LIBERTARIAN NOBEL PRIZE WINNER TO HEAD UAA ECON DEPT.

Al Anders
Juneau, AK
Dec. 16, 2002

According to the Juneau Empire, Nobel Prize winning economist Vernon L. Smith has accepted the economics chair endowed with $5 million from the estate of the late Anchorage banker Elmer Rasmuson.

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According to an interview in the current issue of Reason Magazine Professor Smith calls himself a libertarian and proudly voted for Libertarian Ed Clark for President. Here is that excerpt from the interview as well as a link to read the complete interview.

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Reason: You started out life as a socialist but now call yourself a libertarian. What do you mean by that?

Smith: For me, libertarianism is tied to a certain set of recognitions: that all organizations have the problem of decentralized information, that decentralized mechanisms are the best way to organize that information to produce good outcomes, and that the best results come when the individual is free to make his or her own tradeoffs while aggregating information. That's true whether we're talking about politics or economics or even social interaction. The best systems maximize the freedom of the individual, subject to the constraint of others in the system.

I was born and grew up in Wichita, Kansas. My parents were socialists and our friends were socialists. We were supporters of the Socialist Party. My mother's first vote when she was 21 was cast for Eugene V. Debs, when he was in jail for opposing the First World War. My mother's father was an engineer on the Missouri Pacific Railroad. He was a great lover of Debs, who had organized the railroad workers. My mother ran for state treasurer on the Socialist Party ticket in Kansas more times than I can count. My first vote was cast for [Socialist] Norman Thomas in 1948, when I was 21. The two presidential votes that I've felt the most comfortable about casting were for Norman Thomas in 1948 and [Libertarian Party candidate] Ed Clark in 1980.

This brings the count of known libertarian economics professors at UAA to three. Prof. Smith joins libertarian economists PJ Hill and Jerry Rohacek. A fourth libertarian professor, Robert Logan, teaches at UAF.

In liberty, Alvin