Many Americans struggling to come to grips with the economic crisis have compared the current situation to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Strangely, they have not thought to make a comparison closer in time: to the ruinous 'stagflation' of the late 1970s. But now, in the riveting and genuinely groundbreaking book "Econoclasts", historian Brian Domitrovic reminds us that the greatest and most consequential of the twentieth century's economic counterrevolutions emerged in response to the 1970s crisis: supply-side economics. In a pulsing narrative, Domitrovic tells the incredible story of the economists, intellectuals, journalists, and policy wonks who showed America how to get out of the 1970s funk and who ushered in an unprecedented quarter-century run of growth and expansive entrepreneurial opportunity. Based on the author's years of archival research, "Econoclasts" explodes numerous myths about supply-side economics, which flew in the face of the dominant economic thinking of the time and is frequently disparaged even today.
Supply-side economics succeeded, Domitrovic shows, because it restrained the two great means of governmental intervention in the economy, the income tax and the Federal Reserve. "Econoclasts" is a masterful narrative history in the tradition of Amity Shlaes' "The Forgotten Man" and John Steele Gordon's "An Empire of Wealth". It is also impeccably timely: this is a story we must know if we are to understand the foundation of America's prosperity - a foundation that is now under increasing attack.