Liberty Fund

Last updated
Liberty Fund
Founded1960;66 years ago (1960)
Founder Pierre F. Goodrich
PurposeEducational
Location
  • 11301 N. Meridian Street, Carmel, IN 46032
MethodPublishing, conferences
Website libertyfund.org

Liberty Fund, Inc. is an American nonprofit foundation [2] headquartered in Carmel, Indiana, that promotes the libertarian views of its founder, Pierre F. Goodrich, through publishing, conferences, and educational resources. The operating mandate of the Liberty Fund was set forth in an unpublished memo written by Goodrich "to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals". [3] [4] [5] [2]

Contents

History

Liberty Fund was founded by entrepreneur Pierre F. Goodrich in 1960. Goodrich, "one of the richest men in Indiana". was involved with coal mines, corn production, telecommunications, and securities. [6] Goodrich was a member of the neoliberal or classically liberal Mont Pelerin Society, an international organization of academics, intellectuals, and business leaders who advocated free market economic policies. Goodrich was also an acolyte of Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises. [7] Historian Donald T. Critchlow notes that the Liberty Fund was one of the endowed conservative foundations that paved the way for the election of US President Ronald Reagan in 1980. [8]

In 1997, the fund received an $80 million donation from Goodrich's wife, Enid, increasing its assets to over $300 million. [5] [9] In November 2015, the fund announced the construction of a $22 million headquarters in Carmel, Indiana. [6] [10]

Projects

The foundation has published several books covering history, politics, philosophy, law, education, and economics. These include:

Conference program

Since its inception, Liberty Fund has hosted more than 6,000 small, Socratic conferences, holding these conferences primarily in North America, Europe, and Latin America. It has also held a small number of conferences in other regions of the world, including Asia, Australia, and North Africa. Conferences are organized primarily by scholars who work with Liberty Fund staff to establish a theme and select readings that explore certain aspects of liberty. Conference subject areas have included economics, history, philosophy, religion, literature, law, and, most recently, genomics and artificial intelligence.

Individual conferences cover a broad range of topics and themes, including political theory and history, economics, literature, fine arts, science and technology, and law. Authors and thinkers discussed include William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Fredrick Douglass, and economists Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and James Buchanan. Past conference titles include "Freedom and Rebellion in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov", "Wisdom, Knowledge and the Good Life", "Hobbes, Liberty, and the Rule of Law", "Liberty and Power in the Mexican Revolution", and "Civil Society in the Plague Year".

Major contributions to specific intellectual disciplines have been a series of conferences led by economists James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and Geoffrey Brennan on Public Choice Theory. Professor Henry Manne spearheaded conferences from the late 1970s to the early 2000s that made a considerable contribution to the field of Law and Economics. Scholars William B. Allen, Forrest McDonald, Lance Banning, Gordon S. Wood, and Jack P. Green have served as either directors or discussion leaders of dozens of conferences on the early history of the American Republic. [12]

Publishing program

Liberty Fund's publishing program began in 1971 with the publication of Education in a Free Society, coauthored by Goodrich and Wabash College professor Benjamin A. Rogge, a founding director of Liberty Fund. [13] Since then, Liberty Fund has published more than 400 books exploring the idea of liberty across many disciplines, including economics, political thought, American history, law, and education. [14] As part of Liberty Fund's commitment to the exchange of ideas, Liberty Fund keeps in print many titles that would otherwise be unavailable.

Some of its most popular or influential publications include:

Liberty Fund Online

Besides its main website, the Liberty Fund hosts four websites, including: [15] [16]

Intellectual Portrait Series

Liberty Fund's Intellectual Portrait Series contains in-depth conversations with more than thirty of the world's leading academics in economics, political thought, law, and other disciplines. Liberty Fund also makes available detailed educational documentaries on Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek and features historical overviews of the Industrial Revolution, Hong Kong, and the Constitution of the United States. [21]

Reception

After having participated to a study group on Frank Meyer's fusionism, National Review contributor and National Review Online's founding editor Jonah Goldberg said "The Liberty Fund is simply an amazing organization, dedicated to truth and study, good conversation and civil society and, of course, freedom". [22]

In his book The Assault on Reason , former US vice president and Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore alleged that between 2002 and 2004, 97% of the attendees at Liberty Fund training seminars for judges were Republican administration appointees. Gore claimed that such conferences and seminars are one of the reasons that judges who regularly attend such conferences "are generally responsible for writing the most radical pro-corporate, anti-environmental, and activist decisions". Referring to what he calls the "Big Three"—the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment, George Mason University's Law & Economics Center, and the Liberty Fund—Gore adds his accusations: "These groups are not providing unbiased judicial education. They are giving multithousand-dollar vacations to federal judges to promote their radical right-wing agenda at the expense of the public interest." [23]

