If supply-side economics doesn't solve the problem, we could always try this

Another slavery quote from Arnold J. Toynbee:

When Attica, on Solon's initiative, led the way from a regime of mixed farming to a regime of specialized agriculture for export, this technical advance was followed by an outburst of energy and growth in every sphere of Attic life. The next chapter of the story, however, takes a different and a sinister turn. The next stage of technical advance was an increase in the scale of operations through the organization of mass-production based on slave labor... Here the technical advance was offset by a grave social lapse, for the new plantation slavery was a far more serious social evil than the old domestic slavery. It was worse both morally and statistically. It was impersonal and inhuman, and it was on a grand scale. It eventually spread from the Greek communities in Sicily to the great area of Southern Italy which had been left derelict and devastated by the Hannibalic War. Wherever it established itself it notably increased the productivity of the land and the profits of the capitalist, but it reduced the land to social sterility; for wherever slave-plantations spread they displaced and pauperized the peasant yeoman as inexorably as bad money drives out good. The social consequence was the depopulation of the countryside and the creation of a parasitic urban proletariat in the cities, and more particularly in Rome itself.

I was gonna leave it at that. But what follows is too good to leave out. Decline-of-Civ stuff:

Not all the efforts of successive generations of Roman reformers, from the Gracchi onwards, could avail to rid the Roman World of this social blight which the last advance in agricultural technique had brought upon it. The plantation-slave system persisted until it collapsed spontaneously in consequence of the breakdown of the money economy on which it was dependent for its profits. This financial breakdown was part of the general social debacle of the third century after Christ; and the debacle was doubtless the outcome, in part, of the agrarian malady which had been eating away the tissues of the Roman body social during the previous four centuries. Thus this social cancer eventually extinguished itself by causing the death of the society upon which it had fastened.

 

These "technical advances", Solon's and the plantation slavery, were by any measure economic developments. Economic issues are always most crucial, and -- as your negative reaction to that assertion will likely confirm -- are the least recognized as crucial until troubles get particularly bad. 

As Hayek said in The Road to Serfdom, the common view that economic matters are "matters of secondary importance only" is "altogether unwarranted."