Quotulatiousness

December 30, 2024

RIP Jimmy Carter, “The Great Deregulator”, 1924-2024

Filed under: Economics, Government, History, Liberty, Politics, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

ReasonTV
Published 29 Dec 2024

Nobel-Winning Economist Vernon Smith says the 39th president radically improved air travel, freight rail, and trucking in ways that still benefit us immensely.
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Jimmy Carter was perhaps the most successful ex-president in American history, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his work promoting human rights and economic and social development.

But his single term as president (1977–1981) is largely remembered as a series of failures and missteps, sometimes literally. Gas lines, a record-high combination of unemployment and inflation on the “misery index”, and Americans being held hostage by Iranian revolutionaries for over a year all fueled the perception that Carter was a weak and ineffective leader. When he collapsed during a six-mile run, it personified for many the exhaustion of the country under his leadership.

But there was at least one way in which Carter excelled as president. He was, in the words of 2002 Nobel–winning economist Vernon Smith, the great deregulator. Carter forced the airline industry, along with interstate trucking and freight rail, to compete for business, with powerful and positive effects that continue to this day.

I talked to Smith about Carter, whom he met at a White House event for American Nobel Prize winners, and what it was like to fly in the days when the government controlled air travel.

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  1. Hoist a craft-brewed beer to thank Jimmy Carter for saving America’s brewing tradition
  2. Raise a glass of your favourite microbrew to … Jimmy Carter?
  3. Forget George Washington, Woodrow Wilson, and FDR – studying the presidency of Jimmy Carter is suddenly more relevant

2 Comments

  1. A Canadian connection for Jimmy Carter most people won’t have heard:

    … it was long before Carter ever entered politics that he established a permanent bond with Canada — one forged in the radioactive aftermath of what might otherwise have become the country’s worst nuclear calamity.

    In 1952, Carter was a 28-year-old U.S. navy lieutenant, a submariner with a budding expertise in nuclear power, when he and his crew were dispatched to help control a partial meltdown at the experimental Chalk River Laboratories northwest of Ottawa.

    In his 2016 book “A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety,” Carter described working in teams of three, first practising on a mock-up of the reactor, then on the real thing, in short 90-second bursts to avoid absorbing more than the maximum allowable dose of radiation.

    “The limit on radiation absorption in the early 1950s was approximately 1,000 times higher than it is 60 years later,” he wrote.

    “There were a lot of jokes about the effects of radioactivity, mostly about the prospect of being sterilized, and we had to monitor our urine until all our bodies returned to the normal range.”

    That, Carter would later acknowledge in interviews, took him about six months.

    Comment by Nicholas — December 30, 2024 @ 09:52

  2. Jon Miltimore says we should remember some of the good things that came out of Carter’s presidency:

    It’s well known that Carter bucked history by embracing civil rights in the South while in the state Senate. This move, though courageous, likely cost Carter the Georgia gubernatorial election in 1966, in which he took third, losing to fellow Democrat Lester Maddox, a staunch segregationist.

    What’s less well known is that Carter brought a similar courage and reform mentality to rolling back a bloated federal bureaucracy when he became president, an enthusiasm he also showed at the state level. After becoming the 76th governor of Georgia, Carter was appalled by the labyrinth of state agencies he encountered in the Peach State.

    “It had got so that every time I opened the closet door of my office, a new state agency would fall out,” he said of the 300 overlapping state agencies.

    The federal government was much worse, and Carter eventually began a massive privatization effort that earned him the nickname “the Great Deregulator.” With energy prices surging, Carter signed the National Energy Act of 1978, which goosed production and eased supply constraints, resulting in lower prices and “a vast increase in the supply of energy in the 1980s,” according to Carter scholar Robert A. Strong.

    However, reform didn’t stop with energy. Carter deregulated everything from transportation to airline ticket pricing and even beer.

    Next time you’re sipping an IPA at the local watering hole, take a moment to thank Carter. The explosion of craft breweries across the United States — from 89 in the late 1970s to more than 2,500 just three decades later — stems directly from Carter’s decisions to repeal post-Prohibition era regulations on production.

    “Deregulation reopened the market to craft brewers and the industry blossomed through organic growth and the preferences of consumers,” noted the Atlantic‘s Max Fisher.

    Comment by Nicholas — January 8, 2025 @ 17:13

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