I recently gave a lecture at the Foundation for Economic Education in Irvington-on-Hudson, NY. FEE is the oldest market oriented think-tank and educational resource in the United States having been established in 1946 by Leonard Read. It is currently thriving under the leadership of Richard and Anna Ebeling.
My relationship started with FEE in 1980 when Dr. Hans Sennholz provided an opportunity to his students to attend a weekend seminar for extra credit. So several of my fraternity brothers and I climbed into my station wagon and made the trip from Grove City to Irvington-on-Hudson. My fraternity brothers had a blast going to NYC and the tavern down the street from FEE and intermingling with the staff at FEE, one of whom was a member of our fraternity when he attended GCC two decades earlier. But in addition to partaking in these activities, I also listened intently to the lectures by Ed Opitz, and especially spent time with both Bettina Bien Greaves and Leonard Read. I also left FEE with a pile of books by Frederic Bastiat, Adam Smith, F. A. Hayek, Murray Rothbard, and of course Ludwig von Mises, that I would absorb over the next year or so. When I returned to GCC, Sennholz called me aside and told me that I had made a good impression on the staff at FEE and that they wanted to offer me an internship for the upcoming summer. I was quite happy that I had left a favorable impression, but turned the internship down because at the time I was still focused on playing tennis and had a job at a tennis club working with elite juniors and playing tournaments throughout the eastern states. I still remember the look of disbelief and disappointment on Sennholz’s face when I declined the offer in order to work on my tennis game.
Anyway, despite turning down the internship I would return to FEE again and again over the next several years. The place is sort of a spiritual and intellectual home for Austrian economists of my and earlier generations, and I sincerely believe with the programs that Richard and Anna are running now it will regain that status for future generations of Austrian economists and classical liberals. And rightfully so. FEE was the intellectual home for Ludwig von Mises and Henry Hazlitt, and Mises’s students such as Sennholz and Israel Kirzner, have been strong supporters of FEE throughout their careers. The reason I believe is simple — FEE represents classic values of self-education, and in particular the importance of the written and spoken communication of the basic principles of economics for understanding ourselves and the world around us. H. L. Mencken, for example, once remarked that Hazlitt “is one of the few economists in human history who could really write.” Mises’s writings clearly spearheaded the classical liberal counter-revolution to the socialist intellectual hegemony (obviously Hayek, Friedman, Nozick and Rand were vital to this cause as well, but if the left had Marx then the right had Ludwig von Mises). I remember vividly from my first visit to FEE, the effectiveness of Leonard Read’s lecture style. He turned the lights down in a room with only a tiny fliker of a light remaining from a latern he rested on a table and began explaining to his young audience how through self-education and effective communication they could like the light from that latern grow and eventually illuminate the entire room as he turned up the flame in perfect timing with his narrative. The Ebeling’s are creating a similar atmsophere at FEE to the one Leonard Read and his staff created, and they are lighting the flames in lamps throughout the country.
One of the many great projects the Ebeling’s have undertaken is the publication of Mises’s lectures. Bettina Bien Greaves had taken detailed lecture notes on Mises and these lecture notes are now being transcribed and published. The first volume has been published as The Free Market and Its Enemies. These volumes are being prepared under the skilled hand of Beth Hoffman, long time managing editor at FEE (and an absolutely wonderful person who has devoted her life to FEE and the cause of econmic freedom and economic education).
My favorite part of these volumes is they capture Mises as a teacher. In fact, Ebeling emphasizes this point in his wonderful introduction to this first volume. And he quotes from Leonard Read’s eulogy to Ludwig von Mises in making this point:
The proudest tribute mankind can pay to one it would most honor is to call him Teacher. The man who releases an idea which helps men understand themselves and the universe puts mankind forever in his debt. … Ludwig von Mises is truley — and I use this in the present tense — a Teacher.
So as we head back to classes in the next few weeks lets not forget the role we economists play as teachers and the impact we can have by teaching the young men and women who have been entrusted to our intellectual care the power and insight of “the economic way of thinking”. We should resist the fashionable academic habit of mocking our role as teacher and instead embrace it. It is a most worthy professional calling.