Death Of A Supply Side Salesman - Road to the Middle Class

THERE HAVE been many important figures in the rise of the American conservative movement, but in anyone’s front rank must be Jude Wanniski who died Monday August 29, 2005 aged 69. Obituaries can be found here and here. Bob Novak recalls him here. George Gilder, author of Wealth and Poverty, celebrates Jude as an inspiration: “Economies are driven not by the dollars in people’s pockets but by the ideas in their heads.” Even The New York Times rolls out a decent obit.

It was Wanniski, as one of Bob Bartley’s bright young men, who first advanced on the edit page of The Wall Street Journal the supply-side cocktail of sound money and low tax rates that brought Ronald Reagan to the Presidency and that remains the bedrock of Republican Party economic policy. Wanniski’s economic ideas are expounded in his immodestly titled book The Way the World Works.

Supply-side economics is the basis for the solid economic growth that the United States has enjoyed since the first Reagan income tax rate cuts started to bite in late 1983. The new economic policy seems to have shifted the United States to a decadal business cycle with only two short recessions, in 1991 and 2001, since the start of Reaganomics.

It is natural for the governing class to look with skepticism on supply-side economics. Elites like ideas that boost elites; that is why they loved Keynesian economics. But supply-side economics relies upon a Hayekian understanding of the economy. It is the millions of decisions by millions of economic actors that drives the economy, not the big ideas of powerful people. Bureaucrats and experts simply cannot know enough to outperform the economic decisions of millions of businessmen, entrepreneurs, and consumers.

Understandably, Democrats hate supply-side economics. Their politics is based on dependency and clientage, handing out economic goodies to their supporters in programs and “targeted” tax cuts. In the supply-side world where ordinary people do extraordinary things, there is no need for all-knowing experts and patronage-dispensing political bosses.

Still, the Democrats will probably be hesitant to crank up tax rates again. They tried it in 1993 and were promptly spanked by the voters in 1994 in the Republican takeover of Congress.

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

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

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

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

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

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

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

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Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

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E. G. West, Education and the State

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