I found your March 28th Opinion piece insulting to my intelligence and demeaning to the accomplishments of all American Individuals. The article displayed your conceitedness, thinking you could mischaracterize past events, take facts out of context, and misstate the thoughts and words of individuals to justify your fantasy land. To respond, I’ll start at the beginning of your manifesto.

You start by mischaracterizing Reagan’s objectives with his tax cuts. It was your party and peers that called his actions “trickle down” economics. Reagan’s objectives were about simplifying and inflation adjusting the tax code, and cutting marginal rates below socialistic levels (70%, I believe) so that investment capital could flow more freely. Since all experienced the same percentage drop in taxes (I guess you forgot Reagan’s insistence that “tax relief should be apportioned in proportion to tax liabilities paid”), it would be impossible for a rational being to say that it was unfair to any one class. You neglected truths in order to make your point.

You mention that Obamanomics “is premised on the central importance of public investment in the productivity of Americans.” Productivity is the measure of value created by a unit of effort. How do you, the PhD, intellectual central planners, know what I value? How do you know how much to invest to obtain that value? How do you know when my wishes has been fed and when my desires change? You don’t. Our world is dynamic, yet you hold static and irrational theories above us as truths. Your ego makes you think you know what is best for me, but you are wrong.

You mention many times that you and Mr. Obama see problems that are too large to be solved without government playing a central role. Can you please give examples of problems government has successfully solved (outside of winning wars)? Education? There you have succeeded at empowering teacher unions at the expense of our children’s futures. Social Security? Last time I checked, my IRA and 401k, down 25% in the last year, is still worth more than my social security account since it, at least, has assets in it. Social Security central planners have no ability to make good on their promises, yet you think that that “big-problem-only-government-can-solve” should be placed on government’s resume? That is a foolish and illogical conclusion. How about providing housing for everyone? How’s that working for you? Your fabulous government problem solvers really made a dent there, no? Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac. Those are success stories in your eyes, I presume. Your central planning, good intentions have taken us to the edge. And now you want to blame free markets for that!?! Did you neglect to read the transcripts of the House Finance Subcommittee when Frank and Waters in 2005 expressed happiness with the job being done and the increased leverage being used by your central planning, government-sponsored entities (that would be Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). How about our welfare system? For 61 years, it existed at the federal level with no accountability, no measurement of outcomes. Since the responsibility to administer welfare moved to the state level 14 years ago, only slightly more than half of the states actually measure the success of the programs (as of 2003). Mr. Reich, one tip from an ex-engineer, if you take actions to solve a problem, you have to see if your actions actually go about solving the problem.

You mention that “capital no longer remains within the borders of a nation.” That it “moves to wherever around the world it can get the best return.” If you believe that (which I do), why endorse limiting the number of educated individuals that can immigrate to the US through visa restrictions? Though I may agree with the idea that we have our fill of intellectuals, it seems that we may want to allow capital (both material and human) to flow into this country rather than lock the entrance and force it to leave by imposing restrictive and arbitrary regulations and excessively high corporate tax rates (2nd highest, I believe). I wasn’t educated at an Ivy League Institution so maybe I’m not capable of understanding the intricacies of the issue. I’ll stick to listening to Milton Friedman and F. Hayek who wrote on the benefits of free movement of capital as a means to produce stable and productive societies. You may want to put down your Karl Marx poetry and read some of their works.

When it comes to your comment “every nation faces an implicit choice of whether its strategic advantage will lie in low costs or high productivity. For the better part of the last three decades America’s job strategy has tended toward the former”, I believe you may have forgotten how to use ‘former’ and ‘latter’. You meant to say ‘latter’ or ‘high productivity’. When I look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, I see that our productivity numbers have been accelerating for the past three decades and that we are in the top five countries when it comes to productivity. It was only the decade of the 1970′s that our nation exhibited low productivity (when did you enter the labor force?).

You mention the failures of free markets, using Enron as your example. Last time I checked, it was a regulated institution with significant political power used to obtain it’s position. It had the SEC and state utility central planners reviewing its actions. Never mind the facts, let’s just assume you are correct (which is a lot to assume). Enron failed. Stockholders and bondholders lost lots of money. Employees lost jobs and savings. It was a risk they all knew they were taking. Private individuals working for private institutions were warning that the cashflows of the company were not jiving with the reported income. Fraud was committed. Lessons were learned. The world went on. Business continued. The productive assets within Enron were, through free market actions and the rule of law, placed in more stable hands and went on to be productive.

The biggest issue I have with your article, your comment that “Obamanomics recognizes that the only resource uniquely rooted in a national economy is its people,” is the crux of the difference between you and me, between Obamanomics and Reaganomics. You see people as resources of a nation, I see people as Thinking Individuals coexisting within an inanimate institution called a nation. Implicit in your words is a thought that we are no different than the veins of coal in the ground or the rivet gun needed to make a building. I would rather see people as those that fought for liberty, developed ideas that others found valuable, and produced, through their effort, a foundation for their children. You see us as weak masses incapable of solving today’s problems. I see the people of the United States of America as the individuals that built this country to be the largest holder of wealth in this world, that devote the most to charitable organizations, that have prolonged life, that produced the transistor and produced the operating systems that run most of the worlds computers, and that created the Internet (not Mr. Gore) just to name an iota of our accomplishments. These were/are big issues that were not too big for us to solve.

Your motives are becoming clear. You, as an early Baby Boomer, fought the ‘establishment’ your entire life, not to free the individual but to “win the hill.” You fought power in order to grab it yourself. You have no respect for your fellow man, you look down on him. You prognosticate the teachings of failed dictators and fascists. You deceive by hiding behind words such as ‘fair’, ‘equality’, ‘economic justice’ in order to gain power so you can dictate ‘fairness’ in the manner you feel is correct. It doesn’t work that way. Your utopia is not mine. And you are not on a higher moral ground because of it. You aim to enslave many to bring equal outcomes, instead of allowing each to pursue his own outcome. Your ideals define fascism.

For you ever to be taken seriously by me or by many of the citizens, you need to accurately portray the past events and correctly assess the causes to the effects we are seeing today. Your ego and conceit are standing in your way. Get out of your ivory tower on Mount Berkeley and come view the real world with me. If you do, you will become an optimist, like me, in the American Individual. In my travels, I have the pleasure to go to areas of our country outside of Northern California and East Coast. Travel to anywhere in the Midwest and stay at a Double Tree. Have their free breakfast and eavesdrop on the sales meeting that occurs at the table beside you. Drive from Omaha to Iowa City on Interstate 80 late at night and see the trucker on the side of the road taking a rest or having work done on his truck by a roadside assistance provider. Visit the managements of the millions of small companies that are making the innovations you demand of us. You will see that these are the individuals that make our economy, that solve our problems, that provide for our children. They are not part of your central planning empire. To conclude, it was not the government that made this country successful, it was the absent of government.

Here is an actual quote from Mr. Reagan that you should reread many, many times:

“We need true tax reform that will at least make a start toward restoring for our children the American Dream that wealth is denied to no one, that each individual has the right to fly as high as his strength and ability will take him…. But we cannot have such reform while our tax policy is engineered by people who view the tax as a means of achieving changes in our social structure.” – Ronald Reagan

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