It took several decades for our country to come around but we finally apologized to those Americans of Japanese descent for seizing their land and putting them in internment camps. I'm sure many of you would argue that it was war time, after all, and there wasn't really any choice. Who could know what spies lurked amongst these "yellow devils?" In all honesty, I would have probably been one of those people supporting FDR's decision to make all of these people instant prisoners of war.
One would think, however, that at the conclusion of the war, Truman might have apologized but he didn't. Nor did Eisenhower nor my favorite president, Jack Kennedy. In fact, it took four more presidents before we finally elected a man who had the balls to admit that we were wrong. That man was Ronald Reagan and, on August 10, 1988, he signed a bill that gave reparations to those Japanese Americans. Here is a photo of him signing the bill into law.
In reflecting upon this image, I have to admit that the last vestiges any thoughts I had that defined Reagan as a "bad" president have effectively been vanquished. Ideologically, there are many of his views and actions with which I will always disagree. And he's still not in my Top Five.
But you can't argue with someone who mans up and says that our country fucked up. Ironic, that Reagan is the hero to a party which is completely incapable of that now and heaps vitriol upon President Obama for doing just that.
I suppose it's not surprising that the same group of people that twist the message of Jesus Christ to suit their needs would create a "Fictional Ronnie" that they can worship with candles and ignorance. What would they say about President Reagan talking (gasp!) to our mortal enemies, the Soviets, and actually engaging in diplomacy? What would they say about a man who ran record deficits and debt to GDP spending? What would they say about a man who admitted that arms for hostages were traded and that is was HIS responsibility alone?
Well, they'd probably call him a Nazi. Or a Communist.
I'm man enough to admit that history has shown me that Reagan was a much better president than he is given credit. Why? Results. Ronald Reagan defeated the Soviet Union. It's just that simple. We hear the Cult these days obsess about Obama's teleprompter and how speeches don't solve anything. Yet it was President Reagan's speech, in which he said, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" that has since been shown by author Romesh Ratnesar in his book Tear Down this Wall to be a major turning point in the end of the Soviet Union. This is a fantastic book, btw, which I highly recommend.
And it was Reagan, as Manzi pointed out in his tour de force, that brought the US back to the forefront of the world economy.
Ronald Reagan's solution to the '70s crisis proceeded from two diagnoses. The first was that macroeconomic pump-priming was merely creating inflation, not growth. The second was that America's economy had large untapped potential for growth, but that this potential went unrealized because of the restrictions on markets intended to promote social harmony as part of the post-war economic consensus. These included everything from price controls to government encouragement of private-sector unionization to zealous anti-trust enforcement. Reagan's strategy, therefore, was to promote sound money plus deregulation. He succeeded, and America re-emerged as the acknowledged global economic leader. Economic output per person is now 20 to 25% higher in the U.S. than in Japan and the major European economies, and America's economy dominates the world in size and prestige.
Again, it comes down to the results. Of course, these results did not come without hardship and that is where the left comes in with their complaints about Reagan which I'm certain I will hear in comments. Manzi explains.
The percentage of the U.S. population born abroad — which had reached its historical minimum in 1970 — began to rise rapidly as mass immigration resumed after a multi-decade hiatus. This development increased inequality further by introducing a large low-income group to the population, and by intensifying wage competition among lower-skill workers.
The Reagan economic revolution exacerbated the problem. Its success resulted, in part, from forcing extremely painful restructuring on industry after industry. One critical consequence of this restructuring was a new compensation paradigm — one that relies on markets rather than on corporate diktats, regulation, or historical norms to set pay. This new regime also accepts a much higher degree of income disparity based on market-denominated performance, and it expects that most people will exploit the resulting demand for talent by moving from company to company many times during a career. Growing inequality was a price we paid for the economic growth needed to recover from the '70s slump and to retain our global position.
I think that Manzi explains this quite well. Growing inequality was the price we had to pay or it would have been worse. Reagan knew this, of course, and did what he to do.
That's not to say that all of his ideas would work in today's economy. I don't think many of them would. I'll be talking over the next few weeks about what Bruce Bartlett's take on the difference between the Reagan economy (in which he was a principle architect) and the Obama economy. In fact, as I have reflecting quite a bit on President Reagan since juris put up that comment, I see more and more similarities between him and our current president than I ever though possible. More, I'm certain, that the Cult would not like to admit.
So, isn't it interesting, as juris posed in the same comment regarding his trip to Manzanar, that Reagan was the one to apologize and FDR, the extremely left leaning statesman, got it all wrong in putting American citizens in camps simply because of their ethnicity? And doing this while fighting a war against an enemy that believed in a "Master Race?"
It is, indeed, very interesting and this would be just the kind of reflection upon the gray that all of us should be doing in our current age of hyper vitriolic "Us VS. Them." As one can plainly see, I have no problem doing this. Those who have created a fictional effigy of Ronald Reagan, at least at this point in time, do not have the word "reflection" in their vocabulary.
Until they do, we aren't going to get anywhere.
