A Personal Announcement

After six years with the Foundation for Economic Education, I'm moving on to a new organization.

In 2018, I joined the Foundation for Economic Education as Managing Editor.

I had some reservations, to be honest—not about the organization, but about my ability to serve effectively in this new role. While I had worked as an editor and writer in various capacities for various companies in my professional career, I wasn’t a trained economist and was relatively new in my journey as a libertarian.

Despite my concerns, joining FEE was one of the best career decisions I ever made.

During my six years with FEE, I grew as a writer, editor, curator, and content strategist. I worked hard for FEE and did my best to live up to its principles, spread its beautiful message—“anything peaceful”—and emphasize the importance of liberty, voluntary action, and economic education through storytelling, commentary, and analysis.

The organization was good to me, and I’ll miss the people I worked with over those six years, many of whom I expect I’ll remain friends with forever.

As you might have already gathered from reading this note, my journey as an official FEE employee is now over. I’ve left the organization to join the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), where I’ll begin as Senior Editor today.

Though I’ll no longer be part of FEE, I’ll still be one of its champions. In a world where classical liberalism seems to be in retreat on both the political left and right, FEE’s mission of teaching the intellectual leaders of the next generation the ethical and legal values that underpin and ensure a free society is more important than ever.

While there are too many people to thank without boring readers or straying into self-indulgence, I would like to recognize Lawrence Reed.

I’ve worked under many leaders in organizations over the last 30 years. I’ve had good leaders and bad ones; brave ones and cowardly ones; honest ones and dishonest ones. (My hunch is most people reading this can say the same.) But in all my years, I’ve never served under a better leader than Larry, who was FEE’s president when I joined the organization in 2018, and continued to serve in various capacities after shifting out of that role in 2019.

There were times in my life when I would have scoffed at the importance of leadership, probably because of my natural individualistic streak. (We don’t need no stinkin’ leader!) I don’t anymore. Leaders matter, and I’m not just talking about corporate leadership or political leadership. Leadership matters just as much in coaching a youth soccer team or raising a family or serving on the board of a nonprofit; indeed, perhaps that is where it matters most.

We saw what happens when leadership fails not very long ago—and I’m not just talking about Washington, DC, where I’ve come to expect it. In 2020 and 2021, in media rooms, church halls, boardrooms, and beyond, America witnessed leadership failure on a massive scale, as leaders who should have been leading began toeing the line and regurgitating the rhetoric and policies of public health bureaucrats seeking to initiate the most widespread crackdown on civil liberties in US history to “protect” the American people. During the most terrifying period of my life, we watched a nation conceived in liberty embrace a central planning scheme that seemed more fitting for Maoist China (and proved just as disastrous).

One of the things I’ll always be proudest of during my tenure at FEE is that our organization didn’t fall into line. Instead, we became frontline fighters against the madness and tyranny emanating from panicking public health departments and fear-mongering cable news channels. Our tools of resistance were not pitchforks, but reason, economics, history, and common sense.

We succeeded because of organizational leadership. Unlike so many organizations, FEE had leaders who possessed the courage, wisdom, and principles to resist the madness.

This reason, above all others, is what makes me proudest about my organization and my time at FEE. It’s one of the reasons moving on is difficult. But as they say, all good things must end.

Fortunately, I believe FEE remains in good hands. Though I’ve only had the opportunity to work with FEE’s new president Diogo Costa a few months, it’s my feeling that he’ll live up to the high standard of leaders who came before him, and make the ghost of Leonard Read proud.