The middle of twelve children born to a black Baptist preacher, William Barclay Allen, was swept up by the National Defense Education Act in the country’s excited reaction to the Soviet Union’s launch of “Sputnik.” He was sent to Virginia to acquire greater facility and interest in the study of science at Virginia Union University in Richmond. However, a growing interest in politics and philosophy displaced his aptitude for science. He migrated to California upon graduation from Peck High School in Fernandina Beach, Florida and undertook undergraduate study (Pepperdine College) and eventually graduate education (Claremont Graduate School), obtaining a Ph.D. in government. During his graduate study, he became a Fulbright Fellow, in which role he taught French university students American culture, while completing a dissertation on French contributions to American political culture.

I'm Aaron Ross Powell and this is my blog. I also run ReImagining Liberty, a podcast, blog, and newsletter about the emancipatory and cosmopolitan case for radical social, political, and economic liberalism.

I'm a political ethicist, novelist, podcaster, and former think tank scholar. Most of my work is about the philosophy and application of radical liberalism.

Adam N. Michel is director of tax policy studies at the Cato Institute, where he focuses on analyzing the economic and budgetary effects of taxation in the United States.

Prior to joining Cato, he served as deputy staff director at the US Congress Joint Economic Committee, where he helped lead Senator Mike Lee’s (R‑UT) Social Capital Project, organized congressional hearings, and produced research on a wide array of current economic topics. He has also worked as senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation and as the program manager for the Spending and Budget Initiative at the Mercatus Center at GMU.

Michel is widely published and quoted in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. He has also appeared on Fox News, CNN, and CNBC to discuss tax policy and its economic effects. In addition to numerous book chapters, his scholarly work has been published in the Journal of Public Budgeting and Finance and Tax Notes.

Adam Thierer was a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University from 2010-2022. He specializes in innovation, entrepreneurialism, Internet, and free-speech issues, with a particular focus on the public policy concerns surrounding emerging technologies.

Thierer serves on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Artificial Intelligence Commission on Competitiveness, Inclusion, and Innovation. He is also a member of the Federalist Society’s Regulatory Transparency Project.

Adam White is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the Co-Director of the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State at George Mason University.

Alain Bertaud is a Fellow at the Marron Institute. He is the author of a book about markets and the practice of urban planning titled “Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities” published by MIT Press in December 2018. Bertaud previously held the position of principal urban planner at the World Bank. After retiring from the Bank in 1999, he worked as an independent consultant. Prior to joining the World Bank he worked as a resident urban planner in a number of cities around the world: Bangkok, San Salvador (El Salvador), Port au Prince (Haiti), Sana’a (Yemen), New York, Paris, Tlemcen (Algeria), and Chandigarh (India).

Bertaud’s research, conducted in collaboration with GIS-expert Marie-Agnès Bertaud, aims to bridge the gap between operational urban planning and urban economics. Their work focuses primarily on the interaction between urban forms, real estate markets and regulations. 

Award-winning author Al Zambone crafts compelling narratives grounded in historical context. His book Daniel Morgan: A Revolutionary Life, describes the struggles of one of the finest soldiers of the American Revolution, not only during but before and after that war. A homeless runaway who became a Brigadier General and a Congressman, Morgan’s life is a window that provides a unique view of the world of early America. Daniel Morgan can be found in bookstores everywhere, as hardcover, ebook, and audiobook.

Alice Temnick is an Economics Instructor at the United Nations International School in Manhattan, an International Baccalaureate Examiner, an Instructor for Oxford Study Courses Summer Program at Harvard University, and serves as a Mentor Teacher for the Foundation for Teaching Economics. Previously, Alice taught IB, and AP Economics in Arizona.

Andrea O'Sullivan is the Director of the Center for Technology and Innovation at the James Madison Institute in Tallahassee, Fla. Her work focuses on emerging technologies, cryptocurrency, surveillance, and the open internet.

Anna Flowers is a PhD student in Economics at George Mason University. She earned a BA in Public Administration and a BA in Economics from Samford University. Her research interests include family economics, in particular the economic significance of family relationships and the economic factors that influence family decision-making.

Dr. Anne Rathbone Bradley is the George and Sally Mayer Fellow for Economic Education and vice president of academic affairs at The Fund for American Studies. Through this position, Dr. Bradley works to enhance the impact and reach of TFAS and FTE economic education programs through courses, seminars, videos and social media. She also delivers lectures around the country and oversees curriculum development and evaluation for economics courses. In addition to her role as a fellow and vice president of academic affairs, Dr. Bradley continues to teach impactful economics courses to TFAS students and consistently receives outstanding marks in students’ post-program evaluations.

I am an economist by training, on my nth career, which involves writing. Career n-1 included teaching as well as writing and blogging. Career n-2 was as an Internet entrepreneur. Career n-3 was as a middle manager with Freddie Mac. Career n-4 was as an economist with the Fed.

Bart Wilson is a professor of Economics and Law at Chapman University and the Director of the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy. He is the co-author (with Vernon Smith) of Humanomics and the author of Meaningful Economics. His research spans experimental economics, moral philosophy, and decision-making in both humans and non-human primates.

Baylen Linnekin, a licensed attorney who holds an LL.M. in agricultural and food law, is the founder and executive director of Keep Food Legal. Linnekin’s writing on food and law has appeared in scholarly publications like the Chapman University Law Review, Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, Northeastern University Law Journal, Nexus Journal of Law & Policy, and the Journal of Wine Economics. His writing on food and law also appears regularly in popular publications, including the New York Post, Reason (where he writes a weekly online food-law column), the Huffington Post, Baltimore Sun, Washington Times, and elsewhere. He is co-author of a chapter on food and the law in the Routledge International Handbook to Food Studies, an academic textbook, and author of the entry on “food bans” in the second edition of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America.

Ben Jones is an assistant professor of public policy, as well as a research associate and assistant director in the Rock Ethics Institute. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University, where he was a Beinecke Scholar. He is co-editor with Eduardo Mendieta of The Ethics of Policing: New Perspectives on Law Enforcement (New York University Press, 2021) and author of Apocalypse without God: Apocalyptic Thought, Ideal Politics, and the Limits of Utopian Hope (Cambridge University Press, 2022). 

Ben Klutsey currently leads the Program on Pluralism and Civil Exchange, a Mercatus Center initiative dedicated to fostering a deeper understanding and appreciation for pluralism as a fundamental pillar of a free, flourishing, and prosperous society. In his role, he collaborates with thought leaders, scholars, and dedicated practitioners, aiming to cultivate pluralistic values across society. He runs the Pluralist Lab, a series of structured sessions that bring students from different backgrounds and perspectives together to practice conversation across those differences.

Klutsey is passionate about driving meaningful dialogue and advancing ideas and practices that sustain a free and open society. He holds an MA in International Commerce and P

Benjamin Powell is Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute, Director of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University, and former President of the Association of Private Enterprise Education. Dr. Powell received his Ph.D. in economics from George Mason University and his Bachelor of Science degree in Finance and Economics from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. He has been Associate Professor of Economics at Suffolk University, Assistant Professor of Economics at San Jose State University, a Fellow with the Mercatus Center's Global Prosperity Initiative, and a Visiting Research Fellow with the American Institute for Economic Research.

Bob Ewing has coached thousands of professionals, activists, and students, empowering them to explain complex ideas in clear, compelling terms. Through individualized trainings and interactive workshops, Bob helps people nationwide and beyond connect with their audiences through empathic listening, public speaking, and networking.

Prior to founding The Ewing School, Bob pioneered a communications training program at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, where he also built and led a record-setting media relations team. He was Director of Communications for the Institute for Justice, which has received more than two dozen national communications awards, and held the inaugural Leonard E. Read Research Fellow position at the Foundation for Economic Education. He continues to serve FEE as an alumni board member.

Brad Wilcox is Melville Foundation Jefferson Scholars Foundation University Professor of Sociology and Director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, Future of Freedom Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. The author of Get Married: Why Americans Should Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families and Save Civilization (Harper Collins, 2024), Wilcox studies marriage, fatherhood, and the impact of strong and stable families on men, women, and children.

