Rothbard on Reagan’s economics: “Amidst the intellectual confusion, however, a few dominant tendencies, legacies from their glory days, remain among Keynesians: (1) a penchant for continuing deficits, (2) a devotion to fiat paper money and at least moderate inflation, (3) adherence to increased government spending, and (4) an eternal fondness for higher taxes, to lower deficits a wee bit, but more importantly, to inflict some bracing pain on the greedy, selfish, and short-sighted American public. The Reagan Administration managed to institutionalize these goodies, seemingly permanently on the American scene.”
Rothbard on Reaganism as politics: “Systematic betrayal was the precise meaning and function of the Reagan administration. So effective was Ronald Reagan as a rhetorician, though not a practitioner, of freedom and small government, that, to this day, most conservatives have still not cottoned on to the scam of the Reagan administration. For the ‘Reagan Revolution’ was precisely a taking of the revolutionary, free-market, and small government spirit of the 1970s, and the other anti- government vote of 1980, and turning it into its opposite, without the public or even the activists of that revolution realizing what was going on.”
