ABSTRACT
The economic failure of the Right's supply-side program contains valuable clues for how the Left can build a new road to social justice that overcomes the problems with welfare capitalism in a global economy. The "public choice" approach to economics and politics has propounded an influential analysis of the connections between taxation, Government spending, and democratic politics that sheds light on conservative economic policy in the aftermath of its supply-side failures. American conservatives confidently offered a new approach to economic policy—supply-side economics—with promises of lower taxes, smaller government, and economic prosperity that captured the public's imagination and eclipsed the Left for more than a generation. A supply-side economic policy agenda requires Government to promote economic efficiency by weighing the costs of economic policy moves in terms of their effect on productivity or the cost of production, particularly labor costs, against the gains associated with proposed initiatives.
