Hadley Arkes on Reagan: "Let us simply repeal this lingering, vagrant effort to fine-tune the economy from Washington.

"Now that, I pointed out, was vintage Reagan: It involved a question of principle; its rightness could be judged on its own terms; and that rightness would not be affected in any way by the question of where interest rates would be next fall. I remarked then: Find the guy who threw that line into the speech, and have him serve up about a dozen more. And by the way, who did write that line? Oh that, said Tony, 'the President threw that in' while they had been working on the speech.

"Well, there we had it. As we used to say: Let Reagan be Reagan. His own paths of curiosity, his ways of reflecting about a problem, lingered with questions of principle, and he framed them in ways that were universally accessible."