PAtownhall.com
Pennsylvania's Marketplace of Ideas
Pennsylvania's Marketplace of Ideas
PAtownhall.com
Pennsylvania's Marketplace of Ideas
Pennsylvania's Marketplace of Ideas
by Ralph R. Reiland,
Professor of Free Enterprise
Speaking recently in Milwaukee, would-be First Lady Michelle Obama said, "For the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback." In Madison, she followed up with a similar line: "For the first time in my adult lifetime, I'm really proud of my country, and not just because Barack has done well but because I think people are hungry for change."
Born in 1964, Mrs. Obama was an adult, i.e., 25 years old, when the Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989, when masses of people came with their sledgehammers and delivered a fatal blow to a bloodstained system that had killed an estimated 100 million of its own citizens over the previous seven decades -- as many as 25 million in the former Soviet Union, 65 million in China, 2 million in North Korea, 2 million in Cambodia, 1.7 million in Africa, 1.5 million in Afghanistan, 1 million in Eastern Europe, 1 million in Vietnam and 150,000 in Latin America.
The end of these crimes against humanity and the corresponding end of the Cold War, the collapse of communism, could not have happened without the United States. Without us, there was nothing to prevent the tyranny of communism from advancing indefinitely -- the state-sponsored terror, genocide, forced labor, class hatreds, gulags, the premeditated famines.
The New York Times' Opinionator blog, authored by Times op-ed staff editor Tobin Harshaw and Chris Suellentrop, quotes Jeff Emanuel at RedState.com regarding Michelle Obama's lack of proud thoughts about the United States:
"Let me get this straight: A couple of ultra-successful, Ivy League educated, wealthy, elitist liberals who have never been proud of their country want all of us little people to vote them to be our president and first lady? They want to represent a people, and govern a country, that has never, once, ever in their adult lives made them proud? Wow. Anyway, just shut up and vote for Barack so that his wife can finally appreciate something you stupid people in this country have done."
On the home front, another thing to be "really proud" about in 1989, the same year as the collapse of the Berlin Wall, was the extraordinary turnaround of the U.S. economy during the Reagan years, with unemployment falling from 7.1 percent in 1981 to 5.3 percent in 1989 (that's 1.8 million fewer people unemployed) and a cut in the inflation rate by more than half from 10.3 percent in 1981 to 4.8 percent in 1989.
Especially helpful for those at the bottom who can least afford a decrease in their standard of living, that's a drop in the Misery Index (the combination of inflation and unemployment rates) from 17.4 percent in 1981 to 10.1 percent in 1989.
Michelle Obama spent the Reagan years at Princeton and Harvard, graduating from high school in 1981 and going on to Princeton University to major in sociology and minor in African-American studies -- a double dose of victimology. In 1988, she received her Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School.
One wouldn't expect much discussion about the economic successes of Reaganomics at Princeton in the 1980s, especially in the sociology and black studies departments. But you'd think that Michelle Obama might have picked up a little something at Harvard or Princeton about America defeating the largest-ever tyranny on the planet, more deadly than Nazism, all without firing a shot, and been "really proud."
Prior to her comments in Madison and Milwaukee, Michelle Obama gave a speech at the University of California, Los Angeles, in early February that has received too little attention.
"Barack Obama will require you to work," she asserted. "He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism, that you put down your divisions, that you come out of isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones, that you push yourself to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed."
That sounds like something Castro might say to the sugar bus, pumping up the cane cutters to go out and push themselves around the clock in order to maximize the harvest for the fatherland, for the leader.
"Yes we can!," Barack hollers. Out of the comfort zone! Work! Cease the divisions! Shed the cynicism! Engage! De-isolate! Push! Yes we can!
"Can what?"
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Ralph R. Reiland is an associate professor of economics at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh.
Ralph R. Reiland
Phone: 412-884-4541
E-mail: rrreiland@aol.com
"Ralph R. Reiland is the B. Kenneth Simon Professor of Free Enterprise at Robert Morris University, the owner Amel's Restaurant, and a columnist with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review."
