March 24, 2003
IMPEACH JFK:
A reckless path (Paul Craig Roberts, March 20, 2003, Washington Times)"We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war for our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy."
--U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, U.S. representative to the International Conference on Military Trials, Aug. 12, 1945.Will Bush be impeached? Will he be called a war criminal? These are not hyperbolic questions. Mr. Bush has permitted a small cadre of neoconservatives to isolate him from world opinion, putting him at odds with the United Nations and America's allies.
What better illustrates Mr. Bush's isolation than the fact that he delivered his March 16 ultimatum to the U.N. concerning Iraq from an air base in the Azores, where there was no prospect for massive demonstrations against his policy. Standing with Mr. Bush against the world were Britain and Spain.
The U.S., once a guarantor of peace, is now perceived in the rest of the world as an aggressor.[...]
Mr. Bush and his advisers have forgotten that the power of an American president is temporary and relative. The U.S. is supposed to be the world's leader. For the Bush administration to pursue a policy that sets the U.S. government at odds with the world is to invite comparisons with recklessness that we have not seen in international politics since Nikita Khrushchev tried to install nuclear missiles in Cuba. Is Saddam Hussein worth this much grief?
The comparison is apt, though accidental. John F. Kennedy imposed a blockade on Cuba--which is an act of war--simply because it was taking steps to defend itself with WMD. Is Mr. Roberts suggesting that JFK should have been impeached for this? Probably not.
N.B.--We, on the other hand, would have supported his impeachment for leaving the Castro regime in place when given a perfect pretext to remove it.
Posted by Orrin Judd at March 24, 2003 5:49 PMPaul Craig Roberts and fellow supply-siders contributed mightily to the success of the Reagan Administration. Unfortunately, Roberts makes little sense on most topics these days. It's a shame he's come down so hard on what is effectively the successor to the Reagan Administration in an area (foreign policy) which is not, to put it kindly, a strength of his.
Posted by: Kevin Whited at March 24, 2003 7:32 PMOne wonders if the former Reaganauts now think aid to the mujahadeen and Contras and the liberation of Grenada were illegal and immoral. What of the bombing of Libya? Should Reagan have been impeached too?
Posted by: oj at March 24, 2003 8:13 PMSupply side economics never made any sense and had nothing to do with the growth of the economy. I have read some few of Robert's op-eds over the years -- perhaps a dozen all told -- and consider him a ninny on all subjects.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at March 24, 2003 10:05 PMHarry:
No economist argues with the basic idea of supply-0side economics; the only question is the point at which a tax biurden is so steep that cuts are necessary and will be effective.
Maybe not. But I have spent a lifetime reporting what economists know about the economy and am not very impressed.
To the extent that anything Reagan did propelled the economy, it was a gigantic dose of Keynesian pump priming. Of course, if you believed, in 1980, that the biggest problem facing the US economy was a looming shortage of capital -- which is what Roberts thought -- then it might follow that tax cuts would have relieved the problem.
But, since the problem never existed, it did not require relief. It isn't easy to move something as big as the world's biggest economy, as FDR found out.
Harry:
Bunk. The most important thing he did was give Volcker a free hand to crush inflation and give the American people back some of their own money, thereby breaking the psychology of ever rising taxes.
Then, in the longer term, ending the Cold War allowed us to cut defense spending in half, delivering the entire balancing of the budget and the surplus, which Clinton tragically squandered by not also cutting programs and taxes.
Posted by: oj at March 25, 2003 11:47 AMInflation is not quite crushed, but you are right to think curbing it was important.
However, you are going to have to hunt a long time to find an economist who believes that running very big deficits in the fisc helps to curb inflation.
The development of the US economy seems to my to have been pretty seamless, taking the longer view. I still think the secular decline in commodity prices since 1945 is the most important factor. I could be wrong.
But I cannot be wrong about supply siders. Whatever moved the economcy, that wasn't it.
If you are a fan of capital flows, then the tidal waves of cash -- into the Middle East in 1973, then back to the West, then to Japan, and then back into the US, may have been an even bigger factor than the secular decline in prices.
Being historically minded and not too enamored of equations to describe economies, I look back to the previous secular decline in prices and what it did for the US economy -- made it the biggest in the world.