As European libertarians looking at America around the turn of the millennium, Ed Crane and David Boaz seemed to us like the Richard Cobden and John Bright of modern times.
The 19th-century Manchester radicals institutionalized the campaign for free trade and inspired every European country—from France to Germany—to create its own miniature Anti–Corn Law League. In a similar way, the Cato Institute showed us it was possible to turn libertarianism from ragtag activism into a serious, well-funded institution with intellectual credibility. We all wanted a mini-Cato back home.
To me, the appeal was obvious. Having come out of the libertarian underground movement, I noticed that the Cato Institute managed to earn broader intellectual respect even though it held the same radical ideas we did. This institution seemed to have discovered a formula not just for winning debates but for winning people.
Later, when I joined the Swedish free-market think tank Timbro, I quickly realized that the Cato Institute was treated as the gold standard—combining intellectual credibility, policy relevance, and fundraising capacity while, most importantly, remaining true to its original mission.
Ed’s principled leadership—even when the whole country was against him (as during the Iraq War)—is a core reason Cato did not succumb to the siren song of power in Washington, DC, as some had feared and as so many other think tanks did.
At Timbro, there were frequent references to Cato in internal discussions, documents, and even—as I vaguely recall—a drinking song.
On the first page of Timbro’s 25th-anniversary publication, we tried to borrow some of Cato’s good reputation with a picture of our CEO, Mattias Bengtsson, alongside a smiling Ed Crane and a description of Cato as “one of the world’s most exciting think tanks.”
That’s right. Not just important or influential, but exciting—the place where building a free society was an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage, as F. A. Hayek had famously called for.
I cannot begin to list all the other Western European think tanks that have also been inspired by the Cato Institute. When the Iron Curtain fell, the same thing happened in Eastern Europe, where many came to libertarian ideas through Milton Friedman and Hayek but learned what to do with those ideas through Cato.
Today, there are about 40 serious free-market think tanks in former communist countries throughout Europe, up from roughly zero. That would not have been possible without Cato’s work to “deliver the truth about freedom around the world,” as Mart Laar—the prime minister who reformed Estonia’s economy and received Cato’s 2006 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty—put it. Everybody wanted their own mini-Cato, and they still do.
There is a very moving moment in the story of the great 19th-century French economist Frédéric Bastiat, when he realizes that he is not alone in his struggle for liberty. When Bastiat discovered Cobden and the Anti–Corn Law League in the 1840s, he wrote that he had finally found the very method “by which a principle can be made to triumph, not through a single day’s clash, but through a slow, patient, stubborn struggle.”
Bastiat saw that Cobden had built something far greater than a campaign for a single issue; he had built a machinery for freedom—something he now desperately wanted to bring to his own country.
There are many, many of us, all around the world, who are the Bastiats to Crane’s Cobden.
