ABSTRACT
The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 brought to the United States a political phenomenon it has never really known in the twentieth century: a completely ideological government. Reagan is dirigiste, since neither he nor any conservative economist living in the real world wants a market determination of, say, capital funds. Rather, he uses federal power to rig capital markets so as to increase the monies available to the private sector. As president, Reagan adopted an extremely optimistic version of Kennedy Keynesianism in the form of a three-year, 25 percent across-the-board, personal income-tax cut and a series of concessions to corporations which move toward the abolition of the corporate income tax. The fact that Reaganomics are contradictory does not change this judgment. For the fact is that Reagan has presented the warring elements in his program as interrelated parts of a coherent vision.
