Being a free-thinking libertarian has boundless advantages. It allows one to stand back and evaluate the worldly commotion through a skeptical lens unhindered by dogmas, creeds and “party-line” non-sense. We tend to challenge the “conventional wisdom” of history told to us by ideological historians and rather interpret the meaning of bygone events through logical and creative thinking. We understand the media lies most of the time, governments have dubious agendas and corporations of the military-industrial complex run our country. Libertarians know this, we understand what is coming. This is what permits’ libertarians to see through the hoopla of the mystique Republican Party idol…Ronald Reagan.
If you unravel the media pundit talking points and really get down in the weeds of his presidency, you would find a rather disastrous 8 years in office. In ruthless reality, Reagan expanded government more than any other president before him, increased taxes, increased the deficit, raised tariffs, escalated foreign aid and increased the police state detrimentally. Reagan was never really one to think or make a decision on his own, never one to raise questions or provide empirical resolutions and was generally known for his “strange passivity.” He was otherwise, the perfect puppet for the establishment elite to control.
Here are 4 things that Republicans won’t tell you about their cultish big government hero…Ronald Reagan.
1. BIG SPENDER- After big Ron took office following Carter’s dreadful 4 year presidency, the spending began. It took Reagan just a couple of years to surpass Carter in federal spending, increasing it 53%. He significantly increased the percentage of government spending to GNP and skyrocketed the budget. He also tripled the national debt and quadrupled the deficit in his so-called “small government” 8 years stint in the White House. Your dollar in 1980 would be worth .73 cents by the end of his reign. Some “Reagan Revolution!”
2. BIG TAXER- He’s known conventionally as a tax-cutter. This is false; he actually raised taxes like mad. He increased social security tax drastically to make up for his income tax cut a year earlier. As Murray Rothbard observed, the “Reagan Administration has constantly raised taxes – to punish us for the fake tax cut of 1981 – beginning in 1982 with the largest single tax increase in American history, costing taxpayers $100 billion.” He also raised tariffs and imposed import quotas more than any other president in history. And he’s supposedly the champion of free trade?
3. FOREIGN POLICY BLUNDERS-R
eagan was an unconstitutional warmonger just like all the rest of the prior and ensuing presidents in the last 100 years. His senseless intervention in Lebanon resulted in the death of hundreds of Marines. Just two days after a truck bomb killed 241 Marines in Beirut; the President launched a preemptive invasion of Grenada- a small island lacking any military- which left 19 Americans dead, 116 wounded. But the catastrophe in Beirut was soon forgotten. Also during the Reagan administration, a massacre of hundreds of women and children were conducted by “elite Salvadoran, US-trained Atlacatl Battalion” in Al Salvador. His imperial bullyism has resulted in many pointless civilian deaths around the world while at the same time, supporting many repressive regimes cloaked under the banner of “human rights.” Reagan also partook in a failed attempt to bomb –the US on and off again friendship- Muammar Gadaffi, instead, resulted in the death of his 2-year-old daughter. He plundered away billions of taxpayers’ money to prop up murderous dictators-like the rest of the ruling puppets.
4. Al QAEDA SUPPORTER? The Reagan administration and media at the time were absolutely dazzled by Al Qaeda, otherwise known as “Freedom Fighters.” The US was in full support and even funded Al Qaeda to help them defeat the Soviet Union. As Lew Rockwell wrote “After all, the ideological tendency called Al Qaeda was founded by the US to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. The CIA assembled every fundamentalist fighter it could find, under the leadership of, among others, Osama bin Laden.” Most Americans have no clue about this.
I like to bring these things up so often, not to bash individual politicians, but to expose the fallacy of “talking points”, and to show that presidents who speak of limited government and freedom are disingenuous. As Rothbard points out, “Reagan has been a master at engineering an enormous gap between his rhetoric and the reality of his actions.”
Every cockamamie policy Reagan pursued involved higher taxes, runaway deficit spending, less freedom and more senseless imperial aggression.
The conservative hero added a quarter million government jobs, escalated the War on Drugs, created czar offices and lowered the worth of the dollar. James Ostrowski points out that in the last 100 years, “of the five presidents who presided over the largest domestic spending increases, four were Republicans. Republicans can’t grasp this, libertarian’s can. It’s amazing to me how many conservatives denounce “big government” and yet favor “big government” candidates just because they have an “R” beside their name. This is the failure of the two-party system. It confines people’s rationality and thought process into a small box.
The Founders warned us against evolving into this type of flawed system of government which we call democracy. As Thomas Jefferson put so eloquently many years ago, “A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.” And yet here we are.
This is a nice summary of Reagan’s “achievements”. I only wonder why so many people adore him still. Your Jefferson quote is somehow misleading. A real democracy, as is widely understood nowadays, has to protect the rights of the minority as well. Thus it is wrong to impose social values on other individuals, like you must not smoke pot or you must not have an abortion etc. In this respect we still have a long way to go…
This is very entertaining Eric. The cold war with the Soviets led to all of those government jobs and the deficit. I do agree with your comments on the two party system, it will not work. The United States is not a democracy, it is a republic. The Constitution never once mentions the word democracy. We are a nation of laws, not popular opinion. Allowing Senators and Presidents to bend the law to their will and not hold them accountable is the real problem, for example, Obama care. The country has lost it’s way. Another threat is the government control of our school system. American youths are being brainwashed into liberal views that will in turn leave us in a socialistic state with no understanding of personal responsibility and accountability for one’s actions. Half of the protestors on Wall St. do not even know what cause they are supporting! They, like so many in today’s society, want something for nothing.
Todd, Americans have the option to send their kids to private schools or to educate them at home. So, there is a freedom of choice. I also disagree with your usage of the term “brainwash”. A real brainwash needs an authoritarian environment that shuts out all views or opinions other than the official one. This is certainly not the case in the US. I would go even further. I don’t see an official ideology other than “In God We Trust” etc. If you mean that I would agree to a certain point. In FOX this morning they showed the photos of the nine House members (8 Dems, 1 Rep) who voted “No” on the useless bill with regard to this slogan, obviously with the idea to incite viewers to act against those nine. They didn’t even have to say it but the message was quite clear. It reminds me of the Wall Papers during the Chinese Cultural Revolution where dissidents to Mao’s views were exposed in order to get Red Guards to act against them. Or take the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag that I had to deal with everyday in school. Kids are clearly brainwashed in this case to see the nation in a certain way. Both cases are in contradiction to a libertarian and individualistic approach to deal with our society.