The Sour Fruits of Reaganomics

Reaganomics represents a new economic policy, one that in principle seeks to curtail or abandon public service and oversight and replace it by presumably more efficient private agents. True, the stress Reaganomics places on competitiveness and profitability as regulatory mechanisms is deeply rooted in economic thought. But no less important has been the notion of the social control of business.

Reaganomics bears only a superficial resemblance to earlier postwar economic policies. Like them, it is Keynesian in form, relying on budget deficits to keep economic expansion going. But unlike them, it is reactionary in substance. The earlier policies by and large aimed at what we might call a mixed economy. The proponents of the mixed ec...