Unintended consequences of government intervention.

AuthorHall, Joshua C.
PositionIntroduction

At the core of the economic way of thinking is the notion that well-intentioned public policies often have unintended consequences that lessen or negate the intended outcomes of the policy. To paraphrase Frederic Bastiat, a good economist is one who regularly anticipates and teases out the unintended consequences of public policies. Richard Vedder is a good economist.

Richard K. Vedder: Scholar

Richard Vedder earned his B.A. in economics with honors from Northwestern University in 1962. After graduation, he directly enrolled in the doctoral program in economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he focused on American Economic History and Public Finance. A quick study and even quicker researcher, Vedder received his doctorate in 1965 after only three years at Illinois. In the fall of 1965, he started as an Assistant Professor of Economics at Ohio University and would quickly rise through the academic ranks to eventually become a Distinguished Professor, the highest distinction bestowed on faculty members at Ohio University. Even after taking emeritus status several years ago, he continues to teach American Economic History, 50 years after first stepping foot on campus in Athens.

Vedder's early work focused on migration, primarily during the 19th century. Along with a number of co-authors--including his longtime collaborator Lowell Gallaway--Vedder looked at the factors influencing migration both domestically and abroad. This work was published in top economic history journals such as the Journal of Economic History (Gallaway and Vedder 1971) and Explorations in Economic History (Gallaway, Vedder, and Shukla 1974). While historical in nature, Vedder's work was generally related to contemporary public policy questions, such as the role of economic opportunity on recent migration patterns (Cebula and Vedder 1973, 1976). Vedder taught his students that we can learn much about important issues today by looking at applications in the past.

In 1981, Vedder received an invitation to join tire Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress as an economist. It was during this period that his research turned more to contemporary problems in public finance. In 1985, Vedder published his first academic article on taxation in the Cato Journal (Vedder 1985). Five years later he returned to the CJ to meld his research on migration and taxation with "Tiebout, Taxes, and Economic Growth" (Vedder 1990). Toward the later part of the decade and into the early 1990s, Vedder co-authored a number of articles on rent seeking and the consequences of the U.S. transfer state (Vedder and Gallaway...

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