How Economic Crackpots Devoured American Politics

CONSERVATIVES and Republicans keep hoping that liberals will actually admit that supply-side economics works, that is that low tax rates and limited government is the best prescription for prosperity.

But liberals just don’t want to accept of grace and love, spurning the offer of friendship made by Sir Walter Blunt to Harry Percy in Henry IV Part One.

In fact Jonathan Chait, Senior Editor of The New Republic has just published a book rejecting the whole supply-side deal. It’s called The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics, and it argues that Arthur Laffer (of the curve) was a lightweight, Jude Wanniski (of the Wall Street Journal edit page) was a crackpot, and George Gilder (of Wealth and Poverty) was a blind (and misogynistic) enthusiast.

Well, enough with pulling our punches, let’s get Chait’s own words from anexcept to The Big Con from The New Republic.

American politics has been hijacked by a tiny coterie of right-wing economic extremists, some of them ideological zealots, others merely greedy, a few of them possibly insane.

To add to the fun, Chait and Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, have been trading barbs in the online New Republic:

Of course, Chait is right. Arthur Laffer is no Milton Friedman; Jude Wanniski was weird, and George Gilder enjoys bucking the liberal consensus. And it’s true that the advocates for supply-side economics oversold their product. That’s what advocates usually do.

The big question is whether liberals are ready to concede that they ought to back off, just a little,their philosophy of governance by program and subsidy and endlessly mucking around with the tax code.

That is really the argument of supply-side economics. It says that you can use government to reward your supporters and punish your opponents: politics as usual. Boys will be boys.

But you ought to understand that when you erect confiscatory tax rates and huge subsidies that you distort the economy and reduce the prosperity of ordinary Americans.

You ought to confront, for instance, that when you send huge amounts of money to the poor it reduces their work effort and it devastates their families. And that is not just an economic issue. It is a moral issue.

And it is true. Supply-side economics devoured American Politics—at least as liberals had known it.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Civil Society

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Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems� No more rules, no more models� Genius conjures up rather than learns� ” —Victor Hugo
C�sar Gra�a, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

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Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

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Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

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Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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