Coolidge and Materialism

The Acton Institute has a nice post on Calvin Coolidge and materialism. Coolidge was one of the few presidents to actually reduce the size and scope of government.

Coolidge was lambasted by political opponents and the intellectual class as a “tool of big business,” but he was deeply critical of materialism and profit for merely profit’s sake. While he is famously quoted as saying, “The chief business of the American people is business,” he is not as well known for another line in that same address where he said, “Of course the accumulation of wealth cannot be justified as the chief end of existence.” He warned Americans against sinking into “pagan materialism.” Over his entire career, he argued that economic policies and taxation were indeed moral matters.

Support for free economics should be situated in a larger account of the whole of existence, which includes the moral matters of which Coolidge was distinctly cognizant. I wonder if we are presently capable of producing a politician with such an awareness.