A longer paper on the subject, published by Cato, is here.

While I'm at it, here’s my Cato paper analyzing Reagan's intervention in the Iran-Iraq War. This is when the U.S. alliance with Saddam Hussein really picked up steam.

Much is made by some libertarians and better conservatives over the claim that Reagan adored Bastiat, Cobden, Bright, and Mises. He may have, at some level. But then shouldn't free trade have been his strong point?

Thanks again, Jeff.

First off, I'm not the only one who noted a pretty big difference in the coverage of the Times and the Post. Matthew Continetti from the Weekly Standard makes the exact same claim today. It's always nice to know that it's not just me who saw it that way, but it's considerably less comforting that it's the Weekly Standard........

No matter, so Dresner's question is a fair one - so what? I'd say it matters because Bush is a politician trying to score points. He's a source people look to for a particular perspective on Reagan, not"news." Without getting into a long discussion of what"news" is, it's clear that when people pick up a newspaper they are expecting something different then what they get from politicians. People don't come to blogs expecting objectivity for example, they want our opinions. An obit in the NYT should have, at least, the illusion of objectivity.

This, in my view, is not just about posturing. The Post is every bit as leftie as the Times (hence my normal reference to the Post as Pravda), but it managed to provide something the Post could not, a much more objective assessment of a president who helped to shape the world in which we live. With all the problems at the NYT recently, I'd list this as yet another troubling reminder of how badly managed and staffed this alleged"paper of record" is.

Sometimes the truth comes from the damnedest sources:

SINGAPORE -- The United States and its allies are winning some battles in the terrorism war but may be losing the broader struggle against Islamic extremism that is terrorism's source, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Saturday.

The troubling unknown, he said, is whether the extremists -- whom he termed"zealots and despots" bent on destroying the global system of nation-states -- are turning out newly trained terrorists faster than the United States can capture or kill them.

"It's quite clear to me that we do not have a coherent approach to this," Rumsfeld said at an international security conference.

Oh, well. That's what most governments do best, isn't it? Kill people and spend money, that is.

I guess this is one of those"known unknowns" that Rumsfeld once talked about. You remember:

The Unknown

As we know,

There are known knowns.

There are things we know we know.

We also know

There are known unknowns.

That is to say

We know there are some things

We do not know.

But there are also unknown unknowns,

The ones we don't know

We don't know.

—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

Wait, though. On reflection, I guess the number of new terrorists being turned out might be an"unknown unknown." It's just so confusing. I knew I should have taken more epistemology courses.

It does make you wonder where Mr. Rumsfeld studied epistemology. Well, following his news conferences and speeches is sort of like a graduate seminar, so I guess it will be alright. It's awfully nice of him to take the time to instruct us in these complexities, don't you think? (The news story via Digby.)

UPDATE: I don't disagree with Steve Horwitz's point, insofar as the epistemological issue alone is concerned. However, context is everything: keep in mind that Rumsfeld offerered this little dissertation (and other similar ones) in justifying a foreign policy based on just such unknowns. And that is precisely the problem, as I discussed in this post for example, about The Fatal Utopian Delusion.

You don't commit soldier's lives, or a nation's financial well-being, or endanger our national security, on the basis of factors which you know you don't know or understand, and which cannot be"planned." So in that larger sense (i.e., the overall political context in which Rumsfeld made these observations), I think it's more than fair to make fun of Rumsfeld. It's the least he deserves. What he actually deserves is far worse.

A somewhat lengthy consideration of these questions, together with some observations about the rise of the New Right in the 1980s, here.

UPDATE: The discussion continues here, with some thoughts from our colleague, Chris Sciabarra, and some comments of mine in reply.

Thomas Szasz's point about principals and assistants is crucial because clear language is both an inducement to and a consequence of clear thought. The physician is not merely an assistant if he has the power to veto the patient's desire to kill himself, which he does. Under the Oregon law, the attending physician and a consulting physician must agree, among other things, that the patient's judgment is not impaired and that he suffers no mental illness when he expresses the wish to kill himself and asks for the drugs with which to carry out his wish. The patient is not in the driver's seat. Do you think that if the two doctors veto the request, the patient can simply doctor-shop until he accomplishes his goal? The patient, having been certified as impaired and, by virtue of his request, obviously dangerous to himself, could be committed to a mental hospital against his will. We cannot separate the legal issue of suicide today from the entire psychiatric/mental illness edifice—a massive violation of individual rights that any Objectivist should categorically condemn.

Contrast that situation with a free market. A drug seller could choose not to sell lethal drugs to a terminal patient (or anyone else). But the situation would be very different from what exists in Oregon. If one retailer refused to sell the drug, the patient would be free to find another without fearing commitment to a mental hospital. The seller would not be under a legal mandate to certify that the patient was acting with"unimpaired judgment." He would have no legal liability if the patient committed suicide. (The family of the deceased could not sue him, for example.)

By the way, when a free-market pharmacy sells someone a lethal drug with which to kill himself, would we call that"pharmacist-assisted suicide"? Of course not. That's why Szasz labels"physician-assisted suicide" an oxymoron.

