My 2019 book The Magic Formula is now available in free .pdf form.
Read The Magic Formula
I wrote this as a one-volume introduction to the “supply side” school of economic thought, since 1970. I think that not even some core “supply siders” (such as Steve Moore or Dan Mitchell) have a full appreciation of how powerful these tools are, as I show in my many historical examples. Since US policy has been rather stagnant since the Reagan tax cut era ended in 1991, mostly this has been happening outside the US. Real life keeps coming up more amazing than the wildest fantasies.
Most of this goes unnoticed by the economics intelligentsia. They are still wasting their time on nonsense. In The Magic Formula, I have about a four page description of how a turn from “austerity” policy toward a lower tax/lower spending strategy (combined with a stable euro, basically the Magic Formula) produced a dramatic turnaround in a number of European governments in 2014-18. I have not seen a good description anywhere else (and I was looking in 2019, when I was writing this). That alone would be a good book or PhD dissertation; or, better yet, a PhD dissertation that becomes a book. Plus, there are countless examples from farther back in history, that should be investigated. I turned up some very interesting whiffs of a successful Magic Formula policy during the reign of Anastasius I, emperor of Byzantium from 491 to 518. Plus, there is an interesting Free Enterprise history of the Muslim Empire, also known as the Saracens, which was explored in books such as The Discovery of Freedom, by Rose Wilder Lane (Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter), and also in The Mainspring of Human Progress, by Henry Grady Weaver. It gets another six pages or so in my book. This also should be investigated in more detail. Whole continents of knowledge are just waiting for anyone interested enough to explore and investigate.
