Think the economy is bad now?  Go back a generation.  The prime rate was 20 percent.  Unemployment was nearly 11 percent.  And to top it off, we had been humiliated in Vietnam just a few years before.

President Reagan turned the economy around with his optimism.  Unlike Bush, he didn't have a Republican (much less a conservative) congress.  But he did have the power of persuasion.  No, he couldn't reduce government spending the way he had hoped.  But he cut taxes, a lot, far more than Bush has done.  Reagan also deregulated.

There's no reason that McCain can't make the case for smaller government and less taxes.  People want change.  Under Bush, the Federal Budget has increased from two trillion to nearly three trillion per year.  And that's not counting the bailout.  We need more of that?

Fortunately, we didn't get all the government we paid for.  Our roads haven't been rebuilt.  It still takes forever for the government to process anything.  There's lots of bad loans, thanks to government oversight. 

No, what the government is good at we don't need.  We don't need more bureaucrats having more committee meetings or creating yet another form for us to fill out and for the government to mis-file. We don't need more government "workers" sleeping at their desk or watching TV.  We've got more than enough of that.

We definitely don't need more government regulation.  The idea that some slug bureaucrat is going to outsmart someone who knows how to make $100,000,000 a year is pretty funny.  Instead, regulation will mean all the law abiding citizens will have to fill out more forms and stand in more lines and pay more and get less for whatever is being regulated.

When we deregulated the airline industry, a generation ago, prices fell by almost 50 percent.  And there are now far more flights to far more places than there ever were.  When the government deregulated the phone industry, long distance charges dropped a lot and technological innovation boomed.

Regulation today means higher healthcare costs, more expensive food, higher energy costs, a bankrupt banking industry, and more expensive housing and offices.

So let's use this economic crisis to set the American worker free.  Let's declare unilateral, unconditional free trade with every country on earth.  Let's roll-back government spending to two trillion dollars.  Let's reduce the top marginal tax rates on individuals and companies to twenty percent, and let's make that a consumption tax.  Let's end the death tax and capital gains.

Let's give every parent a $9,000 voucher for each child each year and watch the quality of our education bloom like it never has before.  Let's stop funding and regulating colleges and watch the quality improve there, too.  Let's stop regulating the insurance industry, the healthcare industry, the farming industry, the oil industry, and right on down the line.

Our country will prosper like never before and this crisis will fade away like a small puff of smoke on a windy day.

It's 1929 all over again.  The American people lost faith in free markets then, just as they seem to be doing today.  Back then central planning was all the rage.  People had seen what economies of scale had done for Rockefeller at Standard Oil and they wondered if nationalization of industries might be even more efficient.  People had listened to Marx, the Bellamy brothers, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Keynes, and all the other believers of control from the top down.

And look what it got them.  Tens of millions died in the Gulags, the Nazi ovens, and killing fields of Cambodia.  Wealth was destroyed in America and Europe on an unprecedented level.

Let's not forget the lessons of 1929.  Let's not take over industries.  Let's not subjugate human freedom in the name of "reform."  Instead, let's trust the common man and woman.  Let's make the world better from the bottom up, not the top down. 

Yes, our economy is shaken.  But the solution is less government control and lower taxes, not more government and higher taxes.

If people have broken the law, let's charge them, try them, and put them in jail if they are found guilty.  But let's not saddle everyone with rules and regulations because of the bad behavior of a few. 

We made that mistake in 1929.  Let's not make it again.

We can rest easier now.  Senator Obama is going to change things.  He's got a brand new approach.  He'll hire armies of arrogant bureaucrats who will have a million committee meetings, issue a trillion new forms for us to fill out, and force up to stand in long lines.   With that approach, he'll give us better schools, hospitals, houses, cars, and whatever else we need. Heck, he’ll even improve the weather, from what I hear.

I haven’t done any big studies funded by a government grant or anything, but isn’t this the same formula we’ve tried in most of the big cities like Detroit, Los Angeles, and New Orleans where guys like Obama have been running the show for years and basically invented urban decay?  And Europe has been on this track since well before the last world war. Over there, unemployment is about twice as high as it is in the US. And let’s not forget most of the third world, which is really big on big government.  It worked out real well in the Soviet Union, which we all know didn't lose the Cold War to Ronald Reagan but just sort of collapsed from its own economic dynamism.

What I can't figure out is why the economies of countries that reduce government oversight, like India and China, are growing like crazy.

So the brilliant Senator Obama is going to change things, I guess. He’s going to make our country more like the old Soviet Union.

I know Obama and his followers are really, really smart.  What I can't figure out is why they cling to so many foolish ideas.