A Tribute to William H. Peterson, 1921-2012

0:00Well, Bob Luddy mentioned great entrepreneurs. He's one himself. And I want to make the first announcement. We'll have more to say about this later. But Bob is endowing a chair in Austrian Economics here at the Institute in honor of Bill Peterson. And the Peterson-Luddy Chair is going to have a very important role in the future of the Institute. And so, Bob, thanks for everything you do and thanks a million for doing that. I was going to speak about Bill, but how much more appropriate to have gotten remarks today from his daughter Laura Bennett Peterson. So let me share those with you. She said, Dad would be so proud to see you all here.

0:46Of all the honors he earned, he took the greatest pride in the Schlarbohm Prize for Lifetime and Time Defense of Liberty that he received from the institute in 2005 and the address that Tom mentioned is both online in video and writing, very much worth taking a look at, especially the video, he was such a tremendous speaker. Laura goes on, Bill would be embarrassed, excuse me, my dad would be embarrassed but also greatly honored by these tributes to him today. Dad would not want this occasion to be a somber one, so let me recall for you one of his many gifts and something of a trademark of his, an irrepressible sense of humor. Politicians were a constant source of inspiration, and of course I use that word wryly. U.S. presidential candidates put on what Dad dubbed in a wonderful article in 1956, The Greatest Show on Earth, quoting from an imaginary Larry Huckster's Chorus is a privilege and a pleasure, fellow Americans, to be with you here today, meeting you will be my everlasting inspiration for the next four years.

1:57Lou Mises, dad's great hero, mentor, colleague and friend, also had a sense of humor, which he could display even in lecturing about economic calculation. Margaret von Mises recalled in my years with Ludwig von Mises, quote, once in June 1955, the Petersons brought their children to a seminar arranged by Lew at a Buck Hills farm inn in the Poconos. Mary Peterson sat in the back with her two children. According to the lecture notes of Bettina Bean Graves, Lew said, there will one day be a period of history in which the government will leave the butter price as it is and people The little girl, sitting so quietly in the back of the room, who is listening without too much interest to what we're saying, will perhaps live in a world where the butter price will be left to the free market.

2:49I'm afraid I was that little girl, all of age four at the time. And now, what Mises foresaw, or hoped for, a free market price for butter, among other things, has come to pass. come to pass. Well, four years later, dad analyzed the great farm problem in his book by that title as a problem of interventionist farm policy. He decried the interest group politics, regulatory capture and crony capitalism that brought this about and proposed such radical solutions as the elimination of agricultural price supports and guarantees, as well as acreage and marketing controls. Quote, which will triumph, he asked, nature's law or man's law? As of today, it's still the latter. Israel Kirzner, who studied under both Mises and Dad at NYU, once asked Dad whether he should become a rabbi or an economist.

3:40Well, you can guess the answer Dad gave. In his lucid study of Ludwig von Mises, the man and his economics, Kirzner called Mises the most outspoken, most trenchant, and most passionate defender of free market capitalism of the 20th century. of the Century. Dad, too, powerfully and persuasively defended the market as the most harmonious and efficient way to coordinate economic activity and to foster innovation in a world of imperfect information. It was worth defending because it permitted people to take those actions and to make those choices that best fit their own individual needs and values. Dad, like Mises, had the courage of his convictions, defending liberty even when and it was unpopular or inexpedient.

4:25He managed to shock both liberals and conservatives in a 1959 Harvard Business Review article should we trade with the communists. For all but military weapons and equipment the United States should, he argued, trade as freely with communists as with non-communist countries. The communist challenge could best be met through competition with free enterprise and the freer the better the stronger. For when Communism undertakes all the necessary changes, just to provide the qualitative and quantitative aspects of material well-being for its citizens, it will no longer be Communism. Dad lived by Mises' and this Institute's guiding principle. Tune cati malis, said Contra identi or ito. Do not give in to evil, but proceed ever more boldly against it.

5:13In Virgil's Aeneid, this was the Sybil's prophecy, an exhortation to Aeneas. I know with some poignancy the response of Aeneas, whose father had died. I beg of you but one thing, may it be my lot to look upon the face of my beloved father. You must show me the way. Dad left a legacy to this institute because he trusted it to show the way, and as he so ably did, to freedom. May his and your good work continue, and may he rest in the peace he so richly deserves.