Straight Talk

My former neighbor, Jimmy Carter 

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Letter to the Editor

As everyone knows by now, the local celebrity of Plains, Ga. – Jimmy Carter – recently passed away, leaving behind multiple and complex legacies. 

Although I was a young boy in 1980, I remember going to Reagan rallies at Plains High School down the road from our family farm. There was also a day when some friends and I got scolded by the Secret Service for accidentally wandering onto the Carter compound that bordered the Plains public pool. 

“Mr. Jimmy,” as many locals knew him, would often visit Golden Peanut Co. when the trailers hauled in the annual harvest of peanuts to the warehouse. America thought of him as a peanut farmer, but he was not a farmer in the sense that he actually grew crops with risks associated. Locals knew Mr. Jimmy as a landowner who rented his property to the real farmers.  

Most of America remembers Carter’s presidency as difficult financial times, but presidents usually get the blame (or take the credit) for the ebb and flow of a complex economy, even though it’s the Federal Reserve cabal that pulls the strings. However, some folks might not know that Carter rightfully did what he could to help an ailing economy by way of deregulation. He cut bureaucratic red tape in the oil, trucking, passenger air, and railroad industries to lower prices.  

Anytime there is government regulation in the private sector, a select few elites are getting rich from federal cronyism while the rest of us suffer. Look how messed up the economy has become with unconstitutional intervention today. History proves the bigger government becomes, the more society struggles. 

In 1978, Carter signed a bill legalizing homebrewing, which is something government should never regulate in the first place; yet, he inconsistently came to favor government intervention in the climate cult, which also enriches the few elites and drives up energy prices for the rest of us. At times he didn’t trust the so-called “experts,” but other times he peddled propaganda to the masses.  

Christians admire Carter for his public testimony as a Bible believer saved by grace through faith in Christ Jesus. On killing babies in the womb, he was quoted as saying, “I have never believed that Jesus would be in favor of abortion …,” but he never took a strong stand against this blight on society nor advocated for a simple solution of adoption for innocent babies.  

He was ingenious to create private charities for helping his fellow man apart from government’s stealing from society to subjectively and inefficiently redistribute. Furthermore, historians will have a field day dissecting Carter’s evangelical faith with his flip-flopping on sodomy or women pastors or the disastrous Department of Education, under which academic scores have plummeted. However, he was a Democrat who would definitely not fit in with today’s radical socialists hellbent on destroying America with good intentions.  

Although I didn’t know Mr. Jimmy personally, he made our hometown of Plains, Ga., famous and will be remembered as a POTUS [president of the United States] who loved where he came from. 

Jim Gaston, Franklin