Leadership Quote by Ronald Reagan

Reagan’s line lands like a punchy bit of frontier wisdom, but it’s really a theory of power disguised as common sense. “Solve” is a deliberately high bar: final, permanent, clean. By contrast, “subsidizes” implies a perverse incentive structure - that once government touches a social ill, it keeps it alive with funding, bureaucracy, and political self-interest. The sentence is engineered to make government look not just ineffective but complicit, turning public programs into a kind of moral hazard machine.

The subtext is a reframing of compassion as dependency. If aid “subsidizes” a problem, then the problem becomes something that benefits from staying unsolved: agencies keep budgets, politicians keep talking points, recipients keep assistance. Reagan doesn’t need to prove any of that; the verb does the insinuating for him. It’s a masterclass in rhetorical judo: shifting the burden from “how do we fix this?” to “who profits from pretending to fix this?” The audience is invited to feel savvy, even suspicious.

Context matters. Reagan’s presidency rode a backlash to the postwar expansion of the federal state - the Great Society, stagflation, tax revolt politics - and the growing belief that government had become an expensive, self-reproducing system. This line compresses that mood into a portable slogan, one that can be applied to welfare, education, housing, crime, you name it. Its power is its generality; its weakness is the same. Government sometimes does fail by subsidizing symptoms, but the quip’s real intent is ideological: to make “less government” feel like the only adult answer.