The pseudo-demigod that is Ronald Reagan

In his latest column, Paul Craig Roberts defends (sort of) the deficit spending of the Reagan administration in which he served for a time as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. He does so to contrast the crazy deficit spending (a.k.a. "stimulus") of Mr. Obama (and by implication of Mr. Bush). I frankly don't buy the argument. Ronald Reagan's reckless disregard for sound government financing is the root of our troubles. The twelves years of Reagan-Bush (daddy, not junior) added $3 trillion to the public debt and set the stage for the limitless borrow-and-spend financing that has reduced federal, state, county, and city governments to penury.

Reagan cared not a fig for balanced budgets (he never tried to balance any of the eight federal budgets he submitted) or sound money or prudence or the long-term. For all his government-is-the-problem blather, he vastly expanded the government (particularly the military-industrial complex) and left it more powerful, more intrusive, more arrogant, and more irresponsible than he found it in January 1981. It is he who principally established the prison-industrial complex that now incarcerates more people in both absolute and per capita terms than any government on earth. His loony pseudo-free market rhetoric disguised a politically-oriented manipulation of the private economy favorable to vast private wealth and consolidated corporatism (provided they kept the Republican party awash with campaign donations any truthful person would have to describe as pure bribes). A new book, "The Man Who Sold the World" by William Kleinknecht, is an important contribution in clearing minds of the glittering fantasy that is the common image of Ronald Reagan and an honest look at the man's bleak record and its malignant consequences from which we now suffer. "Morning in America" turned out to be the twilight of America; now it's nightfall; soon it will be midnight in America. Thanks in considerable measure to the vapid Ronald Reagan.

Read Paul Craig Roberts here

Read about Reagan here