President Calvin Coolidge gets a bad rap, says author Amity Shlaes, who notes that under his leadership the economy grew at a rate of four percent annually, taxation was low, and the budget was balanced.

Today few of us know much about this president of the 1920s. But without the corruption of the earlier Harding administration or the big spending of subsequent presidents, Coolidge left office with a smaller federal budget than when he came in. Could there be a lesson there?