Money and Markets: Essays in Honor of Leland B. Yeager

2 Roger Kopplhowever, including Yeager’s fearlessness in intellectual exchange, his concernwith practical policy advice and the role of values in policy prescription, his deep,but unadorned erudition in economic method, including methodological individualism,his deep immersion in the history of economic thought, his freedomfrom the idolatry of methods and the fetishism of jargon, and his constant attentionto the central role of money in creating or frustrating economic coordination.Yeager’s free trade pamphlet, Free Trade: America’s Opportunity, uses the samedevice he would later exhibit in his books co-authored with David Tuerck (1966,1976), namely, using testimony at Congressional hearings as a foil against which toset the analysis straight. The style is disinterested, but impassioned; non-technical,but intellectually rigorous; scientific, but richly informed by the values of peace,cooperation, and individual autonomy. He says, for example, “Free Trade wouldcontribute not only to the health of democratic government but also to worldpeace” (p. 26). He even considers the prospects of promoting peace through aworld government and asks us to consider whether legal rules defending liberty“might be enforced by a limited world government with no other powers” (p. 27).Free Trade: America’s Opportunity was published by the Robert SchalkenbachFoundation. This foundation, according to its webpage, “was organized in 1925 topromote public awareness of the social philosophy and economic reforms advocatedby Henry George (1839–97), including the ‘single tax on land values.’”Yeager’s pamphlet shows the strong influence of Henry George’s writings onthe topic, but it sticks to the subject and is not an overall Georgist tract. (I thankthe Schalkenbach Foundation for graciously providing me a copy of Yeager’spamphlet.)Yeager has explained to me his relationship to Henry George. When Yeager wasin high school, his history teacher, Miss Conner, suggested that he take the HenryGeorge School’s correspondence course in Progress and Poverty. After finishing thatcourse, he took the course in Protection or Free Trade? Through this course of study,Yeager became a convinced, even passionate, Georgist; and, convinced that healready knew the essentials of economics, he majored in economics at OberlinCollege in Ohio. There, and especially in graduate school at Columbia, he learnedthat there was much more to economics that fascinated him. “I still greatly admireHenry George,” he has informed me, “although I am no longer a single-taxer.”While I share Yeager’s view that the Georgist idea is “economically inexpedient,” itmay be worth pointing out that similar ideas have been expressed by economists asprominent as François Quesnay and Leon Walras.Yeager’s free-trade pamphlet contains an interesting passage (pp. 24–5) brieflytouching on themes such as rent seeking that later characterized Virginia PoliticalEconomy. This Virginia discussion leads into a defense of “Free Trade” on thebasis of democracy.Government should not have to manufacture agreement on matter whose verynature makes a genuine consensus unlikely. Government should confine itself,as far as possible, to policies that the citizens can discuss intelligently. Now, thefree market decentralizes and keeps out of politics a far-reaching and important