Brent Orrell is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), specializing in job training and workforce development with a special focus on disconnected and disadvantaged populations, including youth, justice-involved, veterans, and neurodivergent persons. His recent work has focused on the workforce opportunities and challenges resulting from generative AI and automation, as well as strategies for improving economic mobility in rural, redeveloping, and non-metropolitan areas throughout America. Brent has spearheaded AEI’s involvement with the Workforce Futures Initiative, in collaboration with the Brookings Institution and the Harvard Kennedy School, which has produced multiple reports, working group sessions, and interest from communities across the US.

Brent Skorup is a legal fellow in the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies.

Before joining Cato, he was a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at the George Mason University. His research areas include free speech, technology law, Fourth Amendment protections, regulation, and property law. Skorup has published pieces in economics and law journals and in popular media, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Bloomberg Law, Reuters, and Wired. He’s appeared as a TV and radio interview guest for news outlets like C‑SPAN, NPR, CBS News, ABC News, and CNBC Asia.

Brian Hooks is president of the Charles Koch Foundation and Charles Koch Institute and chairman of the Seminar Network, a network of organizations, businesses and philanthropic leaders dedicated to helping remove barriers that prevent people from realizing their potential. Brian also chairs the board of directors of Stand Together and serves on the board of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and Institute for Humane Studies. Prior to his current role, Brian served as executive director and chief operating officer of the Mercatus Center, where he oversaw strategy and operations for a growing research, education, and public policy center. A graduate of the University of Michigan, Brian lives in Alexandria, Virginia, with his wife and daughter.

Brian Riedl is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a member of MI’s Economics21, focusing on budget, tax, and economic policy. Previously, he worked for six years as chief economist to Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) and as staff director of the Senate Finance Subcommittee on Fiscal Responsibility and Economic Growth. He also served as a director of budget and spending policy for Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign and was the lead architect of the ten-year deficit-reduction plan for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.

During 2001–11, Riedl served as the Heritage Foundation’s lead research fellow on federal budget and spending policy. In that position, he helped lay the groundwork for Congress to cap soaring federal spending, rein in farm subsidies, and ban pork-barrel earmarks. 

Professor Caldwell's research focuses on the history of economic thought, with a specific interest in the life and works of the Nobel Laureate economist and social theorist F. A. Hayek. He is the author of Hayek's Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F. A. Hayek (2004) and since 2002 has served as the general editor of the book series The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek. In 2022 he published Mont Pelerin 1947: Transcripts of the Founding Meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society as well as Hayek: A Life, 1899-1950, the first of a two-volume biography that he is writing with Hansjoerg Klausinger. 

I'm Bryan Caplan, Professor of Economics at George Mason University and New York Times Bestselling author.

I've written The Myth of the Rational Voter, named "the best political book of the year" by the New York Times, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, The Case Against Education, Open Borders (co-authored with SMBC's Zach Weinersmith), Build, Baby, Build (co-authored with Ady Branzei), Labor Econ Versus the World, How Evil Are Politicians?, Don't Be a Feminist, Voters As Mad Scientists, You Will Not Stampede Me, and Self-Help Is Like a Vaccine. I'm now writing Unbeatable: The Brutally Honest Case for Free Markets.

Byron "Trey" Carson is an Associate Professor of Economics and Business at Hampden-Sydney College.

In business since 2012, Smith's Etiquette for the Business of Life engages individuals and groups in hands-on learning to gain practical skills in etiquette and protocol and communication for all aspects of  “the business of life.”

Cara Rogers Stevens is an Associate Professor of History at Ashland University, where she also co-directs the Ashbrook Scholar Program. She has a master’s degree in history from the University of Texas at Dallas and a Ph.D. from Rice University. Her research, which focuses on race, slavery, and freedom in the Jeffersonian Age, has been published by the Journal of Southern History and American Political Thought, and she has also written for the Journal of the Early Republic and Law & Liberty. She won the American Political Science Association’s award for Best Article in American Political Thought in 2022.

Charles Noussair is the Eller Professor of Economics and Director of the Economic Science Laboratory at the University of Arizona.

Noussair has been with the Eller College of Management since 2015. In addition to teaching at Eller, he is also a senior extramural fellow for CentER at Tilburg University. Before coming to Eller, he was a professor of economics at Tilburg University, an associate professor at Purdue University and the German International School of Management and an assistant professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He is an expert in experimental economics and currently researches how individuals deal with risky decisions and how they solve collective action problems, as well as the impact of emotions in economi

Dr. Charlotte Thomas specializes in the philosophy and culture of ancient Greece with an interest in other ancient cultures. In the Philosophy Department, she teaches History of Ancient Philosophy, Human Nature and Art (abroad), and Introductory Ethics courses that include a significant service-learning component. She has taught all of the courses in the Great Books program but has spent the last several years teaching the first course with students in their first semester at Mercer that begins with Homer and ends with Plato. Her book, “The Female Drama: The Philosophical Feminine in the Soul of Plato’s Republic,” was published by Mercer University Press in 2019.

Chelsea Follett is the managing editor of Human​Progress​.org, a project of the Cato Institute that seeks to educate the public on the global improvements in well-being by providing free empirical data on long-term developments.

Her writing has been published in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Newsweek, Forbes, The Hill, Business Insider, National Review, the Washington Examiner, and Global Policy Journal. She was named to Forbes’ 30 under 30 list for 2018 in the category of Law and Policy.

Follett earned a BA in government and English from the College of William & Mary, as well as an MA in foreign affairs from the University of Virginia, where she focused on international relations and political theory.

Cheryl Miller is executive director at the Hertog Foundation. Previously, she served as deputy director of research in the Office of Presidential Speechwriting and as research assistant to David Brooks at The New York Times. Her reviews and commentary have appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, and The Weekly Standard. She graduated from the University of Dallas with Bachelor of Arts degrees in English and Politics.

Chris Edwards occupies the Kilts Family Chair in Fiscal Studies at the Cato Institute and is the editor of Down​siz​ing​Gov​ern​ment​.org. He is a top expert on federal and state tax and budget issues. Before joining Cato, Edwards was a senior economist on the congressional Joint Economic Committee, a manager with PricewaterhouseCoopers, and an economist with the Tax Foundation.

Professor Freiman's research interests include democratic theory, distributive justice, and immigration.

Freiman is a graduate of Duke University (B.A. in Philosophy) and the University of Arizona  (M.A., Ph.D. in Philosophy). He is the author of Unequivocal Justice and Why It’s OK to Ignore Politics as well as numerous articles and book chapters. 

Christine McDaniel was a Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center. Her research focused on international trade, globalization, and intellectual property rights.

McDaniel previously worked at Sidley Austin, LLP, a global law firm, where she was a senior economist. She has held several positions in the U.S. government, including Deputy Assistant Secretary at the Treasury Department and senior trade economist in the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and has worked in the economic offices of the U.S. Department of Commerce, U.S. Trade Representative, and U.S. International Trade Commission.

McDaniel has written for the Wall Street Journal, Politico, The Hill, The New York Times, and Forbes, among others, and her media appearances include CNBC, CBC, BBC, Bloomberg, and MSNBC.

Research Interests

Professor Freiman's research interests include democratic theory, distributive justice, and immigration.

Background

Christopher Freiman is a graduate of Duke University (B.A. in Philosophy) and the University of Arizona  (M.A., Ph.D. in Philosophy). He is the author of Unequivocal Justice and Why It’s OK to Ignore Politics as well as numerous articles and book chapters.

Cato Institute. His areas of interest include constitutional law, overcriminalization, coercive plea bargaining, police accountability, and gun rights. Before joining Cato in 2017, Neily was a senior attorney and constitutional litigator at the Institute for Justice and director of the Institute’s Center for Judicial Engagement.

Neily is an adjunct professor at George Mason’s Antonin Scalia School of Law, where he teaches constitutional litigation and public-interest law. He served as co-counsel in District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to own a gun.

Colin Grabow is an Associate Director at the Cato Institute’s Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies where his research focuses on domestic forms of trade protectionism such as the Jones Act and the U.S. sugar program.

