Politics & Power Quote by Dick Cheney

Cheney’s line is doing two things at once: relitigating a policy fight from the early 1970s and laundering his own governing philosophy through the language of hard-earned experience. By reaching back to Nixon’s wage and price controls, he grabs an example that still spooks conservatives: a Republican White House briefly flirting with something that sounded, to the right, like peacetime command economics. The “you know” and the long runway of “I’ve got experiences going back” aren’t casual; they’re a credential. He’s not arguing from ideology, he implies, but from memory.

The subtext is intra-party discipline. Cheney flags that it was “in that case a Republican administration” as a warning shot to any GOP tempted by interventionism when inflation spikes or public anger rises. It’s a reminder that Republican identity is supposed to mean trusting markets even when markets are politically inconvenient. Framing it as “a terrible mistake” and “huge” also compresses a messy historical episode into a morality play: state control equals economic distortion, full stop.

Context matters: Nixon’s 1971 controls were sold as temporary triage against inflation, widely popular at first, and later blamed for shortages and warped incentives. Cheney’s critique is less about that specific toolkit than about the precedent: once government claims the power to set prices, the ceiling disappears. The line’s real target is any renewed appetite for “just for now” economic micromanagement, especially when it arrives dressed up as pragmatism rather than ideology.