Daniel Henninger has been on a roll lately. His column today continues to deliver:
Today, frontline Democrats see the private sector as doing two things: It produces tax revenue for $3.9 trillion federal budgets, and it shafts workers. The private sector in the Democratic worldview is necessary but nasty. Their leadership gives the impression of not having the simplest understanding of how an employer's life unfolds day to day.
A potential solution?
If the Democrats are willing to bet the entire U.S. economy on a 1931 theory known as the Keynesian multiplier, surely Republicans can excavate and relearn the core idea handed down to them by Ronald Reagan. That idea was known as economic growth. Freed to choose between these two competing ideas, I'm guessing many voters would go for growth. All that's needed is just one Republican who can explain this idea halfway as well as Ronald Reagan.
In order to recover this lost ideology of growth, Henninger recommends reading Reagan's Letters, Milton Friedman's Free to Choose, and Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson. Good advice! Ideas don't die. They are just forgotten. Still, I'd add one caveat to Henninger's column. Economic growth is a public good, but it also causes social distortions and resentment among those who do not feel that they are getting their due. Certainly intellectuals, who want to see society ordered according to their own preferences, feel left behind by a culture that takes shape according to consumer tastes expressed in the marketplace. Reagan's talent was that he combined growth economics with a sense of civic pride. He restored the sense of American exceptionalism and grandeur that had been battered by Vietnam and the Iranian revolution. This wasn't enough to correct the various moral deficiencies afflicting American culture. But it did give people something more than growth for growth's sake.