Martin Van Buren by Ted Widmer

• "When he was elected in 1836, Van Buren became the first chief executive from New York, and the first ethnic president," being a native Dutch-speaker - 6
• "One of his most courageous decisions was his refusal to join the stampede for admitting Texas, with all of its slave territory, into the union. It cost him the presidency and he knew it, but he stuck to his guns." - 12
• "Between 1837 and 1841, Americans encountered three important reality checks that suddenly made the future less appetizing. The Panic of 1837 taught that capitalism was fallible. The Log Cabin campaign of 1840, with it false promises and hard cider entreaties, taught that democracy was fallible. And rising rage over slavery taught that the Union itself was fallible." - 16
• "At twenty-nine, he was the second youngest [state] senator ever elected in New York. From then until the end of his presidency, he would serve almost continuously in government service." - 37
• "From the moment he started his career, he was he friend of the small farmer. As Franklin Roosevelt would do a century later, he tried to ease the credit burden on rural producers who were cash poor. In particular, he lashed out at the common practice of imprisonment for debt, which in his opinion was the same thing as a jail sentence 'for the misfortune of being poor, of being unable to satisfy the all-digesting stomach of some ravenous creditor.'" - 42
• "Back in 1813, in his first year as a state senator, Van Buren helped to found a newspaper, the Albany Argus" - 47
• 1821: "Van Buren ran for the U.S. Senate and won a difficult victory." - 49
• "Van Buren had laid the foundation for what would become Jacksonian Democracy in only a few short years. With his ideas about party discipline, communications, and enlarged suffrage, he had shown other like-minded individuals how to take democracy beyond the periwigs of the eighteenth century." - 51
• "Far beyond anything that had existed before, Van Buren envisioned a national structure, tethered together by speedy communications and tight message control" - 56
• "Those who have wrought great changes in the world never succeeded by gaining over chiefs; but always by exciting the multitude. The first is the resource of intrigue and produces only secondary results, the second is the resort of genius and transforms the universe." - Van Buren, 72
• "The Democratic Party, still in its infancy, was a stool with three legs. There were Westerners that Jackson had brought in, Southerners under the sway of Calhoun, and Old School Jeffersonians around Van Buren" - 75
• As Jackson's Secretary of State, "this flattering smooth-talker was good at diplomacy, and before long he had resolved two major problems favorably, winning reciprocal trade benefits from the United Kingdom in the West Indies and securing a large payment of 25 million francs from France for indemnities dating back to Napoleon." - 80
• August 16, 1831: "Van Buren sailed for England [as the newly appointed, and soon rejected by the Senate, minister]...happy to enjoy 'the quietude of a midsummer Ocean' after twenty years of unceasing political infighting." - 83
• "Van Buren's idea of a two-party system received support from an unlikely source -- a new party that sprang into existence for the express purpose of defeating Jackson and Van Buren. The Whigs, as they were ultimately known (for opposing Jackson as the revolutionary Whigs had opposed George III), were an unlikely batch of Northern quasi-Federalists and Southern states' rightists, allied more through alienation than shared principles." - 87
• "At the age of fifty-three, Martin Van Buren was in the ascendant. He was the youngest president elected to date." - 90
• "He aimed for stability, keeping many of Jackson's appointees and leaning South with new choices. Balance always." - 93
• March 17, 1837: New York merchant Philip "Hone wrote, 'The great crisis is near at hand, if it has not already arrived.' Over the next month, prices rose and financial houses fell like stacks of cards." - 96
• "Van Buren inherited a superheated economy that was completely unregulated in some ways and draconically controlled in others [cf. Specie Circular]" - 101
• "he called for Congress to meet in September to take special measures to alleviate the crisis. It was the first special session ever called that did not address a military crisis." - 102
• "Van Buren issued an executive order demanding that the slaves [from the Amistad] be taken to a naval vessel, to hasten their return to their Spanish owners" - 121
• March 31, 1840: "Van Buren issued an executive order creating a ten-hour day for federal workers, a dramatic step forward when many employees worked from sunrise to sunset." - 131
• "In the spring of 1839, the phrase 'OK' began to circulate in Boston as shorthand for 'oll korrect,' a slangy way of saying 'all right.' Early in 1840, Van Buren's supporters began to use the trendy expression to identify their candidate, whom they labored to present as 'Old Kinderhook,' perhaps in imitation of Jackson's Old Hickory." - 140
• "The Free Soil campaign was America's first great third party effort." - 155
• "He lingered into the [Civil] war's second year, and then expired at 2 a.m. on July 24, 1862, a day and a half after Lincoln read the first draft of his Emancipation Proclamation to a startled cabinet." - 164

