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Comment by huitzitziltzin | Hacker News Reader

Sorry man but both this

> 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.

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The only examples I've been able to find were backing Suharto in the invasion of East Timor and backing a coup in El Salvador, both of which are regrettable but are essentially as you say par for the course in terms of the US 20th Century foreign policy (albeit far tamer than the actions of his predecessor and successor).

The invasion of East Timor was one of the worst genocides of the 20th century.

In Indonesia the Carter administration provided aid and weapons to the Suharto government even after evidence of atrocities in East Timor and many other atrocities had come to light.

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.

There's no such thing as an unambiguous policy win. All public policies have winners and losers, and every public policy has alternatives. I would give a very poor evaluation to any economics professor who seemed not to understand those crucial facts.

Perhaps he's thinking of the "brutal despots" who were mobilized _against_ Carter in Iran to make Reagan look like he had some kind of mental activity.

No. I'm not.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1981/01/14/c...

> “brutal despots” comment you’ll need to provide a bit more context

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.

If you want to contribute more positively, you can do so by educating us on the regimes that were backed specifically by the Carter Administration. Nobody is denying that the US has had a habit of supporting brutal dictators (especially as a knee-jerk response to the presence of a USSR-backed opposition), but as far as I can tell the Carter admin was less eager to do so than its peers.

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.

> by educating us on the regimes

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.

If saying I’d like more context and that I could buy OP’s claim makes me guilty of having strong and ‘insulting’ opinions… then IDK yeah I guess I do?

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?

Evidently, he provided military aid to the junta in El Salvador at the beginning of that country's civil war:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1981/01/14/c...

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