However, Gore based his assertions on reports made by the Community Rights Counsel; the CRC made two reports, one in 2000 and one in 2004. [24] Gore published The Assault on Reason in 2007. In spite of the years in between, in his 2007 book Gore failed to mention and interact with any response to the CRC's criticism of the organizations at issue. For instance, in his 2007 book Gore failed to interact with the 2005 criticism made by Prof. Jonathan H. Adler towards the CRC's attacks on the abovementioned organizations. Adler argues for the biased nature of the CRC, as well as listing some bipartisan attendees and endorsees of the seminars and conferences condemned by Gore. Adler says: "Of course, it’s not just any privately funded seminars that attract CRC’s ire: They’ve been remarkably silent about other seminars sponsored by universities or organizations like the Aspen Institute and the Ford Foundation, leading some to suspect that CRC’s real objection is to exposing judges to views with which CRC disagrees." [25] Additionally, Gore's 2007 book failed to mention and interact with what Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences Thomas Schelling said in 2005 in response to the CRC executive director, Douglas T. Kendall. Schelling separates the question of judicial conduct from the question of judgment about the organizations: "Whether judges should accept travel, room, and board to attend twenty-one hours of serious discussion over four days is for the Committee on Codes of Conduct to decide." Then, regarding FREE [Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment], Schelling says: "I have participated in 168 hours of lectures and discussion at FREE and have never witnessed anything that an observer could interpret as remotely corresponding to that characterization." [26] The 2017 edition of The Assault on Reason contains no correction to any of these shortcomings. [27]

See also

References

  1. ↑ The Ama-gi is interpreted by the Liberty Fund to be the earliest-known written appearance of the word "freedom", or "liberty", taken from a clay document written about 2300 BCE in the Sumerian city-state of Lagash. See: Logo Archived 2016-06-12 at the Wayback Machine
  2. 1 2 Simon, Scott (March 28, 2009). "Sarah Palin as Dorothy? We're Not in Kansas". Weekend Edition – Saturday. NPR. Archived from the original on December 3, 2013. Retrieved September 8, 2013.
  3. ↑ Rojc, Philip (July 27, 2016). "Rightward, Ho! Ten Top Funders Behind the Surging Libertarian Movement". Inside Philanthropy. Archived from the original on September 4, 2017. Retrieved September 3, 2017.
  4. ↑ Knull, Morgan N. (September 23, 2011). "Goodrich, Pierre". First Principles. Archived from the original on October 22, 2018. Retrieved February 13, 2025.
  5. 1 2 Robert T. Grimm (ed.), Notable American Philanthropists: Biographies of Giving and Volunteering, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002, pp. 125–128
  6. 1 2 Swiatek, Jeff. "Liberty Fund building $22M headquarters in Carmel". Indy Star. Archived from the original on January 6, 2016. Retrieved November 3, 2015.
  7. ↑ MacLean, Nancy (2018) [2017]. Democracy in Chains . Penguin Random House. p. 125. ISBN   978-1101980972. OCLC   1029879485.
  8. ↑ Critchlow, Donald T. (2008) [2005]. Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism. Princeton University Press. p. 5. ISBN   978-0691136240. OCLC   191755011.
  9. ↑ "Gift pulls Liberty out of shadows". Indianapolis Business Journal . IBJ Corporation. June 30, 1997. Archived from the original on September 24, 2015. Retrieved September 8, 2013. Because the conferences are scattered across the globe and because they attract only elite thinkers, the fund attracts little attention in Indianapolis outside its Allison Pointe offices.
  10. ↑ "Liberty Fund". catalog.libertyfund.org. Archived from the original on March 26, 2017. Retrieved March 26, 2017.
  11. 1 2 "Economics 101-03: History of Economic Thought Spring 2015" (PDF). California State University, Sacramento Department of Economics. Archived from the original (PDF) on March 26, 2017. Retrieved July 24, 2018.
  12. ↑ "Historic Documents Library: Founding Era | Constitution Center". National Constitution Center – constitutioncenter.org. Retrieved April 13, 2024.
  13. ↑ Starbuck, Dane (June 1, 2001). The Goodriches: An American Family. Liberty Fund Inc. pp. 416, 427–428. ISBN   978-0865971844.
  14. ↑ "Home". Liberty Fund. Retrieved April 18, 2024.
  15. ↑ "Online Resources". Liberty Fund. Retrieved January 20, 2024.
  16. ↑ "About Liberty Fund". Liberty Fund. April 10, 2014. Archived from the original on October 16, 2018. Retrieved November 1, 2018.
  17. ↑ "Adam Smith's Enlightened World". John Templeton Foundation. Retrieved April 13, 2024.
  18. ↑ "The Case Against Sugar: Gary Taubes On EconTalk". The Foundation for Economic Education. February 13, 2017.
  19. ↑ "Liberty Fund Links". December 14, 2016. Archived from the original on March 26, 2017. Retrieved March 26, 2017.
  20. ↑ LCCN   2007-15993; OCLC   237794267 , 750248783 , 730302176; ISBN   978-0865976658 , 978-0865976665
  21. ↑ Liberty Fund Books 2022 Catalogue (The Art of Conversation). Liberty Fund Books. 2022. p. 162.
  22. ↑ Goldberg, Jonah (December 15, 2006). "Home, At Last". nationalreview.com. National Review. Retrieved September 28, 2025.
  23. ↑ Gore, Al (2007). The Assault on Reason . Penguin Press. p.  234. ISBN   978-1594201226. Liberty Fund
  24. ↑ Gore, Albert; Gore, Al (2007). The Assault on Reason. Penguin. ISBN   978-1-59420-122-6.
  25. ↑ "Junkets for Judges". National Review . June 23, 2005.
  26. ↑ "Guest column: Allegations against FREE are groundless". May 10, 2005.
  27. ↑ The assault on reason : Our information ecosystem, from the age of print to the age of Trump. 2017. ISBN   978-1-4088-9196-4.
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