His writings have been published in a number of outlets, including USA Today, The Hill, National Review, and the Wall Street Journal.

Prior to joining the Cato Institute, he performed political and economic analysis for a Japan-based trading and investment firm and published research and analysis for an international affairs consulting firm with a focus on U.S.-Asia relations.

Grabow holds a BA in international affairs from James Madison University and an MA in international trade and investment policy from George Washington University.

My books include Loving Life: The Morality of Self-Interest and the Facts that Support It; Rational Egoism: The Morality for Human Flourishing; and the forthcoming, Forbidden Facts: Moral Truths Your Parents, Preachers, and Teachers Don’t Want You to Know. My book-in-progress is about thinking in principles. I’ve also written hundreds of articles, some of which are linked under select essays.

In addition to writing, I speak and teach on a variety of subjects including the philosophy of Objectivism, the morality of self-interest, the source and nature of rights, the science of selfishness, living purposefully, and thinking in principles. 

Craig Richardson is the BB&T Distinguished Professor of Economics at Winston-Salem State University.

Alum Dan McLaughlin ’93, Senior Writer, National Review

Daniel B. Klein is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University where he leads the Smithian Political Economy Program and is JIN Chair at the Mercatus Center. Mr. Klein holds degrees from both George Mason University and New York University, where he studied the connection between economics and classical liberalism. Mr. Klein is the author of the Knowledge and Coordination: A Liberal Interpretation, and Smithian Morals, a work discussing the nuances in Adam Smith's form of liberalism and his views on liberty, ethics, religion, and individualism. Klein is also the co-author of Curb Rights: A Foundation for Free Enterprise in Urban Transit, has co-authored the website FDAReview.org with Dr. Alex Tabarrok and has edited and co-edited many other books such as What Do Economists Contribute?: a collection of published articles from some of the most impactful economists in world history such as F.A. Hayek and Deirdre McCloskey. 

Daniel Di Martino is a Venezuelan freedom activist and economist. He was born and raised in Venezuela, where he experienced the terrible consequences of socialism firsthand. After leaving Venezuela for the United States in 2016, he has dedicated himself to explaining how socialism destroyed his homeland, advocating for its freedom, and stopping this ideology from ever being implemented in America and elsewhere. He graduated with a BA in Economics from Indiana University in Indianapolis and is currently pursuing a PhD in Economics at Columbia University.

Daniel M. Rothschild is an executive vice president at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He previously served as the executive director of Mercatus from June 2014-June 2024, during which time he led strategy and oversaw all programs and operations for the organization.

Prior to serving at Mercatus, Mr. Rothschild was director of state projects and a senior fellow with the R Street Institute. He joined R Street in October 2013 after two years as the first-ever director of external affairs and coalitions at the American Enterprise Institute. Previously, he spent six years in a variety of policy, communications, and project management positions at the Mercatus Center. He has worked extensively with think tanks throughout the country.

Darren Staloff is Professor of Humanities in the Hamilton Center. He taught for many years at City University of New York, where he was Professor of American History and Director of the Hertog Scholars Program. and has been a fellow of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. His research focuses on colonial and revolutionary America.

Beito is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Alabama.

Beito's research covers a wide range of topics in American history including race, tax revolts, the private provision of infrastructure, mutual aid, and the political philosophies of Zora Neale Hurston, Rose Wilder Lane, and Isabel Paterson.

David Boaz is a distinguished senior fellow of the Cato Institute. Over more than four decades as vice president for public policy and executive vice president, he played a key role in the development of the Cato Institute and the libertarian movement. He is the author of The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom and the editor of The Libertarian Reader.

David Epstein is the author of the #1 New York Times best seller Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, and of the New York Times best seller The Sports Gene, both of which have been translated in more than 30 languages. (To his surprise, the latter was purchased not only by his sister but also by President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.) 

He was previously the host of Slate‘s popular “How To!” podcast, and a science and investigative reporter at ProPublica. 

David French is a senior editor for The Dispatch and was formerly a senior writer for National Review. David is a New York Times bestselling author, and his next book, The Great American Divorce, will be published by St. Martin’s Press later this year. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School, the past president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and a former lecturer at Cornell Law School. He has served as a senior counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice and the Alliance Defending Freedom. David is a former major in the United States Army Reserve. In 2007, he deployed to Iraq, serving in Diyala Province as Squadron Judge Advocate for the 2nd Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, where he was awarded the Bronze Star. He lives and works in Franklin, Tennessee, with his wife, Nancy, and his three children.

Henderson was professor of economics at the Graduate

School of Business and Public Policy, Naval Postgraduate

School in Monterey, California and is a Research Fellow with the

Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey is Senior Fellow and holds the Isaiah Berlin Chair of Liberal Thought at the Cato Institute in Washington DC. From 2015 at the University of Illinois at Chicago she has been Distinguished Professor Emerita of Economics and of History, and Professor Emerita of English and of Communication. 

What I do and why I do it …

I constantly seek out art that’s inspiring, thought-provoking, skillfully executed, and/or beautiful so I can share it (in jargon-free language) with others who need and enjoy such art, but who don’t have time to search for it themselves. In the course of doing this for thirty or so years, I’ve made two unique contributions:

A simple, easy way to get from visual to verbal when looking at painting and sculpture, so you can spend more time looking at your own favorite works in detail, in depth, and on your own. This method is set out (with many examples) in Getting More Enjoyment from Sculpture You Love and How to Analyze and Appreciate

Dr. Donald J. Boudreaux is an author, professor, and economist. Dr. Boudreaux is a Senior Fellow with the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, a Mercatus Center Board Member, and a professor of economics and former chairman of the Department of Economics at George Mason University. Previously, he was Director of the Center for the Study of Public Choice; president of the Foundation for Economic Education (1997-2001); Associate Professor of Legal Studies and Economics at Clemson University (1992-1997); and Assistant Professor of Economics at George Mason University (1985-1989). Dr. Boudreaux holds the Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center and specializes in globalization and trade, law and economics, and antitrust economics. 

Douglas Irwin is John French Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Clashing over Commerce: A History of U.S. Trade Policy (University of Chicago Press, 2017), which The Economist and Foreign Affairs selected as one of their Best Books of the Year. He is president-elect of the Economic History Association (2022-23).

Edward L. Glaeser is the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard University, where he has taught economic theory and urban economics since 1992. He leads the Urban Economics Working Group at the National Bureau of Economics Research, co-leads the Cities Programme of the International Growth Centre, and co-edits the Journal of Urban Economics. Glaeser has written hundreds of papers on cities, infrastructure and other topics, and has written, co-written and co-edited several books including Triumph  of the City, Survival of the City (with David Cutler) and Fighting Poverty in the U.S. and Europe: A World of Difference (with Alberto Alesina).

Eli Dourado is the Chief Economist at the Abundance Institute. Previous to this position he was a Senior Research Fellow at the CGO and Opportunity at Utah State University. He focuses on the hard technology and innovation needed to drive large increases in economic growth—speeding up infrastructure deployment, eliminating barriers to entrepreneurs operating in the physical world, and getting the most out of federal tech research programs. He has worked on a wide range of technology policy issues, including aviation, Internet governance, and cryptocurrency. His popular writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Foreign Policy, among other outlets.

Prior to joining the CGO, Eli was the first policy hire at a supersonic aviation startup. Before that, he was a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and director of its technology policy program.

Dr. Emily Chamlee-Wright is the president and CEO of the Institute for Humane Studies, which supports and partners with scholars working within the classical liberal tradition to advance higher education’s core purpose of intellectual discovery and human progress.

She joined IHS in 2016 with an accomplished record as an academic leader, scholar, and educator. From 2012 to 2016 she served as provost and dean at Washington College and was previously the Elbert H. Neese Professor of Economics and associate dean at Beloit College. Emily earned her PhD in economics from George Mason University. She is a former W.K. Kellogg National Leadership Fellow and received the excellence in teaching award from Beloit College and a Distinguished Alumna Award from George Mason University. 

