"So the heralded Reagan Revolution fizzled. In part it failed because the administration never had a strong commitment to fundamental change in the first place. Witness the unyielding support for the massive transfer payments, benefitting mainly the middle class, under the Social Security system; the continued subsides to, bailouts of, and protection from competition for farmers, timber companies, auto, steel, textile, footwear, and apparel producers, shipping companies, commercial banks, and countless others; the pervasive interference in international trade through quotas and so-called orderly marketing agreements negotiated with foreign governments. Virtually the entire hodgepodge, described by Stockman as a 'coast-to-coast patchwork of dependencies, shelters, protections, and redistributions that the nation's politicians had brokered over the decades,' remained intact. Political expediency reigned as supreme as ever. But even had the Reagan partisans genuinely desired to return to a free-market regime, their methods did not augur well for such a reaction. They focused not on institutional change but on altering the budget numbers, on getting income-tax rates down--particularly at the top bracket--and, with much less enthusiasm, on reducing governmental spending. Number juggling is not the stuff of revolution. Ultimately, as Stein has observed, the likelihood of a conservative revolution was slight because 'even conservative governments when in office do not want to limit their own powers.' Conservative politicians, in short, are still politicians. And in a political system devoid of basic constitutional and ideological restraints on the scope of governmental authority, any species of politician may run amok." - Robert Higgs