[Swiftwater Gazette] Bill Effros continues continued

[Bill Effros]

Ed,

I've missed you!

I no longer read the NYT daily from cover to cover, something I did for 
50 years, in part due to your observations about its journalistic 
quality, or lack thereof.

I thought you might be interested to note that a left wing economist 
agrees with much right wing opinion.

What do you think of Pat Buchanan's protectionist views?  He has been 
both consistent and articulate in stating them.  I don't know that he's 
right, but I don't know that he's wrong, either.

What's your take?

B.



tootle wrote:
> Bill,
>  
> You continue to read the New York Times, a great source of left wing 
> opinion.  Try other sources of information. 
>  
> Look and read some of the speeches and articles at this site:
>  
> http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis.asp
>  
> Read a right wing opinion blow:
>  
>
> Rush Limbaugh
>
> Hillsdale Speech
>
> Do Conservatives Need to Get Beyond Reagan?
>
>  
>
> Rush Limbaugh launched his radio broadcast into national syndication 
> on August 1, 1988, with 56 radio stations. Twenty years later it is 
> heard on nearly 600 stations by approximately 20 million people each 
> week and is the highest rated national radio talk show in America. Mr. 
> Limbaugh also hosts "The Rush Limbaugh Morning Update," writes "The 
> Limbaugh Letter," and extends his message to the Internet via 
> RushLimbaugh.com. He received the Marconi Award for Syndicated Radio 
> Personality of the Year, given by the National Association of 
> Broadcasters, in 1992, 1995, 2000 and 2005. In 1993, he was inducted 
> into the Radio Hall of Fame and in 1998, into the National Association 
> of Broadcasters Hall of Fame.
>
> The following is adapted from a speech delivered on December 4, 2008, 
> at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., on the occasion of the 
> ninth annual Hillsdale College Churchill Dinner.
>
> THERE ARE ongoing discussions and debates among conservatives about 
> the kind of president Barack Obama will prove to be, and about how 
> they should react to him. But there is a larger and more important 
> debate going on within conservatism-a debate about what conservatism 
> is. Remarkably, we are hearing from a lot of people who are thought to 
> be conservatives that conservatives need to "get beyond Reagan." After 
> all, these people say, "The Reagan era is over." And the liberal media 
> love to print their articles and broadcast their pronouncements to 
> this effect. My response is, well, yes, the Reagan era is over in the 
> sense that it has been 20 years since Reagan was president. But the 
> funny thing is, I never heard the liberals saying that because the era 
> of FDR was over---it ended in 1945---that they needed to "get beyond 
> FDR." They didn't say that 35 years later when Reagan was first 
> elected, or when he was reelected in 1984. They didn't say that when 
> the liberals lost Congress in the 1994 election. Nor did they say it 
> after the 2000 or 2004 elections. Instead, they kept arguing and 
> fighting for the ideas they believe in. And now Mr. Obama is plausibly 
> promising to revive the era of FDR.
>
> So why are some so-called conservatives today arguing that we need to 
> "get beyond Reagan," by which they mean that we need to abandon the 
> ideas that Reagan stood for? To understand the roots of this argument, 
> I think we only need to look back to the years when Reagan first 
> emerged onto the national scene. /There was a lot of resentment at 
> that time among many of the elites in the Republican Party because 
> Reagan hadn't gone to the right schools, he didn't come from the right 
> part of the country, he had been an actor rather than a lawyer, he was 
> a bumbling dunce, he was an extremist who was too far outside the 
> mainstream to win, and so on. /People have been making these kinds of 
> arguments for a long time. They were saying that conservatives needed 
> to get beyond Reagan even before the Reagan era began. A few of them 
> are the same people. Many of them are new. But _what they have in 
> common is that none of them agree with the principles that Reagan 
> stood for._ And I would argue that this means that they are not 
> conservatives.
>
> Today the get-beyond-Reagan arguments are often put in so-called 
> pragmatic terms of /needing to create blocs of voters who will support 
> the Republican Party. And in order to accomplish this, all that 
> conservatives have to do, these self-proclaimed smart people say, is 
> embrace the idea of big government, because that's what the American 
> people want and because only so-called big-government conservatives 
> will be able to create blocs of voters by spending money to do them 
> favors. /But in answer to this, one has to ask the question---and I'm 
> being a real pragmatist myself here---what's left for government to 
> spend these days? It's already bailing people out right and left with 
> taxpayer money that the government doesn't have. The spigot has been 
> turned on under President Bush. The Obama administration, we can 
> presume, is going to be even more generous in terms of bailouts. But 
> honestly, when we look at auto executives being grilled on TV by 
> liberal members of Congress about their irresponsibility, can we take 
> it seriously? Has anyone ever been as irresponsible with money---and 
> in their case other people's money---than these very same 
> self-righteous members of Congress?
>
> /As history has amply demonstrated, down the line the kind of central 
> planning that Mr. Bush has begun and that Mr. Obama plans to escalate 
> isn't going to work. /Although it may succeed in increasing the 
> control of government over people's lives---which is how many liberals 
> these days seem to define prosperity---it will fail miserably in 
> restoring economic health to America. So in fact, during a time of 
> economic trouble like this when liberals are in charge of both elected 
> branches of government, conservatives have a golden opportunity to 
> reintroduce to the American people the free market ideas and policies 
> that have made our country the greatest and most prosperous country in 
> human history.
>
> My first point, then, is that there is no pragmatic reason today for 
> conservatives to abandon the ideas of Reagan. It is worth remembering, 
> after all, that despite the warnings of Republican "pragmatists" in 
> the economically bleak 1970s that /Reagan was too far outside the 
> mainstream ever to be successful politically/, Reagan won the 
> presidency in two landslides---and that in 1994, his party took over 
> the House of Representatives, for the first time in 40 years, using 
> Reagan-like arguments.
>
> But there is a second and more important point to be made in response 
> to the argument that conservatives should get beyond Reagan. /The main 
> idea that animated Reagan wasn't anti-communism or supply side 
> economics./ *Reagan's main idea was the main idea of the American 
> founding---the idea of individual liberty*---and the policies that he 
> supported, both internationally and domestically, grew from that. 
> /America was founded on the idea that our individual freedoms derive 
> from God, not from government, and that government should protect 
> those freedoms and never violate them. Reagan argued, and history has 
> shown, that America does best when it is true to its original idea. 
> *It does best when its people are left free to work in their 
> individual self-interest---not meant in the sense of being selfish, 
> but in the sense that they are left free to work to improve their own 
> lives and the lives of their families, and for the good of their 
> communities and of the nation at large.*/ The biggest problem with the 
> argument that conservatives should get beyond Reagan, then, is that 
> the idea of individual liberty will never go out of style as long as 
> America exists. To argue that the Reagan era is over is to argue that 
> the era of freedom is over. And to argue that conservatives should 
> abandon Reagan's principles is to argue that they should stop being 
> conservatives.
>
> There is no such thing, at least in America, as "big-government 
> conservatism." A government that abides by the Constitution and 
> protects our God-given freedoms is by definition limited. Rather than 
> carving out blocs of voters by surrendering their principles, 
> conservatives need to continue to tell the American people as a whole 
> that the ideas of individual liberty and limited government are right 
> and that the policies that come from those ideas work best to produce 
> prosperity. /Conservatives don't need to reinvent themselves. They 
> need the courage to be once again who they were./
>
> // 
> Ed K
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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