Tollison and competition

Bob Tollison was a good friend. He was fun to be around. Witty and comical. Sometimes rowdy. All that has been reported elsewhere. Here I would like to talk about the scholarly side of Bob. To be sure, I cannot say something about everything Bob wrote, not even on one or the other narrowly drawn areas like sports or religion. I haven't read it all. Furthermore, I am not smart enough or enough of an historian of economic thought insightfully to characterize the influence of Bob's work on the profession. I hope that some of the other contributors take up this task. What I can do, is talk about the influence of Bobs work on me. Bob had a brilliant and insightful mind. He never seemed to be caught up in the emotions of politics, governmental or institutional. I guess he was, but there was always the lurking suspicion that he didn't really care. He had a NObama sticker on his truck but he probably put it there just to annoy people who were Obama believers. Bob was not a believer in government of any flavor. All he ever seemed to think about seriously was, where is the angle for another paper? And he found a lot of angles.