Emily Hamilton is a Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Urbanity Project at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Her research focuses on urban economics and land-use policy. She publishes both academic research and policy work. Her writing has appeared in outlets including the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, and she writes an occasional column at Governing. Hamilton has testified before several state legislatures as well as the U.S. House of Representatives. Hamilton serves on the Advisory Boards of Up for Growth and Cityscape, a journal published by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. She received her PhD in economics from George Mason University.

Eric Daniels, Ph.D., is Assistant Director of the SISC. He holds a B.A. in History and Rhetoric from Drake University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in American History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to joining the SISC, Daniels served as the Head of School at LePort Montessori, a private school in Southern California. He has taught at the Program on Values and Ethics in the Marketplace at Duke University, where he was nominated for a teaching award, as well as at The Fund for American Studies Institute on Business and Government Affairs at Georgetown University. From 2006-2013, Daniels also served as an Assistant Research Professor and Assistant Director of the SISC.

Daniels maintains research interests in the history of capitalism, American legal history, and the history of American thought. He has published on the history of individualism in American thought, monopolies and antitrust, and American political history.

Eric Leeper is the Paul Goodloe McIntire Professor in Economics at the University of Virginia. He also is a visiting scholar at the Mercatus Center at GMU.

Dr. Erik W. Matson is a Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center and Deputy Director of the Adam Smith Program in the Department of Economics at George Mason University. Dr. Matson also teaches as a Lecturer at The Catholic University of America's Busch School of Business and serves as an Online Lecturer in Economics at The King's College. Dr. Matson received his Ph.D. in Economics from George Mason University in December, 2017 and conducted a postdoctoral fellowship at New York University. His research revolves around eighteenth-century British moral philosophy and political economy, the role of theology and ethics in economic thought, economic methodology, and the history of liberalism and its great great thinkers such as Adam Smith and David Hume. Dr. Matson has a significant amount of publications in a variety of forms such as journal articles, book reviews, chapters in edited volumes, and online publications. 

Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist George F. Will is the country’s most widely read political columnist, as well as its foremost conservative voice. His popular twice-weekly column for The Washington Post syndicate reaches 300 newspapers throughout the United States and Europe. Perhaps there’s no political acumen more finely honed than Will’s. And perhaps no one has more or better insights into the issues and political realities of today. As one of the most respected and sought after political commentators on the national scene, Will provides you with an informed and expert view on the issues. He is a prolific author with books ranging from Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does to Bunts to One Man’s America: The Pleasures and Provocations of Our Singular Nation. 

Giandomenica Becchio (Ph.D. University of Florence) is Professor of history of economic thought, methodology of economics, and theory of entrepreneurship at the University of Torino (ESOMAS Department), Italy. Her research field includes history of political economy, Austrian economics, feminist economics, women economists’ contributions to economic thought. Supported by research fellowships, she has been visiting scholar/professor at Duke University; Yeshiva University (NYC); Hitotsubashi University (Tokyo); VSE University (Prague); Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro;Gender Institute at LSE; the New School for Social Research;UTS (Sydney); Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien (Vienna). 

Greg Lukianoff is an attorney, New York Times best-selling author, and the President and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). He is the author of Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate, Freedom From Speech, and FIRE’s Guide to Free Speech on Campus. 

Clark is Senior Lecturer and Program Director, Political Economy Project at Dartmouth.

Ike Brannon was a visiting fellow, specializing in fiscal policy, tax reform, and regulatory issues. He was previously a senior fellow for the Bush Institute and before that was director of economic policy for the American Action Forum. Brannon has also served as the chief economist for the House Energy and Commerce Committee, chief economist for the Republican Policy Committee, senior adviser for tax policy at the U.S. Treasury, principal economic adviser for Senator Orrin Hatch on the Senate Finance Committee, chief economist for the Congressional Joint Economic Committee, and senior economist for the Office of Management and Budget. He was also chief economist for the John McCain campaign in 2008 as well as an associate professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh. His work has appeared in The Weekly Standard, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg View, USA Today, and The Hill. 

Jacob Levy is the Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory at McGill University. He is also the coordinator of the research group on Constitutional Studies at McGill. 

James Kirchick is a journalist and the New York Times-bestselling author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington and The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age. A writer at large for Air Mail and a contributing writer for Tablet, he has reported from over 40 countries and his writing has appeared in many publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.

Jason Riley is an opinion columnist at The Wall Street Journal, where his column, Upward Mobility, has run since 2016. He is also a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and provides television commentary for various news outlets.

Mr. Riley, a 2018 Bradley Prize recipient, is the author of four books: “Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders” (2008); “Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed” (2014); “False Black Power?” (2017); and “Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell” (2021).

Mr. Riley joined the paper in 1994 as a copy reader on the national news desk in New York. He moved to the editorial page in 1995, was named a senior editorial page writer in 2000, and became a member of the Editorial Board in 2005. He joined the Manhattan Institute in 2015.

Born in Buffalo, New York, Mr. Riley earned a bachelor's degree in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Jennifer Huddleston is a senior fellow in technology policy at the Cato Institute. Her research focuses on the intersection of emerging technology and law with a particular interest in the interactions between technology and the administrative state. Huddleston’s work covers topics including antitrust, online content moderation, data privacy, and the benefits of technology and innovation. Her work has appeared in USA Today, National Review, the Chicago Tribune, Slate, RealClearPolicy, and U.S. News and World Report. She has published in law journals including the Berkeley Technology Law Journal, George Mason Law Review, Oklahoma Law Review, and Colorado Technology Law Journal. Huddleston has a JD from the University of Alabama School of Law and a BA in political science from Wellesley College.

Dr. Jeremy Horpedahl is the Director of ACRE and an associate professor of economics at the University of Central Arkansas. He received his PhD in economics from George Mason University in 2009, concentrating in public choice, public finance, and economic history. His research has been published in Econ Journal Watch, Constitutional Political Economy, the Atlantic Economic Journal, Public Choice, and Public Finance and Management. Dr. Horpedahl has also published op-eds in a variety of regional and national publications. Prior to taking on the role of Director, Dr. Horpedahl has been a researcher with ACRE since joining the UCA faculty in 2015.

Jeremy Lott is Managing Editor at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He oversees CEI’s publications and the Open Market blog.

He was CEI’s Warren T. Brookes Journalism Fellow from 2006 to 2007. Lott returned to CEI in April 2023 from The Center Square newswire, where he was a regional editor. He also founded three websites for the Real Clear Politics organization.

Lott’s several books include “The Warm Bucket Brigade: The Story of the American Vice Presidency.” He has had articles published in more than 1,000 outlets on subjects ranging from computer chips to capitalism to comic books.

Lott holds a Bachelor of Arts from Trinity Western University in British Columbia, Canada. He is married with two children and lives in northwest Washington state.

Jo Jensen is the founder of MovieGoer and she’s currently the SVP of Digital and Entertainment Strategy at Touchdown Strategies, a PR firm. and is an Aspen Institute Civil Society Fellow. Since all fellows have ventures over there, she’s currently writing a book called America Has a Girlfriend Problem.

Johan Norberg is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a writer who focuses on globalization, human progress and intellectual history. Norberg is the author and editor of more than 20 books, translated into more than 30 languages. They include In Defense of Global Capitalism, Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future, and Open: The Story of Human Progress. Both latter books were named by The Economist as a book of the year in 2016 and 2020 respectively.

Efficient transportation is a global issue. Because the effects of transportation on people, business, economies, and the environment are so pervasive, interest in public policies affecting transportation industries is intense. Bitzan's research has spanned public policy issues related to railroads, airlines, motor carriers, waterways, and public transit. As part of that research, he's examined a range of economic issues related to those policy implications, including transportation costs, energy consumption, intermodal competition, industry investment, industry structure, pricing, profitability, and regulatory change.

John F. Cogan is the Leonard and Shirley Ely Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. His research is focused on US budget and fiscal policy and federal entitlement programs. He has published widely in professional journals in both economics and political science. His latest book, The High Cost of Good Intentions (2017) is the recipient of the 2018 Hayek Prize. The book traces the history of US federal entitlement programs from the Revolutionary War to modern times. His previous books include Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise: Five Steps to a Better Health Care System (2005), coauthored with Glenn Hubbard and Daniel P. Kessler, and The Budget Puzzle (1994), with Timothy J. Muris and Allen Schick.

