humanities.philosophy.objectivism

On Apr 11, 9:59 am, Agent Cooper wrote:
>
> When Reagan came into power, if anything the letting business be
> business thing was more militant than ever. But so was advocacy for
> religion.


Ridiculous.

> And prudent foreign policy gave way to a determination to
> win the Cold War.


The prudent foreign policy was to end the Cold War by winning it!


> One consequence of the determination to rollback confiscatory taxes,

It was, at least, to simpilfy income taxes and to project Laffer
economics.


> coupled with the political inability to control spending, was that the
> traditional Republican emphasis on fiscal prudence fell by the
> wayside.

Ridiculous.


> Now as an old Reaganaut I am far from blaming the Old Man for
> this. But it created a precedent that deficit spending by Republicans


No, it didn't. The "precedent" had been set by the Democrats in 1938.


> ain't so bad, and gave political cover for what were essentially
> Keynesian pump-priming policies. Ever since, ironically, the
> Republican Party has become the fiscally irresponsible one,


No, it isn't.

> a hard
> truth manifested by its complete unwillingness or inability to tackle
> spending during an era of total Republican domination of all three
> branches of government.


There was never "total domination" of all three branches of government
at any time by the Republicans in any period after 1933.


> The second bad lesson the Republicans took away from the Reagan era
> was the idea that prudence is bad, assertiveness is good. Cold War
> nostalgia leads to a need for some kind of cosmic crusade that can be
> fought and won, so that we can relive 1989 over and over again. This
> is not classic Republican prudence; this is classic Democrat obsession
> with subsuming the individual into a collective, meaning-conferring
> crusade against evil, defined now as some blurry conflation of Nazism/
> Communism/Islamofascism. And when the prudent, Realpolitik agenda of
> pre-empting an apparently dangerous regime collapses when it is
> discovered that the regime is a Potemkin village, the Wilsonian
> rationale is all that's left. Republicans get converted to the fantasy
> of an America on the march, making the Middle East free from fear,
> making it safe for democracy.
>

Babble, babble -- blubbering blithering nonsense.