Reagan's Legacy: Our 25-Year Boom

[HT:JH]
Golden Age: After 25 years of record-setting economic performance around the world, set off by President Reagan's free-market policies, the world has fallen into a recession. Is this the inevitable end of an era?

Let's go back to 1982, in many ways the bleakest year since the Depression. The economy had emerged severely damaged by the stagflation of the 1970s. Americans' confidence, both in government and in the economy, had reached a low ebb in 1980. Many felt our best years lay behind us.

On the nations' campuses and even in some of its boardrooms, people were talking about capitalism as a failed system.

Some advocated a "third way" between socialism and capitalism, as in Europe, which would include heavy doses of government intervention in markets to bring them back to life. Still others took up the call in E.F. Schumacher's best-seller, "Small Is Beautiful," to downsize expectations. Live frugally, they said. Inhabit small houses. Drive small cars. Don't use oil. Rein in your ambitions.

One man didn't agree with this: President Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980 amid a wave of voter disgust at his predecessor's failures.

It was Reagan who brought America's capitalist economy roaring back to life, ending energy price controls, slashing income tax rates by 25% and dramatically reducing tax rates on capital gains.

Americans had been told for years — as they're now being told again — to expect diminished standards of living. Then they watched as the Reagan years set in place one of the most durable and remarkable booms in incomes and wealth in history.

Yet the media and academia rarely credited Reagan for his accomplishments — especially on the economy, where "Reaganomics" became a term of opprobrium among the intelligentsia.

But it's a fact.

As the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research once declared, we lived in the "longest sustained period of prosperity in the 20th century" from 1982 to 1999 — one big boom, the NBER said, set off by Reagan. [snip]

A shocking new Rasmussen Poll shows that just 53% think capitalism is superior to socialism — despite the fact that socialism, wherever it's been tried, has brought misery and poverty.

So is Reagan's dream of free-market capitalism dead? Or is it just sleeping, as in the 1970s, waiting for a new champion to emerge?

[And do we passively wait for a 'leader' or demand a return to the principles that made this country great?]

[Not long, Recommended > ]

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