I am an economist, specializing in financial economics and macroeconomics. I am the Rose-Marie and Jack Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Previously I was a Professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and before that at the Department of Economics.  I also write the Grumpy Economist blog. 

John Stossel is one of the most recognized and articulate reporters today. However, he once considered giving up his broadcasting career because of his stuttering.

“Fear of stuttering can easily become worse than the stuttering itself,” observed Stossel. “The idea that I’m on television and making speeches is still a shock to me sometimes.”

As part of its educational outreach, the foundation offers a toll-free hotline, 800-992-9392, and maintains two Web sites, www.stutteringhelp.org (English) and www.tartamudez.org (Spanish).

Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow in the Governance Studies program and the author of eight books and many articles on public policy, culture, and government. He is a contributing writer of The Atlantic and recipient of the 2005 National Magazine Award, the magazine industry’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. His many Brookings publications include the 2021 book “The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth”, as well as the 2015 ebook “Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy.” Other books include “The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better after 50” (2018) and “Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America” (2004). He has also authored research on political parties, marijuana legalization, LGBT rights and religious liberty, and more.

Katherine Mangu-Ward is editor in chief of Reason, the magazine of "free minds and free markets." A few of her more memorable cover stories include a defense of plastic bags, an argument for why you almost certainly shouldn’t vote, and a welcome to our new robot overlords.

She started as Reason intern in 2000, and has worked at The Weekly Standard and The New York Times.

Her writing has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and numerous other publications. She is a frequent commentator on radio and television, including Fox, MSNBC, C-SPAN, and HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher. She has debated capitalism and socialism for Intelligence Squared and with Jacobin. She gave a TED Talk about what capitalism gets right and what governments get wrong. She did a Reddit AMA. She is a Future Tense Fellow at New America and serves on the board of directors of Students for Liberty.

Kaytlin Bailey, is a nationally touring stand up comic, notorious old pro, and sex worker rights advocate. She’s partnered with the whole team at Old Pros to create an accessible and entertaining resource for anyone who wants to learn more about sex workers and our place in history.

North Dakota State University-Assistant Professor of Economics

Kerianne Lawson is a scholar at the Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth with the Center for the Study of Public Choice and Private Enterprise and an assistant professor of economics in the Department of Agribusiness and Applied Economics at North Dakota State University. She teaches undergraduate coureses on real estate, microeconomics, and math economics. Her research interests include economic freedom, crime and civil unrest, and electricity reliability. Her work on the expansion of property rights in South Africa sheds light on the charitable work done by the Khaya Lam Project and its role in deterring crime, encouraging investment, and creating opportunities for entrepreneurship. Dr. Lawson also conducts research on the importance of economic freedom at the local, state, and national level, and how it relates to political freedom and economic growth.

KRISTI KENDALL IS A PRODUCER, IMPACT STRATEGIST, AND FILMMAKER BASED IN BROOKLYN, NY.

Lauren Hall is professor and associate dean of Academic Affairs at the Rochester Institute of Technology College of Liberal Arts. She is the author of The Medicalization of Birth and Death (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019) and Family and the Politics of Moderation (Baylor University Press, 2014) and the co-editor of a volume on the political philosophy of French political thinker Chantal Delsol. She has written extensively on the classical liberal tradition, including articles on Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, and Montesquieu. She serves on the editorial board of the interdisciplinary journal Cosmos+Taxis, which publishes on spontaneous orders in the social and political worlds. Her current research is on the moral and political implications of healthcare regulations as well as issues relating to gender and the family. 

Lawrence W. (“Larry”) Reed became President of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in 2008 after serving as chairman of its board of trustees in the 1990s and both writing and speaking for FEE since the late 1970s. He previously served for 21 years as President of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Midland, Michigan (1987-2008). He also taught economics full-time from 1977 to 1984 at Northwood University in Michigan and chaired its economics department from 1982 to 1984.

Lawrence H. White specializes in the theory and history of banking and money. He previously taught at New York University, the University of Georgia, and the University of Missouri - St. Louis. Professor White is the author of The Clash of Economic Ideas (2012), The Theory of Monetary Institutions (1999), Free Banking in Britain (2nd ed., 1995), and Competition and Currency (1989). He is the editor of The History of Gold and Silver (3 vols., 2000), Free Banking (3 vols., 1993), and other volumes. His articles on monetary theory and banking history have appeared in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Economic Literature, the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking, and other leading professional journals. In 2014 he received the Adam Smith Award of the Association for Private Enterprise Education. He has been a visiting research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, a visiting lecturer at the SNB, and a visiting scholar at the FRB of Atlanta. 

Lenore Skenazy is an American speaker, blogger, syndicated columnist, author, and reality show host, known for her activism in favor of free-range parenting.

Lisa Snell is Director of Education at Reason Foundation, where she directs Reason’s research and outreach on school choice and school finance reform including student-based funding. She has testified before the California State Legislature and numerous government agencies and authored policy studies on school finance and weighted student funding, universal preschool, school violence, charter schools, and child advocacy centers. In 2015 Gov. Doug Ducey appointed Lisa to the Classrooms First Commission to help redesign school funding in the state of Arizona.

Lisa is a frequent contributor to Reason magazine and is a regular contributor to the Orange County Register. Her commentary has also appeared in Education Week, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and numerous other publications.

Liya Palagashvili is a senior research fellow and director of the Labor Policy Project at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Her research focuses on labor regulations, the gig economy, and the changing nature of work. Her writing has been published in academic journals, in books, and in media outlets such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. She regularly writes for her Substack, Labor Market Matters, and for a column at The Hill. Palagashvili has testified before several state legislatures as well as for the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives. She serves on the Data Users Advisory Committee for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and is a scholar at New York University School of Law. She was previously awarded as a Forbes ‘30 under 30’ in Law & Policy. 

Lord Daniel Hannan of Kingsclere is an author and columnist. He serves as International Secretary of the Conservative Party, as well as teaching at the University of Buckingham and the University of Francisco Marroquín.

He has written nine books, including the New York Times bestseller Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World. He sat as a Conservative MEP for 21 years, and was a founder of Vote Leave. He is a regular columnist for, among others, The Sunday Telegraph, The Washington Examiner and The Daily Mail.

Lord Hannan is President of the Institute for Free Trade and can be contacted via ifreetrade.org/contact.

Marian L. Tupy is the founder and editor of Human​Progress​.org, and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.

His articles have been published in the Financial Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Newsweek, the U.K. Spectator, Foreign Policy, and various other outlets both in the United States and overseas. He has appeared on BBC, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, Fox News, Fox Business, and other channels.

Tupy received his BA in international relations and classics from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and his PhD in international relations from the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom.

Mark A. Calabria was a senior advisor to the Cato Institute. He provided strategic input and direction on the federal economic policymaking process. He previously served as director of financial regulation at the Cato Institute, where he cofounded Cato’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives.

Calabria is the former director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which regulates and supervises Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Home Loan Banks. During his service at the agency, Calabria led the response to COVID-19, as well as laid the groundwork for a removal of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from government conservatorship.

Matt Ridley’s books have sold nearly two million copies, been translated into 31 languages and won several awards. His books are Warts and All, The Red Queen, The Origins of Virtue, Genome, Nature via Nurture, Francis Crick, The Rational Optimist, The Evolution of Everything, How Innovation Works, Viral and Birds, Sex and Beauty

He has been a weekly columnist for the Telegraph, The Times (London) and the Wall Street Journal. He writes regularly in The Spectator, The Telegraph, the Daily Mail, Spiked and other publications. His TED talk “When Ideas Have Sex” has been viewed more than two million times.

Matt Welch is editor at large of Reason, the magazine of "free minds and free markets," and panelist on The Reason Roundtable podcast.

Welch served as editor in chief of Reason from 2008-2016, during which time the magazine won 18 first place awards from the Greater Los Angeles Press Club and five from the Western Publications Association. He was a magazine columnist before and after his tenure, on media and politics, respectively. He has written cover stories on COVID policy, the death of Communism, bipartisan fiscal incontinence, biased fact-checking, deregulation, John McCain, Rand Paul, Gary Johnson, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and the Ukraine War.

