I Voted For Ronald Reagan

A long time ago, right here on this planet, I was a college freshman. Coming back from class, I clustered around the TV set with my room mate to witness the spectacle of burned out helicopters in the Iranian desert. The first thought that came to my mind was: "Is that how weak my country has become?" I was a college senior, and it had been an eventful four years. An ongoing energy crisis had shaken the country, leading to a recession, gas lines, and stagflation. Two different years, my school had canceled classes, something that had never happened since its founding in 1842, and we had nearly been sent home, because the coal supply to run the University power plant ran so low.

It seemed to be a shaky time in American History, and I came from a family of New Deal Democrats. I chose to break with family tradition, and voted for Reagan. Now, looking back, I can see that I made a grave error.

Reagan's pronouncement: "Government isn't the solution, it is the problem" is how it is remembered. But the correct quote is "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem, government IS the problem." And he was referring to a specific economic crisis that occurred at one point in time. But Reagan was a front man for a movement that practiced complete free market economics, the Chicago school. And that WAS the problem.

The Chicago School can be summed up by one name, Milton Freedman, and by one principle, absolute deregulation. Freedman defected from New Deal Keynesian economics, which believed that in the absence of government regulation businesses would practice predatory capitalism. He convinced Ronald Reagan, who put those practices into place and help start the long stint of deregulation that lead to the 2008 financial crisis.

I voted for Ronald Reagan, because I thought he would make our country strong. It is ironic, since in his westerns, the people of the lawless towns were preyed upon until a strong man on a white horse rode in to bring some law and order. Yet Reagan rode into Washington to remove the law and order. It was a clear case of mistaking a flawed system, a government with problems, and discarding it for a worse solution.

And has anything changed? Seven years after the financial crisis, our economy is still considered too fragile to allow normal economic practices to take place. The Federal Reserve continues to keep interest rates at zero to keep the economy on life support. The EU is doing the same, because they are still suffering from the excess debt that was sold to them by an American financial system that is no longer of making real, valued products, only paper instruments like collateralized debt obligations.

And we Americans delude ourselves into thinking we are free, that we live in a free nation. Since ten percent of the population owns ninety percent of the wealth, and the vast majority must work to pay their debts, we are hardly a nation of freemen.