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Introduction
I have known Jim Miller for twenty years. We were in the Ph.D. program together at the University of Virginia. We marched down the Lawn, side by side, to receive our doctoral degrees on a sweltering summer day laced with a thundershower in June 1969. We, like our colleagues in the Virginia graduate program in economics at the time, were profoundly influenced by our education at the feet of teachers such as James M. Buchanan and G. Warren Nutter.
Many of the students who came out of the Virginia program during those days have done extremely well as scholars, lawyers, corporate executives, government officials, and the like. A small list would include Otto Davis, Charles Plott, Charles Goetz, John Moore, Richard Wagner, John Peterman, Jack Snow, Mark Pauly, Torn Willett, Craig Stubblebine, Jack Albertine, Roger Shields, and many others too numerous to mention. A list of their professional accomplishments would compare favorably with those of the students in any other graduate economics program in the United States at the time. Jim Miller could have chosen any of these routes to success and done well. He chose instead a different route. To use Gordon Tullock’s phrase, he chose to do well by doing good.
In a way, Jim is an odd result of his education. Public choice teaches that government is neither perfect nor perfectible and that the idea that people work for the public interest as opposed to their personal private interest is far removed from the reality of day-to-day, election-to-election government. Jim is a glaring exception to such maxims. What Jim Miller took from his economics training was the idea that economics could be used to promote a more rational and effective economy and that, generally, economic freedom within rules, rather than government programs that stifle individual initiative and responsibility, was the key to sound economic policy. As his career evolved, from academia to government, to think tank and back to government, Jim Miller has focused his immense energies on applying this vision of political economy to promote a better world.
In this regard, Jim has been very skillful and very fortunate. His ability as an economic analyst is unquestioned. He has written extensively on the economics of public policy issues ranging from the military draft, to airline regulation and deregulation, to economic regulation generally, to antitrust enforcement, to budgetary policy. He has even made an insightful argument about how to improve the functioning of representative democracy through computer voting.
Jim has also been fortunate. By this I mean that he has lived and worked in government at a time when the relative value of his skills, knowledge, and abilities was high. Who else, after all, had a lifesized poster of Ronald Reagan, posed as a gunslinger from the Old West, prominently displayed on his office wall in 1967? Jim has been at the center of many important policy debates over the past several years. He was a significant analyst and participant in the successful effort to deregulate U.S. airlines. He organized and implemented Executive Order 12291, instituting Office of Management and Budget oversight of the federal rule-making process. He took over the Federal Trade Commission at a time when it was widely viewed as being out of control and, in short order, put the agency back on a saner course. He is now a major player in the “battle of the budget,” where his unique background in Virginia political economy has led him to support initiatives by Congress and the president (such as Gramm-Rudman-Hollings) to precommit themselves to a plan for budget balance. Jim understands the difference between behavior with and behavior without constraints. Any one of these accomplishments would be enough for the career of the rest of us. And, remember, Jim is still a young man.
History, then, has been kind to Jim Miller, who will surely go down as one of the most significant public servants of the Reagan era. He is not a creature of the media, nor is he a creature of the Congress where the natural inclination is to make deals. Jim figures out what the best policy for the country is and works to reach that goal. He is that rare individual who has done well by doing good.
I would be remiss in closing if I did not add a personal note about the private Jim Miller. The public success of some people comes at the expense of their private success. The correlation in Jim’s case goes in exactly the opposite direction. Over the years, Jim and Demaris Miller have been outstanding examples of what marriage partners and parents should be. My admiration for Jim extends equally to Demaris, and you will not meet three better young people than Katrina, Felix, and Sabrina Miller. Good things do sometimes go together, and in his personal life, Jim Miller has also done well by doing good.
Robert D. Tollison
Professor of Economics, George Mason University |
