When I took my first economics course, the first proposition was The Economic Man.

The Economic Man was theoretical being whose only interest was maximizing his income. The course then went on to explain how, in a world of supply and demand, this Economic Man would maximize his income.

The Economic Man was very useful. Once you posited a human being whose only interest was in making money, you could then go on to showing, in terms of supply and demand, HOW this theoretical person would maximize his income in a world of pure supply and demand.

All this was fine until people started taking The Economic Man SERIOUSLY.

Ayn Rand built a whole world of Economic Men and Women who maximized their incomes and had no children. As every parent will testify if you want to end up with the maximum amount of personal assets, the LAST thing you will do is have children.

Socialists took the Economic Man seriously, too. They said that total output would be maximized if “intellectuals” told everybody what to produce and how.

Then came Public Choice, originally called Collective Decisions. It began with the obvious statement that there is no such thing as an Economic Man.

This gets so childishly basic it is hard now to explain what a revolution it was at the time.

It began with the idea that a person earns money to BUY things.

One of the things a person will buy is liesure time.

The Economic Man never bought liesure time. He only wanted money.

Economists were very worried ahout this whole concept of a non-Economic Man.

Here I run into the problem I always have when trying to explain what Mommy Professor believed fifty years ago. You think I am joking.

But the idea was that if you did not posit The Economic Man, economics would turn into something beside the nice safe area of supply and demand. Once you start talking about a human being as someone who wants more than money, a real human being who balances priorities, you are n o longer just an economist.

Psychologists and sociologists began to reaise hell about this new field of Public Choice.

The first person to ask me to be a discussant on academic papers was a sociologist at the University of Chicago.

Public Choice uses suply and demand to go into how a person leads a balanced life. It becomes sociology, psychology, philosophy.

All the other social sciences who worried that economists would get out of their safely bordered world of supply and demandwere right. But we’re out of htat stage now and Nobel Prizes are awarded in Public Choice, and nothing shows something is accepted by the least imaginative minds than a Nobel Prize.

So we grew out of The Economic Man crap a generation ago.

Today we still have a medical ethic based on Do No Harm.

Do No Harm to WHAT?

Do No Harm goes back to Hippocrates. The idea is that the first rule a doctor must follow is not to HARM his patient.

For couple of millennnia doctors treated patients by taking our an unsterilized knife they had recently used on somebody with smallpox and using it to cut their veins and take out a quarrt or so of blood.

In emergency cases they would take out two quarts.

I do not possess an MD degree, but I strongly suspect they were Doing Some Harm.

But it never occured to any of them to check and see if they were doing any harm.

Today, Do No Harm means that you do not cause a patient to be in danger of his life.

There is an exact parallel between Do No Harm and The Economic Man.

The Economic Man was based on the idea of a person who had no object in life except to maximize his income.

Do No Harm is based onthe concept of a human being whose only motivation is to maximize the number of years his heart keeps beating.

One assumes that an Economic Man would not have the slightest happiness in his life. For most people, working day and night would be miserable.

One assumes that a person whose only goal is to keep his heart beating for the maximum period would be miserable.

So what?

The economist has his supply and demand and the doctor has his Ethics.

Today

Once again, let us look at an overwhelming fact:

George Washington was not bright.

People who know they are not all that bright on an IQ test react in one of two ways:

1) They hire people who are even less IQ bright to make themselves feel good;

or

2) They hire very, very smart people to do what they know they can’t do.

I have wondered why people react in the 1) way.

If you are a boxing promoter, you hire people who could beat the hell out of you.

Any boxing promoter who only hires people he can whip in a fistfight would be sent to a rest home.

Washington hired people who could beat the hell out of him when it came to smarts.

Now I get to one of the absolutely unique things in American history.

Anybody with an understanding of human beings, which definitely does not include historians, would assume that a man who knew he was not bright would get himself a group of underlings were even less bright.

When Washington became president he had a Cabinet consisting of, I believe, four men.

I forget the other one, but three of them were Postmaster General Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson.

You cannot say that GW took on three men who were “intelligent.”

They were not just intelligent, they were damned near transcendental.

Nobody has EVER gotten three giant geniuses at one table that is anywhere near Washington’s first Cabinet.

You know, Old Dumb George.

George wasn’t all that bright.

So he HIRED genius.

Which, in my definition of the word, was genius squared.

When you see an entire hill disappear in an explosion, the reason it happened was because someone pushed the pluner that set off the blast.

You could, however, push the plunger all day long and get nothing but a squeak out of it unless certain preparations were made in the pre-plunger stage.

Washington watched while his army nearly starved and he despaired many, many times.

What confuses historians is that all that time he was also writing letters about what land he intended to buy after the war was over.

This is not confusing if you understand that GW was not looking at the Revolution as a Path of History or in terms of Glory or disaster. He just didn’t think that way.

GW saw that things could go two ways: 1) He could lose and be hanged or spend the rest of his life as a guerrilla fighter with all his property confiscated or 2) He could win.

There is no good way to plan getting hanged.

So he planned what needed planning. He wrote letters about land purchases, detailed instructions to Martha about hwat to do on his plantations while he was away, and he knew and remembered every detail about each of his holdings, down to the health of each of his slaves and which overseers should be gotten rid of.

The average historian cannot understand that. I can understand it, but I could never DO it.

I have been in situations where people were trying to kill me. In those cases I never wrote one single calm letter about hwat stock I planned to purchase if the market looked promising.

George Washington assassination plots were everywhere. The British Army could appear out of nowhere and wipe his tiny frozen army out at any moment. But Old Dumb George kept writing letters reminding Martha to get those damned overseers out of bed at dawn.

I am sure that most historians consider him Old Dumb George, a man who simply did not understand how serious things were.

I have heard some of them say so, but not in print.

Actually, the Revolution was over in July of 1776, so long as GW kept his army in one piece.

By July 1776 every single colony had chased its Royal Officials out.

There was no going back.

The Revolution was costing Britain a fortune every day it kept going. Britain couldn’t afford it forever.

So GW lost New York, but savedhis army.

GW lost the nation’s capitol, Philadelphis, and kept his army in being.

We lost Charleston. We lost Savannah, which was about there was of the pitiful little colony of Georgia.

It was exactly like Napolean when he took Moscow in 1812. By all the rules, he had won.

Dumb George didn’t understand why those rules mattered. Britain was bleeding, and possession is nine points of the law. They had all the places that constituted Victory.

GW just sat around and thought about it, and he realized that none of that mattered. He just kept bleeding Britain.

That, my friends, is GENIUS.

Every historian understands why Napolean’s conquest of Moscow in 1812 destroyed him.

But they cannot see that GW foresaw all that in the 1770’s.

The point is that Napolean was a high-IQ type. GW was a genius.