The heart of supply-side doctrine is revealed in its best-selling philosophic manifesto, The Way the World Works, by Jude Wanniski. Wanniski’s view is that the people, the masses, are always right, and have always been right through history.

In economics, he claims, the masses want a massive welfare state, drastic income-tax cuts, and a balanced budget. How can these contradictory aims be achieved? By the legerdemain of the Laffer Curve. And in the monetary sphere, we might add, what the masses seem to want is inflation and cheap money along with a return to the gold standard. Hence, fueled by the axiom that the public is always right, the supply-siders propose to give the public what they want by giving them an inflationary, cheap-money Fed plus the illusion of stability through a phony gold standard.

The supply-side aim is therefore “democratically” to give the public what they want, and in this case the best definition of “democracy” is that of H.L. Mencken: “Democracy is the view that the people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”