Originally posted by: Bigguns 93

Originally posted by: DirtyMitten
Yo
FDR & JFK galvanized this country when it needed it most. Policies aside, they were true leaders. Ike warned this country (although his warning were not heeded) about the potential effects of the military industrial complex on the democratic process.

So you think Regan was a great president then. He galvanized not only the country but was able to bypass partisanship in Congress. He brought the U.S. back from the despair of the Carter years when the U.S. was a whipping boy abroad and a shambles at home. He rebuilt our military, stood down and broke the USSR, got Ruskies to agree to disarm their nukes, and got Americans proud to be American.

Regan warned us that government is not the answer it is the problem but his warning was not heeded. Regan got most of his policies passed by a Democratic majority. Regan lead not only the U.S. but showed true leadership world wide that is still applauded today.


GOD DAM IT! You got me pumped up. Great speech. You hit the Regan presidency on the head. He made Americans proud to be American again. He had the communist leaders agreeing to his ideas and had communist oppressed countries freed so that they want to build a statue in every city.

He far surpassed JFK in that area and therefore must be your favorite president of your life time. HOLY SHIT that is a great point. God bless America!

Originally posted by: William T. Sherman
This is nonsense. Aside from lip service and media whoring, Reagan never did anything to topple the USSR. They were on the way out before he even came to power.

The only thing Reagan deserves credit for in relation to the USSR is the talks with Gorbachev that led to a slightly more fluid and well managed collapse.

And Bigguns,

You're probably my favorite poster here on account of your intellect and rational nature, but I couldn't disagree with you more about Reagan. I think in the grand scheme of things he's probably one of the worst presidents we've ever had. I think you've effectively been swindled by Reagan hype.

Originally posted by: Stryk
I guess you were asleep when the Soviets tried to take the same path China had taken in order to salvage their dictatorship. Reagan told them to pound sand until they had some real reform. That created the cracks for the system to crumble. Russia had seen worse economic times and their government survived.

But go bury your head in dogma and stamp out what you should have learned with your own eyes.

The scholars contributing to this volume write in the economic and historical tradition of the Austrian school, founded by Carl Menger with his book Principles of Economics (1875). The tradition emphasizes a deductive method, the role of choice and uncertainty in economic affairs, the power of market prices to coordinate economic activity, and the essentiality of private property for forming the basis of rational calculation. The Austrian school is also the historical bête noire of the Marxian school. Long before any other school came around to understanding the deep flaws in the Marxian approach, the Austrians had devoted an enormous amount of intellectual power to exposing its fallacies and dangers. Carl Menger refuted the labor theory of value, his student Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk demolished Marx's views of capital, F.A. Hayek showed the incompatibility between socialism and political freedom, and Ludwig von Mises attacked the core of socialist economic theory.[6]

It was Mises's criticism that has proven to be the most prescient. In his 1920 essay "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth," he argued that the socialist economy couldn't properly be called an "economy" at all, since the system provides no means for rationally allocating resources. It abolishes private property in capital goods, thereby eliminating the markets that produce prices with which to calculate profit and loss. The absence of rational economic calculation, and the institutional structures that undergird it, prevents any realistic assessment of the proper uses and opportunity costs and resource allocation options. "As soon as one gives up the conception of a freely established monetary price for goods of a higher order," Mises wrote, "rational production becomes completely impossible." The central planners of an industrial economy will find themselves in a perpetual state of confusion and ignorance, "groping in the dark."

"One may anticipate the nature of the future socialist society," he said seventy years before the rest of the world was to become convinced. "There will be hundreds and thousands of factories in operation. Very few of these will be producing wares ready for use; in the majority of cases what will be manufactured will be unfinished goods and production goods… Every good will go through a whole series of stages before it is ready for use. In the ceaseless toil and moil of this process, however, the administration will be without any means of testing their bearings."

From my life and study in Moscow, I can attest to the truth of this prediction. In an economy, nearly every consumption good requires several stages of production. The more natural resources used and the more complex the technology involved, the more stages of production are required. Yet lacking an ability to see a production process through to ends that consumers desire, Soviet socialism produced only military hardware, useless goods, goods to make other goods, while consumers were deprived of bare essentials.[7]

In the late 1980s, when glasnost at last permitted Soviet economists to speak out, they confirmed the death sentence that Mises had pronounced. As Martin Malia put it, "through the voices of Nikolay Shmelev, Gavriil Popov, Vasiliy Selyunin, Grigory Khanin, Larisa Piyasheva, Mikhail Berger, and subsequently Grigoriy Yavlinksy and Yegor Gaidar, they offered us a portrait of the Soviet that was in full accord with the evaluations of … Ludwig von Mises, whose book contains hardly a single figure and not a word about GNP."[8] This powerful confirmation, Malia points out, led to "methodological smuta" ("Time of Troubles" in Russian) in Western economics.

A common mistake Western observers made was to think the Soviet Union's fundamental problem was a lack of democracy. They completely overlooked that the institutional structure of the political system cannot overcome the problem inherent in an economic system with no means of rational calculation. The Soviet Union had a number of leaders who promised political reform, but none was able to put bread on the table. In fact, the primary problem in the Soviet Union was socialism, and it is still far from being dismantled in the nations that once made up that evil empire.

Ludwig von Mises

The Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises predicted the unsustainability and eventual collapse of the Soviet system in his 1921 book Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, published months before Lenin implemented the New Economic Policy reintroducing partial property rights. His analysis was based on the economic calculation problem, a critique of central planning first outlined in 1920 journal articles.

