A blog post from the 2016-7 Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy, Prof. Francis Beckwith:

This week the Center of Western Civilization, Thought, and Policy (CWCTP) is . The first is a talk by , Professor of Sociology at the University of North Texas. He will be speaking on “Conservatives in Academia: Is There Bias Against Them?” Professor Yancey is the author of several books on race, religion, and the academy. Among them are ,  (w/ Michael Emerson) Transcending Racial Barriers: Toward a Mutual Obligations Approach (Oxford University Press, 2010), , and .  Professor Yancey’s talk will be held on September 21, 2016 at 7:15 PM in Eaton Humanities 150. 

The next day CWCTP will be hosting a panel discussion,   Moderated by CWCTP director, Robert Pasnau, the panel will feature Professor Yancey,  (Professor and Chair of Political Science, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs) and  (Professor and Chair of Political Science, University of Colorado, Boulder).  Professor Dunn’s most recent book, , has been praised by  as “the authoritative treatise, integrating all previous work in an accessible and fair-minded way, and adding in empathy - the rarely heard voices of conservative professors. All academics should read this book, as should anyone who wants to improve the scholarship, prestige, and public funding of the academy." The panel will be held on September 22, 2016 at 4:00 PM in the British Studies Room in the Norlin Library.  

I hope that you will join us on Wednesday and Thursday for what I am sure will prove to be the sort of thought-provoking and conversation-starting events that are vital to the life of a university. 

Francis Beckwith

Sept 19. 2016

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This coming week, on Wed. Feb. 17 and then on Thurs. the 18th, the Conservative Thought and Policy lecture series presents two events. On the 17th, I myself shall give a public lecture, on the acute and ever-growing need for absorbing the historical lessons of supply-side economics, that of the Reagan Revolution, in our agonizingly sluggish and underperforming economy. The venue is Benson Earth Sciences 180 and time 7pm. 

On the heels of this event, 24 hours later, on Thursday the 18th at 7pm, in Hale 270, Lily Williams will discuss the harrowing experience of growing up in Mao's Cultural Revolution. Lily is rightly concerned, in this "feel the Bern" (as in Sanders) wave that we see this election season in young people, that Americans have become too un-acquainted with the failures (and worse) of socialism and its devolutions into Communism. Lily is also the libertarian candidate for Senate.

The goal, the Aristotelian telos of this nation, is for all to live well--very well--in prosperity. Distressing as it has been not to shake the after-effects of the Great Recession, and to have our economy persist in its low-employment, debt-ridden state, it will do us well to remember that this situation comes unnaturally to this country. The standard experience of the American people is of opportunity and success. The strong, repeated tendency of this nation is to grow and grow abundantly. We shall have the chance to discuss these matters on the 17th and 18th. Yesterday, on Forbes.com, I harkened back to the last time we had the opportunity to fix a major economic mess:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/briandomitrovic/2016/02/09/the-last-time-oil-collapsed/#38f437c94017

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The Laffer curve--a bell curve looking like a "McDonald's arch on its side," as the great Wall Street Journal editor Robert L. Bartley described it--remains the most recognizable economics graph of the last fifty years. Economists and non-economists alike know or have heard of it: at some point, tax rates get so high such that they produce progressively less government revenue, at which point cutting tax rates can increase revenue. The author of the curve, Arthur B. Laffer, is speaking at CU Boulder, tomorrow (Jan. 20) at 4pm in Old Main, in the Conservative Thought and Policy speaker series.

When Laffer developed his curve in the early 1970s, as a faculty member at the University of Chicago, he was working on the "substitution effects" of macroeconomic policies. These were the kinds of behavior that changed because, as was the case at the time, the dollar was unsound, taxes were increasing on account of inflationary "bracket creep," and government spending and regulation was on the march. Economic actors were "substituting" hedges (such as buying commodities) against the blanket governmental intrusion upon the economy for what they had been previously doing, namely real-world investment and consumpton. Underlying the curve was the notion that if tax rates were cut (and if the dollar regained soundness and the spending and regulation stepped back), people would substitute back into real-world economic activity. The increased tax revenue would be an effect of a much larger process of a return to the normal conditions of economic growth. 

