Supply-side silliness

In Washington they're talking about cutting taxes to stimulate the economy. As if giving businesses more profit will create jobs. I've run a business, and I know there is only one thing that creates jobs:

Customers.

If you want to stimulate your economy, you have to convince people to buy. It doesn't do any good to convince business to produce; stacking up inventory doesn't help the economy. How is this not obvious? If the supply of a good is too great, people just won't buy it; if it's too small, people will buy alternate goods (switching to wine instead of beer, say). Changing production has little change on consumption.

But if you change demand, then businesses will either hire so they can produce more, or fire so they produce less. The free market is really good at responding to changes in demand with rapid changes in production. In fact, that's the whole point of the free market: that local conditions can quickly propagate through the system - unlike in planned economies, where some bureaucracy has to digest changing data through its long paper ailmentary canal.

So why are Americans - the most commercial empire on the planet - and Republicans in particular - the alleged party of fiscal responsibility - so oblivious to this fact? It's not just the current financial crisis; it's the entire War on Drugs, where controlling the supply of various illicit chemicals is imagined to control the demand for psychotropic relief. The entire country seems to have bought into Reagan's fantasy, and I don't know when the nightmare will end.