by Henry Olsen
Libertarians like Klausner disagreed. Self-ownership, the inherent right of an individual to do whatever he or she wants with his or her own person or property, is a core principle for the libertarian. This right can be constrained only in the case of a direct violation of another person’s right, such as physical violence. Prospective action to reduce the likelihood of harm coming to pass, or any effort to provide services that would empower one person at the financial expense of another, is to a libertarian inherently unjust.
Reagan and Klausner clashed again and again over these competing principles. A lengthy exchange occurred over the Food and Drug Administration. Reagan stated that he supported the existence of the FDA, a federal agency that is in charge of ensuring the safety of all food and drugs sold in America. The FDA, he argued, ensures “that some unscrupulous individual can’t sell us canned meat that gives us botulism” and gives us “the protection of knowing that a drug on the shelf is not going to poison us or give us an adverse effect.” In this and other fields, Reagan believed that “regulations that are for the protection of the people” were a legitimate function of government; only those that “tak[e] away the rights of management to make business decisions with regard to their competition” were improper.
Klausner disagreed. He pointedly asked Reagan if he thought “the Food and Drug Administration basically serves the Big Brother role, the protectionist role, and that the free market could adequately deal with it in the absence of regulations.” Reagan replied that perhaps the free market would deal with it, but that government should remain a “Big Brother” to oversee private regulation to ensure that “industry did not, for profit, gradually erode the standards.” Reagan again backed the principle that society acting through government could legitimately restrain others to prevent them from potentially committing harmful acts even when there was no evidence a particular individual was likely or even considering such action.
It is one thing to constrain people to prevent the commission of future direct harms. Some libertarians view these policies as extensions of the idea that government can protect people against the commission of directly harmful acts. It is quite another to argue that the government can legitimately tax one person to provide services to help advance another. Most libertarians deeply reject this principle and thus are opposed to government social insurance or welfare schemes, and in many cases are also opposed to government provision or financing of education and schools.
Not Reagan. As we have seen, Reagan always supported this principle even when supporting Barry Goldwater. He did not retreat from this principle when confronted in this interview.
Higher education was the arena in which this battle was waged. Klausner asked Reagan if he thought “there was a proper role for government in providing a university education” and if “it’s proper to use tax revenue to finance higher education.” While expressing sympathy for the idea of private education, the man who had long expressed approval of the “expansion of our public university system” and had told Eurkea College graduates that “no one would have it otherwise” politely said yes to both questions. He saw nothing wrong with government “‘provid[ing] an education for the individual that can’t provide for himself” and said “tuition should never be a block to anyone getting an education who could not otherwise afford to go to the university.” While he wished that government had provided this education through “private sector universities,” the fact they did not do so was not a violation of principle for Reagan. The major harm he saw that came from the expansion of the public sector was that higher education would be otherwise “far cheaper.”
Here again we see the wide gap between the principles of Reagan and those of libertarians like Klausner and Goldwater. To the latter, using taxation to provide benefits that are intended to help a person advance in life was illegitimate and counterproductive (Klausner) or deeply suspect (Goldwater). For Reagan, it was a perfectly natural sentiment, one tied indelibly to the realization of the American dream of freedom and self-determination. On this, the core question that divided Hoover and Roosevelt forty-three years before, Reagan still stood with FDR.
Of course, FDR’s vision is legitimate only if one considers indirect popular consent through elections to be a legitimate form of self-government. Libertarians even today are extremely suspicious of democratic government. They do not view democratic consent as legitimate in most cases, as it always leads to some people being coerced into a transaction through taxation that they did not personally agree to. Libertarians contend the only legitimate consent is, with the few exceptions granted for mutual self-protection, that which is granted individually and specifically to another individual for a specific purpose.
Reagan disagreed, and he and Klausner clashed over this principle as well. The clash started with a discussion about the income tax. Reagan said he was critical of progressive income taxation, but thought income taxation itself was “probably as fair a method of raising revenue for the government as any.” He likened the income tax to an arrangement a hypothetical group of shipwrecked people might make on a desert island, assigning people certain tasks so that they spent a certain part of their time doing their share to keep everyone alive and safe. That led to the following exchange:
Klausner: Of course, if you’re talking about starting from scratch—the shipwrecked people on the island—you’re really talking about a voluntary approach, aren’t you—as against taxation?
Reagan: Well, we’re inclined to think our government here is a voluntary approach and that we’ve set up a government to perform certain things, such as the national protection, etc.
Klausner: Aren’t we deluding ourselves in terms of consent, though? When we’re talking about taxation, aren’t we really dealing with force and coercion and nothing less than that?
Reagan: Well, government’s only weapons are force and coercion and that’s why we shouldn’t let it get out of hand. And that’s what the founding fathers had in mind with the Constitution, that you don’t let it get out of hand.