The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek

• "Whatever merits this book possesses consist not in the reiteration of this thesis but in the patient and detailed examination of the reasons why economic planning will produce such unlooked-for results and of the process by which they come about." - 43-4, 1956 Forward
• "The essence of the liberal position, however, is the denial of all privilege, if privilege is understood in its proper and original meaning of the state granting and protecting rights to some which are not available on equal terms to others." - 46, 1956 Forward
• "Few are ready to recognize that the rise of fascism and naziism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies." - 59
• "'Freedom' and 'liberty' are now words so worn with use and abuse that one must hesitate to employ them to express the ideals for which they stood....'Tolerance' is, perhaps, the only word which still preserves the full meaning of the principle" - 68
• "Probably nothing has done so much harm to the liberal cause as the wooden insistence of some liberals on certain rough rules of the thumb, above all the principle of laissez faire." - 71
• "We have in effect undertaken to dispense with the forces which produced unforeseen results and to replace the impersonal and anonymous mechanism of the market by collection and 'conscious' direction of all social forces to deliberately chosen goals." - 73
• "Nobody saw more clearly than Tocqueville that democracy as an essentially individualist institution stood in an irreconcilable conflict with socialism: 'Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom,' he said in 1848, "socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.'" - 77
• "socialism means the abolition of private enterprise, of private ownership of the means of production, and the creation of a system of 'planned economy' in which the entrepreneur working for profit is replaced by a central planning body." - 83
• "The liberal argument is in favor of making the best possible use of the forces of competition as a means of coordinating human efforts, not an argument for leaving things just as they are." - 85
• "What in effect unites the socialists of the Left and the Right is this common hostility to competition and their common desire to replace it by a directed economy." - 88-9
• "planning and competition can be combined only by planning for competition but not by planning against competition." - 90
• "To direct all our activities according to a single plan presupposes that every one of our needs is given its rank in an order of values which much be complete enough to make it possible to decide among all the different courses which the planner has to choose. It presupposes, in short, the existence of a complete ethical code in which all the different human values are allotted their due place." - 101
• "The point which is so important is the basic fact that it is impossible for any man to survey more than a limited field, to be aware of the urgency of more than a limited number of needs. Whether his interests center round his own physical needs, or whether he takes a warm interest in the welfare of every human being he knows, the ends about which he can be concerned will always be only an infinitesimal fraction of the needs of all men. This is the fundamental fact on which the whole philosophy of individualism is based." - 102
• "Even if...a democracy should succeed in planning every sector of economic activity, it would still have to face the problem of integrating those separate plans into a unitary whole. Many separate plans do not make a planned whole -- in fact, as the planners ought to be the first to admit, they may be worse than no plan." - 107
• "It is the price of democracy that the possibilities of conscious control are restricted to the fields where true agreement exists and that in some fields things must be left to chance." - 109
• "It may well be true that our generation talks and thinks too much of democracy and too little of the values which it serves....Democracy is essentially a means, a utilitarian device for safeguarding internal peace and individual freedom. As such it is by no means infallible or certain." - 110
• "It cannot be denied that the Rule of Law produces economic inequality -- all that can be claimed for it is that this inequality is not designed to affect particular people in a particular way." - 117
• "Central planning means that the economic problem is to be solved by the community instead of the individual; but this involves that it must also be the community, or rather its representatives, who must decide the relative importance of the different needs." - 127
• "in competition chance and good luck are often as important as skill and foresight in determining the fate of different people." - 134
• "all government affects the relative position of different people and that there is under any system scarcely an aspect of our lives which may not be affected by government action is certainly true." - 139
• "there can be no doubt that some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work, can be assured to everybody." - 148
• "It seems to be almost the law of human nature that it is easier for people to agree on a negative program -- on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off -- than on any positive task. The contrast between the 'we' and the 'they,' the common fight against those outside the group, seems to be an essential ingredient in any creed which will solidly knit together a group for common action." - 161