He is co-author, along with Nick Gillespie, of the 2011 book The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America, and also wrote the 2007 book McCain: The Myth of a Maverick. 

Matthew Continetti is the director of domestic policy studies and the inaugural Patrick and Charlene Neal Chair in American Prosperity at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where his work is focused on American political thought and history, with a particular focus on the development of the Republican Party and the American conservative movement in the 20th century.

A prominent journalist, analyst, author, and intellectual historian of the right, Mr. Continetti was the founding editor and the editor in chief of the Washington Free Beacon. Previously, he was opinion editor at the Weekly Standard.

Matthew D. Mitchell is a Senior Fellow in the Centre for Human Freedom. Prior to joining the Fraser Institute, Mitchell was a long-serving senior fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, where he remains an affiliated senior scholar. He is also a senior research fellow at the Knee Regulatory Research Center at West Virginia University.

Mitchell received his PhD and MA in economics from George Mason University and his BA in political science and BS in economics from Arizona State University. His writing and research focuses on economic freedom, public choice economics, and the economics of government favoritism.

Matthew Feeney was the director of Cato’s Project on Emerging Technologies, where he worked on issues concerning the intersection of new technologies and civil liberties. Before coming to Cato, Feeney worked at Reason magazine as assistant editor of Rea​son​.com.

He has also worked at the American Conservative, the Liberal Democrats, and the Institute of Economic Affairs. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, HuffPost, The Hill, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Examiner, City A.M., and others. He also contributed a chapter to Libertarianism.org’s Visions of Liberty. Feeney received both his BA and MA in philosophy from the University of Reading.

Megan McArdle is a Washington Post columnist and the author of "The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success."

Michael F. Cannon is the Cato Institute’s director of health policy studies. His scholarship spans public health; regulation of clinicians, medical facilities, pharmaceuticals, and medical devices; employer‐​sponsored and other private health insurance; Medicare; Medicaid; CHIP; the Veterans Health Administration; medical malpractice litigation; administrative law; international health systems; political philosophy; and more. Cannon is “an influential health‐​care wonk” (Washington Post) and “the most famous libertarian health care scholar” (Washington Examiner). Washingtonian magazine named Cannon one of Washington, DC’s “Most Influential People” in 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024.

Michael R. Strain is the director of Economic Policy Studies and the Arthur F. Burns Scholar in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute.

His research and writing span a wide range of areas, including labor markets, public finance, social policy, and macroeconomics. He has published several dozen articles in leading academic and policy journals. 

Michelle Minton was a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Minton specializes in consumer policy, covering regulatory issues that include gambling, tobacco harm reduction, cannabis legalization, alcohol, and nutrition.

Minton has authored numerous studies, including topics like the effectiveness and unintended consequences of sin taxes and history of gambling regulation. Her analyses have been published and cited by nationally respected news outlets such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today as well as peer-reviewed journals. She regularly appears in news media to discuss the unintended effects of laws and rules designed to save adults from their own choices which, not only conflicts with the principle of individual liberty, but often the goals of public health.

Ms. Minton holds a Bachelor of Arts from the Johns Hopkins University and a Master of Science from the University of new England.

Nadine Strossen, the John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law Emerita at New York Law School and past President of the American Civil Liberties Union (1991-2008), is a Senior Fellow with FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education) and a leading expert and frequent speaker/media commentator on constitutional law and civil liberties, who has testified before Congress on multiple occasions. She serves on the advisory boards of the ACLU, Academic Freedom Alliance, Heterodox Academy, National Coalition Against Censorship, and the University of Austin.

The National Law Journal has named Strossen one of America’s "100 Most Influential Lawyers," and several other publications have named her one of the country’s most influential women. 

Nicholas A. Snow is the BKT Assistant Professor of Economics and Tom and Anne Walsh Professor of Philosophy, Political Science and Economics at Wabash College. 

Nick Gillespie is editor at large of Reason, the libertarian magazine of "Free Minds and Free Markets." The two sites draw over 4 million visits per month and have been named among the nation's best political sites by Playboy, Washingtonian, National Journal, and others. Gillespie is co-author, with his Reason colleague Matt Welch, of The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America, published in 2011 by Public Affairs (an updated paperback edition was published in 2012).

Nico Perrino is FIRE's Executive Vice President and the creator and host of FIRE’s So to Speak: The Free Speech Podcast. Prior to his current role, he led FIRE's Communications department for nearly a decade, most recently as its Senior Vice President of Communications.

Nico's writing has been featured in The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Politico, The Boston Globe, and The Guardian, and he regularly appears on radio and TV to speak about free speech and other civil liberties issues. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Triumph of the Civil Libertarians: How a Generation of Lawyers, Writers, and Activists Created America’s Free Speech Century (BenBella).

Paul Mueller is a Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. He received his PhD in economics from George Mason University. Previously, Dr. Mueller taught at The King’s College in New York City.

Peter J. Boettke is a Distinguished University Professor of Economics and Philosophy at George Mason University, as well as the Director of the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, and BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

Peter Van Doren is editor of the quarterly journal Regulation and an expert on the regulation of housing, land, energy, the environment, transportation, and labor. He has taught at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, the School of Organization and Management at Yale University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

An economist by training, Senator Phil Gramm has had a long and distinguished career in public service, academia and the private sector. Before joining AEI, Sen. Gramm was the vice chairman of UBS Investment Bank, where he provided strategic economic, political and policy advice to important corporate and institutional clients. He served in the US Congress representing Texas for more than two decades, first as the 6th congressional district representative to the US House of Representatives, then later as senator. His legislative record includes landmark bills like the Gramm-Latta Budget – which reduced federal spending, rebuilt national defense and mandated the Reagan tax cut – and the Gramm-Rudman Act, which placed the first binding constraints on federal spending. As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Sen. Gramm steered legislation modernizing banking, insurance and securities laws. 

I am an economic historian whose work focuses on the United States and the broader Atlantic world. My research explores the intersection of history and political economy, including the 19th century as well as longer term trends in the macroeconomy such as taxation, trade, and economic inequality. I also work on the political economy and business ethics of higher education.

Rachel Ferguson is the Director of the Free Enterprise Center at Concordia University Chicago, Assistant Dean of the College of Business, and Professor of Business Ethics.

She is an affiliate scholar of the Acton Institute and co-author of Black Liberation Through the Marketplace: Hope, Heartbreak, and the Promise of America. Her commentary has been featured at the Christian Post, the Acton Power Blog, Discourse Magazine, Law and Liberty, EconLib, and the Online Library of Liberty.

Radley Balko is a opinion blogger at the Washington Post, where he writes the popular blog on civil liberties and the criminal justice system, The Watch. Balko’s work on paramilitary raids and the overuse of SWAT teams was featured in the New York Times, has been praised by outlets ranging from Human Events to the Daily Kos, and was cited by Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer in his dissent in the case Hudson v. Michigan.

Balko is also credited with bringing national attention to the case of Cory Maye, a black man who prior to Balko’s work was on death row in Mississippi for shooting and killing a white police officer during a raid on Maye’s home. Balko’s Reason feature on Maye was also cited in an opinion by the Mississippi State Supreme Court. National Journal also profiled Balko’s coverage of the case.

Randy E. Barnett is the Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law at the Georgetown University Law Center and is the Faculty Director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. After graduating from Northwestern University and Harvard Law School, he tried many felony cases as a prosecutor in the Cook County States’ Attorney’s Office in Chicago. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Constitutional Studies and the Bradley Prize, Professor Barnett has been a visiting professor at Penn, Northwestern and Harvard Law School.
Professor Barnett’s publications includes twelve books, more than one hundred articles and reviews, as well as numerous op-eds.

Robby Soave is a Senior Editor at Reason and host of Rising on Hill TV. He enjoys writing about culture, politics, education policy, civil liberties, television, and video games. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Daily Beast, U.S. News & World Report, and The Detroit News.

Robert Doar is the president of the American Enterprise Institute.

