MIDDLE TENNESSEE VALUES


MIDDLE TENNESSEE VALUES

James M. Buchanan*

I have often been asked how my Middle Tennessee heritage has affected my way of looking at the

world, my Weltanshauung, my vision of the inclusive social-economic-political order.  Adam Smith, the

patron saint of economics, once said that the task of the philosopher is to observe everything and to do

nothing, while Nietzsche, the great German skeptic, warned us that the world looks different from different

windows.  Is there something about a "Middle Tennessee window" on the world that is distinctive enough

to warrant attention?

I answer this question affirmatively by historical reference.  Andrew Jackson was a Middle

Tennessean who made his mark on history by opening up American democracy.  My grandfather John P.

Buchanan, a Rutherford County farmer, was one of six populist state governors elected in 1891 in protest

against the dominance of the Eastern establishment.  Cordell Hull, also a Middle Tennessean, whom I heard

speak on the Courthouse Square here in Murfreesboro, was an ardent free trader, who was perhaps more

responsible than anyone else for breaking up the protectionist coalition that had caused such damage by the

Smoot-Hawley tariffs.  He did so by initiating the Roosevelt reciprocal trade agreements, which set off a

sixty-year period of trade liberalization.

I summarize these positions by four words--open markets, open politics.  Let me say such

advocacy exhibits a basic self-confidence in two distinct aspects.  To support open markets, it is necessary

to believe that we can produce valued goods and services as efficiently as anyone else.  In saying this, we

are expressing a willingness to work as diligently as anyone else.  A strong work ethic goes along with

economic self-confidence.

Advocacy of open politics, by comparison, expresses self-confidence of quite a different sort.

Such advocacy implies a categorical rejection of any belief that some persons, some outsiders, are better

judges of our own well being then we are.  An open politics makes no distinction between the ivy leagues

and the bush leagues when it comes to telling us what we want our government to do.  The people, yes, but

* Dr. Buchanan is the Advisory General Director, Center for Study of Public Choice, George Mason
University, Fairfax, Virginia. In 1986, he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science.
These remarks were presented at the Spring 2000 commencement at Middle Tennessee State University.

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all the people, treated as equals, and not some more equal than others.  Along with this attitude, there is an

abiding mistrust in allowing others, no matter whom, to control too many elements of our lives.

These are surely some Middle Tennessee values that are worth stressing at this start of the new

century.  But how do these values square with the economics and the politics that are observed?  What,

precisely, do we see?

We see the rhetoric of free trade and open markets used as a screen or mask for protectionism that

is slipped in under environmental and labor standards rubrics.  We see the United States abandoning its

decades-long role as leader in opening world markets; we see the Cordell Hull legacy eroded through

strained application of anti-dumping rules.  This drift of policy away from open markets should be

particularly disturbing to Middle Tennesseans, who hail from a region that has differentially benefited from

economic globalization.  Imagine how Cordell Hull would feel today when he sees his own party switch

from free trade to protectionism.

In politics, we see an upcoming electoral choice between two putative leaders-one, the scion of an

Eastern establishment family who, as some wag has said, has no last name to call his own, and, two, a

career politician who has literally never been weaned from taxpayers' titty, and who participated in the most

morally corrupt of all administrations in our history.

If Andrew Jackson could return, he would stand aghast at the emergence of the quasi-permanent

political class in Washington, whose members feed on the rents offered up by those interests who demand

differentially favorable legislation.  John McCain's iron triangle remains alive and well.  If you do not think

so, drive the Washington beltway.  And both Andrew Jackson and Cordell Hull would have found almost

inconceivable the range and extent of politicized intrusions into the everyday lives of all of us.  Surely these

times dictate our need for a new Andrew Jackson to wipe out the crud, and to open, once again, our politics

to the people, and a new Cordell Hull, who does really understand free trade, without qualifying

disclaimers,

Yet the Middle Tennessee values endure, even as they are disregarded by so many.  I trust that you

may, as you leave this great institution, carry with you at least a modicum of these values in your own way,

and that you will, when, as, and if the occasion warrants, oppose those who would try to close off your

opportunities in ideas, in markets, and in politics.

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