A Thought Experiment

I did a thought experiment with some of my students after class yesterday that, I think, illustrates the importance of the economic way of thinking. Imagine the following three pairs of people:

1. LBJ and FDR
2. Bill Gates and Sam Walton
3. Mother Teresa and Gandhi

Now identify which pair people would classify as heroes, which pair people would classify as saints, and which pair people would classify as villains. As one might expect, LBJ and FDR are perceived as heroes, Gates and Walton are perceived as villains, and Mother Teresa and Gandhi are perceived as saints.

I then asked them to rank the group in order of the degree to which they have alleviated genuine human suffering. The students anticipated where I was going with this: I think Gates and Walton are the runaway winners, followed by Mother Teresa and Gandhi. If Robert Higgs is correct, LBJ and FDR have actually created human suffering instead of alleviating it. On ranking the presidents, here's John Denson's edited volume Reassessing the Presidency, which includes a chapter by Richard Vedder and Lowell Galloway on ranking the presidents.