A Tribute to William H. Peterson, 1921-2012

0:00Before we get back to our academic program, I would like to, I'm very pleased actually, to introduce a tribute to William Peterson. It will feature remarks by three speakers who are well acquainted with the qualities of Bill Peterson, the man, the economist, and the devoted student and follower of Ludwig von Mises. The speakers will be Tom DiLorenzo, Robert Luddy, and Lew Rockwell, in that order. Tom? Thanks Joe, thanks for coming. Bill Petersen was a friend of mine and I was actually his successor in a job at the endowed chair in free enterprise at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga and I was Bill's pick as his replacement apparently because he called me up and coached me about the interview and things like that and I'll never forget his key piece of advice was get a haircut and wear a nice suit And those of us who knew Bill, Bill was a physical fitness aficionado, diet and exercise was very important to him decades before he became a fad in America.

1:08He always kept himself in good shape and he wore a nice suit every single day, just like Ludwig von Mises did. And so he very much imitated his hero, von Mises, for his entire life in terms of how he lived his life. And as a college student, one of the things I worked very hard at is I was an economics major and finding out who were the most persuasive writers out there. And I worked hard in college and in graduate school in trying to imitate the best techniques and best types of logic of various people. And Bill Peterson was one of them. I'd run across Bill Peterson's writings. and I consider Bill Peterson to have had no peer as far as clarity of writing and thinking apart from Henry Hazlitt in terms of popular writing in the Austrian School of Economics and so, and I encourage all of you to go and take a look at or listen to Bill's Schlarbom lecture, he was one of the winners of the sort of the lifetime achievement award that the Mises Institute gives out, the Schlarbom award, I've heard all of them or read all of them and I think Bill's was by far the most lucid

2:19Probably the best of all of them, and that's some serious company he's in with that. And so Bill's forte or his contribution to our world here, our intellectual world, was he was a devoted member of the Austrian School, a tremendous writer, a tremendous writer, and his wife Mary was sort of similar. She worked for one of the big three automobile companies, and she had what sounded like a great job is sort of supporting the free enterprise system by writing and speaking. about being paid the salary that you would get paid by General Motors or something, not some out-of-the-way local college or something like that. And so I'm very, I was very pleased to be asked to be a part of the five minute or so tribute to William Peterson.

3:05And like I said, I encourage you all to read or listen to his Schlarbaum lecture, which I think was just wonderful, very scholarly. And I did get the job, of course. of course. But in all fairness, I think the one thing that got me the job as Bill's replacement, as an endowed chair holder, was when they asked me, well, ideally, what would you like to be doing when you're 60? And I said, ideally, I'd like to be the top money winner in the senior golf tour. And the man who the chair was named after was a huge golfer, and his wife was the sort of the and the former state of Tennessee women's golf champions. So I think that probably is what got me the job. Much more than the haircut that Bill recommended for me to get.