He cut taxes, eliminated burdensome regulations, turned on the spigot to increase oil exploration, opened global markets to U.S. goods, started the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the economy took off.

Newspaper headlines said Reagan had made "capitalism fashionable again."

Now we are again in a deep recession, and Barack Obama has ridden it to the pinnacle of power by saying that the economy has been gunned down by Wall Street, bankers, speculators and unfettered capitalism. Obama became the anti-Reagan. Government, he said, is the answer to all our economic problems, and we need lots of it. Income taxes will have to be raised on those very entrepreneurs, investors and risk-takers that Reagan saw as the pioneers of economic progress. And the government will "invest" those taxes as it sees fit in government-run green technology and nationalized healthcare. Oil exploration and all other fossil fuels will be taxed and curtailed. Trade will be restricted and demoted. The heroes of Obama's centralized economy will be administrators, czars, regulators and overseers in Washington.

"What Obama proposes is a 'post-material economy,'" and that's not good, writes Washington Post economic columnist Robert J. Samuelson.

"He would deemphasize the production of ever-more private goods and services, harnessing the economy to achieve broad social goals" like curbing global warming and creating government health insurance. "In the process, he sets aside the standard logic of economic progress.

"Since the dawn of the Industrial Age, this has been simple: produce more with less," i.e., increasing productivity, Samuelson continues. "Mass markets developed for clothes, cars, computers and much more because declining costs expanded production. Living standards rose. By contrast, the logic of the 'post-material economy' is just the opposite: Spend more and get less."

Obama is betting $9 trillion in debt that it will work. Wise economists like Samuelson know that it can't.

Obama thinks the age of free-market capitalism is ending, and that we are entering the Age of the Managed Economy where government redirects the nation's resources and its capital to achieve broad, untested social reforms.

"Those who predict capitalism's demise have to contend with one important historical fact," Harvard Professor Dani Rodrik writes in the current issue of The International Economy. It "has an almost unlimited capacity to reinvent itself." It has survived countless crises over the centuries and has outlived all of its adversaries. It will survive Obama, too.