Several years ago my wife, Karol, was in the graduate history program at the University of Georgia. She served as a teaching assistant for a large-section freshman class on American history. The text for the class was David Shi’s and George Tindall’s America: A Narrative History.

I recall perusing this text and reading in it that one of the benefits that Ronald Reagan enjoyed during his first term as president – a benefit that eluded Jimmy Carter – was that the gasoline shortages that marked the 1970s stopped occurring in the 1980s. Shi and Tindall wrote of this fact as if it were a merely lucky happenstance for Reagan’s presidency.

I agree completely Arnold Kling (at http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/000486.html) that “Reagan's greatest economic policy was the decontrol of oil prices.” Reagan decontrolled oil and natural-gas prices almost immediately upon moving into the White House. No sustained shortage of these things has since reared its ugly head in the United States.

Anyone who writes of these shortages, and their disappearance, as if these phenomena were forces of nature is an economic ignoramus of the first fiber. Reagan, for all of his imperfections, saved Americans from the wholly unnecessary and extraordinarily costly and counterproductive price-caps that juvenile minds believe to work magic.

Lawrence Brooks Hughes - 6/8/2004

One of the least remembered facts on this subject is that President Gerald R. Ford had an opportunity to decontrol natural gas prices (at the wellhead) and declined to do so. It was an option which came up under old legislation, to be exercised "at the discretion of the President." Ford passed. It was also Ford who signed foot-in-the-door legislation for both federal aid to education and urban mass transit. I am not sure of the timing, but suspect these dreadful mistakes occurred during his "Honeymoon" period, or else just prior to his own run against Carter.

Ralph E. Luker - 6/8/2004

If you mean to suggest that David Shi and George Tindall are "economic ignoramus"es "of the first fiber," you are entirely mistaken. I know David Shi and George Tindall; and you, sir, are no David Shi or George Tindall. Or, whatever.