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I have arrived in Boulder for the year here in these waning days of August, and I am full of anticipation about the upcoming time. I am certain that it shall be an excellent year. As the fall semester begins, the campus looks crystalline in its Rocky Mountain splendor. The students, eager and fresh, are populating the area to fullness. Friends of the University from Boulder and beyond are connecting with the institution. And there is much that is already in planning in this third year of the program in Conservative Thought and Policy.

My area of expertise and interest is the history of supply-side economics — the doctrine of monetary and fiscal restraint that gave us, in practice, the great Ronald Reagan boom of the 1980s and 1990s. The book I published on the history of supply-side economics, (2009), is my main work in this area, now supplemented by an initial volume of the collected works of economist Arthur Laffer, . Larry Kudlow (of CNBC-TV and ABC radio) and I shall soon publish a history of a key episode of supply-side economics avant la lettre. We are writing a history of the great John F. Kennedy tax cut of 1964. The book will come out in the spring.

Conservatism in the United States has one special obligation that perhaps it has not had in other eras and places. The United States has always been prosperous. It has always held out material hope for the masses to do well — very well — in life. One of the unstated assumptions of American life, from over the centuries, is that everyone is to live like a king — to be especially prosperous and successful. Everyone. Before it somehow became déclassé to say so, we called this the American Dream.

The United States has, easily more often than not, delivered on this promise of mass abundance. It has sustained enormous economic growth for centuries, and its greatly extended middle class has no like in history. It is unthinkable that America can be America unless there is widespread, penetrating prosperity throughout this country.

As we suffer through, unbelievably, the seventh year of pitifully substandard recovery from the Great Recession, this message of, indeed, conservatism needs to be delivered all the more urgently. It is the one I am most equipped to deliver, and I shall be performing this function from the high platform of this position. The point I shall stress, from the evidence of history, is that when the government signals that it is shrinking and then in fact shrinks, the private, or “real,” economy responds overwhelmingly.

A life of abundance implies a great deal of time for leisure, art, culture, and healthy social interaction. Hence conservatism is a distinguished tradition in these areas as well. I look forward to bringing to campus important speakers who address these matters, in addition to representatives of the supply-side revolution and the conservative movement in economics.

I am very happy that this year is upon us — Brian Domitrovic

August 2015