FEE seeks candidates who may be unfamiliar with the ideas of a free and prosperous society, but are eager to discover the driving forces behind the maximization of human potential. We strive to impart these principles to our students in order for them to articulate, debate, and defend them when they return home.

For a third consecutive year we will host seminars in our branch office location: Atlanta, Georgia. Taking place in the Georgia Pacific building, our exciting Freedom University seminar series are designed to introduce college students to: Austrian economics, history and current events. For the first time this year we offer a summer seminar only for FEE alumni. Communicating liberty is designed to teach FEE alumni techniques of how to become effective communicators and spread the ideas of liberty.

Our Advanced Austrian economics seminar will take place at the FEE headquarter office in Irvington, NY.

Beautiful Salt Lake City will be the home of two seminars specifically designed for high school-aged students.

The goal of our seminars is not only to educate and engage students with the ideas of the free and prosperous society, but also to create life-long associations between our alumni and the Foundation for Economic Education.

Please visit the seminars page to download and complete the application, and do a friend a favor by forwarding this link!

May you have a prosperous and liberty-filled New Year!

Spend a full or partial day at one of our Freedom University Summer Seminars getting to know more about economics and FEE as an organization.

Please visit our summer seminar webpage for more information and a detailed schedule.

Pick a date from the schedule below that works for you and come experience first-hand all that FEE Summer Seminars have to offer!

OPEN HOUSE REGISTRATION FORM

Thursday, June 2, 2011 – Freedom University: Basic Economics

9:00 am – 10:15 am: Index Card Activity (FEE staff)

10:30 am – 11:45 am: Public Choice (Frank Stephenson)

11:45 am  – 1:00 am: Lunch

1:00 pm – 2:15 pm: Protectionism (Bob Ewing)

2:30 pm – 3:45 pm: Protectionism Skits (Staff)

4:00 pm – 5:15 pm: Monopoly and Antitrust (Ivan Pongracic)

5:15 pm – 6:15 pm: Dinner

6:15 pm – 8:30 pm: The Cartel (movie)

Friday, June 10, 2011 – Freedom University: Introduction to Austrian Economics

9:00 am – 10:15 am: Austrian Economics Today (Steve Horwitz)

10:30 am – 11:45 am: Institutions, Policies, and Economic Development (Frederic Sautet)

11:45 am – 1:00 pm: Lunch

1:00 pm – 2:15 pm: A Critique of Protectionism (Lawrence W. Reed)

2:30 pm – 3:45 pm: Austrians and Other Schools of Thought (Frederic Sautet)

4:00 pm – 5:00 pm: Hot Seat (with Faculty Involvement) (FEE staff)

5:00 pm – 5:30 pm: Action Plan Activity (FEE Staff)

Tuesday, June 14, 2011 – Freedom University: History

9:00 am – 10:15 am: Foundations of Economics and Prosperity Reading Discussion

10:30 am – 11:30 pm: Money & Inflation (Lawrence W. Reed)

11:30 pm – 12:00 pm: Activity

12:00 pm – 1:00 pm: Lunch

1:00 pm – 2:30 pm: Competition & Monopoly (Edward Lopez)

2:30 pm – 3:45 pm: The Meaning of Liberty During the American Founding (Brad Birzer)

4:15 pm – 4:45 pm: Student Tests

4:45 pm – 6:15 pm: Amazing Grace / Cinderella Man

Tuesday, June 21, 2011 – Freedom University: Current Events

9:00 am – 10:15 am: Public Choice (Matthew Mitchell)

10:30 am – 11:45 am: Business Cycles (Ben Powell)

11:45 am – 12:15 pm: Team Tests Activity

12:15 am – 1:00 pm: Lunch

1:00 pm – 2:15 pm: The Housing Boom and Bust (Ben Powell)

2:30 pm – 3:45 pm: Money & Inflation (Anthony Carilli)

4:00 pm – 5:00 pm: Skit Activities

5:00 pm – 6:30 pm: Dinner

6:30 pm – 8:30 pm: The Cartel (movie)

OPEN HOUSE REGISTRATION FORM

Carson’s article, “The Distorting Effects of Transportation Subsidies,” appeared in the November 2010 issue of The Freeman. It was selected from a list of five nominees by an outside panel of judges who knew and worked with Beth Hoffman for many years.

