This Day In History: President Richard Nixon signed a bill lowering the maximum U.S. speed limit to 55 MPH in order to conserve gasoline on this day in 1973. The law would be repealed in 1995.
According to Milton Friedman, Nixon, despite being a Republican (the party of small government) "was the most socialist of the presidents of the United States in the 20th century." He adds "his ideas were not socialist, quite the opposite, but if you look at what happened during his administration, first of all, the number of pages in the Federal Register, which is full of regulations about business, doubled during his regime. During his regime the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, was established and the OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the OECA [the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance of the EPA] -- about a dozen, a half-dozen alphabetic agencies were established so that you had the biggest increase in government regulation and control of industry during the Nixon administration that you had in the whole postwar period."
Nixon, our most anti-communist president also instituted wage and price controls, took us off the gold standard, and famously repeated Milton Friedman's line "we're all Keynesians now."
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