CEI celebrates important free market leaders and anniversaries: Our Words

Today, in celebration of the 250^th anniversary of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s 42^nd birthday, CEI is proud to publish a lecture on some of the great free market thinkers and the intellectual “monsters” each had to fight. Vice President of Strategy and Senior Fellow Iain Murray’s lecture entitled “Giants of the Free Society: Figures from Smith to Simon Point the Way” is now available for all to read, after having been delivered to the Philadelphia Society and then modified for CEI’s Luncheon Club.

Intellectual giants of free market economics, including Adam Smith, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman, defended liberty against the threats of mercantilism, socialism, totalitarianism, and interventionism.

“Fortunately, the giants left us weapons: Smith’s moral foundations, Mises’s defense of entrepreneurship, Hayek’s philosophy of spontaneous order, Friedman’s gift for persuasion,” Murray observes. “They showed that freedom is not a default condition but a choice — and a fragile one.”

These leaders’ dedication to securing a free society shapes CEI’s mission and informs how we counter threats to self-determination.

“Our task, then, is not merely to admire these giants, but to follow their example: to argue with clarity, to act with principle, and to defend liberty with both seriousness and good humor, as both our north star and our heritage.”

• Read Iain Murray’s “Giants of the Free Society: Figures from Smith to Simon Point the Way” on CEI.org.
• Read more about CEI’s 42-year legacy of eliminating excessive regulation and unleashing human potential.
• Read more about Smith’s influence on free society from CEI experts:
• “Adam Smith’s guide to life, loveliness, and the modern economy”
• “The real Adam Smith”
• “Adam Smith, national ruin, and human progress”