Paul Craig Roberts - Biography

Biography

Roberts is a graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. He was a post-graduate at the University of California, Berkeley and at Merton College, Oxford University. His first scholarly article (Classica et Mediaevalia) was a reformulation of "The Pirenne Thesis."

In Alienation and the Soviet Economy (1971), Roberts explained the Soviet economy as the outcome of a struggle between inordinate aspirations and a refractory reality. He argued that the Soviet economy was not centrally planned, but that its institutions, such as material supply, reflected the original Marxist aspirations to establish a non-market mode of production. In Marx's Theory of Exchange (1973), Roberts argued that Marx was an organizational theorist whose materialist conception of history ruled out good will as an effective force for change.

From 1975 to 1978, Roberts served on the congressional staff. As economic counsel to Congressman Jack Kemp he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill (which became the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981) and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy. His influential 1978 article for Harper's, while economic counsel to Senator Orrin Hatch, had Wall Street Journal editor Robert L. Bartley give him an editorial slot, which he had until 1980. He was a senior fellow in political economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, then part of Georgetown University.

From early 1981 to January 1982 he served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Ronald Reagan and Treasury Secretary Donald Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department's Meritorious Service Award for "outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy." Roberts resigned in January 1982 to become the first occupant of the William E. Simon Chair for Economic Policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, then part of Georgetown University. He held this position until 1993. He went on to write The Supply-Side Revolution (1984), in which he explained the reformulation of macroeconomic theory and policy that he had helped to create.

He was a Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute from 1993 to 1996. He was a Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

In The New Color Line (1995), Roberts argued that the Civil Rights Act was subverted by the bureaucrats who applied it and, by being used to create status-based privileges, became a threat to the Fourteenth Amendment in whose name it was passed. In The Tyranny of Good Intentions (2000), Roberts documented what he saw as the erosion of the Blackstonian legal principles that ensure that law is a shield of the innocent and not a weapon in the hands of government.