Columbian Exchange Essay

Submitted By karievigi
Words: 633
Pages: 3

As noted in my earlier answer, LBJ's obsession with the "Great Society" caused the domestic economy to tank. Nixon tired to manage things with price and wage controls, but that didn't work worth a darn. Ford did nothing, and Jimmy Carter embraced the bad economic conditions and held them up as proof that the free market economy was a failure and supported a more socialist approach to the economy. The American people didn't buy it and elected Ronald Reagan to fix, among other things, the economy. Liberals today have a fit when it is suggested Reagan did fix the economy, but the fact of the matter is, while it took him most of his first administration, by the second administration the economy took off and was great for the next twenty years before the Democrats brought it down again.

The postwar 70s and early 80s was a drag. The radical Democrats in Congress, the old antiwar movement which was brought in to the Carter administration to run things, and Jimmy Carter, kept telling the American people the days of our glory were past and we would never be great again. We had to get used to being a second rate power with no options except the turn the economy over to the socialist (closet-Communist) bureaucrats and let them mange it on our behalf. It was a time when most Americans felt a sense of depression.

The Democratic radicals running Congress instated a neo-isolationist foreign policy and disengaged the United States from the Cold War. The Carter administration made it official and made human rights them center of our foreign policy instead of containment. Carter succeeded in offending almost every Third World leader and government the United States had relations with. He was PERSONALLY responsible for the fall of the Shah of Iran and the government in Nicaragua. He refused to take any action as the USSR promoted the Iran/Iraq War that destabilized the Persian Gulf, the Soviet client state of Syria promote a Civil War in Lebanon which brought down the richest and most diverse society in the Middle East outside of Israel, encourage a Civil War in El Salvador through their new Communist state of Nicaragua, promote Wars of National Liberation in sub-Saharan Africa where they deployed Cuban troops to fight, Central and South America, deploy SS-20 missiles in Europe to neutralize NATO, encourage wars in the Horn of Africa, intimidate Poland and invade Afghanistan. Millions of people died all over the world while Jimmy Carter and the