Ronald Reagan

Perhaps the most harmful example of the anti-alcohol bias in recent legislation occurred in 1984, when Congress and President Reagan jammed a new minimum drinking age of 21 down the throats of 26 states ... Upon signing the bill, Reagan declared, "We know that drinking, plus driving, spell death and disaster. We know that people in the 18 to 20 age group are more likely to be in alcohol-related accidents than those in any other age group." ... [He] concluded, "With the problem so clear-cut and the proven solution at hand, we have no misgiving about this judicious use of federal power."

[W]e constantly confronted the need to distinguish Ed Clark from the other serious candidates in terms of issues, while not omitting or downplaying any salient issue. This became a particular problem vis-a-vis Reagan, who was regularly portrayed in the news media as a hard-core advocate of the pure free market. There were two ways to counter this: by talking about Reagan's real economic record, and by emphasizing Libert-arian differences with him on civil liberties and foreign policy.

In his 1989 farewell address, Ronald Reagan asserted, "'We the People' tell the government what to do, it doesn't tell us. 'We the people' are the driver—the government is the car. And we decide where it should go, and by what route, and how fast." But the American people did not choose to drive into Beirut and get hundreds of Marines blown up, or choose to run up the largest budget deficits in American history, or provide thousands of antitank weapons to Ayatollah Khomeini, or have a slew of top political appointees either lie or get caught in conflicts of interest or other abuses of power or ethical quandaries between 1981 and 1988.

In his 1989 farewell address, President Ronald Reagan asserted,

"We the People" tell the government what to do, it doesn't tell us. "We the people" are the driver—the government is the car ...

But the American people did not choose to "drive" into Beirut and get hundreds of Marines blown up, choose to run up the largest budget deficits in American history, provide thousands of anti-tank weapons to Ayatollah Khomeini, or have a slew of top political appointees either lie or get caught in conflicts of interest or other abuses of power or ethical quandaries between 1981 and 1988.

[Arnold S.] Trebach: I believe you were a supporter of Ronald Reagan.
Friedman: I still am, but not of everything that he did ... There are two areas in which I think the Reagan administration performed very badly. One was the drug war and the other was foreign trade ... Reagan was a man of principle. He is the first president in my life who was elected because the people had come around to agreeing with him, rather than because he was looking at polls and saying what the people wanted to hear. He was saying exactly the same thing in 1980 ... as he was in 1964 when he supported Mr. Goldwater.

Mr. Reagan wants to be known as a free-trader ... On taking office, the President installed officials who pay lip service to free trade ... [In the Japanese auto case] he exhibited a remarkable penchant for Orwellian newspeak. Throughout the debate [he] professed allegiance to free trade. Yet the Japanese officials finally agreed to "voluntary" quotas when Mr. Reagan threatened to sign a Senate bill to impose harsher restrictions ... He [also] seeks extraordinary powers to seize ships in international waters, close ports and other entrances and fine employers for hiring illegal aliens.

Forbes is a typical Republican. Reagan is praised as a great tax cutter, but no mention is made of the Social Security tax rate increasing from 10.16 percent when he took office to 12.12 percent when he left, or the Medicare tax rate increasing from 2.1 percent when he took office to 2.9 percent when he left. And what about Reagan's record spending and deficits? Forbes also praises Reagan for "a massive military buildup" while he criticizes Carter for "gutting the military."

Ronald Reagan's tax planning is just one simple example of how the rich can easily avoid the upper tax brackets. Someone noticed what a fine golf swing Reagan had, and the answer was that when he reached the top tax bracket, he stopped working and played golf for the rest of the year. Many wealthy doctors (and others) do the same thing, closing down their medical practice around August and then taking a vacation from earning money for the rest of the year ... However, the Rabbi Trust and Reagan's golf habits are ... just two of many routine ways to avoid Kerry's soak the rich tax strategy.

Continuing the U.S. hostility toward the Islamic Republic begun by the Carter administration, and siding with Iraq when Saddam Hussein's military attacked Iran, the Reagan administration imposed "a series of interventions ... to prevent international assistance of any kind to the Iranian nuclear program." Not only did President Reagan block American firms from helping the Iranians; he also pressured American allies to participate in the embargo. This was in clear violation of the NPT, which recognizes the "right" of participating states to acquire nuclear technology for civilian purposes.

