At the end of Ronald Reagan's first year in the White House, an energetic debate before a Harvard audience. Two samples: WFB: "The moral question to one side, [the notion] that by freeing the more wealthy you are damaging, pari passu, the less wealthy is economically illiterate. During President Carter's last year we were running at an inflation rate of 13 per cent and achieving a negative growth rate. Inflation does not, noblesse oblige, decline to afflict poor people." ... JKG: "Let us cease to think of economic policy as a matter of liberalism or conservatism and retreat from hope and fantasy to arithmetic. It's better, let us realize, to pay taxes than to suppress investment with high interest rates. A balanced budget is better than a big deficit that must be financed at high interest rates with further adverse effects on investment."