Observations on president Reagan

Well, I'm going to guess a lot of people hate him and a lot of people think he was the last great American hero.
As much as he has been derided for his supposed "Voodoo Economics", Reagan's economic policies were clearly applications of serious academic views of Economics.

His "A Time For Choosing" speech in support of Barry Goldwater referred to the ideas of the Laffer Curve in that high taxes were wasted after a point. His condemnations of Jimmy Carter were references to the Neo-Malthusian of Paul Ehrlic and on the "conserve resources because we will eventually run out of them" economic approach of Carter. In what was Julian Simon's ideas without a citation, Reagan argued that humans create resources and trying to ration raw materials was a needless impoverishment of humanity.


The bitter bilious battle between bureaucrats is based on the divide between the economic arguments of the Noe-Malthusian assumptions of Paul Ehrlich and those of Julian Simon.

The pattern I see is that Reagan operated under highly insightful and counter-intuitive economic ideas which were not fully received by academia at the time. Because the assumptions and prescriptions of those economists were outside the main body that was quickly accessible to Liberal thinkers and journalists, they could not follow his reasoning and had little inclination to do so.

The economic legacy of his times are still generally acknowledged as being a good one but the hostility directed towards him at the time is a reminder of the political difficulties in trying to apply economic policies that are outside the common set of analogies. Another factor is that when there is a major economic crisis on the level of 1970s era stagflation tends to be the product of existing and widely accepted economic theories being flawed.