• By Terry L. Anderson and Peter J. Hill: The Not So Wild, Wild West; Stanford Press; 2004; 250 pages; $24.95

I remember very well the images of the American West I received as a child. Movies, TV shows, and books convinced me that the West was excitingly wild and violent, with wars and gunfights staples of everyday life. No doubt, millions of others have grown up with the same idea, and a corollary — that the West was tamed by the extension of governmental authority into the region to bring about order and peace.

Guess what? It’s a fable.

In their book The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier, economists Terry Anderson and Peter Hill masterfully demonstrate that the West was not at all like the common view. Not only was violence not particularly prevalent, but also stable socio-economic relationships arose spontaneously before there was much governmental presence.

In fact, Anderson and Hill repeatedly show, the arrival of governmental authority usually made matters worse, as politicians and interest groups were able to upset the arrangements that people had worked out to maximize the benefits they could derive from the land and its resources and minimize conflict.

Writing from the vantage point of “new institutional economics,” the authors explain that “cooperation dominated conflict because the benefits and costs of institutional change redounded to small, well-defined groups or communities. As long as new institutions evolved locally and voluntarily, the costs of conflict and the benefits of cooperation were internalized by the decision makers.” Whether the issue was cattle, mining claims, water, or anything else, people were remarkably good at devising efficient rules and structures in order to make the most out of the conditions they faced. Putting it in a nutshell, the American West was a laboratory in which Hayekian ideas about the benefits of spontaneous order were put to the test and found to hold true.

Anderson and Hill look at the West from numerous angles, all yielding fascinating insights. Their chapter entitled “Property Rights in Indian Country” dispels the myth that Indians lived in a kind of socialistic utopia with no taint of private property rights. Depending on their circumstances, which varied greatly in different regions, Indian tribes developed property rights institutions ranging from communal to “systems hardly less individualistic than our own.” Indian cultures devised private property where resources required long-term investments and care to avoid what we now call the tragedy of the commons. The romantic leftist notion that American Indians prove the superiority of socialism has lain in intellectual ruins for years.

What about all the warfare with Indians? Most readers will be surprised to learn that there wasn’t much of it in the 18th and well into the 19th centuries. In those years, trading and negotiation were the norm and warfare rare.

The famous Indian wars of the 1870s and 1880s had to do mainly with the arrival of the regular U.S. Army. “Maintaining a standing army, as opposed to raising local militia, shifted the cost of fighting to others and predictably increased the number of battles,” Anderson and Hill say. For one thing, the incentives of the Army were aligned with combat — the more of it, the more the chance for higher rank and pay.

More importantly, those who were interested in taking Indian land could spread the cost and risk among the rest of the population, and didn’t hesitate to do so. The book makes it clear that the problem wasn’t “the white man,” but rather the fact that some white men were in a position to make others bear the cost of aggression when they could use what Franz Oppenheimer termed “the political means” (organized coercion) to achieve their objectives.

Rationality rather than conflict was similarly the rule with frontier mining claims and the allocation of water rights. The book also has a wonderfully insightful chapter on the economics of wagon trains, and its discussion of the irrationality, inefficiency, and utter folly of federal intervention with the natural order that had previously arisen should be imported into college economics and public policy courses.

The Not So Wild, Wild West is a beautifully written and printed volume that teaches us much about the American West, but also about human nature and the economic way of thinking. Congratulations to Terry Anderson and P.J. Hill for an outstanding book.

George C. Leef is the executive director of the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy and a contributing editor of Carolina Journal.