LIBERTY is one of the premier libertarian publications of the world. Thus, I was intensely interested in the obituaries it would publish on Ronald Reagan’s death.
There is no doubt that Reagan talked the talk but didn’t always walk the walk. So, I expected there to be some mixed remembrances of his presidency and there were. The score was three up and three down. What I didn’t expect was the unvarnished vitriol of two of them.
Murray Rothbard is one the most central figures of twentieth century libertarianism. He derides Reagan with terms like ‘cretin’, ‘blithering idiot’ and ‘demented half-wit’, descriptions which simply do not square with the recollections of all who knew him personally. In fact, Reagan made a career of pundits underestimating him. Many opponents who dismissed him before they knew him privately, later expressed astonishment at the depths of his knowledge. Evidently, the esteemed Rothbard was not one of them.
Jeff Riggenbach had an article entitled, ‘Ronald Reagan, R.I.H. (For Rot in Hell)’. Heavens! This is a magazine of intellectual appeal. Was Reagan a latter day Hitler or Stalin or even Pinochet?
Dale Gieringer did one entitled, ‘”Just Saying No” to Freedom’. Gieringer (is it he or she?) does give credit to Reagan for winning the Cold War but emphasizes the misplaced Reagan Administration emphasis on the war on drugs. Gieringer also bemoans the pressure that came from Nancy Reagan to raise the drinking age, nationally, to 21. Every state has now caved in which I, too, don’t like. I was raised in New York State when the drinking age was eighteen. I knew a lot of guys who when they turned eighteen, they stopped drinking. All libertarians should rue the unconstitutional infringement on states’ rights that the alcohol and drug initiatives violate.
Gieringer calls him a ‘B’ actor but not in a particularly disparaging manner, more as description. Reagan was a ‘B’ actor but not in today’s sense nor what Gieringer probably thinks. ‘B’ actors made careers in ‘B’ movies, the second film for a double feature, like the B side of the old 45s. They don’t make movies for double features anymore.
Few actors made the transition from ‘B’ to ‘A’, John Wayne an exception. Reagan was a second tier ‘A’ actor who never made it to the top but was on the verge doing so. He was regarded as on a par with Errol Flynn, a top star in waiting.
Riggenbach blasts Reagan’s movie career, dismissing most of his work as mediocre. Riggenbach’s and my idea of good acting must differ greatly. I found the scene from ‘King’s Row’, with the famous line, ‘Where’s the rest of me?’, riveting. As George Gipp, he was effective with his other most famous line, ‘Win one for the Gipper’. He played that opposite Pat O’Brien, no Hollywood lightweight. And mediocre films have been the bane of every film star since the industry’s inception. Has Riggenbach never sat through some of the clunkers that Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Cary Grant, Marlon Brando, Richard Burton and Paul Newman made?
Riggenbach pillories Reagan for the legacy that ‘deficits don’t matter’, as expressed by Vice-President Richard Cheney. But it was a Democratic House that approved all of Reagan’s budgets. What neither Rothbard nor Riggenbach, nor any of Reagan’s critics, for that matter, addressed is how much worse the deficits would have been if the Democrats’ domestic spending had been allowed to go on. Remember, the Reagan ‘spending cuts’ were not spending cuts at all, but rather decrease in the projected increases. And as Milton Friedman has shown, deficits truly don’t matter when it comes to government. Libertarians must answer which they would rather have. A government budget of a trillion dollars with a $500 billion deficit or a $3 trillion budget with $200 billion deficit?
Let’s all accept that Ronald Reagan caved into the forces of Big Government far too more frequently than he should have. But everyone has to acknowledge, that he made public discussion of the necessity of government functions acceptable.
What Reagan’s detractors don’t explain, as Bill Clinton’s detractors don’t either, is how, if he was such a disaster, did we have the longest, till then, peacetime expansion of the economy? He must have done something right. The same with Clinton. Instead of kicking around their corpses, libertarians, especially libertarian economists, would do well to explore their records and find out what that right thing was.
In Reagan’s case, I think it was his reduction of the number of government regulations. I understand that he reduced them by over 50%. With Clinton, I think it was that he stood on the side of free trade when it came to new proposals. Not all of the Clinton boom was due to the dot-com latter day tulip bulb mania and, in spite of Reagan’s cave-ins to the forces of centralization, his years in office were very terrific for the economy.
Come on guys. He had to have done something right!
“Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact.”