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While preparing the opening-dinner talk for this weekend’s 2013 Public Choice Outreach Conference, a comparison dawned on me – a comparison that the two economists involved would likely not endorse.  But I fancy that, even if it’s imperfect, there’s something valid to this comparison.

On pages 54-55 of his 1992 essay “Virginia Political Economy” (reprinted here on pages 50-63), Jim Buchanan recollects Gordon Tullock’s initial arrival at the University of Virginia, in 1958:

Tullock acted as what I have called a “natural economist,” who reduced any and all human behavior to that of Homo economicus, at least as an initial working hypothesis.  This basically hard-nosed vision of the behavior of persons in bureaucratic roles allowed Tullock to “explain” and to “understand” what he had observed in his nine years of experience in the foreign service bureaucracy.  And this basic behavioral model gave him an initial handle on analyzing the workings of majoritarian democratic process.

In a real sense Tullock’s contribution to Virginia Political Economy was to harden the underlying behavioral model, to make the individualistic approach that I had long stressed more amenable to precise analytical manipulation.

In another autobiographical essay (that I cannot now lay my hands on), Jim admitted that, prior his joining forces with Gordon at UVA, he – Jim – wasn’t as consistent as he ought to have been in applying to agents in his analyses of public-sector activities the same assumptions that he applied to agents in his analyses of private-sector activities.

So it strikes me that Tullock was the John Lennon to Jim Buchanan’s Paul McCartney.  Tullock gave Buchanan’s work just the edge and near-cocky self-confidence it needed to soar to superstardom heights that it likely would not have otherwise reached.

Please, dear readers, I truly do understand that my comparison is far from perfect – for example, unlike McCartney in the Lennon-McCartney team, Buchanan was the more philosophical of the two in the Buchanan-Tullock team.  But the analytical edge and theoretical daring – the singular clarity of vision of the power of basic economic postulates – these were brought to public-choice scholarship by Tullock.  And when these combined with Buchanan’s more melodious themes, a uniquely successful partnership bore great and good fruit.

It is, of course, purely coincidental that Buchanan joined forces with Tullock in the very same year that Lennon joined forces with McCartney: 1958.

…

(P.S.  I thank Center for Study of Public Choice Director Alex Tabarrok for giving me the honor of opening this year’s splendid seminar.)

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… is from page 182 of the 1991 Robert Schalkenbach Foundation edition of Henry George‘s 1886 volume, Protection or Free Trade (original emphasis):

In the United States, the East has had over the West all the advantages which protectionists say make it impossible for a new country to build up its manufacturing industries against the competition of an older country – larger capital, longer experience, and cheaper labor.  Yet without any protective tariff between the West and the East, manufacturing has steadily moved westward with the movement of population, and is moving westward still.  This is a fact that of itself conclusively disproves the protective theory.

The protectionist assumption that manufactures have increased in the United States because of protective tariffs is even more unfounded than the assumption that the growth of New York after the building of each new theater was because of the building of the theater.  It is as if one should tow a bucket behind a boat and insist that it helped the boat along because she still moved forward.

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Today’s Bob Zadek Show – heard on radio live at noon (PDT) in the Bay Area on 910AM, KKSF – is on immigration.  Here’s a slice from Bob’s site promoting the show:

To discuss the economic, social and security aspects of this most emotional issue and more importantly, to replace rhetoric with objectivity, Bob is honored to welcome Cato’s Alex Nowrastah back to his show.

David Henderson reviews Cass Sunstein’s Simpler.

In the Summer 2013 issue of The Independent Review William Anderson and David Kiriazis analyze “Progressivism’s” contribution to Jim Crow.  Here’s the abstract:

Could it be that the institutional racism of Jim Crow occurred not despitethe Progressive era but because of it? Not only did the Progressive reforms create new economic rents that could be exploited by whites and by the politicians who enacted those reforms, but many leading Progressives espoused views on racial purity and segregation that put them in the vanguard of the American apartheid system.

Writing about the retail book market, Sandy Ikeda explains some of the complex trade-offs handled by genuine competition.

From Steve Landsburg: Green-energy subsidies are here used to educate people about the wastefulness of green-energy subsidies – and yet the educator, by losing money on the deal, is still putting his money where his mouth is.

