‘Reading Reagan’s Rights’

Re: “Reading Reagan’s Rights” (Editorial Pages, July 3):

Surely you jest if you are suggesting or implying that James Madison and the Federalists would feel at home in today’s unfathomable maze of bureaucratic regulation. They were addressing the critical issue of their day, which was the lack of any focus or control which would truly define the newly independent nation as just that--a nation. Common currency, taxation for defense and public welfare, ground rules for interstate commerce, and means to pay off the public debt were areas of need in search of a solution which would better define the thirteen colonies as a nation.

But then your editorial in its haste to ridicule the Reagan Administration muddies the ideological and historical waters, so to speak, by fortuitously proclaiming that . . . “without government regulation of the economy there could be no united states.” It seems to me that the United States of America grew to the threshold of being the pre-eminent world power, both politically and economically, before embracing our modern notions of “government regulation.” The graduated income tax and the modern Federal Reserve System were not born until the Wilson Administration and the seeds of the New Deal weren’t planted until 1931. Madison et al in their quest to bring definition to our infant nation had little notion as to what would eventually be brought forth much later as a “logical” extension of their original ideas.

The New Deal up through the Carter Administration reflected a “sea change” in philosophical and political thinking in this country. It was the forces behind these Administrations which broke our connections with the past, all the way back to the early days of the Federalists. Among the many accomplishments of the Reagan Administration is to sever the political debate from the recent past and reconnect it to the historical past by which we can plug into the vision of our nation as it has evolved in light of the timeless principles laid down for us by the Founding Fathers.

“Over-regulation” has been a detrimental legacy of the recent political past which, if Madison were in power today, he would be loath to tolerate. Just as fragmentation was a danger 200 years ago, stifling taxation and regulation is a danger today. And just as Madison in his Federalist approach wasn’t opting for a suffocating centralized government, Reagan isn’t calling for the complete dismantling of the Washington bureaucracy.

DAVID S. McCALMONT

Glendale