When President Reagan nominated me as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy, he told me that we had to restore the US economy, to rescue it from stagflation, in order to bring the full weight of a powerful economy to bear on the Soviet leadership in order to convince them to negotiate the end of the cold war. Reagan said that there was no reason to live any longer under the threat of nuclear war. The Reagan administration achieved both goals, only to see these accomplishments discarded by successor administrations.

Reagan repeatedly called for Israeli withdrawal from Beirut and declared, "Israel must have learned that there is no way it can impose its own solutions on hatreds as deep and bitter as those that produced this tragedy." ... On September 13, 1983, Reagan authorized Marine commanders in Lebanon to call in air strikes and other attacks against the Muslims to help the Christian Lebanese army ... Shortly afterwards, Reagan withdrew most of the U.S. troops from Lebanon. His actions enraged neoconservatives who seemed to believe that America was obliged to pay any price to ensure the success of Operation Peace for Galilee.

Didn't President Reagan tell his supporters that overgrown government was itself the problem, not the solution? Didn't he vow to eliminate draft registration, the Department of Education, and the Department of Energy? ... Reagan is remembered for opening the curtains on 'morning in America' despite saddling taxpayers with massive debt and profligate spending, ... expanding bureaucracies, and an extension of criminal law that has stuffed our prisons with nonviolent offenders. Even his tiny cut in marginal tax rates in 1981 was offset by tax hikes later that year — not to mention bracket creep from inflation.

Witnessing the state funeral and worshipful wall-to-wall cable-television coverage, [a] Martian [visiting the United States last week] would have sworn that Ronald Reagan had been the king of America ... The Washington Post called it "a funeral fit for a king" ... [A]ll culminated in Reagan's lying in state under the Capitol dome ... For several days Ronald Reagan was the State. (Selective memory helps, for example, the "memory" that Reagan was an unreconstructed cold warrior. You'd never know from the past week that he retracted the "evil empire" charge when he warmed up to Gorbachev.)

Each person leaves a legacy. Its visibility is usually narrowly confined, but it is there ... Poirot's legacy is a generation of people who learned the basics of free market economics from The Freeman ... There is a photo hanging in FEE's headquarters. Ronald Reagan is reading a copy of The Freeman, with Mrs. Reagan's head on his shoulder. She is asleep. The photo ran first in a New York City newspaper (not the Times). That photo recorded for posterity a representative sample of Poirot's legacy.

Ronald Reagan, the consummate conservative politician, would exemplify this problem more than a decade later ... [In 1980], as the Republican nominee for the presidency, he promised voters to end compulsory draft registration, which had been resurrected by the incumbent president, Jimmy Carter. But in 1982, Reagan reneged on this promise, explaining that ... it could hardly be denied that "we live in a dangerous world," and "in the event of a future threat to national safety, registration could save the United States as much as six weeks in mobilizing emergency manpower."

After more than seven years in office, Ronald Reagan is still widely regarded as a devoted free trader ... A recent example of Reagan's free-trade rhetoric came ... [when] he said the American trade deficit was a sign of strength ... Unfortunately, a look at the record leads to the question: With free traders like this, who needs protectionists? ... Many people would be surprised to learn that under Ronald Reagan the American economy is more closed than it was before he came to Washington ... Reagan says that one of his heroes is Frederic Bastiat. Reagan ought to reread Bastiat ...

[On] April 23, 1983, Reagan announced to the press: "The tragic and brutal attack on our embassy in Beirut has shocked us all and filled us with grief ..." ... On September 13, Reagan authorized Marine commanders in Lebanon to call in air strikes and other attacks against the Muslims to help the Christian Lebanese army. ... After the "arms for hostages" deal became public ... Reagan's credibility was devastated. Reagan went into such a tailspin after the crisis broke that his new chief of staff ... briefly examined invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to remove Reagan from office because of medical unfitness.

The election of Reagan to the presidency, the gaining of a Republican majority in the Senate, and the increase of conservatives in the House, have been interpreted as a major change in the thrust of government. Also, Reagan has been most vigorous in promoting his economic program during the first six months or so in his term of office. There has been considerable talk of economic freedom, of freeing enterprise, of removing government controls, and the like. But the justifications of these, so far as I am aware, have been made almost solely in utilitarian and pragmatic terms.

