Happy 100th President Reagan!

Ronald Reagan:  A Defense and a Criticism

Ronald Reagan was the greatest president of the 20th Century.  He recaptured America's glory and global respect after the ham-handed buffoonery of the Carter years.  Yeah, FDR must be considered great for his fireside chats and WW II leadership, but his statist economic policies increased the country's misery.  Reagan, on the other hand, knew how to jump start an economy left for dead by liberal experimentation.

Nonetheless, liberal gargoyles like Paul Krugman love to blame all our ills on Reagan, the man responsible for the longest economic boom in our nation's history.  He was not perfect, but on balance, Reagan was a great president, but more importantly, he was a great man of rock-solid values who knew why he believed what he believed.  Here I offer a summary of Reagan criticism (some legitimate), and some links that defend his policies.


Paul Krugman is a dishonest, diabolical troll
Instead of using his education to enlighten Americans about the difficult and dismal science of economics, he chops up facts like firewood and serves up selectively sliced statistics in order to score cheap political points in an attempt to smear this great president.  Ignorant liberals lap it all up and regurgitate it on the rest of us, forcing us to do the homework lazy liberals just won't do.

Practitioners like Krugman use little funhouse mirror tricks to stretch and distort our view.  Yes, some conservatives do it too, but I don't listen to them or repeat their BS.

Most liberal writing on our economic mess is a hopeless tangle.  A typical writer will take crony capitalism, spending, deregulation, bubbles, and poverty, wad it all in a big ball and throw it in Ronald Reagan's face.  The logic is terrible and typically lacks cause and effect. 

Tis true, Reagan didn't shrink the government and he grew the national debt
In return, we collapsed the Soviet Union, freeing tens of millions of Eastern Europeans and got a well-respected kick-ass military to boot.

Add to that the regulatory reform that allowed millions of Americans to start their own businesses and brought structural unemployment to below 5%.  The result was the longest economic expansion in American history, thanks to President Clinton continuing Reagan's policies. What have we gotten for the trillions Obama has spent?  At least Reagan's spending produced results.

For a serious libertarian criticism of Reagan, see free-marketer Sheldon L. Richmon's article, or Murray Rothbard's excellent critique, The Myths of Reaganomics. Their main criticism is he did not roll back government and he spend too much.  These are not liberal screeds, but rather cold-eyed analyses of the facts devoid of any personal criticism of the man.

Reagan was a great man and a great president.  If you want to defend him, you must consider his record, warts and all (no one in the public arena is wart-free).  He did the best he could in an America remade by progressives.  FDR build a clanking, soul-destroying bureaucratic machine, and even the great Ronald Reagan couldn't dismantle it. 

The only way progressives can defend Obamanomics is to turn it all upside down, and that involves taking the success that is Reaganomics and convincing enough soft-headed people that the longest economic expansion in our history was really a failure.

For a serious defense of Reaganism, see the following articles.  There's a lot of liberal BS out there, you'll need to refer to them often:

Reaganomics - William N. Niskanen
Thomas Firey - There Krugman Goes Again
Max Barron - Chief Lib Propagandist Krugman
Reagan Did What? Fantasies of Paul Krugman
Donald Luskin - That Old Hack Magic
Robert Scheer - Krugman Ignores the Real Culprits
Stefan Karlsson
Nick Gillespie - Blame Reagan!
Krugman - Enron's Nobel Advisor