General Interest > Tacitus' Realm

Mission Accomplished

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Xelebes:
The government has the right to protect people by holding people to account for foolish or misguided notions.  Romantic leadership coupled with privilege devolves into the very abuses we experienced in the programs or the abusive schools.  Reagan relied on romantic leadership and privilege to cover up his incompetency and achieved, for the most part, sideways results for the things he claimed he would do.  The exceptions were either downright awful or fairly good.

heretik:
When I think of Reagon and Clinton I look at their approval ratings just before their 2nd terms as presidents. They were high somewhere around 50% which in my mind means these two presidents were resonating with Americans and a lot of them. Their programs were being pushed through and for the most part life was good, business was good. These two men were real leaders (like them or not) they led, they stood out and you knew who was running things.
 Bush and O'Bama I haven't ever felt that they were running this country. Treasury Sec. Geithner runs the country for O'bama and Cheney and Rove ran the country for Bush. I could go on and on concerning the ignorance both of these presidents have where it involves international diplomacy, business and politics.
Men or Women that are qualified no longer want to run. The media has turned politics into a rag mag weekly blog. Dirt and filth are great if you can't find it or make it up so it looks like it. Who cares if this in the end creates more damage to the fragile physic America is feeling today. Just keep piling it on.
The next major problem is the entrenched warfare going on between the two ideologies (if you can even call them that) Republicans and Democrats refuse to work together at all. They can give a rats ass about this country, they have this fantasy that everything will be OK in the end. Well for them it will be OK, they get to walk away with a pension and health care paid for by the taxpayer.

ajax13:
Ronald Reagan claimed to have particpated in the liberation of Nazi death camps when in fact he spent the war in California.  That fact alone leaves me with total bewilderment about who Reagan the man was, and what his role was during his presidency.  Nothing could convince me that Ronald Reagan led anything.  I am very curious about the two ideologies to which you referred.  I have lived through Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, the Bushes, Clinton and Obama.  Throughout that time the armed forces of the United States killed people in foreign lands.  Workers rights were eroded and their incomes declined in spite of vast increases in worker productivity.  The massive profits reaped by capitalists were siphoned off from the productive areas of the economy and transferred into speculative finance.  There has been one single ideology in US government, and that is fostering an environment in which the richest get richer, and the rest of the population serves to make this happen.

Xelebes:
I would not say that philosophy or ideology in the US has been solely to make rich get richer.  There has been technology leaps in the last 40 years that have left the law in the dust.  The biggest is decision-point automation (computers and robots.)  This development has left the person working on the factory lines unable to compete with the new hardware.  Some of the philosophies have clashed - the philosophy that we should focus our human resources more into higher level decision making and the philosophy that people hold dear hand-crafted goods over the expendable but necessary manufactured goods.  The first relies heavily on colleges and universities to provide it while the other has seen shop floors disappear in schools and technical schools remain stagnant.

There are other distortions going onand they do protect some people's wealth but for the most part, we have to start recognising what decision-point automation means and focus the development of labour to providing services to each other (design, health care, education, and entertainment.)

Reagan's policies are lifted directly from the hot economics of the 70s where people were postulating with the same tools as the Keynesian economics save for the experimental data.  The truth is that Keynesian economics was derived at a time when historical analysis and auditing was crucial to determine how things fell so precipitiously while the economists of the 70s were left studying the same data and left to their wits to come up with an opposing theory.  Behavioural economics, something that may have only been in it's most bare beginnings at the time only became a whole school of investigation in the 2000s, and we have yet to come up with enough significant analysis to come up with policies grounded on it.

That being said, Reagan pretty much relied on using sweet words to comfort the people who had just come out of the precipitious 70s, in much the same way as Obama had.

ajax13:
So it was an inability of American workers to compete with computers that led to the transfer of the manufacturing sector to China, and to the creation of a an economy where finance has supplanted commodity production, with the exception of course of arms manufacturing which is  financed entirely by public debt?

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