Re the claim that the Oregon law does not expand the power of doctors because they can already write prescriptions: the law expands the"therapeutic state" by widening the definition of"medical treatment." In Szasz's words,"neither the person who kills himself nor the physician or anyone else who gives him a lethal drug is performing a medical act." This is critically important: killing oneself is not treatment. Neither is helping someone to do so."Not everything physicians do is a treatment," Szasz writes. Suicide is a moral/legal matter in which doctors have no special expertise. Yet the Oregon law obscures that fact—worse: it declares assisted suicide to be medical treatment. To put it mildly, there is no progress in having the status of suicide changed from symptom of mental illness to medical treatment.

Because the law expands the therapeutic state by expanding the notion of"treatment," I cannot accept the argument that physician-assisted suicide is a proper reform pending laissez faire in drugs. On the contrary, such laws (including medical marijuana laws) put off the day we will achieve laissez faire. Who needs laissez faire (most people will ask) if doctors can prescribe drugs under"proper" conditions and safeguards? But what about the rights of someone who is not a terminal patient but who nevertheless wants to take his own life? Is he not a self-owner?

We should use the right of suicide as part of our agitation for a free market and full property rights. As to what someone wishing to commit suicide should do in the meanwhile, I would prefer to see him break the law (as many do) rather than see more power go to the already-threatening therapeutic state.

Like my L&P colleagues, Sheldon Richman and Steven Horwitz, I too have some thoughts about Ronald Reagan, who passed away yesterday (on what was also the 36th anniversary of Robert F. Kennedy's assassination). There really are no words to convey the pain that a family endures watching the slow deterioration of a loved one due to Alzheimer's disease. My heart goes out to his family for their loss.

I did not vote for Reagan in 1981. So convinced was I of the horrific alternative between a wishy-washy Jimmy Carter and a Moral Majority-beholden Ronald Reagan that I voted for Ed Clark, the Libertarian candidate for President.

But in 1984, I did cast my vote for Reagan because I believed that he had achieved an important ideological shift in the terms of the American political debate. While this shift was aided by other important world figures, as Jonathan Dresner explains, Reagan's convictions and principles, his humor and optimism, enabled him to score a rhetorical victory on behalf of free markets that was unparalleled in the post-New Deal era.

If only his actual legacy had matched his rhetoric ... Indeed, aspects of that legacy were profoundly mixed, and some of his policies have had unfortunate, long-term consequences.

But Ronald Reagan had made fashionable the use of words like"markets,""privatization," and"freedom." By the time, in 1987, when he stood before the Berlin Wall and told Soviet Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev to come to the Brandenburg Gate, to"open this gate" and"tear down this wall," it was clear that he had won a crucially important ideological victory on behalf of that"shining city upon a hill."

Whether it was his poignant tribute to the Challenger crew or his much earlier speech about a"rendezvous with destiny," Reagan's words were an inspiration. Indeed, that"Rendezvous with Destiny" speech, given on October 27, 1964 in support of Barry Goldwater's quest for the Presidency, inspires us even today. Why say anything about Reagan when he himself could say it better than almost anyone?

I think it's time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers. ... If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right, but I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down --- up to a man's age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order --- or down to the ant heap totalitarianism, and regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course....

[T]he Founding Fathers ... knew that governments don't control things. A government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. They also knew, those Founding Fathers, that outside of its legitimate functions, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector of the economy. ... No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this Earth....

Somewhere a perversion has taken place. Our natural, inalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation of government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment. You and I have the courage to say to our enemies,"There is a price we will not pay." There is a point beyond which they must not advance. ... You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.

To the Editor:

I am puzzled by your June 4 story about moving “criminally acquitted patients” from facilities in Little Rock to facilities in Corning (“Judges get final say in patients’ transfers”). If they have been acquitted, why are they being moved anywhere? Then I learned that the Arkansas Partnership Program “has provided treatment to those acquitted of crimes because of mental disease or defect since…1995.” It goes on: “Most have…years of mental health problems.” Yet I was not reassured. For as Thomas Szasz points out, no one, including psychiatrists, has ever seen a mental disease, mental defect, or mental health problem. When people say they’ve seen those things, all they really mean is that they’ve seen bad behavior. But behavior, however bad, is behavior, not disease, and behavior has reasons, not causes (such as disease), even if the reasons are not readily apparent to observers. (Don’t bring up brain scans: they do not show causes of behavior. Correlation, even if it exists, is not causation.)

So when you report that people acquitted of rape, murder, and aggravated robbery have histories of mental health problems, all you’re saying is that these people have histories of bothering and harming other people. Why not just say that? And if that’s the case, why were they acquitted and why are they locked in a “mental health facility”? They belong in prison. We can't excuse people of responsibility for their crimes, then wonder what happened to self-responsibility.

There goes our hope for gridlock: Kerry in the White House fighting with a GOP Congress.

Don't me wrong: I want the killing to stop; I want the Iraqis to be on their own; and I want the U.S. out. But I also want Bush defeated. It's the only punishment he and his people will understand.