The prize consists of $2,000 and a plaque. A perpetual plaque will also be displayed at FEE headquarters.

The upshot of Carson’s winning article is that “subsidies to transportation have probably done more than any other factor (with the possible exception of intellectual property law) to determine the present shape of the American corporate economy. Currently predominating firm sizes and market areas are the result of government subsidies to transportation.”

Beth Hoffman (1950-2008) was the long-time managing editor of The Freeman, having joined the foundation staff in the 1970s. She also edited books, pamphlets and other materials. Over the years FEE supporters and seminar students came to know her as the friendly face or voice on the telephone ever ready to assist anyone seeking to learn the freedom philosophy.

Carson is an independent scholar and a public intellectual, whose books include Studies in Mutualist Political Economy; Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective; and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto. He is also a research associate with the Center for a Stateless Society and a prolific op-ed writer. He blogs at Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism.

Three honorable mentions were also named: James C. W. Ahiakpor, “Paying the Unemployed Does Not Stimulate an Economy” (December); Warren C. Gibson, “GDP: Who Needs It?” (May); and Chidem Kurdas, “Financial Regulation Snake Oil” (September).

Cast Your Vote for Freedom Here!

November 22, 2010

Dear Friends,

What a year of success 2010 has been! FEE is on the move—in every respect and on all fronts.

Financially, we turned a corner. When our fiscal year ends in March 2011, I expect we will have generated the first positive bottom line in three years and begun to rebuild reserves. Programs are expanding. More students than ever are learning the life-changing lessons of freemarket economics, personal liberty, and moral character development. Additions of young, energetic staff are infusing new levels of professionalism and vitality into the organization.

We are especially proud of sponsoring an impressive schedule of week-long summer seminars for high school and college students. We held seven seminars in three places—Irvington, New York; Atlanta, Georgia; and Estes Park, Colorado—featuring many of the best speakers in the country. The nearly 700 students who participated represented 42 states and 40 countries. But this is about more than numbers; it’s about impact and outcomes. This was sent by a grateful mother of two daughters who attended our program:

“Thank you FEE staff and supporters – My daughters, Kelsey and Mary Kate, attended the seminar at Estes Park last week and they came home completely on fire to pursue the economic principles of a free society! Your program is life-changing and we so appreciate you!”

Your support empowers FEE to pass these principles we hold dear to our next generation of civic leaders, entrepreneurs, and thoughtful, engaged voters. There is plenty of room to grow: We had to turn away 350 qualified applicants for budget reasons. We gathered this level of enthusiasm by relying solely on our website and word of mouth for advertising.

You can see why we are devoted to spreading the word about FEE’s programs. Parents and students alike thirst for ideas about liberty and how a free economy works. Students appreciate our unique way of blending economics with moral character. A free society requires private property, the rule of law, and open markets, but none of those can arise or endure unless people practice high standards of honesty, patience, courage, responsibility, and self-reliance. Character is indispensable—that lesson resonates with our students, but it’s a lesson not being taught in government schools. (For more, visit FEE.org and click on Seminars.)

Visitors to the revamped FEE websites have tripled since last year. FEE has 15,000 Facebook fans generating conversation and bringing in new friends by the hundreds every month. Repostings and reprints of FEE materials and articles from our magazine, The Freeman, are soaring. Just in the past year we’ve seen articles reprinted in the Dallas Morning News, The Daily Reckoning, UnMondeLibre, Reason’s Hit & Run, Libertad Digital, Gizmodo, Indiana Policy Review, the Campaign for Liberty website, and many more.

Large crowds for FEE programs around the country, including our high school debate events, are encouraging evidence of a rekindled interest in the ideas of liberty and free-market economics. In August we held our largest “Evening at FEE” in history at our Irvington, New York, headquarters. Over 170 people gathered to hear me discuss “The Origin, History and Nature of Money.” People are craving more education on the tenets of a free society, and FEE is providing it to them!

