ground to countries that adopted "planned economies". In addition, the post-1929 bust had caused a tremendous loss of faith in capitalism. Yet, even within this context, FDR led the country the wrong way. If he had got all he wanted, the U.S. would have been a much worse country today. Even with what he got done, he implemented problems that haunt us today.

Further, FDR had a very dictatorial attitude in his reaction to criticism, and his threat to stuff the SCOTUS shows serious disdain for the constitution.

To top it all, he seems to have been naive (or worse) in not heeding Churchill's warnings about the Stalin... thus making him slightly responsible for the extended "Cold War".

Intellectually, the key turning point for the U.S. seems to have been the 1890s, with the progressive movement. So I can understand Scott Powell placing Theodore Roosevelt as the worst. At any rate, FDR is down there with the worst.

Interestingly, FDR is commonly considered one of the best presidents of the U.S. Even many Republicans think so. So, when it comes to undeserved legacy and reputation, I think FDR takes the cake.

Edited April 26, 2013 by softwareNerd