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One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors. -- Plato (429-347 BC)

Friday, February 16, 2018

How The Dow Went From 814 to 26,000 . . .

. . . And How Jeff Bell's Populist Postulate Could Top That
Jeff Bell (1943-2018)

by Ralph Benko, Contributing Author: Have you checked your stock portfolio lately? You’re probably checking it hourly, watching the Dow climb, since November 1, 2016, from a bit over 19,000 up to 26,616, then, recently, roller-coastering around the 24,000 range.

A thousand-point drop in a day, which we’ve experienced recently, sure is dramatic. It is also, assuredly, distressing to those who have not parked their assets in cash. But, hey, let’s add some context.

On November 13, 1979, the day Ronald Reagan declared his candidacy for the presidency, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was at 814.

814. Eight hundred fourteen.

Three digits. Not five digits.

There was, way back when, if memory serves, a whimsical “Pepper and Salt” cartoon in the Wall Street Journal captioned along the lines of 'the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell to zero today, then recovered, closing unchanged.’

Wry! Yet, in fact, a 1000-point drop, back then, would have reduced the DJIA well below, well, the “zero bound,” were such a thing not mathematically impossible.

The transformation in the world economy over the past 40 years is not limited to the stock markets. It’s the real economy, stupid! As I wrote in 2010 in a column entitled The $100 trillion man about meeting leading supply-side economist Robert Mundell:
It was an honor to meet the man who (along with Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, and a few others) created the policies that created $100- trillion-plus of world wealth.

Yes, that is “trillion,” with a t.

Mundell, Kemp, Art Laffer, Jeffrey Bell … and a few others were the fountainhead of “low tax rates, stable money, and free trade” as the foundation for prosperity. Few now remember how ridiculed (“Voodoo economics,” is what candidate George H.W. Bush called it while running against Reagan in the 1980 Republican presidential primaries) was this prescription.

When Reagan campaigned against Carter, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was well below 900. Applying what Jude Wanniski ... called “the Mundell-Laffer Hypothesis,” America rode the wave to a Dow now still well over 10,000.

… According to the World Bank, the world’s GDP in 1980 was around $11 trillion. Today it is around $60 trillion. The added $50 trillion-per-year capitalizes to over $100 trillion in new wealth… even when adjusted for inflation.
Nearly a decade after publishing that column the Dow is over 20,000 and world GDP is now almost $76 trillion, per the World Bank Group. Mind boggling, isn't it?

The near-7X increase (admittedly not adjusted for inflation or population, but take the point) in world GDP -- and the nominal increase in the Dow of something like 30X -- did not happen by accident. It was the result of a heroic, against-the-odds achievement by a small band of Equitable Prosperity Warriors.

Captained by Rep. Jack Kemp, these became known as the Supply Side.

Last Saturday, an important member of this warrior band, Jeffrey Bell, joined Kemp, Wanniski, and Bob Novak in Paradiso. So, let’s take this moment to celebrate their contribution to the epic achievement of largely replacing world poverty with world prosperity ... and to imagine the Golden Age of peace and prosperity that it might portend.

A phalanx of professional economists today will tell you that, and why, the world is consigned to economic stagnation forever. They call it “the new normal.” This claim is less persuasive, and far less intimidating, to those of us who had the first-hand experience, back in the 1970s, of facing a phalanx of professional economists confident that the economy just could not possibly grow at the rates propounded by the Supply Siders.

The Supply Siders? Who were those Masked Men who left these silver bullets? Jack Kemp, Jeff Bell, Robert Mundell, Arthur Laffer, Robert Bartley, Steve Forbes, Lewis E. Lehrman, Dave Hoppe, John Mueller, Jude Wanniski, George Gilder, Larry Kudlow, Warren Brookes, Bob Novak, Alan Reynolds, Charles Kadlec, Frank Cannon, Steve Moore and a handful of others including, in a very junior capacity, just the little drummer boy in The Spirit of ’76, me, the founder of the Prosperity Caucus. (I later had intermittent professional relationships with Lehrman, Bell, Mueller, Cannon, Moore, and the Jack Kemp Foundation.)

The conventional wisdom – then as now -- ruled out the possibility of sustained real 4% economic growth. Until, of course, with the “riverboat gamble” of the Kemp-Roth tax rate cut phased in, and, courtesy of Paul Volcker, the integrity of the dollar as a unit of account was restored, sizzling equitable prosperity ensued. Just as the Supply Side predicted.

