Politics & Power Quote by Arthur Laffer

Laffer’s sentence is built like a closing argument, not an economic model: a piled-up indictment capped with the gavel slam, “It just can’t be done.” The rhetorical trick is the list itself. “Overspending,” “raising tax rates,” “printing too much money,” “over regulating,” “restricting free trade” aren’t neutral categories; they’re a curated set of conservative stressors, arranged to feel like common sense as they accumulate. By the time you reach the end, the reader has been walked into inevitability. Prosperity and big government become mutually exclusive by definition, not by evidence.

The subtext is a familiar supply-side moral: government is the primary source of drag, and markets are the default engine of growth. Laffer doesn’t merely argue that these policies might be harmful in certain conditions; he frames them as inherently incompatible with “a prosperous economy.” That absolutism is strategic. It preempts the messy empirical reality that prosperous countries often mix higher taxes with strong growth, that regulation can both stifle and stabilize, that trade restrictions can be disastrous or (occasionally) targeted industrial policy.

Context matters because Laffer is not just any economist; he’s an emblem of Reagan-era supply-side politics, where economic claims were inseparable from a governing philosophy. Read this way, the quote functions less as diagnosis than as permission slip: it tells policymakers what not to do, and voters whom to blame. The line’s power is its simplicity; its weakness is that simplicity is doing the ideological work.