1980: October Surprise
... Barbara Honegger, activist in the Reagan 1980 campaign, and ... Carter national security aide Gary Sick ... claim in outline that in 1980 William Casey, long-time U.S. super-spy but at that point without the least portfolio, led a secret Reagan campaign delegation to Europe to strike a secret deal ... In the alleged deal, Iran agreed not to release the hostages until the U.S. presidential race was over, thus denying President Carter the political benefit of getting the hostages back. Reagan agreed that, if elected, he would help Iran acquire certain weapons.

American history is strewn with politicians who used foreign adventures to bolster their domestic political standing. But the idea of an October Surprise' in particular is of recent vintage. It began with the charge by the political Left, backed by no shortage of evidence, that in 1980, the Reagan campaign arranged for Iran to hold the American hostages until after the election and release them at Reagan's inauguration. Conservatives at the time dismissed such charges as the ravings of former Stalinists trying to discredit the savior of the free world.

Ronald Reagan stood out as a rare leader who could express moral appeals for liberty ... [He] knew how to deal with class warfare, too: "Since when do we in America believe that our society is made up of two diametrically opposed classes—one rich, one poor—both in a permanent state of conflict and neither able to get ahead except at the expense of the other? Since when do we in America accept this alien, discredited theory of social and class warfare? Since when do we in America endorse the politics of envy?" ... [H]e had been speaking ... and debating for some three decades before [1980] ...

While the constellation of strong leaders in Britain, the United States, and the Vatican (Thatcher, Reagan, and John Paul II) helped the process of communist disintegration immensely, those very same leaders rightfully and repeatedly credited the defiant spirit of the Poles. "The people of Poland," declared Reagan, "are giving us an imperishable example of courage and devotion to the values of freedom in the face of relentless opposition ... The torch of liberty is hot. It warms those who hold it high. It burns those who try to extinguish it."

The Reagan Administration (1981-1989) reversed long-standing Keynesian trends by pursuing a supply-side economic program of tax and non-defense budget cuts. The program built on the thought that high tax rates and government regulation discourage private investment in areas that fuel economic expansion, and that more capital in the hands of private investors will benefit the rest of the population ... Economic expansion remained relatively modest although the rate of inflation fell below 4 percent during President Reagan's tenure.

Reagan paved the way for subsequent presidents in immersing anti-terrorist policy in swamps of falsehoods. In October 1983 ..., a Muslim suicide bomber devastated a U.S. Marine barracks ... Reagan portrayed [it] as unstoppable, falsely claiming that the truck "crashed through a series of barriers, including a chain-link fence and barbed-wire entanglements. The guards opened fire, but it was too late." In reality, [they] did not fire because they were prohibited from having loaded weapons—one of many pathetic failures of defense that the Reagan administration sought to sweep under the carpet.

Accepting the nomination at the 1980 Republican convention, [Reagan] said of the American people: "They are concerned, yes; they're not frightened. They are disturbed, but not dismayed. They are the kind of men and women Tom Paine had in mind when he wrote, during the darkest days of the American Revolution, 'We have it in our power to begin the world over again.'" Kaye is aghast: How did [he] manage to use Paine to "bolster conservatism ..."? "Arguably," Kaye writes, referring to Reagan's days as president of [the] Screen Actors Guild, "only a onetime man of the left could have done so ..."

Milton Friedman: ... I expected so much out of the Reagan administration and was disappointed. I'm a great admirer of Ronald Reagan himself, and I suspect he would have gotten much more done if it hadn't been for the Cold War and the problem of Nicaragua and El Salvador. But nonetheless, there's no doubt that while he talked about cutting down the size of government, he did not succeed. He did slow it down—you've got to give him credit for some achievements. But not the massive reduction that he hoped for and planned for. That makes me hesitant now.

HESS: ... The Reagan administration is increasing the debt and the national expenditure, not decreasing them, but they're doing it in a popular way ... You see, perfectly reasonable people who can tell you that you can never solve domestic problems by throwing money at them, like Reagan, are eager to tell you that you can solve international problems by throwing money at them ... Reagan is a perfectly decent middle-class American who believes the rhetoric. The rhetoric isn't bad—I like the rhetoric, too. But I don't think he studies the legislation very hard.