Reagan was not wrong. The constant attempts to grow government and the governments constant meddling in the business world has caused the crises of today. Newsweek, a generally Leftwing rag, is just looking for a way to slander the greatest President that I have ever had the privileged to vote for.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/202620
Fairlie's views of toryism, like his views of most things (America, women, Parliament, Scotch), were deeply romantic. He described his kind of conservative as one who stands alongside "the King and the People, against the barons and the capitalists." In other words, government's role was to preserve tradition and social order, not to speed the accumulation of great power and wealth among the elites or to enact sudden or overreaching reforms. He warmed to this view as a boy, when summers on a family farm in Scotland taught him that "nothing very much changes, and then changes only slowly." He refined it as an adult, coming to revere the leadership of Winston Churchill, whom he called "the greatest tory of them all," and absorb the writings of Michael Oakeshott, "the most formative conservative political thinker of his generation." When he arrived in America, he expected to find conservatives with similar beliefs. Instead he found the Republicans.Fairlie's critique of American conservatism began with a GOP heresy: that by embracing the free market so completely, the party had gone calamitously awry. "The conservative can all too easily drift into a morally bankrupt and intellectually shallow defense of those who have it made and those who are on the make," he wrote. Without a humanizing tory influence, conservatives were apt to forget "the ugly face of capitalism"--the way that the market tends to coarsen and destabilize society, making the gross national product fodder for our "gross national appetite." Republicans, he argued, could never succeed in uniting the country as long as they supported business interests so completely with both their policy choices and their rhetoric: "The nation cannot be brought to you, as if it were Masterpiece Theatre, by a grant from Mobil Oil," he wrote.
I think you may be missing the point. The point is that today's Republicans aren't delivering less government, but rack up higher deficits than even the liberals do. the focus of today's 'conservative' seems to be on protecting the rich and furthering a religious and political agenda vs. staying out of our business. It's time to claim 'conservatism' back.
I understand that the Republicans have drifted quite far from being conservative. Believe me!
I left them about six years ago, or did they leave me. I only vote for politicians who are willing to uphold the Constitution.
However, Reagan was not wrong. The Party left his wisdom in the dirt and trampled it so the Dems would be nice to them. (And the more principles they abandoned, the more the dems abused them.) The Reagan principles of small government and even less government interference have been abandoned and I miss them. The next generation of government needs to return to the basics. PLEASE!