The Reagan myth

This topic was a huge realization for me, as someone who used to be a big fan of Reagan. I finally came to the conclusion that the "Reagan Revolution" is a myth. It never happened. It was all talk and no walk, and just a way to sell big government to conservatives. The size and scope of government massively increased under Reagan, but they figured out a way to do it cleverly and discreetly, with lots of free market and small government rhetoric, and some tax cuts (while also raising taxes).

Basically, the foundation of Reaganomics is that deficits and debts don't matter. Government can grow and spend whatever it wants, and as long as the upper tax brackets are cut, the effects will "trickle down" and the economy will grow and more taxes will come in and feed the growing beast of government. This is partly why Ron Paul stopped supporting Reagan, and why Reagan's budget adviser, David Stockman, resigned and has now written a brand new 700 page book talking about the US's long slide into statism, and doesn't hesitate to point the finger at his former boss where it's due. (Cutting taxes while also massively expanding government spending was Bush's trick as well. This is part of the great evil of the Federal Reserve and how it enables these slick politicians to fleece us while pretending to let us keep more of our money.)

Reagan also, and I think most devastatingly, enabled the complete takeover of foreign policy by the Military Industrial Complex, and the massive expansion of the global US military empire -- which was not financed by the evil-but-honest way of raising taxes, and instead financed by evil and dishonest money printing, Fed borrowing, and deficit & debt growing. 

From David Stockman's book:

"Within days of Reagan’s taking office, the White House made a historically devastating mistake by signing over to the Pentagon a blank check known as the ’7 percent real growth top line.’ This massive injection of fiscal firepower nearly tripled the defense budget from $140 billion to $370 billion within just six years. More importantly, it fueled powerful expansionist impulses throughout the military-industrial complex at exactly the wrong time in history."

And the earth-shaking consequences were felt two decades later:

"The Reagan defense buildup gave birth to a historical monstrosity: the Bush wars of occupation and imperial pretension that were possible only because of the immense conventional war machine the Gipper left behind."

His conclusion on Reagan is brutally straightforward and quite damning:

"In fact, Reagan was an out-an-out statist in the realm of the military and national security. All the well-warranted skepticism he had about Big Government – the empire-building tendency of the bureaucracy, the inherent inefficiency and waste of public sector monopolies, the self-serving propensity of bureaucrats to hide the facts and twist the truth – did not apply on the Pentagon side of the Potomac."

I didn't actually read the book. 700 pages is a bit much. But I did read a great review of it from a favorite writer of mine, Justin Raimondo. Part 1 and Part 2. I highly recommend reading these to get the viewpoint of Reagan's role in building the warfare state, and how this is dependent upon massive debt and deficits and other economic horrors...and also how the warfare state and welfare state are really just two sides of the same statist coin.

Sadly, Reagan's true legacy is that he convinced millions of people who instinctively distrusted big government and opposed its intervention in their lives that their views are totally compatible with and even require support for a global military empire and that no price is too big to pay for militarism -- deficits and debt be damned. In fact, what he (and Bush) did was more insidious than people like Clinton and Obama have done, because he sold his statism (and all of it's negative effects) as "limited government", "capitalism", and "free market".

- Mike 

PS another thought I had. I remember saying things when I was younger like "Reagan won the cold war!" and "Reagan's military spending bankkrupted the USSR!" This is utter nonsense. Communism defeated and bankrupted the Soviets, and saying that massive government spending is what made us victorious is pure Keynesianism, and state propaganda. Either we think socialism is a fatally flawed and unworkable system, and that government spending cannot lead to prosperity, or we don't. I was mindlessly repeating things I heard Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and FOX News say, and it was complete BS.