Jeff Bell ran for the United States Senate in 1978 on a supply-side platform. This turned out to be a very big deal. He knocked off the presumed-unbeatable Republican incumbent Clifford Case in the primary. His doing so took supply-side economics out of the realm of theory where it had previously floated, as if in a parallel universe, on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.

Suddenly, supply-side economics was seen as politically viable. It went, as if overnight, from a ridiculous heresy to conservative doctrine and was adopted, most significantly, by presidential aspirant Ronald Reagan. Reagan campaigned on it and, when elected, implemented it. The rest is history.

Bell’s Senate race was instrumental in making that happen. Otherwise, we might still be looking up for Dow 1000.

But wait. There’s more.

The supply-side economic formula – low marginal tax rates coupled with high integrity money (optimally the classical gold standard, then and still supply-side orthodoxy) along with free trade has never been particularly well understood by the political elites. The conventional elite policy makers and academics trend toward conflating tax cuts with tax rate cuts. They trend confused on monetary policy, preferring the academically respectable and well-intended, but ultimately misguided, monetarism.

Nevertheless, whenever the supply-side policy mix is tried it works, as elegantly demonstrated by Larry Kudlow and Brian Domitrovic’s JFK and the Reagan Revolution: A Secret History of American Prosperity. Looks like it is working again. That said, good monetary policy has been ad hoc and its sustainability is by no means a given. To shiver your timbers, check out Prof. Domitrovic's recent Forbes.com piece on the importance of the Dollar-Euro exchange rate ... highlighting certain ominous implications.

So much for history. As Peggy Noonan cleverly noted science has proven that the fastest drying substance in the Universe is tears of gratitude. So, let’s put Bell’s instrumental role in generating all that prosperity aside.

Bell has not one but two claims to fame. His economic policy legacy, supply-side economics, has been, at least somewhat, assimilated. His political legacy has yet to peak. If it does it may end up making you much richer than before.

Jeff Bell’s political legacy is that of the definer of modern populism: Bell's Populist Postulate.

Put another dime in the juke box, baby.

In 1992, Bell wrote a book entitled Populism and Elitism: politics in the age of equality. This book, which the iconic political journalist Fred Barnes termed the most important political book of its year, redefined populism. As Bell opened his interview with Brian Lamb, the host of Booknotes:
Populism I see as optimism about people’s competence to handle their own affairs. Elitism as optimism about an elite’s ability to handle the affairs of the people, always in comparison. In other words, you might not be that optimistic about the people at a given time, but you’d be more optimistic if you were a populist than you would be about the elite’s ability to handle their problems for them. … I think the end of ruling monarchy in World War I was a greatly underrated event in its importance. I think in 1918, 1920, around that time, when the last big ruling monarchies vanished from the face of the globe – Turkey, Austria, Germany, Russia, all those monarchies disappeared at once – the world was plunged fully into the age that de Tocqueville foresaw a century earlier, and we started working out the implications of what politically equality – that nobody owns anybody else in a country – was really all about.Bell’s book propelled a national debate. In important ways, he anticipated politically important movements like the Tea Party. That said, the Tea Party – of which I was a member – and Occupy Wall Street, of which I was a sympathizer, even more so -- projected a grotesque caricature of Bell’s shrewd insight. Both proto-movements ended up defeating themselves by focusing their rhetorical fire on elites rather than on elitism. Big mistake.

Bell forthrightly observed, in Populism and Elitism, that a healthy society generates lots of elites. That’s a sign of success and a desirable thing. Equality implies equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcomes. A Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution designed to punish the successful is mere demagoguery masquerading as populism.

Bell was unashamedly elite, and deservedly so. He, rather, was a genial but trenchant critic of elitism -- the attitude that the elites would be better capable of managing our lives for us than we ourselves are. Many failed to recognize the distinction Bell made between being anti-elitist and anti-elite. It’s a crucial one. And in passing let it not pass unnoticed that elitism is the poison pill at the core of fascism, communism, socialism (democratic or otherwise), most progressivism, and much snobbish Country Club Republicanism.

Why does this matter and why do I suggest that Bell’s political legacy might prove more significant – and more valuable – than his stellar economic legacy? Two words:

President Trump.

Let me stipulate to President Trump’s propensity to venture into galootish and sometimes even overbearing conduct. It’s a propensity which I, another kid from Queens, share with him. We share it with Archie Bunker, Doug Heffernan, and Arthur Spooner. Departing from the theatrical, we share this propensity with Andrew Cuomo, Fran Drescher, Art Garfunkel, Cyndi Lauper, and Howard Stern. Still, to know us is to love us! (Cyndi? Call me?)

