Everybody in Washington knew Fred, and Fred knew everybody. Even people who disagreed with everything he stood for couldn’t help but like him. He was always smiling and laughing, even when making serious intellectual arguments. People around him couldn’t help but take on some of his joy. Fred was a Washington institution, in a good way.
It’s sad and a bit weird to write “was” instead of “is.” Fred passed away on November 23, 2024, peacefully and at home. He was 83.
Fred L. Smith, Jr. was born in Jim Crow-era Alabama on the day after Christmas, 1940. His family moved near Slidell, Louisiana when his father got a job as a lock master on the Pearl River. Fred rejected the racism around him, so he figured he was a liberal, and became an activist. He ended up in Washington, working for the newly-founded EPA, and became disillusioned.
His EPA colleagues were focused on growing the agency’s budget, advancing their careers, and signaling their ideology. They were less interested in what Fred cared about, which was discovering the best ways to protect the environment.
Thus began Fred’s embrace of free markets, which led to CEI’s founding in 1984.
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One of my fondest Fred memories is the time we had an argument that lasted for two years.
Our dispute was over rent-seeking. This is the economics term for private companies lobbying for special government favors like subsidies, sweetheart contracts, or regulations that hobble competitors.
At the time, Washington was doling out about $100 billion worth of such corporate welfare. Yet, lobbying was only a $3 billion industry. That’s more than a 30-fold return. For comparison, the stock market only yields about 8 percent. With those kinds of returns, the question isn’t why is there so much rent-seeking, but why so little?
I thought the answer was in economics and incentives. Fred thought the answer was in virtue. He had recently borrowed my copy of Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Virtues, and had taken it to heart. It reinforced Fred’s longtime belief that most, though not all, business people had a sense of decency and honor that limited their rent-seeking.
For the next two years, every time I walked past his office, Fred would bring up some point about business ethics, and I would counter with some public choice theory argument. We would exchange volleys over email, and even in meetings that were supposed to be about something else.
Fred and I eventually realized we were both right. We also realized that our combined perspectives might make a good paper.
Arguments about past presidents shape the nation’s present understanding of itself, and hence its unfolding future. In recent years, biographies by nonacademics have rescued some presidents from progressive academia’s indifference or condescension: John Adams (rescued by David McCullough), Ulysses S. Grant (by Ron Chernow), Calvin Coolidge (by Amity Shlaes). The rehabilitations of those presidents’ reputations have been acts of justice, as is Christopher Cox’s destruction of Woodrow Wilson’s place in progressivism’s pantheon.
In “Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn,” Cox, former congressman and former chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, demonstrates that the 28th president was the nation’s nastiest. Without belaboring the point, Cox presents an Everest of evidence that Wilson’s progressivism smoothly melded with his authoritarianism and oceanic capacity for contempt.
His books featured ostentatious initials: “Woodrow Wilson Ph.D., LL.D.” But he wrote no doctoral dissertation for his 18-month PhD. He dropped out of law school; his doctorate of law was honorary. But because of those initials, and because he vaulted in three years from Princeton University’s presidency to New Jersey’s governorship to the U.S. presidency, and because he authored books, he is remembered as a scholar in politics. Actually, he was an intellectual manqué using academia as a springboard into politics.
David Bier explains that “the math on mass deportation doesn’t add up.”
Kent Lassman reflects on the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Andrew Stuttaford decries “the climate gravy train.”
How badly does the Biden Administration want to punish Google? So much that the Justice Department’s antitrust cops are now asking a federal court to hobble the search giant, even though their proposals would hurt consumers and could benefit China. That’s only the start of the reasons to be skeptical of this government market meddling.
In a court filing last week, the DOJ proposed a slew of remedies for Google’s alleged antitrust violations. Federal Judge Amit Mehta ruled in August that Google had maintained an illegal search-engine monopoly by paying web browsers and device manufacturers to be featured by default, even as he acknowledged this wasn’t the primary reason for its success.
“Google has not achieved market dominance by happenstance. It has hired thousands of highly skilled engineers, innovated consistently, and made shrewd business decisions,” Judge Mehta wrote. “The result is the industry’s highest quality search engine, which has earned Google the trust of hundreds of millions of daily users.”
No matter, the government now wants to degrade Google’s search-engine quality to help less successful rivals.
