As a historical note abou the Laffer curve, it's interesting to see that
the phenomenon was already described by Bastiat in his 1847-02-21 article
"Curieux ph�nom�ne �conomique" (a peculiar economical phenomenon), itself
inspired from actual experience gathered in Great Britain before that time.
http://bastiat.org/fr/cpe.html
The phenomenon is also discussed in his latter essay
"Paix et libert�" ou "le budget r�publicain" (not yet digitized,
but available as scanned photos of the original french text).
Re-reading his Economic Harmonies (the whole of which are available in
English from econlib.org), I can but marvel at how he was more than just
a precursor of von Mises -- he did have a deeper and clearer understanding
of economic mechanisms than is even possible nowadays, with so many false
ideas and not-so-relevant details constantly getting in the way.
[ Fran�ois-Ren� �VB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
[ TUNES project for a Free Reflective Computing System | http://tunes.org ]
L'�tat, c'est la grande fiction � travers la quelle tout le monde
s'efforce de vivre aux d�pens de tout le monde. -- F. Bastiat, "l'�tat".
