Daniel Hannan: How to shrink the state? Copy Reagan

I’ve blogged before about why I admire Ronald Reagan; why, indeed, I see him as the greatest of all 44 US presidents. Here, in his centenary year, is a reminder of his greatest domestic achievement: he managed to bring spending down as a percentage of GDP. He did so in the only way possible in a modern democracy, not by slashing expenditure in absolute terms, but by allowing the private sector to grow faster than the public sector. Never forget the central message of Reagan’s inauguration speech: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government...