Bob Higgs has a fine little transvaluation of Presidential Greatness up on mises.org. And Reason took the occasion of Presidents' Day to open up a discussion on Hit and Run (courtesy, of course, of the witty Jesse Walker, with whom I've played the game Greatest/Most Evil Presidents).

Yes, I added my two cents to the discussion, rating George Washington the greatest, with Grover Cleveland coming in a close second. As my favorite Vice President I listed the subject of one of my favorite novels, Gore Vidal's Burr.

Jesse's question of favorite ex-presidents could be endlessly fascinating. Didn't Monroe become a justice of the peace, and go back into the House of Representatives, serving his district? If so, that's admirable. John Quincy Adams's post-presidential career is a great one, surely. William Howard Taft became a not-bad Supreme Court Justice. And a much-maligned president, Martin Van Buren, ran for the presidency in 1848 as a Free Soil candidate. Thus he helped lend respectability to the rising tide of abolitionism. Not a bad thing at all.

Yet I listed Thomas Jefferson as my favorite ex-president, writing, [m]y hat tip to anyone who translates the work of a French Harmony School economist . . . in Jefferson's case, Destutt de Tracy (A Treatise on Political Economy).

Yes, I learned more from Destutt de Tracy's mistakes than I have from most economists' successes, Carl Menger, Friedrich von Wieser, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, F.A. Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises excepted.

I've told this story before: In my days at Liberty, Bill Bradford and I often played the Game Greatest/Most Evil Presidents. Jesse Walker (then assistant editor of the rag) and I, in one bout, separately put Andy Jackson on both lists. Bill Bradford scowled and dismissed our clever dialectical response to the game. The world is complex, and adding Andy to both the Greatest and Worst lists made sense to us. Not to Bradford, who could at times be both as humorless and dualistic as Ayn Rand.

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