For Fred Smith, economic freedom requires dollars and sense.
In a presentation hosted by PRAXIS, Hillsdale’s economic club, Friday, Smith, founder of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, explained that intellectuals and businessmen should cooperate to cause change in a political environment that is often hostile to free market principles.
“We can’t expect capitalism to survive if we fail to enlist capitalists in its defense,” Smith said. “Right now, we have a thinker wing and a doer wing, and we need to create an alliance if we want to make a difference.”
Smith, a long-time defender of classical liberalism, worked as a policy analyst for the Environmental Protection Agency early in his career. The impracticality and inefficiency of the government bureaucracy left him disillusioned, he said. When the EPA struck down many of his suggestions for protecting the environment through private ownership, Smith took a different path.
In 1984, he founded the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which aims to connect businessmen with thinkers and politicians who support free market economics.
“In founding the institute, my first act in the liberty struggle began,” Smith said.
Calling themselves “media call-girls,” the members of the institute reached out to business groups, working through advocacy and litigation to change policies that made it difficult for businesses to grow.
“It’s easy to focus on the war of ideas,” Smith said. “We wanted ideas to become political realities. We wanted to make something happen.
The defense of capitalism, however, depends on its practical applications, according to Smith. By creating a “thinker-doer alliance” between intellectuals and businessmen, Smith hopes to promote conversation between these two groups for their mutual benefit.
Cooperation between these two groups would allow businessmen to provide intellectuals with information that allow for more effective laws and more accurate economic theories. In turn, intellectuals could create narratives that support the virtues of capitalism.
“Our challenge is to craft narratives that present the societal value of products. Our policies need to support people’s values,” Smith said.
President of PRAXIS Tyler Groenendal, a junior, said he appreciates Smith’s strategies for promoting economic liberty.
“Smith presented both the strategy and the philosophy necessary to advance the free market,” Groenendal said.
Smith used the taxi company Uber as an example of the benefits capitalism provides for consumers.
“Uber appeals to a wide class of people. It’s an example of the free market creating better opportunities through competition,” Groenendal said.
For sophomore Brendan Noble, Smith’s presentation forged its own thinker-doer alliance by outlining how the ideas he learns in class are put into practice.
Smith concluded by encouraging students to reach out to thinkers and doers within the student body before they enter the workforce.
“Smith reminded me to make connections now, so if I go into business consulting or management, I can use those ideas in practical situations,” Noble said.
Throughout the semester, PRAXIS will continue to foster conversation among Hillsdale’s thinkers and doers. Future speakers include Joshua Hall, co-author of the “Economic Freedom of the World” report; Chris Douglas, a specialist in energy economics; and Michigan Congressman Justin Amash.
“The speakers that PRAXIS brings in,” Noble said, “show how the ideas behind economics apply to a specific issue.”
