Paul Craig Roberts : biography

From early 1981 to January 1982, Roberts served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Ronald Reagan and Treasury Secretary Donald Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department’s Meritorious Service Award for "outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy."

Roberts resigned in January 1982 to become the first occupant of the William E. Simon Chair for Economic Policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, then part of Georgetown University.Toledo Blade, 19 January 1982, "Treasury Dept. Economist Quits Post: Advocate of Tax-Cut Plan Going To Georgetown U He held this position until 1993. He went on to write The Supply-Side Revolution (1984), in which he explained the reformulation of macroeconomic theory and policy which he had helped to develop.

From 1993 to 1996, he was a Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute. He also was a Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

In The New Color Line (1995), Roberts argued that the Civil Rights Act was subverted by the bureaucrats who applied it. He thought it was being used to create status-based privileges and threatened the equality of the Fourteenth Amendment in whose name it was passed. In The Tyranny of Good Intentions (2000), Roberts documented what he saw as the erosion of the Blackstonian legal principles that ensure that law is a shield of the innocent and not a weapon in the hands of government.

Honors and recognition

In 1987 the French government recognized him as "the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism"; it inducted him into the Legion of Honor on March 20, 1987. The French Minister of Economics and Finance, Edouard Balladur, came to the US from France to present the medal to Roberts. President Reagan sent OMB Director Jim Miller to the ceremony with a letter of congratulation.

In 1992 Roberts received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism from the free-market American Legislative Exchange Council. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists in the United States.

Views

Criticism of Bush

Roberts opposed the Iraq War and wrote frequently on the subject. On May 18, 2005, in response to the publication of the "Downing Street memo," Roberts wrote an article calling for Bush’s impeachment for lying to Congress about the case for war.

Roberts also criticized a potential Bush administration attack on Iran. In an August 15, 2005 article, he stated "Bush…dismisses all facts and assurances and is willing to attack Iran based on nothing but Israel’s paranoia."

Although his criticisms of Bush often seemed to align him with the political left, Roberts continues to explain Ronald Reagan’s two goals—to end stagflation and the cold war. Roberts has written that "true conservatives" were the "first victims" of the neocons of the Bush administration., CounterPunch He has said that supporters of George W. Bush "are brownshirts with the same low intelligence and morals as Hitler’s enthusiastic supporters.", NewsMax

Israel

Roberts has criticized actions by the Israeli government in the 21st century. He cautions against confusing opinions about a right-wing Zionist government with support of world Jewry. In one of his columns, "What Became of Western Morality?" (January 2005), he noted that it is Israeli newspapers, not American ones, that protest the Israeli government’s "atrocities" against Palestinians:

"It is the goyim moralists who are silent, not the Jews. It is the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, not the goyim media, that provides reports of Israel’s abuse of Palestinians. Gideon Levy’s “The Neighborhood Bully Strikes Again” was published in Haaretz on Dec. 29, not in the goyim press. Levy’s words—”Once again, Israel’s violent responses, even if there is justification for them, exceed all proportion and cross every red line of humaneness, morality, international law and wisdom”—are not words that can appear in American print or TV media. Such words, printed in Israeli newspapers, never reach the goyim."