But you say voluntary on the island. . . . Now, what do you think would happen in that community if some individual said: “Not me; I won’t stand guard.” Well, I think the community would expel him and say “Well, we’re not going to guard you.” So voluntarism does get into a kind of force and coercion where there is a legitimate need for it.
Klausner quickly moved on, but the fundamental disagreement had been laid bare.9 Reagan believed that indirect consent was true consent, and that as such elected representatives had the legitimate right to enact coercive laws for prospective protection and for individual advancement regardless of the direct opposition some individuals might have to those laws.
If libertarians exalt individual consent and denigrate democratic consent, their opposition to social conservatism and hawkish national defense becomes easier to understand. For the libertarian, the social conservative seeks to deny individuals their right to self-government by regulating abortion, drug usage, pornography, or any sort of sexual expression. If democratic government itself is inherently suspect, the fact that a majority or supermajority of people in a community think such behavior is harmful to them has no weight. Those people are, in a libertarian view, free not to engage in any of the behaviors they seek to proscribe. In short, their only legitimate remedy is an individual one rather than a collective one. Any attempt to impose a collective decision in these matters is as illegitimate to a libertarian as attempts to restrain a businessperson in the conduct of his business or to levy taxation on someone to finance another person’s service.
The same reasoning leads to a very restrictive view of international engagement. For a libertarian, wars are just only in cases of direct self-defense, and hence the sort of military engagement with the world that America started to employ after World War II is both harmful and unjust. Libertarians were vociferously opposed to communism: it was, indeed, the very denial of every major premise of a libertarian society. Despite this, libertar
ians in the 1970s and 1980s tended to oppose American military alliances and involvement overseas unless American territory or lives were directly threatened.
It should come as no surprise that Reagan did not easily share the libertarian premises in either case. He had problems with what he called “sin laws” such as prohibitions on gambling or prostitution, but did not instinctively oppose them. For Reagan, a social prohibition was legitimate when it “protect[ed] us from each other,” but not when it “protect[ed] us from ourselves.” But while he would wrestle with whether a specific law was on one side or the other of that line, he was clear on his basic principle: “I cannot go along with the libertarian philosophy that says all of the sin laws can be ruled out as simply trying to protect us from ourselves.”
Reagan clearly loved individual liberty, but some of the circumstances that he thought would place a “sin” in the realm of proper government regulation might be too broad for many libertarians. Gambling, for instance, involved the need for government to protect against “dishonest gambling” and the fear that a “father [could] gamble . . . his money away and thus leave his family dependent on the rest of us.”10 Prostitution involved the reality that prostitutes were not usually willing participants, that they were part of what Reagan said “in an earlier day was called white slave traffic” and which today we call human trafficking. It also involved public health concerns: Reagan cited the example of the military closing New Orleans’s brothels during World War II because brothels reduced the cost of finding clients and thus increased the number of liaisons a prostitute could engage in, thereby increasing the risk a solider would contract venereal disease. Libertarians might argue that each of his examples either involve an unfortunate cost of liberty or self-protection measures better left to individuals. Reagan firmly disagreed.
Reagan was, as we might expect, less conflicted about America’s foreign involvement. After saying that Republicans should say they would “do whatever is necessary to ensure that we can retain this free system of ours,” Klausner asked if that meant “a Fortress America approach or a world policeman approach.” Reagan firmly rejected the former, saying that “Fortress America is just what Lenin wanted us to have.” He rejected the idea that “the war in Indochina” did not represent a threat to America, because the Russians were “sponsoring the aggression of the North Vietnamese.” While Reagan said he would not have sent “American boys half-way around the world,” once they had been sent there America had “a moral obligation as a nation to throw the full resources of the nation behind them and to win that war and get it over as quickly as possible.” Reagan found reason to disagree with libertarians even on conscription (a.k.a. the military draft), which Reagan opposed during the time of the Vietnam War. He opposed it, however, because Lenin had said he wanted capitalist countries to maintain conscription “until the uniform became a symbol of servitude rather than patriotism.” In short, Reagan opposed conscription because it was an unwise tactic in the fight against global communism rather than a violation of an individual’s right to liberty.
Everything Reagan said in this interview was consistent with the views he had expressed so many times before.11 He opposed government that tried to determine outcomes and plan society. He supported government when it genuinely sought to protect people against harm, no matter how hypothetical or indirect. He also supported government as a tool to help people advance in society (education) or to protect them against poverty that occurs “through no fault of their own” (the family “dependent on the rest of us” because of the gambling dad). Such a view of government may have been consistent with the ideals of most Americans at that time, but it was certainly more expansive than anything libertarians had in mind.
This did not mean that Reagan did not want to cut back government. As his thoughts on higher education—it would cost less if provided privately—show, he always believed that government spent too much in overhead for the services it provided or financed. This was especially true for the federal government and its many programs that it shared with states and cities. It was to this that he turned his attention as he prepared his nascent presidential campaign.
