The side he picked in economics was an odd one. A 1975 issue featured a pair of articles: “The Social Pork Barrel” launched the career of a young Michigan Congressman, David Stockman, who would become budget director for Ronald Reagan; and “The Mundell-Laffer Hypothesis – a New View of the World Economy,” by Wall Street Journal editorial writer Jude Wanniski, introduced the world to economists Arthur Laffer and Robert Mundell, and their newly-invented brand of ‘supply side economics’.
Widely known as ‘the Godfather’ of neo-conservatism, Irving Kristol explained:
Among the core social scientists around The Public Interest there were no economists…. This explains my own rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems.
The task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority – so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government…
For power, stump lies.