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Let's Hear it for George Mason.
Does March Madness have public policy implications? It might, if people learn something about George Mason--the man, not the university.
The Wall Street Journal (link for subscribers) has a profile of the forgotten founding father.
Born in 1725, Mr. Mason was a gentleman farmer from northern Virginia who heavily influenced the Bill of Rights. Though few people realize it, he helped write Virginia's Declaration of Rights and Constitution, both of which served as models for America's Founding Fathers as they began crafting national versions.
"All men are born equally free and independent and have certain inherent natural rights...among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety," Mr. Mason wrote in May 1776. Thomas Jefferson used similar language -- although with a good deal more elegance -- a few months later in the Declaration of Independence.
Mr. Mason was forgotten, historians say, because he committed a major Founding Father faux pas: At a gathering of the Federal Convention of 1787, he refused to sign the Constitution. He worried that the new federal government might be too powerful and believed a Bill of Rights should have been included in the document.
Don McAndrews, a resident of Manassas, Virginia, gets a lot of play in the article as the nation's leading, if not only, George Mason impersonator.
But back to policy: George Mason, the university, has an economics department that includes a Center for Public Choice. Public choice is an analytical approach to economics and politics that does a good job of explaining how public policy gets into the mess that it often is. The department at GMU is also home to some faculty members who blog, including one professor who includes links to recent articles about the department and university that have been spurred by the basketball tournament. The former department head, by the way, does a great job of explaining how the voluntary action of people through markets generally provide better results than the compulsory results brought through by politics.
So thank you, NCAA, for an excuse to introduce the world to George Mason, and "his" university.
(permalink)
"Justice Louis D. Brandeis'?s metaphor of the states as "laboratories" for policy experiments ... had almost nothing to do with federalism and everything to do with his commitment to scientific socialism. .... To this day, it continues to inhibit a truly experimental, federalist politics." -- Michael S. Greve
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