The Reaganite economic conviction 25 years later...

James K. Galbraith The Predator State p 3-4:

The Reaganites offered up a famous combination of policies that had grown largely from seeds planted in the academy during the long years of liberal rule.  The central element was reduction of taxes on wealth, intended to unlock the productive powers of capital, spurring saving and investment.  Tight money was intended to end inflation quickly, brutally if necessary.  And with this came a wide-ranging assault on government, regulation, and unions, whose purpose was to let market forces--and private capitalists--rule.

 

Except among the immediate victims, the great conservative ideas for a time had wide appeal.  Some of it was scientific.  For each problem they offered a solution.  Each solution was rooted in the attractive vision of free individual economic choice, coordinated only by the marketplace and the gentle persuasions of price.  The solutions had scholarly credentials; they were rooted in the economics my generation had imbibed in graduate school.  For that reason, President Reagan was able to draw on some of the most prominent economists in the country, not all of them ideologues by any means.  Murray Weidenbaum and Martin Feldstein were his first chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers, and even young tyros Lawrence Summers and Paul Krugman, who each came in for a year under Feldstein, would serve in his administration.  Nobody of remotely comparable talent would work under George W. Bush.

 

In addition to intellectual legitimacy, the popularity of the conservative viewpoint in those days had an emotional, even a romantic, aspect.  The conservatives promised prosperity without the trouble of planning for it, achieved through a simple three-step program: cut taxes, end inflation, and free the market.  At a deeper level, they promised an end to a kind of politics that many in elite circles--frankly in both major parties--had come to loathe: the politics of compromise, redistribution, and catering to the needs and demands of minorities and the poor.  America in 1980 had compassion fatigue.  The conservative agenda promised, perhaps more than anything else, to make compassion redundant.  In addition, it was audacious, radical, flashy--a program with sex appeal.  Suddenly it was the conservatives who were the brave and brash bad boys of American culture, while liberals like myself had become the country's killjoys, young fogies hopelessly in the grip of old ideas.

 

What is left of all this, twenty-five years on?  Essentially nothing...