In late September FEE launched The Informant, a web-based resource for home-school parents and high school teachers of economics. It supplies recommendations for text materials and curriculum guides while providing a forum for free-market educators to discuss their plans. In this way FEE is able to speak directly with those who instruct young people. We are already receiving excellent feedback on this new resource, including thousands of page views and this endorsement from a home-schooling mother:

“Wow, this is really fantastic. I’ve promoted it to our local home school network. The links, cross-referencing, key topics, skill levels–you couldn’t ask for more! THANK YOU FEE!”

Though I have already mentioned our magazine, The Freeman, I want to share with you some further observations about it. It’s been our flagship publication for half a century and a highly acclaimed leader among free-enterprise journals. No publication has covered the financial crisis from a pro-freedom perspective as thoroughly and as clearly as The Freeman. Issue after issue applied solid analysis to all aspects of the recession and has explained the free-market solution in banking and housing.

Likewise, we have relentlessly offered the case for the free market in health care and exposed the prevalent statist fallacies and proposals. Intellectual ammunition from FEE on these issues has become an important weapon in the arsenal for the pro-liberty side of the debate.

We have jumped on every major political-economic issue with clarity and consistency, while also attending to lesser-known threats to liberty and important episodes in economic history. We keep readers informed of the most important new books of relevance to champions of freedom.

The most respected names in the broad free-market movement grace our pages: Peter Boettke, James Bovard, Richard Epstein, Roger Garrison, Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, Sandy Ikeda, Israel Kirzner, Wendy McElroy, Gerald O’Driscoll, Ben Powell, Murray Weidenbaum, Lawrence White, Bruce Yandle—not to mention the best of the up-and-coming pro-freedom scholars and writers.

Our regular columnists are an all-star cast and include Charles Baird, Don Boudreaux, Steve Davies, Burt Folsom, David Henderson, Robert Higgs, editor Sheldon Richman, John Stossel, Thomas Szasz, and Walter Williams. All of this comes in the most attractive packaging in The Freeman’s history—and I don’t mean just the print version. The newly redesigned website, TheFreemanOnline.org, attracts hundreds of thousands of readers, who continue the lively debates by posting comments, emailing articles to friends and sharing The Freeman through social networking sites. We launched a Kindle edition in October and it met with immediate and unreserved enthusiasm. Please visit TheFreemanOnline.org at your earliest opportunity! And remember that contributors to FEE of $50 or more receive the magazine for a year.

So there in a nutshell is the good news about our work this past year. But you should know that we practice what we preach in every respect. We don’t think we’re entitled to anything, but we do hope we have earned your support. Ask yourself these questions as you ponder your year-end giving:

I hope you will answer all five questions with a resounding YES! Since our founding in 1946 FEE has relied exclusively on the voluntary, generous, and tax-deductible contributions of friends of liberty everywhere. We can’t do our work without you. Remember, we will never, ever pursue or accept any government funding.

Moreover, it is my hope that you will place great value on these crucial elements that define what FEE is all about:

Your generous support now will help us immensely as we prepare the budget for the next year. How many summer seminars should we plan for? How many students can we accept? Those questions are greatly affected by how our supporters respond in the final weeks of the calendar year. Funds permitting, we would also like to produce instructional videos for classroom use, expand the readership of The Freeman, schedule more speakers around the country, and provide educational materials to as many students as possible.

The work of FEE in promoting liberty, free markets, and personal character has never been more critical than it is today. We need your help to reach even more students next summer, when we will celebrate the 50th anniversary of FEE’s commencement of seminars! This year you can pledge support that will directly, profoundly, and indelibly impact the lives of our student participants! I urge you to take a moment and complete the pledge form in the envelope provided. Better yet, you can make your contribution quickly and securely online. Simply go to FEE.org and click on the Donate button.

Liberty—it makes all the difference in the world! Help us spread the word with a contribution today. We would be honored once again to count you as a friend of FEE!

With the deepest appreciation,

Lawrence W. Reed

President

P.S. – This remark from Benjamin Franklin is especially appropriate for this time of year. It expresses the wishes of the FEE staff for you and your family in this holiday season: “Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.”

P.P.S – Don’t forget, anyone within the United States who contributes $50 or more receives The Freeman for one year. And, as an added thank you for your generosity, anyone who contributes $200 or more will receive a copy of one of the following books:

Cast Your Vote for Freedom Here!

