Editorial / Reagan, Carter, and Cash
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
"Editorial / Reagan, Carter, and Cash" by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. On September 9, in Chicago the city that works," as local boomers still proudly affirm Ronald Reagan unveiled his...
...Hockey fans might call this the presidential hat trick...
...The Wonderboy's last economic program was announced on August 28...
...He stands with Kennedy and views the citizens' income as government property to be returned to us only for socially useful purposes...
...So has unemployment...
...The theory peaked, seeming to have vanquished all rivals, roughly at the time of the Darwin Centennial in 1959, when that poor lost old humanist, .Julian Huxley, grandson of Thomas Henry, did his best to declare evolutionism a religion...
...First of all, there has been a straightforward grassroots assault on materialism, the roughly 150-yearold ideological substratum or bedrock upon which almost all other intellectually certified ideas have since been constructed...
...At any rate, one of the reasons that 7.6 percent of our citizens spend their days with idle ?9 is that the so-called liberals have in their wisdom set up various impediments against economic activity...
...Materialism posits a "dead" universe consisting solely of empty space and particles of matter forever seeking greater disorder and randomness (entropy...
...He has, over a period of eight months, fashioned three different programs--all of them attempts to duplicate such New Testament feats as the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes and the Wedding Feast at Cana, where water was turned into wine...
...Prometheus stole fire from the heavens and championed man against the gods...
...Carter wants to conserve it for pumping rocking chairs on the front porch, for roosting before the boob tube, and for other such dynamic purposes...
...It is an unusual achievement...
...Increasingly militant fundamentalTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1980 5...
...C A P I T 0 L I D E A S EVOI.UTION NOW by Tom Bethell Governor Reagan, bless his heart, remarked at a press conference recently that he had doubts about the theory of evolution, and supported the idea that creationism should be given separate but equal billing in school biology texts...
...Malthus scowled, shook his old head, and figured that the human race would run off the edge of the earth instantaneously were it not for crime, disease, war, and vice...
...He wants to use it...
...On September 9, in Chicago--' 'the city that works," as local boomers still proudly affirmwRonald Reagan unveiled his economic program, a program for citizens who work or at least who want to work...
...about 15 years now...
...Jimmy adjudged it a "very, very serious mistake...
...Some of those impediments are government regulations to keep us saintly and healthy and down...
...Lewis Lehrman has described the difference between Reagan's economics and Carter's as the difference between Prometheus and Malthus...
...In this instance they see it as their unwritten duty to defend what they perceive as the modern enlightenment against religious assault, much as a good many of the journalists in the 1850s saw it as their duty to defend the church against newfangled science...
...Reagan sees us as capable...
...Mind refused to go away...
...Some of those impediments are laws like the minimum wage law that eliminates low-paying jobs--the only jobs some newcomers to the job market are capable of--thus creating unemployment and all the social evils that come with it...
...So has inflation...
...Under our President's roof there are counselors who advise that this is to be expected, for the eighties is to be a decade of limits, to which we shall simply have to habituate ourselves...
...To all these robust tax increases Ronald Reagan now proclaims that he would do cruel violence...
...Carter is the pessimist...
...No other president has accomplished it in this century...
...Even though he came into office roaring that our tax system was "a disgrace to the human race," the tax burden has risen wondrously during the reign of the smartest young man ever to graduate from the Plains, Georgia, high school...
...E D I T 0 R I A L REAGAN, CARTER, AND CASH by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Roughly speaking, for the 20th-century intellectual the second law of thermodynamics thus replaces the Apostles' Creed...
...Our President is a very smart fellow--or a quick study, as the cognoscenti of Washington say--and even before Reagan delivered his speech the Wonderboy served up his judgment of the GOP tax-cut plan...
...Thought remained something other than silent speech...
...Reagan wants to free us to improve our condition...
...As my friend Joe Sobran remarked, one begins to suspect that the news media simply define as a gaffe whatever they do not want discussed...
...Carter will keep us in our beds...
...Carter is not so sure we can do much more than pollute our environment, cheat one another, and line up for welfare...
...After these three years he wants to index taxation so that if the crafty pols on Capitol }Jill continue to inflate our economy, the), will not be getting away with ever larger hunks of the ever larger paychecks we are forced to earn just to keep up with our past standard of living...
...He believes we can do it, and he is unafraid of the outcome...
...Not even Herbert Hoover...
...Heavy taxes discourage people from working and creating wealth...
...His program would turn America into the largest poverty hospital ever heard of...
...He calls his program a "strategy for growth...
...One does not want to make too weighty a point of this disagreement, but Reagan's program does seem to place him more in the tradition of FDR, HST, and JFK than the policy of lowered expectations over which the present administration purrs...
...Well, when it comes to making mistakes with economic programs, the Wonderboy ought to know...
...that is to say, against the creation of jobs...
...Recent criticism of evolution has come from two very different directions...
...His prescription is to cut taxes 10 percent per year for three years, and he wants to reduce business taxes through faster depreciation...
...In his economic program he declares, rather eloquently I would say, that "more than any single thing, high rates of taxation destroy incentive to earn, to save, to invest...
...He was, naturally enough, opposed to the only one of these pastimes that is any fun...
...Seven and six-tenths percent of the Republic's workers, becalmed in this Age of the Common Carter, cannot get jobs...
...Placed side by side, the economic programs of Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter reveal antipodal views of mankind...
...Whether the second law really is a law in any meaningful and scientific sense of the term may legiti mately be doubted...
...First of all, whether we like it or not, let us at least concede that there has been a certain amount of controversy surrounding the theory of evolution for Tom Bet/sell is The American Spect a t o r ' s Washington editor and a Washington editor of Harper's...
...Reagan is out of sympathy with this Malthusian perspective...
...Yet the most onerous impediment against economic activity is taxation...
...He sees America as one vast geriatric ward...
...In 1979 it reached 21 percent, and under present law it is estimated that federal taxes will inhale 24.7 percent of our GNP in fiscal 1985...
...discourage businesses from expanding...
...They Adapted from RET's Monday columr, in the Washington Post...
...In 1976 the federal tax gouge amounted to 19.5 percent of our gross national product...
...He called it an "economic program for the '80s," and a glance at 4 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1980 its policies suggests that it is not the decade of the eighties but the age group that the Carter administration has in mind...
...They cripple productivity, lead to deficit financing and inflation and create unemployment...
...Carter sees us as inept and wobbling for Skid Row were it not for government's watchful eye...
...This was immediately pronounced a gaffe by members of the news media, whose arrogance is exceeded only by their ignorance...
...See Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind for a well-known, strenuously promoted but ultimately futile attempt by the modern academy to perform this latter act of reductionism...
...Actually, I've been looking for an opportunity to discuss this evolution business for some time now, so I'm grateful to the governor for giving me the necessary news peg...
...In sum, Reagan views the American people as a source of energy...
...One must keep in mind that working is not so feasible today as it was in days of yore...
...They force labor leaders to demand tax-free fringe benefits for their rank and file rather than wage increases...
...In the materialist scheme, mind is regarded either as less easily discerned matter, or a phenomenon somehow explicable in terms of behavior...
...Reagan is the optimist...
...Interestingly cnough, the theory of evolution itself contradicts the second law of thermodynamics, as does each and every instance of life...
...Apparently the administration senses that most of us were octogenarians, all bedridden and senile...
Vol. 13 • November 1980 • No. 11
