It is with intense feeling that I acknowledge my long association with and admiration for Ed Crane.
When Cato was first formed, I believe in 1977, Ed and Charles Koch invited me to attend the first Cato conference in Rio Rico, Arizona, 60 miles south of Tucson. It was my great honor and pleasure to attend and hear talks by Ed, Charles Koch, Alan Greenspan, and others.
By 1977, I was a long-standing devotee of the significance and power of markets to discover prices as information conveyors. My first market experiment had been conducted at Purdue University over 20 years earlier (1956), and I published the results of my first dozen plus experiments in the Journal of Political Economy in 1962.
At that time, I lacked only the discovery of Hayek’s work and Adam Smith’s monumental Theory of Moral Sentiments, a much neglected, or worse, misunderstood contribution to a theory that accounts for order in human society and economy.
In 1977, through Ed and Charles Koch, I discovered the libertarian movement, not realizing that I was and had been a libertarian. I had, however, long shed my early fascination for socialism, in part because of the influence of Norman Thomas, the six-time candidate for president on the Socialist Party ticket. Thomas had left socialism and dedicated himself to First (and other) Amendment rights and was a leading peacenik.
The traditional socialists he had left behind did not understand his new commitment. I did.
This history is not about me; it is about why Ed Crane befriended me in 1977 and how I have never been the same.
With the announcement in October 2002 that I had won the Nobel, I was confronted with the pleasure of inviting family and close friends to the celebration in Stockholm. Ed was an easy choice for me and proudly included on this list of most treasured friends.
Regrettably, because of his loss, he will not be on my 100th birthday party list in January 2027.
I cannot even imagine the libertarian movement in the United States without Ed Crane. His dedication and vision gave American libertarianism its unique stamp as a fundamentally anti-war bastion of uncompromising freedom regardless of one’s other in-group identification. Ed believed in American Exceptionalism and was himself a great American in the tradition of such Founders as Franklin, Madison, Hamilton, and Washington.
