BREAKING: Former President Jimmy Carter Has Passed Away.
Flashbacks: Jimmy Carter Was a Better President than You Think.
To fight stagflation, Carter appointed tight-money advocate Paul Volker to head the Federal Reserve Board, and Volker pulled the brakes on inflationary monetary policy — hard. It solved inflation but sent the economy into a painful correction that probably cost Carter reelection.
And despite his personal big government sympathies, Carter’s most lasting legacy is as the Great Deregulator. Carter deregulated oil, trucking, railroads, airlines, and beer. (H/t Caleb Brown.)
At the Atlantic, Derek Thompson chronicles the dramatic and almost unnoticed impact of Carter’s airline deregulation over the last thirty years. The bottom line: per-mile ticket prices fell by over fifty percent. And the results have transformed American social life and travel:
— In 1965, no more than 20 percent of Americans had ever flown in an airplane. By 2000, 50 percent of the country took at least one round-trip flight a year. The average was two round-trip tickets.
— The number of air passengers tripled between the 1970s and 2011.
— In 1974, it was illegal for an airline to charge less than $1,442 in inflation-adjusted dollars for a flight between New York City and Los Angeles. On Kayak, just now, I found one for $278.The impact of beer deregulation has been similarly overlooked: In 1978, the USA had just 44 domestic breweries. After deregulation, creativity and innovation flourished in the above-ground economy. Today, there are 1,400 American breweries. And home brewing for personal consumption is also now legal.
As for civil liberties, Carter also signed the most significant reform of government surveillance powers since World War II in the original FISA Act, and in 1979, he called for the decriminalization of marijuana, well ahead of the cultural and political curve. His legacy is also significant for what he did not do: he did not start any wars.
As P.J. O’Rourke wrote in his classic 1993 American Spectator article, “100 Reasons Why Jimmy Carter Was a Better President than Bill Clinton:”
98. Carter let the Soviets have Angola, Ethiopia, and South Yemen. And, in retrospect, the Soviets deserved no better.
99. Carter wasn’t a throwback to the Carter era.
100. And let us not forget that Jimmy Carter gave us one thing Bill Clinton can never possibly give us—Ronald Reagan.
Perhaps as a result of that last item, it’s after Carter left the White House, that he really began to lose the thread, as Jay Nordlinger wrote in his classic 2002 NRO article, “Carterpalooza!”
In a 1997 op-ed piece entitled “It’s Wrong to Demonize China” (also for the New York Times), Carter wrote — and forgive the awkward prose — “American criticism of China’s human rights abuses are justified, but their basis is not well understood. Westerners emphasize personal freedoms, while a stable government and a unified nation are paramount to the Chinese. This means that policies are shaped by fear of chaos from unrestrained dissidents or fear of China’s fragmentation by an independent Taiwan or Tibet. The result is excessive punishment [excessive punishment!] of outspoken dissidents and unwarranted domination of Tibetans.”
Carter said that “ill-informed commentators in both countries have cast the other side as a villain and have even forecast inevitable confrontation between the two nations.” You see the exquisite moral equivalence between a giant and repressive Communist state and the American republic. He then said, “Mutual criticisms are proper and necessary [mutual criticisms, mind you: Communist China, America . . .], but should not be offered in an arrogant or self-righteous way, and each of us should acknowledge improvements made by the other.” Carter arrogant or self-righteous, ever? Improvements made by the United States, too?
That’s what Xi said.
UPDATE: From Peanut Farmer to President: Former President Jimmy Carter Dead at 100.
Once in office, his popularity gradually began to fade, partly because of his drift to the Left. He supported the legalization of abortion by the courts, and his first act in office was to pardon all Vietnam War draft dodgers. In some ways, it was the McGovern agenda without the McGovern political baggage. His aides were often inexperienced in the ways of Washington, and like the only other engineer elected president, Herbert Hoover, Carter had an unfounded faith in his ability to both lead and micromanage his administration.
While in office, he created the Department of Energy and the Department of Education. In a hotly contested decision, he gave away the American-built Panama Canal. He faced an energy crisis sparked by war in the Middle East and an Arab oil embargo, which Carter called the “moral equivalent of war.”
But critics saw his address to the nation on the energy crisis while wearing a sweater as a sign of weakness in American global leadership. He seemed to ask Americans to get by with less and lower national expectations. In a struggling economy, he provided the equivalent of $11 billion to bail out a failing Chrysler Corporation as Japanese car imports flooded the struggling American automobile market.
In his famous “malaise speech” towards the end of his term, he epitomized the economic malaise the nation was experiencing under his leadership with high gas prices, inflation, and slow economic growth.
It all started off so promisingly though, complete with Gene Marshall’s absolutely groovy, perfectly 1970s song: “Can Our Government Be Competent? Jimmy Carter Says, Yes!”
Alas, it was not to be. As James Lileks wrote in 2021, “I think I got the second-shot blahs. I felt dull and fuzzy…The best word to describe it: malaise. Once I realized that was the best word, I wondered whether it could be due to gas lines, Mideast unrest or the return of inflation. As someone who came of age in the ’70s, and immediately regretted it, I associate these things with Jimmy Carter’s famous speech. He said the country suffered from malaise, which sounded like a bad sandwich spread. It wasn’t a popular speech. It’s one thing to be depressed, and another to be French depressed.”