Reagan unveiled his thoughts in a speech he delivered to the Economic Club of Chicago on September 26, 1975. His speech included a specific, original proposal to end federal involvement in a host of policy areas broadly covering social service programs. Reagan contended this would reduce the federal budget by $90 billion a year—an enormous sum at a time when the entire annual budget was about $370 billion.12 Cutting this would enable states and local governments to run programs in these areas by themselves, free from federal mandate or interference, while immediately balancing the federal budget and allowing for a cut to “the federal personal income tax burden of every American by an average of 23 percent.”13
Reagan did not list specific programs to be eliminated in his speech, although he did name certain areas in which the federal government had “created more problems.”14 An addendum passed out by his campaign to reporters and attendees, however, gave indications of what might be on the chopping block. That document listed topics such as education, job training, community development, commerce, welfare, law enforcement grants, revenue sharing, Medicaid, and other unspecified health programs.15 Specifically exempt were defense, NASA, Social Security, Medicare, energy, and transportation. Even some programs Reagan had long railed against, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority and farm subsidies, were on the exempt list.16
One may have thought that this would immediately have been severely criticized by the left, but that didn’t happen. The speech was widely ignored even after Reagan formally entered the race in November. It garnered national attention only when President Ford’s campaign drew attention to it, arguing that it would force voters in New Hampshire and Florida—two states without broad-based income taxes and two of the first states to hold presidential primaries—to create an income tax or raise other state and local taxes to take up the slack.17 The political pressure forced Reagan to backtrack, first by proposing to transfer federal revenue sources to states to help finance the programs and then by dropping the specific $90 billion figure itself.18
Most of Reagan’s biographers have focused on the speech’s political effects, arguing that it cost him both early states and with them the 1976 nomination. Analyzing the speech’s intellectual impact, however, is much more important. Some might contend that this address exemplified Reagan’s libertarian or Goldwaterite philosophy, that it was an example of his supposed long-standing opposition to the New Deal and the principles of modern government it had initiated. A careful reading of the talk, however, shows nothing of the kind.
The New Deal’s primary innovation was to enlarge the range of activities that government felt itself capable of addressing in order to give average Americans a hand up in life. Roosevelt and his followers sought to regulate and tax more in order to increase security and upward mobility for all. They differed among themselves as to how much to do and on the scope of private industry and charity within the new political order; the Truman and the Wallace wings of the post-FDR Democratic Party differed significantly on this point. But while much of their activity was directed to federal action, New Dealers struggled to win control of state and local governments too, precisely because it was less important where the action took place than that it did take place.
Thus, New Dealers fought to control the Democratic Party throughout the country and, once they were in control, to expand state and local governments’ activities. G. Mennen Williams, David Lawrence, and Gaylord Nelson are obscure names now, but in the 1940s and 1950s they were the Democratic governors of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, leaders in the effort to expand FDR’s approach to governing to the states. California’s Pat Brown was the Golden State’s version of these men. Republican governors in large states, like Tom Dewey and Nelson Rockefeller of New York, George Romney of Michigan, and Earl Warren of California, also played their parts in hiking state
aid to K–12 education, building new public universities and roads, and expanding social services and state parks.
We have seen that Reagan, in speech and in deed, as a private citizen in the late 1950s and early 1960s and as a public figure once elected governor, supported much of the expansion of government these men had wrought. He did not intend his Chicago proposal to result in dramatic cuts to these programs except insofar as cutting out the federal middleman would reduce bureaucracy. Rather, he believed that the care of the poor, education, policing, and local economic development were matters about which citizens of states and cities were in a better position to decide what should be done than representatives and bureaucrats.
These sentiments came through loud and clear when Reagan addressed the reaction to his proposal in subsequent speeches. The landmark collection of Reagan’s handwritten, late-1970s radio addresses includes a “stump speech insert” dated January 22, 1976. That insert is a detailed refutation of the charges levied by critics against his Chicago speech and an explanation of what problems had arisen in these programs by lodging them at the federal level. Reagan’s attack on the federal administration of these programs rested on two main critiques: waste and control.
Reagan’s definition of waste was not limited to unnecessarily large levels of bureaucratic overhead or people who defrauded the programs. He mentioned both, the latter especially in the case of the infamous “Chicago welfare queen” who allegedly used multiple addresses, names, and phone numbers to collect over $150,000 a year from many different programs.19 The major cause of waste, however, was people getting benefits who did not need them. Thus, he criticized the fact that existing programs allowed people “earning more than the median income” to collect food stamps, Medicaid, and welfare benefits.20 With respect to food stamp eligibility, he criticized the fact that people could receive stamps even if they earned the median income, held substantial assets, or were children of wealthy parents.21 He levied the same criticism of public housing programs, alleging that people with 80 percent of their area’s median income were eligible for federal rent subsidies and that one-half of the units built by federal public housing programs “can only be afforded by upper-middle-class renters.”22 The problem for Reagan was not that government was taxing Peter to pay Paul, but rather than it was taxing Peter to pay Paul when Paul could provide quite well for himself.
