Nixon Ran to the Right, Governed to the Left

Many patriots find themselves growing defensive when the name of our 37^th president, Richard M. Nixon, is mentioned. He is an everlasting target of the left’s hatred and contempt, and that alone makes many patriots stick up for him. Many also regard the Watergate scandal as not so much about Nixon’s lying and obstruction of justice as about the left carrying out a coup against a popular president who had just carried 49 states in his re-election campaign of 1972. Nevertheless, Nixon’s presidency is very much a mixed bag. It was the embodiment of an old adage that all too many Republicans followed: Run to the right, govern to the left.

For example, on December 2, 1970, Nixon signed an executive order establishing the Environmental Protection Agency. This was part of an ambitious program that Nixon had devised to clean up the nation’s air and water and monitor the state of the environment, and the agency took immediate action to solve several nagging and large-scale pollution problems.

Yet although the EPA was established in order to deal with genuine problems and did some real good, it quickly became a massive, multi-tentacled monster that would exercise all manner of interference in the lives of Americans, often in pursuit of a nebulous economic goal that was based on poorly supported or politically motivated scientific findings.

Another manifestation of Nixon’s leftism was his taking America off the gold standard and imposing wage and price controls. On August 15, 1971, in response to rising inflation, Nixon took the nation’s currency off the gold standard, under which a paper note was a certificate that could be turned in for a certain amount of gold. Instead, America has ever since issued fiat currency, that is, a dollar is a dollar because the government says it is, not because the paper dollar has any relation to any amount of precious metal.

The abandonment of the gold standard likewise worked against Nixon’s stated goal of ending inflation. Tying paper money to the gold supply limited the amount of paper money that could be produced; once that tie was removed, money could be printed at will. With more money in circulation, prices rose, and the savings of millions of Americans were steeply devalued.

That same day, Nixon also became the first president in American history to impose wage and price controls during peacetime. In a nationally televised address, he explained that his freeze on wages and prices was “temporary”: “To put the strong, vigorous American economy into a permanent straitjacket would lock in unfairness; it would stifle the expansion of our free enterprise system.”

And while he threatened “government sanctions” on those who violated the freeze, he maintained: “It will not be accompanied by the establishment of a huge price control bureaucracy. I am relying on the voluntary cooperation of all Americans—each one of you: workers, employers, consumers—to make this freeze work. Working together, we will break the back of inflation, and we will do it without the mandatory wage and price controls that crush economic and personal freedom.”

Nixon’s wage and price controls were initially popular; they gave the impression that the president was acting boldly to meet a crisis. He would have done better, however, to have emulated all the presidents who faced economic crises before Herbert Hoover and done nothing, knowing that the economy would recover quickly. The freeze helped stabilize inflation rates for a brief period, but as many Americans did all they could to get around the freeze, prices started rising again.

Nixon reimposed the wage and price controls in June 1973, making the situation even worse. The wage and price controls were damaging for many reasons but especially for two: they represented an expansion of federal power over the national economy, and they reduced supplies of goods, as cash-strapped businesses cut production rates to meet expenses. This resulted in shortages and the rise in prices that the controls had been meant to prevent. Some farmers even killed their own chickens rather than sell them at artificially fixed prices that were lower than the cost of raising them.

When Dwight D. Eisenhower, Nixon’s political mentor and the grandfather of his daughter’s husband, became president, he ratified and continued the New Deal, rather than rolling it back. In the same way, the Nixon administration was, in many ways, a continuation of the Great Society, to the detriment of all Americans