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> deregulate transportation,
and this
> appoint an inflation hawk to the Fed
were and remain unambiguous policy wins. It’s not even close. There isn’t a serious economic argument in favor of high inflation or the pre carter transportation regulation scheme. (Source: myself, an economics professor.)
For a better evaluation of the “brutal despots” comment you’ll need to provide a bit more context on who you are talking about. I could buy that one being a bad decision, though certainly not an uncommon error for a US president in the 20th century.
In El Salvador the Carter administration provided funding to the Revolutionary Government Junta who were also responsible for numerous atrocities.
The Carter administration also provided support for the Guatemalan military government including using Israel to provide them with weapons and military aid in defiance of the embargoes passed by congress. His administration even provided training for their security forces at clandestine sites in Chile and Argentina.
Read some history before having such strong opinions then. That 'context' comment is insulting to hundreds of thousands of people who were disappeared or outright buried alive by US backed regimes during that period.
FWIW I’ve read a lot of history of US interventions in Asia, Africa and Central and South America. I have an opinion about most presidents in that regard - as I noted support by US presidents for murderous dictators is pretty common!
I don’t have a strong opinion about carter on that front which is why I asked for more. So far in this thread I’ve seen East Timor mentioned. Do you have anything else to offer?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1981/01/14/c...
Also, if you can show me a large country that got through the 20th century without backing (or being) a brutal dictatorship, I'd be very appreciative.
No. This is HackerNews. Not some random forum. The education and intelligence levels in this forum are supposed to be much higher. Even in most far-right nationalist American forums people stopped making such knee-jerk retorts that 'require education'. From FOIA requests to those countries making their documents public, there isn't anything left to debate, discuss, leave aside 'not know about'.
If someone educated and intelligent is making such utterly ignorant sounding commentary about this in such a forum, at this point it cant be ignorance, it definitely cant be lack of intelligence, it can only be bad faith. And there is no reasoning with bad faith - like how your last sentence demonstrates.
Well, that's a lie, he actually did the opposite of this.
I remember clearly when Rosalind Carter went to Brazil and gave a speech there praising democracy and respect to human rights in front of the dictator Ernesto Geisel. I remember the U.S. Department of State criticizing the dictatorship for the practice of torture.
And I do remember that he strongly and successfully pressed the dictatorship against developing nuclear weapons.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1981/01/14/c...
The Brazilian dictatorship began to collapse before the end of the Carter administration. When Carter left there was a new president in Brazil that removed censorship for the press, ended political torture and granted amnesty to all political prisoners.
> those dictatorships survived for decades more.
No. Almost all dictatorships in South America ended less than 10 years after Carter left office. "Backing them" is something that Thatcher and Reagan did for Pinochet but not Carter.
Read operation condor and see if the dictatorships actually ended.
Given the persistent and painful inflation that had been happening in the 1970’s, wouldn’t appointing an inflation hawk be considered an appropriate choice?
Appointing an inflation dove would probably exacerbate the situation and I imagine he would be judged even more harshly.
Carter didn't create the inflation crisis (hint it was Nixon who did), so yes having to appoint Volcker was due to a bit of being president during a unluckly economic time.
Thankfully, inflation isn't bad enough to warrant any drastic action like that.
Reminds me of "Deep Impact", where President Morgan Freeman tells the world that an asteroid is coming, and by some sort of Presidential Decree he orders all prices fixed to avoid mass hoarding and price gouging. I wasn't around during the Nixon years, but the writers of that screenplay must have been.