Remembering Jack Kemp

THIS WEEKEND Jeb Bush was telling conservatives that the Reagan era was over.The American people responded, he said, to the message of hope and change offered by the Democrats in 2008, and Republicans should offer the same.

Well maybe so. But before we do let’s pause one moment to remember Jack Kemp who, after Ronald Reagan himself, symbolized the Reagan era.

Jack Kemp was an AFL football hero who parlayed his local fame as quarterback of the Buffalo Bills into a seat in Congress. In the 1970s he responded to the Carter malaise and inflation by proposing, with Senator Bill Roth (R-DE), the Kemp-Roth plan to reduce income tax rates across the board by 30 percent.

The idea was anathema both to big-spending Democrats and budget-balancing Republicans.

But it caught the attention of presidential candidate Ronald Reagan and eventually became enacted in 1981, taking effect in 1983.

The year 1983, when the Reagan-Kemp-Roth tax cuts took effect, marked the beginning of the Great Boom that lasted from 1983 till 2000.

You can say that going over the events of the late 1970s is mere nostalgia, and that we should move on. Maybe we should, if we just want to win the next election.

But the point that Reagan enthusiasts are trying to make is that the policy of hard money, low tax rates, and restrained government spending is an agenda for the ages. In this view the troubles in the economy since 1998 arise from the abandoning of the Reagan-Kemp principles. Government is always a dead weight on the economy. It is also used by special interests who want to use the power of government to skew the economy to their advantage.

The point that Reagan and Kemp enthusiasts want to make is that the Obama agenda of cheap money, high spending, mega-projects, and high tax rates will end in tears just like the Carter economy of the late 1970s.

If that is nostalgia then let’s have more of it. It would certainly be a fitting memorial to Jack Kemp, conservative hero and great American.

Sphere: Related Content |

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

TAGS

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

mysql close 0