Reagan's Magic Market
Quote collage by J.S. Larochelle, December 2007
(page 1 of 3)
"...President Reagan's 'magic of the market'
is the bedrock of American capitalism."
-- Business Week Archive
"His trust was in the magic of the marketplace."
-- Lou Cannon, "President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime," 2000 |
INTRODUCTION: The invention of 'money' seemed like a brilliant solution to the problem of 'trading' or 'exchanging' my product for your product, until WE had to do the actual mathematics of determining how much money to produce and how to pay for the banking system.
If it sounds 'magical' to put ten cents in the 'piggy bank' at night and count 11 cents in the morning, that's because it is 'magic' to 'earn interest on your investment.'
U.S. President Ronald Reagan used the concept "magic of the marketplace" over and over in his many speeches about the wonders of 'economic growth.'
Which leads to the question, if economics is a science, why aren't we all billionaires?
"we embrace what President Reagan called the magic of the marketplace"
"Reagan promised to restore prosperity by returning to the philosophy of limited government and putting faith in the "magic of the marketplace."
-- Dennis Florig, "The Power of Presidential Ideologies," 1992
"Ronald Reagan unleashed free markets upon the world by giving corporations expansive powers. Reagan pronounced, 'Government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem. The societies which have achieved the most spectacular broadbased economic progress in the shortest period of time ... What unites them all is their willingness to believe in the magic of the marketplace.'"
-- Ronald Reagan, Remarks at the Annual Meeting of the Boards of Governors of the World Bank Group and International Monetary Fund, September 29, 1981
"Even Reagan's opponents conceded his 'magic' and had all but given up seething about it." --Michael Kinsley "Sitting Pretty, TIME Magazine, Sep. 02, 1996
"Reagan's magic seems to be working abroad as well as at home."
-- TIME Magazine,
"A Whiff off Panic" - TIME Magazine: "The Reagan Administration, though, was not apologizing last week for its economic policies. In fact, it was preaching its free-market program to the less developed countries. Said President Reagan to the 11,000 central bankers and financiers: 'The societies that have achieved the most spectacular, broad-based economic progress in the shortest period of time are not the most tightly controlled nor necessarily the biggest in size nor the wealthiest in natural resources. No, what unites them is their willingness to believe in the magic of the marketplace.'"
"Alex Gibney's Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is a thoroughly professional, frequently spectacular piece of muckraking | In the end, here was Ronald Reagan's 'magic of the marketplace' steeped in moral turpitude, the opportunities of government deregulation scornfully debased, the power of comic-book machismo unleashed . . ." --Bill Gallo, Dallas Observer, April 28, 2005
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