Oh, How We and the NY Times Love to Fantasize
P. Schultz
January 3, 2014
Immediately
below is a link to an article in today’s NY Times reminiscing about how
wonderful it was when Reagan was president and he and the Congress “made
government work,” as the saying is these days. And then following that is an
excerpt from Walter Karp’s Liberty Under
Siege, providing a different description and evaluation of Reagan and how
government “worked” when he president. When the oligarchs get together, it is
amazing just how well the government “works.” Of course, the question is:
“Works” for whom? Which is always the question.
Excerpts From Liberty
Under Siege, by Walter Karp
The Reagan Revolution As A Political Crime Against
Self-Government
“A tremor
of fear ripples through Republican ranks [1980] – with reason most compelling.
Inside the supply-side quackery and immense and dangerous force lies latent,
coiled up within it like a boa constrictor. Once the Federal Reserve succeeds
in disinflating the economy, the one certain result of Reagan’s huge promised
tax cut is huge annual budget deficits – more than $100 billion a year; $150
billion, perhaps, counting the military buildup. So calculates Reagan’s future
budget director, David Stockman, age thirty four, a former protégé of Senator
Moynihan’s. No mace in Stockman’s eyes are these huge crushing deficits, but an
‘opportunity,’ he calls it, a once-in-a-lifetime chance for ‘a formal assault
on the welfare state.’ Given the ‘battering ram’ force to those deficits, a
titanic reversal of history lies within the power of the Right: ‘Forty years of
promises, subventions, entitlements and safety nets issued by the federal
government to every component and stratum of American society would have to be
scrapped or drastically modified,’ so Stockman recalls himself thinking in
those heady autumn days of 1980. The ‘craven politicians’ would have no choice:
dismantle the enterprises of government, liberate and exalt the power of
capital – trampled and brought low for so many years – ‘or risk national ruin’
from the crush of those deficits.
“Therein
lies the true beauty of the scheme: no choice. No need to persuade a feckless
electorate that mitigating gross inequality is an enterprise unworthy of a
republican commonwealth. No need to persuade them that a house of one’s own,
yeomanly independence, security in old age, clear air and clean water, the
principles of liberty and equality perpetually upheld (however ill served), a
public realm shielded from hungry mobs and criminal despair (for misery is the
enemy of liberty) are impermissible public goals – ‘bloated, wasteful and
unjust spending enterprises,’ so the future budget director calls them. No need
to undertake the hopeless task of teaching the national mob the sublime, icy
truths of laissez-faire capitalism; no need to persuade them – for it is
equally hopeless – that no purpose beyond ‘economic efficiency’ is fit and
proper for a capitalist country, for America as ‘just one big business,’ for
America the ‘industrial giant,’ as the President-elect likes to call this
Republic. Are we not something other than that, the feckless rabble would ask?
Have Americans not died on a hundred battlefields for something other than
that? For something more like government of, by and for the people, which is
supposed not to perish from this earth? No need to turn aside such questions.
The American people are drowning in inflation, are clinging to the balanced
budget idea like a shipwrecked sailor clutching at flotsam. Let Congress enact
– but will it? – these huge tax-reduction deficits and then let Reagan demand
they be wiped away and there is no need to persuade a free people to abandon
their feckless public goals. Under the crushing weight of ‘fiscal necessity’ –
a false necessity, necessity brutally, deceitfully contrived – the judgment of
the vicious many shall be subjugated to the will of the righteous few, to us,
the Right, keepers of the flame, dwellers in the political wilderness for fifty
years, in the wilderness no longer.
“Such is
the latent power coiled up within supply-side quackery – the power to carry out
a brutal plot, a deceitful scheme, a political crime, a crime against
government by the consent of the governed, a tyrant’s crime against a free
people’s freedom to decide their own fate, a crime by no means deeply
concealed. On October 14, poor, unheeded Carter had presciently warned that his
rival’s program must lead, inevitably, to a $130 billion deficit by 1983, to a
bloated military establishment and a federal government stripped, impoverished
and paralyzed for years to come. Suppose the supply-side plot were launched and
the people rose up against it? What would become of the Reaction then? What
possible hope would there be for Oligarchy restored?” [127-29]
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