Robert Lawson holds the Jerome M. Fullinwider Centennial Chair in Economic Freedom and is director of the Bridwell Institute for Economic Freedom in the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University. He earned his PhD and MS in Economics from Florida State University and his BS in Economics from the Honors Tutorial College at Ohio University. He previously taught at Auburn University, Capital University, and Shawnee State University.

Dr. Lawson is a founding co-author of the Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of the World annual report, which presents an economic freedom index for over 160 countries. Lawson has authored or co-authored over 100 academic publications. With Benjamin Powell, he is co-author of the Amazon Bestseller, Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World (Regnery Publishing). Lawson's research has been cited over 12,000 times according to Google Scholar.

Rob Tracinski studied philosophy at the University of Chicago and has been a writer, lecturer, and commentator for more than 25 years. He is the editor of Symposium, a journal of political liberalism, is a columnist for Discourse magazine, and writes The Tracinski Letter. He is the author of So Who Is John Galt Anyway? A Reader’s Guide to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

Ronald Bailey is the science correspondent for Reason and the author of the books The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century (July 2015) and Liberation Biology: The Moral and Scientific Case for the Biotech Revolution (Prometheus, 2005). His work was featured in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004.

In 2006, Bailey was shortlisted by the editors of Nature Biotechnology as one of the personalities who have made the "most significant contributions" to biotechnology in the last 10 years.

Russ Roberts is the John and Jean De Nault Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution. In 2006, he founded the award-winning weekly podcast EconTalk, which has featured guests including Milton Friedman, Martha Nussbaum, Christopher Hitchens, Agnes Callard, Bill James, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Amor Towles, and Emily Oster. All 875+ episodes remain available free of charge at EconTalk.org and reach an audience of more than 125,000 listeners in 200 countries.

In 2021, Roberts became the president of Shalem College in Jerusalem, Israel, a liberal arts college dedicated to great ideas and books with the goal of creating the next generation of Israeli leadership.

Dr. Russell S. Sobel is a native of Charleston, South Carolina. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in business economics from Francis Marion College in 1990, and his Ph.D. in economics from Florida State University in 1994.

Ryan Bourne occupies the R. Evan Scharf Chair for the Public Understanding of Economics at the Cato Institute and is a columnist for The Times (UK). He has written on a number of economic issues, including fiscal policy, inequality, price and wage controls, and infrastructure spending.

Ryan Patrick Hanley is Professor of Political Science at Boston College. Prior to joining the faculty at Boston College, he was the Mellon Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Marquette University, and held visiting appointments or fellowships at Yale, Harvard, and the University of Chicago. A specialist on the political philosophy of the Enlightenment period, he is the author of Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue (Cambridge, 2009) and Love's Enlightenment: Rethinking Charity in Modernity (Cambridge, 2017), and Our Great Purpose: Adam Smith on Living a Better Life (Princeton, 2019).  His most recent projects include The Political Philosophy of Fénelon, and a companion translation volume, Fénelon: Moral and Political Writings, both of which will be published by Oxford in 2020.

Ryan M. Yonk is Senior Research Faculty at the American Institute for Economic Research. He holds a PhD from Georgia State University and a MS and BS from Utah State University. Prior to joining AIER he held academic positions at North Dakota State University, Utah State University, and Southern Utah University, and was one of the founders of the Strata Policy. He is the (co) author or editor of numerous books including Green V. Green, Nature Unbound: Bureaucracy vs. the Environment, The Reality of American Energy, and Politics and Quality of Life: The Role of Well-Being in Political Outcomes. He has also (co) authored numerous articles in academic journals including Public Choice, The Independent Review, Applied Research in Quality of Life, and the Journal of Private Enterprise. His research explores how policy can be better crafted to achieve greater individual autonomy and prosperity.

Ryan Streeter is executive director of the Civitas Institute. He is also a senior lecturer in the School of Civic Leadership. Previously, Streeter was the State Farm James Q. Wilson Scholar and director of domestic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he facilitated research in education, technology, housing, urban policy, poverty studies, workforce development, and public opinion. Before joining AEI, he was executive director of the Center for Politics and Governance at UT Austin.

Sally Satel, M.D., a practicing psychiatrist and lecturer at the Yale University School of Medicine, examines mental health policy as well as political trends in medicine. Her publications include PC, M.D.: How Political Correctness Is Corrupting Medicine (Basic Books, 2001); The Health Disparities Myth (AEI Press, 2006); When Altruism Isn’t Enough: The Case for Compensating Organ Donors (AEI Press, 2009); and One Nation under Therapy (St. Martin’s Press, 2005), coauthored with Christina Hoff Sommers. Her recent book, Brainwashed – The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience (Basic, 2013) with Scott Lilienfeld, was a 2014 finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science.

Samuel Gregg is the Friedrich Hayek Chair in Economics and Economic History at the American Institute for Economic Research. He has a D.Phil. in moral philosophy and political economy from Oxford University, and an M.A. in political philosophy from the University of Melbourne.

Dr. Sandra J. Peart became the fourth dean of the Jepson School of Leadership Studies in August 2007. In August 2018, she was appointed to the E. Claiborne Robins Distinguished Professorship in Leadership Studies. She became president of the Jepson Scholars Foundation in 2019. She is immediate past president of the International Adam Smith Society and a past president of the History of Economics Society, where she began the Young Scholars Program. Since 2018, she has been a Reform Club member and a Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce Fellow. In 2024, the History of Economics Society awarded her the Distinguished Fellow Prize for her lifetime contributions to the study of the history of economics.

Sarah Skwire is a Senior Program Officer at Liberty Fund, Inc. Sarah has published a range of academic articles on subjects from Shakespeare to zombies and the broken window fallacy, and her work has appeared in journals as varied as Literature and Medicine, The George Herbert Journal, and The Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.

Scott Bullock joined the Institute for Justice at its founding in 1991. In January 2016, he became its second President. Since becoming president, IJ has more than doubled in size in terms of its staff, budget, and the number of cases it litigates (including more than doubling its cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.) Since 2020, IJ has also launched three new projects, focused on immunity and accountability, Fourth Amendment rights, and zoning justice.

Before becoming president, Bullock served as a senior attorney and litigated a wide variety of constitutional challenges in federal and state courts, including some of IJ’s most iconic cases.

Scott Lincicome is the vice president of general economics and Cato’s Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies. He writes on international and domestic economic issues, including international trade; subsidies and industrial policy; manufacturing and global supply chains; and economic dynamism.

Lincicome also is a senior visiting lecturer at Duke University Law School, where he has taught a course on international trade law, and he previously taught international trade policy as a visiting lecturer at Duke. Prior to joining Cato, Lincicome spent two decades practicing international trade law at White & Case LLP, where he litigated national and multilateral trade disputes and advised multinational corporations on how to optimize their transactions and business practices consistent with global trade rules and national regulations.

Scott Winship is a senior fellow and the director of the Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he researches social mobility and the causes and effects of poverty. He also focuses on economic insecurity and inequality, among other poverty issues.

Before joining AEI, Dr. Winship served as the executive director of the Joint Economic Committee (JEC). During his time at the JEC, under Chairman Mike Lee (R-UT), Dr. Winship created the Social Capital Project, a multiyear research project to investigate the evolving nature of social relationships including families, communities, workplaces, and religious congregations.

Shikha Dalmia is a former visiting fellow with the Mercatus Center's Program on Pluralism and Civil Exchange. Previously, Dalmia was a writer at Reason Magazine and a senior analyst at Reason Foundation, a nonprofit think tank. She is a columnist at The Week, and writes regularly for Bloomberg View, The New York Times, USA Today, and numerous other publications. From 1996-2004, Dalmia was an editorial writer at Detroit News.

Dalmia’s work at Mercatus focuses on populist authoritarianism.

Dalmia has an M.A. in Mass Communication from Louisiana State University and a B.S. in Chemistry and Biology from the University of Delhi.

Shoshana Weissmann oversees R Street’s social media, email marketing, website, and other digital assets. As a fellow, she also works on occupational licensing reform, social media regulatory policy, age-verification policy, Section 230, child identity theft, and other issues.

