LETTER: George McGovern and supply and demand

I enjoyed your July 21 editorial, “George McGovern’s lesson for a foundering president.” I am a former adjunct faculty member in economics at UNLV. The course I taught was Principles of Macroeconomics, your basic Econ 101. For most of my students, it was their first exposure to the field of economics. The subject is not widely taught in Nevada’s public school systems.

Over my years as a teacher of and an advocate for economic education, I concluded that an understanding of a simple supply-and-demand graph changes lives. The law of supply and demand is as immutable as the law of gravity. Governments that ignore it or try to deny it might as well try unaided flight: The result has been the same.

That Mr. McGovern admitted he would have been a better public servant with a working understanding of “the reality of the marketplace,” which is grounded on supply and demand, is admirable. As you point out, Mr. Biden and his administration, as well as the country, would do well to learn from his lesson. I don’t know if Mr. McGovern applied his newfound understanding in his fight to end world hunger in his later years, but it would have helped him achieve that goal.

Supply and demand should be required learning in public schools everywhere. How are we as citizens supposed to elect representatives who will do what’s best for us if we ourselves don’t understand it?