Replies

central_va:

First of all, I make no claim to expertise in matters economic. A five decade member of the conservative movement, I simply tend to take its positions as my default position on many issues.

You say you do not read comedy. That is simply a editorial comment Then your next sentence is another editorial comment. You may well have specific reasons for your conclusions but you have not shared them. If Wanniski's thesis is laughable, you must have reasons for saying so. What are they?

I don't uncritically support Wanniski. He was the east end of a westbound horse on foreign policy and on Islam (cozying up to Calypso Louis Farrakhan who was probably behind the assassination of Malcolm X because Malcolm X, having gone on his Hejira to Mecca had discovered and was preaching that Islam was a religion not merely of blacks but also of people of just about every race and nationality).

That preaching was intolerable to race hucksters like Elijah Muhammed and Calypso Louis whom he sent to NYC immediately before the assassination of Malcolm X by some nobody with a name like Herbie 5X Brown. Farrakhan, within a few days demanded tat the widow Betty Shabazz and Malcolm X's children vacate the parsonage that was attached to his ministry at Muhammed's Mosque #7 in Harlem.

Nothing in Wanniski's background suggested his great weakness for the likes of Farrakhan or Islam. His father was a Polish itinerant butcher who became a bookbinder and his mother was a Scottish book keeper in Pennsylvania and then in NYC. the father of one of his parents was a communist who gave Wanniski a copy of Marx's Das Kapital for his high school graduation gift in about 1954. Whatever his future track record, he was never a communist.

Wanniski made a fool of himself and just about killed his career by bitterly denouncing Bush the Younger over the Second Gulf War and actually endorsing John Kerry in 2004.

Back to economics, his actual area of expertise, Wanniski apparently coined the term "supply side economics" which has been quite a useful concept. He was also a mentor to the late Jack Kemp whom I, at least, hold in high esteem.

So, like most of us, Wanniski was a mixture of good and bad elements. He laid out his theories of supply side economics and of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff triggering the Great Depression at length in published books. His assertions might be wrong but they deserve full rebuttal (at least the executive summary) not cursory editorial rejection.

If I, as a Catholic, would like to vomit over the present pope's forays into religiously irrelevant areas like "global climate change," support for the European Union, support for waves of Islamic immigration making large areas of Europe uninhabitable, moral relativism and so forth, I do not have to reject his all too rare pro-life statements. Likewise as to Wanniski, his foreign policy and Islamophile deviations from common sense do not compel a conclusion that he must therefore be wrong on economics and the effect of Smoot-Hawley. I want to hear your reasoning.

Meanwhile, may God bless you and yours! As conservatives, we need to regain and practice the habit of arguing our case for what we believe in the public square with due regard for the opinions of others. I usually agree with your posts and I look forward to your evidence and arguments for disagreeing with Wanniski.