Against that galootishness, we must weigh the fact that Trump comes the closest to exemplifying the quality of Bell’s Populist Postulate -- Optimistic Populism -- optimism about people’s competence to handle their own affairs -- of any of his rivals in the Republican presidential primary and the 2016 general election.

Optimistic Populist? Let’s get funky and coin a word for it:

Opulist.

Jeff Bell first coined the taxonomic category of Optimistic Populist. Thus, he might well be considered the Aladdin that unleashed this djinn of President Trump from the Reality TV lamp. If Bell was not quite the causative agent in conjuring President Trump he was, at minimum, its Prophet.

Politicians do not learn from words. As Jeff Bell himself demonstrated with his epic 1978 primary victory, politicians learn by example. Whether or not you consider Donald Trump worthy of the presidency there is no question that Trump is fully an Opulist. Trump’s adversaries, of both parties, will impugn him for real violations of etiquette or with unhinged allegations of Russian collusion or for support from a microscopic Alt-Right.

These only strengthen the case that Trump's victory was rooted, above all else, in the Opulism which Jeff Bell originally invented or discovered.

So, I contend that Bell’s most important contribution to the political discourse is his discovery, Bell's Populist Postulate: successful political campaigns revolve around optimistic populism. This discovery makes Bell the Copernicus of our upcoming Opulist political era.

The election of Donald Trump – who Bell enthusiastically supported and on whose transition team he served – is both a portent of Bell’s prophecy and an instrument in shifting the American political discourse in a decisively Opulistic direction.

Moreover policy derives from political axioms. Irrespective of an administration's policy rigor, or lack thereof, if Bell’s Populist Postulate – that people are more competent to manage their own affairs – is true then federal policies under whoever holds this truth to be self-evident tend to produce political outcomes more beneficial than the elitist alternatives.

I had the privilege of being with Jeff Bell at a baby shower for incoming Baby Boy Schweppe just a few hours before Jeff was beamed up to Paradiso. Jeff was an unapologetic political junky to the very end and in fine spirits. We discussed what he saw to be Steve Lonegan’s excellent electoral prospects for election to Congress in NJ 6; he complained about how the GOP Establishment had allowed itself to get intimidated out of fielding a potent Congressional contender in the eminently winnable NJ 2; and warmly praised Rich Pezzullo, a candidate for US Senate from New Jersey (who Bell had defeated for the nomination in 2014) for Pezzullo's depth of character, intelligence, and personal grace.

As I was preparing to depart, Jeff -- famous for his impish humor -- came over to tease me good-naturedly about my winter jacket, emblazoned with the word HYPNOSIS. I reminded Jeff of my avocation and that I am recognized as one of the preeminent nonclinical hypnotists in the world by that profession's oldest, largest, and most respected professional association, the National Guild of Hypnotists.

Adopting my best Svengali voice I told him to gaze deeply into my eyes. This he refused to do, declaring how my status as a hypnotist “explained a lot.”

I waved my hands gently before Jeff's eyes and winked at him as we parted ways.

Let me tip my professional hat to Jeff Bell for his own virtuosic powers of suggestion. Benjamin Franklin, as a member of a French Royal Commission scientifically investigating Mesmerism participated in the report stating that "the practice of all magnetism [hypnosis] consists of increasing the imagination by degrees...." Napoleon himself once observed, "Yes, imagination rules the world. The defect of our modern institutions is that they do not speak to the imagination. By that alone can man be governed; without it he is but a brute." The Supply Side imagination, very much including that of Jeff Bell, confronted and defeated the failure of imagination that was the underlying cause of the stagnation of that era.

As it turned out, Jeff and I were parting for the last time.
Farewell, Jeff L. Bell.

I can't believe your song is gone so soon....
But only physically. Politically and spiritually we remain forever connected by a commitment to equitable prosperity, the conviction that the classical gold standard is essential to bringing that about, and to traditional values as the fountainhead of happiness. We, especially, forever are conjoined inside the rising political category of Optimistic Populism.

Discover Bell’s Populist Postulate: optimism about people’s competence to handle their own affairs.
-----------------
Ralph Benko is an advisor to nonprofit and advocacy organizations, is a member of the Conservative Action Project, a contributor to the ARRA News Service. Founder of The Prosperity Caucus, he was a member of the Jack Kemp supply-side team, served in an unrelated area as a deputy general counsel in the Reagan White House. The article which first appeared in Forbes.

Tags: Ralph Benko, Dow. From 814 to 26,000, Jeff Bell  To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!
Posted by Bill Smith at 4:50 PM - Post Link

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