“Republicans believed they didn’t have to be the party of root canals, warning the public about the dangers of deficit financing, or always saying no. Why don’t we become the Santa Claus Party and give tax cuts to everybody? We’ll win elections and live happily ever after — well,I think that’s just another variation of the Keynesian magic that the state can solve everything. There needs to be discipline. Economic growth, wealth, and prosperity take a lot of effort, sweat, and real-world endeavor over long periods.”
David Stockman
“Because Republicans claim that we had this great Golden Age in the 1980s, that there was a boom in the 1990s, and that everything was going well during the George W. Bush era until some mysterious comet came in from deep space and caused a meltdown in 2008. My argument is that this was mostly a phony prosperity built on massive additions to public and private debt. That so-called prosperity came from the printing press in the Eccles Building run by Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke. The “prosperity” didn’t come from tax cuts made by Republican policy makers.”
David Stockman
“I’m in the Ron Paul camp, and Rand sounds pretty good, too — at least on liberty, the warfare state, anti-interventionist foreign policy, opposition to big government, and the Keynesian deficit delusion. And he’s also solid on the clear and present danger to the American economy posed by [Federal Reserve Chair Ben] Bubbles Bernanke and his loony band of money printers.”
David Stockman
“We’ve got a rogue central bank that’s violating the principle of sound money that mankind accumulated over centuries. Interest rates were dropped to zero in early 2009 — I say zero, but 10 basis points is the same thing — and Bernanke’s suggesting he’ll keep them at that level through 2015. That’s six years when money markets have zero interest rates. That’s a lunatic economic proposition. Capital has to have a price. Money has to have a price. When it’s driven to zero, you’re essentially disarming the financial system. It can’t function without prices.”
David Stockman
“Reagan’s defense build-up was unnecessary — most of it went into a vast conventional armada of ships, planes, and tanks that could be used to invade places such as Iraq and Afghanistan and had nothing to do with the so-called Soviet threat. I would give him terrible marks for being so stubborn and insistent in that defense build-up. He had a vision of trying to shrink government, but every time some real tough choices came along, he walked away from them because the political heat was so great. He was easily talked into rationalizations for things that were very antithetical to free markets and supply-side. For instance, he put quotas on auto imports from Japan because he got double-talked into it by Secretary of Transportation Drew Lewis and the auto industry.”
David Stockman
