Cederford. Do you never tire of straw men? Do you never tire of pretending to know something about conservatism?
Every point of yours is wrong or a willful misstatement of facts.
Let us deconstruct just the first two.
!) Reagan did not think Wall Streeters were “America’s finest people”. Just hogwash. Wrong on the face of it. Reagan would never say such a thing and it is preposterous to claim so. He admired many sectors of the country, not wall street exclusively. He may have thought some of them were , and he certainly though that they were better business people than their soft socialist European counterparts or the management structures of the communist world, which was precisely the point he was making. You are taking this completely out of context.
And he was right in this.
He certainly was not talking about people who came to work on Wall Street a generation later. How could he? This too is an absurd claim on your part.
Now, it was not the a failure of “the genius of the private sector to innovate and self-police” that caused this problem. It was the perverse redistributionist policies of the government and collusion with some (corrupt) Democrat big shots on wall st and in the hedge funds that cause this. They may have done it on purpose. It was self serving regluation, and a mixture of corrupt and incompetent regulators that caused this.
And of course, it is the “genius of the private sector to innovate” is the source of American wealth. This is an irrefutable truth. So are the evils of regulation. It is absurd to claim otherwise, and it is just ridiculous to claim that by making this statement Reagan somehow invalidates or comprises his thought or legacy. Rather, just the opposite is the case.
Beyond that, the regluatory climate was completely different in 2008 than it was in 1980. If the government would not have screwed around with it and taken Reagan’s advice, the current fiasco would have never had happened. That is rather the point. In any event. Reagan was talking about regulation in general, not just regulation in the financial world. It is absurd to criticize Reagan for the regulatory laws of today.
Again, you are engaging in circular logic here, and straw men arguments, and the straw men are complete falsehoods as well–just fabricated. You are projecting on to Reagan responsibilities that are completely nonsensical for him to have.
You also don’t have mush understanding of what has just happened.
In any event, the Wall Street of his time was a completely different place than today. It was much less of a casino. It was much less connected to Washington. Firms were much smaller and specialized. Program trading was in its infancy (people were still carting around actual physical stock around at night to settle at the end of the day). Computing was mostly just for accounting and order tracking. Glass-Steagall was still inplace. There was not the huge consolidations of Ibanks and brokerages. Hedge funds were a tiny industry. Most importantly, there was actually an investment culture. That is what people did back then for the most part.
(BTW, Most of the changes down there can be traced to mostly Democrat moves in government or Democrats in the industry. This is particularly true of the bad changes)
And look at the results. Investment was opened up to the middle classes. Take look at the level of the major index prior to Reagan and after he came to power. It is another world. You can also look at the effect of his policies on capital gains as on the high tech industries and the VC culture that supported them. This was also robust investment culture and enriched the country and allowed it to lead the world in this sector for 20 years. Reagan’s policies lead to the longest and largest boom of the post war years–some 20 years of it. It is a stunning vindication of conservative philosophy. It is not a indictment of it.
(I will also point out that there were more Republicans and conservatives in leadership positions in the fancial industry and the VC sector back then there are now. Now these sectors are pretty much a Liberal democrat camps. I know because I worked down there in those day.)
In Summation: To blame Reagan for the tribe down there now, or to say that the the current mess discredits his achievements, the financial sectors’ achievements during his time or Reagan’s philosophy about regulations is absurd and complete nonsense. It is a straw man argument, and the straw man is based on pure fabrication. It is also guilt by association, and equally fallacious. Once more you show your propensity of intellectual dishonesty and shallow thinking.
2. Reagan “predicted” no such thing about health care. How could this be, when medicare and medicaid was enacted a decade or more than when he was in office, He was constantly complaining about how inaccurate LBJ was about the outlay estimations for these Democrat programs. Beside, it was one of his saying that it was impossible to kill a federal entitlement program once it was enacted. Here he was just voicing his fond hope that the government could in the future keep itself from getting further involved, and extolling the benefits of the free market. He was trying to stop further nationalization. And of course he was right about this. And to the extent that government stayed out of it there was much innovation. Just look at the wide use of MRI tech, for example.
But government did not stay out of it. That is why prices are up. They are mostly up becuase of the programs enacted before he was in office hat were way pummped pafter he was in office.
You are making an absurd argument. You are saying that conditions that are the exact opposite of what he was proposing invalidates his porposition.
This is just irrational on the face of it,and it is a loony argument to make.
The conditions actually vindicate his position.
Again, a straw man argument, and a completely irrational assertion.
The same thing applies to you other points, with the exception of 6 and 7.
