About Brian Domitrovic

Brian Domitrovic is Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. He is the author of Econoclasts: The Rebels Who Sparked the Supply-Side Revolution and Restored American Prosperity, and editor of The Pillars of Reaganomics: A Generation of Wisdom from Arthur Laffer and the Supply-Side Revolutionaries. Dr. Domitrovic has a Ph.D. from Harvard and is the Chairman of the Department of History at Sam Houston State University.

The Blessings of Capitalism

By |2020-01-02T15:09:59-06:00June 2nd, 2017|Categories: Aristotle, Brian Domitrovic, Capitalism, Democracy, Economics, Science, Technology, Virtue|

Capitalism offers us outstanding new ways to be good. As a civilization, we should concentrate on taking advantage of these remarkable opportunities rather than entertaining idle suggestions, born of intellectual confusion if not sloth and envy, that the great boon of capitalistic plenty is undesirable or an illusion… Around the year 1885, the American economy [...]

Paul Elmer More: The Virgin and the Dynamo

By |2019-04-07T10:51:10-05:00August 16th, 2015|Categories: Conservatism, Featured, Paul Elmer More, Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind|

Long ago, The Nation had a conservative editor. Paul Elmer More edited the already venerable magazine for five years just before the First World War. On joining The Nation, More was already an entrenched conservative; indeed, he preferred the term “reactionary.” While at the magazine, he wrote 600 articles. At his departure, he was well [...]

A Return to Classical Monetary Policy?

By |2020-01-09T11:01:42-06:00April 22nd, 2015|Categories: Economic History, Economics|

Recently, I numbered among the twenty-some self-styled conservatives, organized by Steve Lonegan, who gathered at the headquarters of the Federal Reserve to meet with Chair Janet Yellen and governor Lael Brainard. (Steve is Director of Monetary Policy for American Principles in Action.) We met for an hour, with a selection of us giving remarks for [...]

On A Gold Roll

By |2015-01-02T04:42:19-06:00January 1st, 2015|Categories: Brian Domitrovic, Economics, Gold Standard|

Former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan is on a gold roll. In September, Greenspan published a thought piece in Foreign Affairs musing on the indubitable monetary qualities of gold. “If, in the words of British economist John Maynard Keynes, gold were a ‘barbarous relic,’” Greenspan wrote, “central bankers around the world would not have so [...]

Did the Tariff Really Make America?

By |2020-01-14T11:43:11-06:00December 11th, 2014|Categories: Brian Domitrovic, Economic History, Economics, Political Economy|

Every nation has its “founding myth,” as we are apt to hear from post-modern quarters. But is this ever true when it comes to our economic history. In curricula from K-12 to history graduate school, it is staple fare that as a new nation in the early nineteenth century, the United States nurtured its “infant [...]

The Messianic Devices of Karl Marx

By |2019-04-18T12:21:51-05:00November 28th, 2014|Categories: Brian Domitrovic, Featured, Politics|Tags: |

Incredible legerdemain has been coming out of the Barack Obama policy shops. Taking the cake is the administration’s response to the Congressional Budget Office report showing that Obamacare will reducejobs for lower-earners. Here’s the official spin: unfortunates (as we used to call them), bolstered by health insurance provided by the government, will now be able [...]

Legal Realism and ’Public Choice’ Economics

By |2019-08-27T17:13:04-05:00November 20th, 2014|Categories: Brian Domitrovic, Federal Reserve|

The musty old document that supposedly governs this country, the Constitution of the United States put into practice way back in 1789, makes no provision for the governmental institution that has proven the most influential of our time: the Federal Reserve. About the only clause in the whole multi-page document that might even remotely pertain [...]

The Pillars of Reaganomics

By |2019-05-02T12:55:05-05:00November 12th, 2014|Categories: Brian Domitrovic, Economics|

Last week at the President Ronald Reagan Ranch Center in Santa Barbara, Calif., the staff made a nice move. On the occasion of the publication of the first volume of the collected works of the progenitor of supply-side economics, Arthur B. Laffer, out from storage and onto display came the original wicker table on which [...]

Going Off Gold

By |2014-10-17T11:49:09-05:00November 6th, 2014|Categories: Brian Domitrovic, Economics|Tags: |

In their impossibly good book Money, Markets, and Sovereignty (2009), Benn Steil and Manuel Hinds make the point that over the last four thousand years, the only period in which humanity has not consistently based its currency in metal, specifically gold, is the last forty. That’s right. Ever since President Richard M. Nixon announced forty [...]

Economic Recovery: Presidents Reagan and Obama

By |2014-10-16T17:27:36-05:00October 16th, 2014|Categories: Brian Domitrovic, Ronald Reagan|

With the stock market cruising at all-time highs and the unemployment rate sitting at quaint levels, a fashionable new argument is making the rounds. Barack Obama is better at economic recovery than Ronald Reagan ever was. The numbers make the case. Dow Jones Industrial Average the day President Obama was inaugurated in January 2009 was [...]

The Battle of Unemployment

By |2014-10-06T09:33:29-05:00October 9th, 2014|Categories: Barack Obama, Brian Domitrovic, Economics, Politics|

With the stock market cruising at all-time highs and the unemployment rate sitting at quaint levels, a fashionable new argument is making the rounds. Barack Obama is better at economic recovery than Ronald Reagan ever was. The numbers make the case. Dow Jones Industrial Average the day President Obama was inaugurated in January 2009 was [...]

What President Obama Has Learned From FDR

By |2014-10-02T15:06:57-05:00October 2nd, 2014|Categories: Barack Obama, Brian Domitrovic, New Deal, Taxes|

The greatest editorialist of our age, Joseph Rago of the Wall Street Journal, is at it again. Mr. Rago profiled two investors in Philadelphia who are resisting government pressure to admit that they did something wrong when trading in the electricity marketplace. The investors’ case is that everything they did was transparently legal. The feds don’t care—if they [...]

Houston, Texas: The Golden City

By |2014-09-25T15:16:26-05:00September 25th, 2014|Categories: American Republic, Brian Domitrovic, Gold Standard|

Houston, Texas sure is entering a golden era. It seems that everyone is moving to the town (the nation’s fourth biggest) these days. The largest construction project in the nation is just north of the city, a campus for Exxon Mobil. Houses are getting thrown up like suburbanization is some new fad. Maserati cars (remember [...]

The Gold Standard: A Barbarous Relic?

By |2021-03-13T12:44:45-06:00September 18th, 2014|Categories: Brian Domitrovic, Culture, Gold Standard, Keynesian|

Neither the panics or busts of fiscal America can be attributed to the gold standard. Any currency that is on the gold standard can have its manager ruin the monetary system if so disposed. One of the main reasons that detractors of the gold standard contend it is a “barbarous relic” (in John Maynard Keynes’s [...]

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