Ronald Reagan – by far the greatest president of my lifetime – would be 103 today. 

I’ll be doing my usual Reagan’s Birthday celebration; special dinner, talking with the kids (and, soon, granddaughter Watermelon, who will be old enough to learn the basics before too terribly long), jelly beans at the office. 

Of course, Reagan’s Birthday is more than just a fun holiday, commemorating one of the great men of Western Civilization, a man whose brief ascendancy may have bought the United States a few more decades of prosperity – indeed, existence in its current form – than it had any right to expect 35 years ago. 

No – there are a lot of people out there trying to steal Reagan’s legacy, to pervert it into something it wasn’t, to lie and deceive for craven and low purposes. 

And I’m here to steal Reagan’s legacy back. The lies are all over the place; the answers, the scathing debunquements, are harder to find. 

But not on this blog. 

“Reagan spent a lot of money!”:  Read your Constitution.  Presidents don’t spend money.  The House of Representatives does.  Tip O’Neil spent money like a meth hooker with a stolen Gold Card.  Yes, Reagan’s primary priority – the downfall of Communism – cost money, and a lot of it.  That spending was supposed to be met with cuts to entitlements.  Congress – which, for the first 3/4 of Reagan’s time in DC was entirely controlled by spendthrift Democrats – insisted on keeping the entitlement gravy train flowing.  Presidents aren’t dictators (although Barack Obama seems to have expressed his intention to test that thesis in his last State of the Union); compromises were made. 

But economist James Lindeman of the Heritage Foundation estimated that Reagan’s defense spending paid for itself, with interest, in the nineties; freed of a Soviet Union, America’s economy de-militarized, freeing up immense capital and capacity for civilian production.  The technology that went into making the sonar on the Los Angeles class submarines a top-secret wonder of the world in 1982 was turned into making cell phones smaller, lighter, more capable and downright cheap by 1997.  Bill Clinton’s boom economy was entirely the result of Republican policy; Reagan made the “peace dividend” possible, and Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Congress prevented Bill Clinton from spending it all on Hillarycare. 

“Reagan was teh dum!”:  This notion has been shredded by waves of scholars. 

Of course, the source of that slander was something more toxic than the slander itself.  Reagan was a regular, middle-class American with a degree from a humble, obscure midwestern college, who’d worked his way up through several fields – radio, acting, public relations and then politics – without any of the academic fripperies that the elite has come to regard as the price of entry to respectable success – degrees, and more degrees, from institutions whose main claim to fame is their claim to fame. 

Reagan had none of that.  He had vision, talent, and hard work – the same things the vast majority of Americans bring to the table. 

 

And that – today, when our academy has turned into a self-sustaining parasite class (not to knock any particular members of the academy who may be friends and occasional radio co-hosts of mine), that’s an example all Americans need.

“Reagan raised taxes”:  Yes, he did.  Eventually.  But not until the real work was done, and much less than he cut them in the first place. 

We talked about this a couple years ago.  Reagan’s tax cuts came early in his Administration, when the economy was, by some measures, worse than it was in 2007.  He slashed taxes – and (unlike the 2007 recession) the economy came storming back. 

The “tax hikes” came in his second term; they were a result of Tip O’Neil and the Democrat Congress reneging on a deal with Reagan.  They were less than 1/4 of the size of the cuts and, most importantly, they happened when the economy was booming.  Could the economy have boomed more without the hikes?  Absolutely.  But raising taxes when the economy is booming isn’t quite as blazingly stupid as raising them when the economy is crippled. 

There truly is no compararison. 

“The Soviet Union would have collapsed on its own”:  That’s one of those things that everyone agreed about – in about 1993.  Of course, reading those same ‘experts’ in the seventies and eighties was quite another story; almost to a person (as showed by Dinesh D’Souza in his essential Reagan bio,Reagan:  How An Ordinary Man Became An Extraordinary President, they agreed in the seventies, the eighties, and even into the early nineties that the Soviet Union and the “Second World” it led were here to stay.  Many believed, on an intellectual level, that the USSR would one day collapse.  Not a one of them went on the record claiming it’d be in any of their lifetimes, to say nothing of “within a decade of Reagan’s inaugural”. 

But that’s history.  For me, it was very personal.  I grew up about 30 miles from the nearest first strike nuclear target, a Minuteman III silo, in the middle of a state with 329 more of them; missiles were almost as dense as oil wells, and covered much more of the state. 

And through most of my teens and twenties, I wondered – what would be the purpose of having children in a world that could get vaporized in half an hour? 

And having that threat ebb – having the bombers roll back from standby, having the Armageddon Clock back off a few minutes, moving the hammer back to half-cocked – answered that question for me; “don’t worry; life looks pretty likely to go on for the foreseeable future”. 

So my response to people knocking Reagan is the same as it ever was – polite contempt for their intellectual vapidity.  But for stealing Reagan’s legacy?  Perverting the facts?  Trying to forcibly bugger history? 

For that, there is no mercy. 

(Which is what you’ll find out if you waste space in my comment section disagreeing with any of the above.  While this blog tries to foster a lively discussion, on this issue there will be no dissent.  It’s my blog and I’ll censor if I want to).

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Thursday, February 6th, 2014 at 12:00 pm and is filed under History And Its Making. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.