One need not overstate the claims of Jimmy Carter’s supposed post-presidential saintliness or understate the failures of his presidency to recognize three of his signal achievements.
Democrats customarily are heavy regulators, but Carter, who died on Dec. 29 at age 100, deregulated the air, truck, and rail industries very much to the public’s benefit. Carter also deserves at least backhanded credit for appointing inflation-fighter Paul Volcker to lead the Federal Reserve and then not fighting Volcker’s bitter but necessary medicine. And even in retrospect, the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt are among the most stunning diplomatic triumphs of the modern world.
Before Carter, the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Civil Aeronautics Board, and other agencies set fares for almost every element of the transportation industry, aside from private automobiles. As president, Carter personally urged deregulation. In the final two years of his term, he pushed through Congress the Airline Deregulation Act, the Motor Carrier Act (for trucking), the Staggers Rail Act, and the Telecommunications Act, each of which massively deregulated the associated industry.
Combined with technological advances that helped improve efficiency, Carter’s initiatives worked tremendously well. That’s what free-market competition usually does. In inflation-adjusted dollars, the costs in each industry have fallen significantly in the past 45 years. Indeed, as one study shows, in the 40 years from 1980 to 2019, “the wage-adjusted cost of airfare was cut in half … [and if measured in] the cost per mile flown, the decline [has been] even more dramatic.”
Alas, much of the rest of Carter’s stewardship was disastrous both abroad and, economically, at home. Now is not the time to blast him for his failures. What merits praise is that, even as his own advisers warned him that appointing a hawk against inflation such as Volcker could slow the economy significantly in the short term, Carter didn’t flinch. While other policies could have helped stem the inflation that reached more than 13% without necessitating quite so drastic a hike in interest rates, which reached 21%, Carter at least recognized, even if belatedly, that the inflationary disease was worse than Volcker’s cure. He, therefore, let the cure be administered to his own short-term political detriment. While it took former President Ronald Reagan’s policies to unleash prosperity, at least Carter let Volcker set the anti-inflationary predicate.
Then, of course, there were the 13 extraordinary days when Carter hosted Israel’s Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat for peace talks at Camp David. Egypt and Israel have now been at peace for so long that it is hard to remember just how much they hated each other and for how many bloody decades. That a formal accord could be reached at Camp David, much less a lasting and overwhelmingly productive peace, seemed miraculous.
Granted, it’s not as if Carter, by force of will, brought the two leaders together: Both, especially Sadat, had been laying the two-state groundwork for several years while Carter pursued a more multipolar approach. Still, Begin and Sadat personally detested each other. It took Carter’s dogged and quasi-spiritual efforts, shuttling back and forth between two leaders reluctant even to cross from one retreat building to the next to speak in person, to make the whole thing work.
Even for those of us in our early teenage years, the accords seemed astonishing. Egyptian-Israeli hatred, and especially the oil shortages flowing from that hatred, were an infuriating backdrop to our lives. Long gas lines, canceled vacation plans due to worries about fuel availability, and even fears of nuclear weapon use precipitated by Great Power competition for Middle East oil, had plagued us for as long as we had been aware of a wider world beyond our own neighborhoods or towns.
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Thus, when Carter emerged in full, toothy smile between a Sadat and a Begin cordially shaking hands, it seemed an epochal moment indicating that no hurdle, no hatred, was necessarily the final status in any human endeavor.
That peace, alone, made Carter’s presidency somewhat worthwhile.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
