Politics & Power Quote by Martin Van Buren

Spoken like a man trying to keep the republic solvent while pretending the market is a force of nature. Van Buren’s line is a compact defense of laissez-faire dressed up as common sense: if government simply backs off, “general prosperity” will supposedly rise on its own, as if wealth were a tide rather than a contest.

The intent is political triage. Van Buren inherited a country in convulsions, with party warfare, expanding suffrage for white men, and a rapidly commercializing economy that could boom and crash with alarming speed. His presidency was defined by the Panic of 1837, and this sentence reads like a preemptive alibi for restraint: don’t blame Washington for not fixing what it shouldn’t touch. It’s also a continuation of Jacksonian suspicion of concentrated power, especially financial power that looked “public” when it demanded favors and “private” when it demanded freedom.

The subtext is that “private pursuits” deserve a protected zone - and that the people doing the pursuing are the rightful engines of the nation. That framing quietly sidelines those excluded from prosperity by design: enslaved people, dispossessed Native nations, women barred from most formal economic agency, and workers facing volatile wages. “General” is doing rhetorical work here, universalizing benefits that were unevenly distributed.

Why it works is its moral economy: interference equals distortion, liberty equals growth. It’s a tidy equation that flatters both entrepreneurs and voters who want someone to blame when markets misbehave, while keeping government’s hands clean when its “non-interference” is itself a choice with winners.