Keynesians had said that the chief effect of even a marginal tax cut was on the "income" side--it put more money in people's pockets. Laffer countered with an array of behavioral changes far beyond the income effect. The identification of the primacy of substitution effects became the foundation of the supply-side economics that at last bore fruit with the capital gains tax cut of 1978 and the Ronald Reagan reforms of the 1980s. 

Laffer and his colleagues at his research and investment firm have published an enormous amount in this tradition. I have had the priviledge of bringing a sample of this work to print and public access: http://www.amazon.com/The-Pillars-Reaganomics-Supply-Side-Revolutionaries/dp/1934276197

Please join us on Wednesday, Jan. 20 at 4pm in Old Main, for the public lecture by Arthur Laffer, and see this site for further announcements of lectures in the supply-side tradition. 

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We are planning a course of talks on the history and significance of supply-side economics--and the tradition of economic growth in this country--beginning in January. Tonight, before an undergraduate audience assembled by the student group The Inklings (the reference is to Tolkein's circle), I shall be giving a talk on The Moral Foundations of Capitalism. Please come if you like, at 7pm in Koelbel 255, but I should point out that I shall be reprising my remarks tonight in a larger public talk in the early spring term, in the supply-side lecture series. This Staurday, in another event, 20 students will be joining me, under the auspices of the Institute for Humane Studies, in studying several great works in 20th-century free-market ideas. As the semester winds up, student interest in classical polical economy, and how it might serve us in our 21st century challenges, remains keen.

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The Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755
Disaster, Enlightenment, Plate Tectonics, Fear of the Lord

Featuring author Mark Molesky

Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2015
6:30 p.m. - 8 p.m.
Hellems Room 252
University of Colorado Boulder

Free and open to the public.

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Tomorrow afternoon and evening, on Wednesday, October 28, the fourteen Republican candidates will be debating at CU’s Coors Events center. A number of students shall be in attendance – I am bringing four. CNBC-TV is the broadcaster, and my co-author, CNBC anchor Larry Kudlow, is arriving in Boulder just now for a series of events with us and with the debate tomorrow evening.

Larry and I are completing a book on the great John F. Kennedy tax cut of 1964—the tax cut that not only gave us the boom of the 1960s, but inspired Ronald Reagan to emulation. In the Republican primary debates of 1980, it was the major issue that separated Reagan and his opponent, George Bush.

Bush won the Pennsylvania primary that April, much on the strength of a new line. He called Reagan’s economic plan “voodoo economics” in the primary’s stretch run. What has been forgotten is why Bush called Reagan’s plan voodoo economics. Bush believed that Reagan’s across-the-board income tax rate cut of 30 percent (modeled off the Kennedy cut) would result in a consumer price inflation of an equal magnitude—of “30 to 32 percent,” in Bush’s words. That was why Reagan’s plan was voodoo: it would cause inflation.

The following clip is from the content-heavy debate Reagan and Bush had in Texas that April, shortly after Bush’s big Pennsylvania win. At 5:40, Bush specifies his belief that Reagan’s tax cut will cause a 30-32 percent inflation. Shortly thereafter, he speaks of the concerns about Reagan’s plan from “our creditors abroad.”

The debate was content-rich: perhaps unlike what prevails in political discourse today. But the facts certainly did bear out Reagan’s position—wiping out the legitimacy of the “voodoo” charge. Once Reagan’s 25 percent tax cut passed in August 1981, inflation (which had been running in the double-digit rates), collapsed almost immediately to 3 percent per year. In addition, the interest rate on the 30-year long-bond (the preferred vehicle of America’s creditors abroad), peaked in 1980 and marched relentlessly downward as Reagan’s tax cut came in—so much so that the bond actually had to be retired for a time in 2002.

Here is the central clip of the powerful Republican primary debate in 1980:

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edchtf9MS7g]

And here are the graphs of the historical inflation and long-bond rates:

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