Stan Veuger is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Stephanie Slade is a senior editor at Reason, the magazine of "free minds and free markets," and a fellow in liberal studies at the Acton Institute. Her writing has appeared in America magazine, The New York Times, U.S. News and World Report, the Online Library of Liberty, and elsewhere. She covers the intersection of religion and politics.

Steven Teles is Professor of Political Science at the Johns Hopkins University, and Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center. He is the author of The Captured Economy: How The Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth and Increase Inequality (With Brink Lindsey, Oxford 2017); Prison Break: Why Conservatives Turned Against Mass Incarceration, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law and Whose Welfare: AFDC and Elite Politics (Kansas, 1996). He is also editor of Conservatism and American Political Development (With Brian Glenn, Oxford, 2009) and Ethnicity, Social Mobility and Public Policy: Comparing the US and UK. He has published widely in more popular outlets, from Democracy Journal, The Nation, and The American Prospect, to National Affairs, The Public Interest and National Review. He is currently working on a book, under contract with Oxford University Press (with Rob Saldin) on Republican opponents of President Donald Trump. 

TAWNI HUNT FERRARINI is an economist, educator, and author who serves as a member of the Missouri State Board of Education, having been nominated by the governor in 2024. In addition, she is a faculty scholar with the Fraser Institute (Canada), the Council on Economic Education (Japan), the Mackinac Center for Public Policy (Michigan), and the Center for Regional Economic Research at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga. Until May 2024, she was the associate director of the Hammond Institute for Free Enterprise, the director of the Economic Education Center, and the Robert W. Plaster Professor of Economic Education at Lindenwood University in St. Charles, Mo.

Terry L. Anderson is the former president and executive director of PERC, as well as the John and Jean De Nault Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His research helped launch the idea of free market environmentalism and has prompted public debate over the proper role of government in managing natural resources. He is the co-chair of Hoover’s Property Rights, Freedom, and Prosperity Task Force.

Anderson is the author or editor of 39 books. Among these, Free Market Environmentalism, co-authored with Donald Leal, received the 1992 Sir Antony Fisher International Memorial Award. 

Tevi Troy is a senior fellow at the Ronald Reagan Institute, a Senior Scholar at Yeshiva University’s Straus Center, and a former Deputy Secretary of HHS and senior White House aide. He is the author of five books on the presidency, including most recently “The Power and the Money: The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry.”

On August 3, 2007, Dr. Troy was unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. As Deputy Secretary, Dr. Troy was the chief operating officer of the largest civilian department in the federal government, with a budget of $716 billion and over 67,000 employees.

Dr. Troy has extensive White House experience, having served in several high-level positions over a five-year period, culminating in his service as Deputy Assistant and then Acting Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy.

Thomas Hazlett holds the H.H. Macaulay Endowed Chair in Economics at Clemson, conducting research in the field of Law and Economics and specializing in the Information Economy, including the analysis of markets and regulation in telecommunications, media, and the Internet. Prof. Hazlett served as Chief Economist of the Federal Communications Commission, and has held faculty positions at the University of California, Davis, Columbia University, the Wharton School, and George Mason University School of Law. His research has appeared in such academic publications as the Journal of Law & Economics, the Journal of Legal Studies, the Journal of Financial Economics and the Rand Journal of Economics, and he has published articles in the Univ. of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Yale Journal on Regulation, the Columbia Law Review, and the Berkeley Technology Law Journal. 

Thomas Stratmann holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Maryland. He is a Distinguished University Professor at Mason and holds an appointment as Professor of Economics at the Department of Economics and has a courtesy appointment at the Antonin Scalia Law School. He has written on topics of political economy, law and economics, health economics and experimental economics, and has published in journals such as the American Economic Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of Law and Economics, and the Review of Economics and Statistics.

Timothy P. Carney is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he works on civil society, family, localism, religion in America, economic competition, and electoral politics. He is concurrently a senior columnist at the Washington Examiner.

Mr. Carney’s forthcoming book, Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be, will be published by HarperCollins in March 2024. He is also the author of Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse (HarperCollins, 2019), which was a Washington Post bestseller; Obamanomics (Regnery Publishing, 2009); and The Big Ripoff: How Big Business and Big Government Steal Your Money (John Wiley & Sons, 2006), which was awarded the 2008 Culture of Enterprise award by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

Mr. Carney has a bachelor’s degree from St. John’s College in Annapolis.

Timothy Sandefur is the Vice President for Legal Affairs at the Goldwater Institute’s Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation and holds the Duncan Chair in Constitutional Government. He litigates to promote economic liberty, private property rights, free speech, and other crucial values in states across the country.

Timothy is the author of eight books, including most recently Freedom’s Furies: How Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Liberty in an Age of Darkness (2022), and Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man (2018), as well as more than 50 scholarly articles on subjects ranging from Indian law and antitrust to copyright law, the constitutional issues involved in the Civil War, and the political philosophy of Shakespeare, ancient Greek drama, and Star Trek. 

Todd J. Zywicki is George Mason University Foundation Professor of Law at George Mason University Antonin Scalia School of Law, Research Fellow of the Law & Economics Center, and former Executive Director of the Law and Economics Center. In 2020-21 he served as the Chair of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Task Force on Federal Consumer Financial Law. In 2021 he was inducted into the American College of Consumer Financial Services Lawyers. He served as Chair of the Association of American Law Schools Section on Law & Economics in 2019.

Trevor Burrus was a research fellow in the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review. His research interests include constitutional law, civil and criminal law, legal and political philosophy, legal history, and the interface between science and public policy.

Troy Senik is a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and the cofounder of Kite & Key, a digital media channel focused on public policy. He is also the author of A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland, recently published by Simon & Schuster.

Mr. Senik’s career has spanned politics, journalism, public policy, and non-profit leadership.

He has been a columnist and member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register; the host of a series of podcasts for the Hoover Institution at Stanford University; and a vice president of the Manhattan Institute for Public Policy. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and The Guardian, amongst others.

A Jeopardy! champion, Mr. Senik holds a bachelor’s degree from Belmont University and a master’s degree in public policy from Pepperdine University. He lives in the New York City area.

Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University

Distinguished Senior Fellow, F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Faculty Director, Mercatus Center.

Tyler Cowen is the Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University and serves as chairman and faculty director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. With colleague Alex Tabarrok, Cowen is co-author of the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution and co-founder of the online educational platform Marginal Revolution University.

Chapman University, Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy and Economic Science Institute

Originally from Quebec, Canada, I am an Assistant Professor of Economics at George Mason University and earned my Ph.D. in economic history from the London School of Economics. I was previously postdoctoral fellow at Texas Tech University and assistant professor of economics at King's University College and Bates College. I have an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Montreal.

I specialize in the measurement of living standards today and in the distant past and in economic history. I combine this specialization in economic history with a specialization in political economy in order to explain differences in living standards over time and space. My articles have been published in Economic Journal, European Economic Review, Public Choice, Economic Inquiry, Canadian Journal of Economics Explorations in Economic History, European Review of Economic History, Contemporary Economic Policy and Southern Economic Journal. 

Will Rinehart is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he focuses on the political economy of technology and innovation. His research covers policy areas such as diagnostic testing regulation, federal agency regulatory guidance, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the regulation of artificial intelligence. He also serves as an expert at the Federalist Society’s Emerging Technology Working Group, which is part of the Regulatory Transparency Project.

Before joining AEI, Mr. Rinehart was a senior research fellow at the Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University. He was also the director of technology and innovation policy at the American Action Forum, a research fellow at TechFreedom, and the director of operations at the International Center for Law & Economics. 

Yesim Sayin is the founding Executive Director of the D.C. Policy Center.

With over twenty years of public policy experience in the District of Columbia, Dr. Sayin is recognized by policymakers, advocates and the media as a source of reliable, balanced analyses on the District’s economy and demography.  Yesim’s research interests include economic and fiscal policy, urban economic development, housing, and education. She is especially focused on how COVID-19 pandemic is changing regional and interregional economic interdependencies and what this means for urban policy. Her work is frequently covered in the media, including the Washington Post, the Washington Business Journal, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, WAMU, and the Washington City Paper, among others.

Levin is Senior Fellow, the Beth and Ravenel Curry Chair in Public Policy and Director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute; and Editor in Chief of National Affairs.