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Obamacare has a depressing effect on ordinary people’s employment prospects.  (HT Bob Murphy)

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… is Art Carden’s letter in today’s Wall Street Journal:

Ms. Oster’s essay speaks to modernity’s outsized obsession with minor risks generated by a news cycle that is constantly warning us about monsters under the bed or in the coffee pot. Fretting about trivial risks is itself risky; it leaves us with less time and attention to deal with more substantial concerns.

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… is from page 165 of volume III (“The Political Order of a Free People,” 1979) of Hayek’s Law, Legislation, and Liberty (original emphasis; footnote excluded):

At present, however, an ever increasing part of the population of the Western World grow up as members of large organizations and thus as strangers to those rules of the market which have made the great open society possible.  To them the market economy is largely incomprehensible; they have never practised the rules on which it rests, and its results seem to them irrational and immoral.  They often see in it merely an arbitrary structure maintained by some sinister power.  In consequence, the long-submerged innate instincts have again surged to the top.  Their demand for a just distribution in which organized power is to be used to allocate to each what he deserves, is thus strictly an atavism, based on primordial emotions.  And it is these widely prevalent feelings to which prophets, moral philosophers and constructivists appeal by their plan for the deliberate creation of a new type of society.

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… is from page seven of Amity Shlaes’s 2013 biography of America’s 30th President, Coolidge:

Economic heroism is subtler than other forms of heroism and therefore harder to appreciate.

Indeed.  A truly heroic politician, for example, is one who refuses to cater to special-interest groups.  Benefits received by special-interest groups are quite visible (for instance, it’s easy to see the benefits to General Motors of the bailout it got in 2009 from Uncle Sam) while the costs of supplying these benefits, even though almost always much larger in total than the benefits themselves, remain mostly invisible.

In the case of the auto bailout, the output and businesses and jobs not created elsewhere because of the resources that were forcibly transferred to G.M. and Chrysler are not seen.  One cannot see what would have existed – but which is never actually created – because of such subsidies.  In addition, compared to the still-employed autoworkers and the new vehicles rolling off of G.M.’s and Chrysler’s assembly lines, the visibility of the weakened incentives of auto executives to get their companies to perform as efficiently as possible are invisible.  Also invisible is the line of causation from ever-greater government intrusion into the economy to the dampening and distortions of commerce caused by such intrusions.

Cowards play to the roaring crowd, and give the crowd what the crowd demands.  Cowards buy their cheap glory and security by coddling what is seen and loved, and by attacking what is seen and despised, without regard to the consequences that such coddling and attacking will have in the future.  In contrast, a true economic hero is someone who, even at great personal cost, appropriately deals with the unseen future – with the unnoticed and unappreciated potentials – no less than with the noticed and looming here and now.

(Calvin Coolidge, by the way, was himself hardly always an heroic politician – although compared to most in that profession so filled with scoundrels, posers, and ego-maniacs, Coolidge was generally quite good.)

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Here’s a letter to the Republican Governors Association (sponsor of the television ad to which the letter below is a response):

Members, Republican Governors Association

Dear Republican Governors:

At my home in Fairfax, Virginia, this evening I saw your tv commercial criticizing Democratic Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe.  The torrent of economic stupidity that is your commercial, while insufficient to convince me to support Mr. McAuliffe, is more than sufficient to convince me not to support Ken Cuccinelli, his GOP rival.

The commercial accuses Mr. McAuliffe of hypocrisy because, while he brags about creating jobs as an American businessman, he also once proposed to outsource some jobs for his business to China.

Your criticism of Mr. McAuliffe’s off-shoring of some jobs to China is rank economic idiocy.  Do Republicans not understand that nations gain from foreign trade?  Are you as oblivious as are Democrats to the dangers inherent in unleashing government to protect firms and workers from the forces of global competition?  Is your grasp of economics really so weak that you do not comprehend that a firm that saves money by buying some services from lower-cost foreign suppliers is able not only to supply domestic consumers with lower-priced products but also able to expand its domestic operations on other fronts?

Establishment Republicans boast of being economically informed champions of free markets.  Your commercial, however, is evidence that such a boast is nothing more than a farcical pretense.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA  22030

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Obamacare is harming at least some of the people it is meant to help.  Oh my.  (HT Reuvain Borchardt)