Rotten Domestic Apples

I see that David Stockman has been indicted on charges “that he covered up the dire financial state of his company as it headed into bankruptcy.” That is a quote from the Jeremy Peters article in The New York Times. How the apples do fall! This is the very same David Stockman who engineered the Reagan economic policy referred to as ‘supply side economics.” My limited understanding of economics tells me that what the Reagan administration sought was the reduction of what they termed ‘the welfare state.” That would be those people least able to care for themselves and for whom the government would assume some degree of responsibility. Pe’ah 1:1 says that there are no limits to the size of corners of the field which may be left to the poor. But Stockman and his cronies set severe limits to the size, sometimes eliminating the corners altogether. As there Republicans are all clichés, let me end this with a cliché: the apple just doesn’t fall very far from the tree, does it? It lands on the ground, and gets ground into cider.

There has been this talk of late that Ronald Reagan was one of our great Presidents. There is even some talk that his ideas can be traced to the Transcendentalists and particularly, Ralph Waldo Emerson. The latter would be appalled to be linked with the former.

Check out the more recent issue of The New York Review of Books, and Russell Baker’s essay discussing some recent books on Ronald Reagan, and particularly John Patrick Diggins’ new adulatory book on the Great Communicator.

Let the trees fall. He may have grayed, but David Stockman still looks mean.