The Kindle version for this book is available here.

The full version of the “Great Myths of the Great Depression” is available here.

Historically governments inflated their currencies because they benefited in various ways. For example, they spent the new money, gaining the purchasing power lost by holders of the depreciating currency. This gain, called seigniorage, is an implicit tax on the people’s cash balances.

Another way government can gain is in its role as a debtor. If inflation is unanticipated, interest rates will not have risen enough to compensate lenders for the decline in purchasing power. Net debtors gain, and net creditors lose. Government, of course, is the economy’s biggest debtor. During the Great Inflation of the 1970s private investors holding long-term U.S. Treasury securities actually earned negative real returns despite receiving positive nominal interest. So from 1946 to 1982, while the government’s nominal debt to the general public rose from $242 billion to $925 billion, in 1946 dollars it had actually fallen to $201 billion.

If in the past inflations were able to ease the government’s financial problems, this is less true now since globalization gives investors more options.

Globalization, with the corresponding relaxation of exchange controls in all major countries, allows them easily to flee to foreign currencies, with the result that changes in central-bank policy are almost immediately priced by exchange rates and interest rates. Add to this the ability to purchase inflation-indexed government securities, and it becomes highly unlikely investors will be caught off guard by anything less than sudden, catastrophic hyperinflation (defined as more than 50% per month)–and maybe even not then.

Thus it would take a mighty and unexpected inflation indeed for the U.S. government to benefit in its current fiscal predicament–but at what cost?

The full commentary in Forbes here.

Hummel’s original Freeman article on government’s diminishing benefits from inflation is here.

I say hero. When a government secretly engages in such consequential activities as aggressive wars justified by at best questionable and at worst fabricated intelligence, covert bombings and assassinations, and diplomatic maneuvering designed to support such global meddling, the people in whose name that government acts – and who could suffer retaliation – have a right to know.

The full op-ed is here.

Summer Seminars Donor Book

IRVINGTON, NY—From its founding in 1946 until 2010, the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) had one office: its headquarters facilities near the Hudson River in this Westchester County community, less than an hour north of New York City. Now, it has a second home in the heart of the South.

In early May, a branch office was opened at 260 Peachtree Street, NW, Suite 2200 in downtown Atlanta, Georgia 30303. Located in Atlanta’s financial district, the office houses four staff members at present and is just three blocks from the site of five of FEE’s summer 2010 student seminars, the Georgia-Pacific Building. The organization’s headquarters will remain in its historic mansion in Irvington.

Why Atlanta? FEE president Lawrence W. Reed explains: “There are many good reasons for a branch office in Atlanta: Local support is strong. Operational costs are low. Opportunities for FEE programs in the region are great. The proximity of a major airport hub makes Atlanta very accessible. And by putting roots down in a second community, we are broadening the base of FEE’s long-term support.”

No sooner was the office opened in early May than FEE staff in both New York and Georgia were immersed in the organizations’ highly successful summer seminars. Nearly 700 students from 40 states and 42 countries descended on Irvington, Atlanta, and a third site—Estes Park, Colorado—to hear many of the country’s top free market economists.

“Now that the seminars for 2010 are over and planning is underway for next year, we can really settle in to the new office and reach out to the local community,” says Ben Stafford, director of programs. “We’re excited about working with groups in the area to get the FEE message of liberty and free enterprise into the schools and colleges.” One of many new lecture programs will be an occasional “Evening with FEE” event, fashioned after the successful “Evening at FEE” programs at the Irvington headquarters.

FEE’s executive director, Carl Oberg, hailed the branch office opening as “a testimony to our new growth path” for the organization. “Our funding base is growing, our programs are reaching record audiences of young people, our new media exposure is soaring, and now we have a new office from which we can extend our reach,” he said. “People are responding to our unique approach of combining free market economics with the necessity of personal character, and that’s a cause for celebration!”

Questions?  Email informant@fee.org.

Download PowerPoint: Praxeology, Supply & Demand 2010

Note: The first two and a half minutes are quiet due to an issue we had with the mic while recording. After the 2:30 mark, the recording becomes much more audible. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Download Powerpoint

Power Point presentation for this lecture – Business Cycles 2010.