“Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
If you were to ask fans of the late Ronald Reagan, they would tell you this quote from his 1981 inaugural address summed up why they loved him so much.
To them, Reagan meant the end of activist government intervening in the lives of the less than fortunate. He joked that the scariest words in the English language were “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
All very snarky after more than three decades of post-war prosperity.
There’s just one problem.
Reagan never said the quote at the beginning that was attributed to him.
He said something like it, but something far less comprehensive.
The first section of his inaugural on January 20th, 1981, was about a decade or more of economic misery that was a combination of stagnated growth and runaway inflation. Folks called it stagflation and this was what Reagan said:
“The business of our nation goes forward. These United States are confronted with an economic affliction of great proportions. We suffer from the longest and one of the worst sustained inflations in our national history. It distorts our economic decisions, penalizes thrift, and crushes the struggling young and the fixed- income elderly alike. It threatens to shatter the lives of millions of our people.
“Idle industries have cast workers into unemployment, causing human misery and personal indignity. Those who do work are denied a fair return for their labor by a tax system which penalizes successful achievement and keeps us from maintaining full productivity.
“But great as our tax burden is, it has not kept pace with public spending. For decades, we have piled deficit upon deficit, mortgaging our future and our children’s future for the temporary convenience of the present. To continue this long trend is to guarantee tremendous social, cultural, political, and economic upheavals.
“You and I, as individuals, can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but for only a limited period of time. Why, then, should we think that collectively, as a nation, we are not bound by that same limitation?
“We must act today in order to preserve tomorrow. And let there be no misunderstanding–we are going to begin to act, beginning today.
“The economic ills we suffer have come upon us over several decades. They will not go away in days, weeks, or months, but they will go away. They will go away because we, as Americans, have the capacity now, as we have had in the past, to do whatever needs to be done to preserve this last and greatest bastion of freedom.”
That was how Reagan defined and described the problem.
Here’s what he said next.
“In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
Read that carefully and think about it. He didn’t say government was never the solution and always the problem. He was describing one specific time and one specific problem.
With President Joe Biden unveiling his plans tonight, there will certainly be those on the right who will throw Reagan as a response to Biden’s plans for an expanded government role. But if Reagan were still alive, he would certainly understand that the private sector could never have dealt with the pandemic.
We have had nearly 600,000 deaths because of a bad actor in the White House.
Without the government playing any role at all, there might have been 10 times that many … or even more.
This has been one of those times when the response to someone being from the government and being here to help would be very different.
Oh, thank goodness.