A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, America – and the world around it - was rapidly descending into Economic Hell. It was a protracted, confused, process called “the ‘70s.” A number of problems were causing recession, unemployment, and suffering, quantified by “the Misery Index” at twice the depth as today’s. America also was enmeshed in a Cold, yet latently nuclear, War. This held a very real risk of world annihilation.
Two men filled with moral courage, both “deuces,” gave us an era of peace and prosperity. They were deuces, low face value cards in the deck, not jokers, and designated themselves wild. The wild deuce trumps. These two extraordinary men transformed the world.
One of these, a backbencher in the House of Representatives, turned the world economy from misery to affluence. His name was Jack Kemp, a Representative from Buffalo, New York, and former football quarterback. He chaired no committee. He was not part of House leadership. He did not have SuperPAC donors behind him or the support of a MoveOn.org-scale entity.
Kemp had just four assets.
Kemp had a strong intellectual curiosity, one blessedly exempt (he was a physical education major) from having been deformed by the nonsensical economic dogmas then prevailing. He had the humility required to learn from outsiders to the jejune consensus — the pre-Nobel Robert Mundell, Art Laffer, and the odd but brilliant Jude Wanniski. The minds he sought out gave him his Big Idea: lower tax rates and solid monetary policy (which he ultimately concluded meant the classical gold standard).
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