We may admit that in its initial period a socialist regime could to some extent rely upon of the preceding age of capitalism. But what is to be done later, as conditions change more and more? Of what use could the prices of 1900 be for the director in 1949? And what use can the director in 1989 derive from the knowledge of the prices of 1949?

Originally posted by: Kal-
Amen. He was a disastrous President.

Originally posted by: Stoneymontana
Kal, you weren't even a stain on your parents sheets yet.
Your opinion doesn't count.

Originally posted by: Stoneymontana
Kal, you weren't even a stain on your parents sheets yet.
Your opinion doesn't count.

Originally posted by: samUwell

Originally posted by: Stryk
I guess you were asleep when the Soviets tried to take the same path China had taken in order to salvage their dictatorship. Reagan told them to pound sand until they had some real reform. That created the cracks for the system to crumble. Russia had seen worse economic times and their government survived.

But go bury your head in dogma and stamp out what you should have learned with your own eyes.

wow so, what you are saying is that the American media thats owned and operated by the CFR is correct about the collapse of the USSR and everything i ever read on Mises.org, you know, the leading school on free market economic's who also predicted it would collapse on their own from their failed economic system is wrong?

lets see.... CFR controlled media opinion on the USSR or from the worlds greatest economic school?

start here http://mises.org/daily/3105

The scholars contributing to this volume write in the economic and historical tradition of the Austrian school, founded by Carl Menger with his book Principles of Economics (1875). The tradition emphasizes a deductive method, the role of choice and uncertainty in economic affairs, the power of market prices to coordinate economic activity, and the essentiality of private property for forming the basis of rational calculation. The Austrian school is also the historical bête noire of the Marxian school. Long before any other school came around to understanding the deep flaws in the Marxian approach, the Austrians had devoted an enormous amount of intellectual power to exposing its fallacies and dangers. Carl Menger refuted the labor theory of value, his student Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk demolished Marx's views of capital, F.A. Hayek showed the incompatibility between socialism and political freedom, and Ludwig von Mises attacked the core of socialist economic theory.[6]

It was Mises's criticism that has proven to be the most prescient. In his 1920 essay "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth," he argued that the socialist economy couldn't properly be called an "economy" at all, since the system provides no means for rationally allocating resources. It abolishes private property in capital goods, thereby eliminating the markets that produce prices with which to calculate profit and loss. The absence of rational economic calculation, and the institutional structures that undergird it, prevents any realistic assessment of the proper uses and opportunity costs and resource allocation options. "As soon as one gives up the conception of a freely established monetary price for goods of a higher order," Mises wrote, "rational production becomes completely impossible." The central planners of an industrial economy will find themselves in a perpetual state of confusion and ignorance, "groping in the dark."

and if you want more, i can get you plenty more.

Originally posted by: -EB- Bluedoctor
Ronald Reagan?! THE ACTOR?!

Originally posted by: Nathan Bedford Forrest
The greatest American heroes of the 80s:

1. G.I. Joe
2. Hulk Hogan
3. Ronald Reagan

Everyone of them was fiction.

Originally posted by: =>PX<=Major

Originally posted by: -EB- Bluedoctor
Ronald Reagan?! THE ACTOR?!

It's (not so)funny how the hardcore conservatives love to rip on Hollywood and all those darned liberals....unless of course...it's about their beloved Reagan. Oh what a wonderful actor he was, have you seen the one with the monkey in it? HILARITY!

Originally posted by: [-NM-] -SS-

Originally posted by: Pixel
half the time it's offense. and if you want to bitch about spending, you are a hypocrite if you don't acknowledge military spending, taking up nearly 2/3 of our entire budget.

Normally, we ignore each other's posts, but this time, I would like to see how you come up with 2/3.

Originally posted by: ~~Snake~~

Originally posted by: =>PX<=Major

Originally posted by: -EB- Bluedoctor
Ronald Reagan?! THE ACTOR?!

It's (not so)funny how the hardcore conservatives love to rip on Hollywood and all those darned liberals....unless of course...it's about their beloved Reagan. Oh what a wonderful actor he was, have you seen the one with the monkey in it? HILARITY!

Oh yea. Because Hollywood is the same now as it was when Reagan was an actor

Now please shut the fuck up

Originally posted by: =>PX<=Major

Originally posted by: ~~Snake~~

Originally posted by: =>PX<=Major

Originally posted by: -EB- Bluedoctor
Ronald Reagan?! THE ACTOR?!

It's (not so)funny how the hardcore conservatives love to rip on Hollywood and all those darned liberals....unless of course...it's about their beloved Reagan. Oh what a wonderful actor he was, have you seen the one with the monkey in it? HILARITY!

Oh yea. Because Hollywood is the same now as it was when Reagan was an actor

Now please shut the fuck up

I will if you will....DEAL?

Of course not, you like running your mouth like a runt.

Originally posted by: ~~Snake~~

Originally posted by: =>PX<=Major

Originally posted by: ~~Snake~~

Originally posted by: =>PX<=Major

Originally posted by: -EB- Bluedoctor
Ronald Reagan?! THE ACTOR?!

It's (not so)funny how the hardcore conservatives love to rip on Hollywood and all those darned liberals....unless of course...it's about their beloved Reagan. Oh what a wonderful actor he was, have you seen the one with the monkey in it? HILARITY!

Oh yea. Because Hollywood is the same now as it was when Reagan was an actor

Now please shut the fuck up

I will if you will....DEAL?

Of course not, you like running your mouth like a runt.

You calling me a runt is a perfect example of how outa touch you are yet again.