Re: The old days - Aboard the Apollo - 1973
Ronald Reagan violated every value that I hold dear--and that was just his acting career!
I kid the neo-cons.
My take on Reagan is that he had an intutive sense of what was in the hearts and values of most Americans. I would say he shared these values.
And he had a great, real, profound sense of humor. Not a cheap-shot show-business sense of humor, but one that could express deep issues in a parable sort of way.
I greatly admired the man.
But not all of his policies.
His tax program, the Kemp-Roth Act, was a brillliant application of the tax policy to the present needs of the economy.
And his views on taxation wasn't fixed because he modified rates and credits as needed.
But his foreign policy was shameful, except for one very, very important point.
After being convinced by Margaret Thatcher, he accepted Gorbachev's hand in peace.
Every previous president refused to make that kind of concession in the name of peace.
The world became a safer place.
But he gets credit for things in which he was in no way responsible, specifically the collapse of the Soviet Union.
I have spent a great deal of time and effort studing this, and I can say unquestionably that the collapse of the Soviet Union was due to Gorbachev's thoughtless reforms.
Gorbachev was the worst administrator of a large country in modern times. Maybe only Tzar Nicholas the III comes close.
Think Jimmy Carter but 100 times worse.
Also I believe that Reagan really did believe that deficit spending was a vice, but once he got to Washington he realized that it is a necessary element to how our current economy works. In other words, he became a Keynesian too.
This is the exact opposite of what Gorbachev did. Gorbachev dismantle the Soviet admistrative system of patronages and the fealty in the Central Asian republics.
Patronage in Russia and Fealty in the Asian republics have been the traditional insitutions of administration in Russia and central Asia for centuries.
Gorbachev dismantled them and thereby doomed not only any reforms, but also the adminsitration of everyday life in the Soviet Union.
Judging presidents is really difficult becasue there are so many complicated and complex factors going on simultaneously. But I think Reagan did as good a job as LBJ at having a direct effect on conditions.
Some day I have to explain how I went from a libertarian Republican Executive Committee person to a card carrying Socialist.
I read and loved Ludwig von Mises. But eventual I realized that, "Damn!, Marx is mostly right about the important things."
The Anabaptist Jacques
You said a mouthful! Your a card carrying Socialist and think Marx is mostly right about the important things. Very interesting. I don't know much about Marx and don't really want to know about him. Its good that we can still reach common ground on occasion on this forum. Just from a cursory glance, it seems that everywhere his principles have been put into action they have not worked very well. Most of the people are subjugated by the state and end up slaving for it. The people have very little freedom and basically can not leave their country, even for vacations.
Some of the places where the governments are still using a form of Marxism are Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, not to mention Venezuela. Those countries are not good promo for a Marxist system. No freedom of speech, no freedom of the press, no right to free travel freely.
My only experience from the inside was when I went to Germany in 1967 and took the subway, alone, over to East Berlin. Here it was, 1967 and most of the city was still in ruins. The former ritzy avenue, Unter den Linden had a lot of beautiful new buildings built in a neo classic style. These were all various museums, libraries, music halls,government administration buildings. When you looked down the side streets everything else was still in ruins.
My tour guide explained that the Russians were not going to invest in rebuilding East Germany because they had lost 20 million citizens killed by the Germans in WWII. I could see the guys point! Meanwhile, the Berlin Wall was up and thriving at that time. I went back in June, 2009 and it was all totally rebuilt and beautiful. The fashionable Unter den Linden district was fully restored.
Since 1991, East Germany reunited with Germany and is now a showplace and the people are much freer and much happier than when they were under a Marxist regime.
That brings up a point. If Marx had the big things right, When a Marxist stat exists side by side with a non Marxist state, as in the cases of East and West Berlin, East and West Germany, North and South Korea and Cuba and the coast of Florida, why is it that people are trying to flee the Marxist state and come to the non Marxist state? The government has to be ruthless and build fences to keep their own citizens inside their own countries. Do you have an explanation for it?
Other good examples are the ex Soviet Bloc countries in Eastern Europe. Virtually everyone of those regimes wanted desperately to leave their Marxist government behind and live in a more Western type of society. Hungary rebelled in 1956 and had to be held in check by Soviet tanks. As soon as the Iron Curtain fell, Poland, Hungary, Lithunia, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovokia, etc all jettisoned Marism for a Western type of government. If Marxism had anything to offer people you would think that a least a few of those countries would have formed a Communist government but there was no delay, no debate or vote, the people immediately set up Western type governments
It probably sounds simplistic to you but it is pragmatic. People want to get into countries where they have the opportunity to lead good lives. When a Marxist state exists next to a non Marxist state, the people pick up on the difference in the quality of life and want desperately to live under a non Marxist regime. I don' see much value in studying a particular type of governmental system when so much pragmatic evidence has shown over and over that it does not work!
Lakey
