Success of the impact of the Mises Institute in a small anecdote; one well educated convert at a time:
Shortly after Mises Daily published my written testimony before the Subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy and Technology of the Committee on Financial Services, US House of Representatives “Fractional Reserve Banking and Central Banking as Sources of Economic Instability: The Sound Money Alternative,” from June 28, 2012 as a daily artilce on July 12 (http://mises.org/daily/6100/Fractional-Reserves-and-Economic-Instability), I received an email from a former colleague from Metro State asking if I would be willing to meet him for lunch with a Physcian friend of his. Rigors of a schedule of a retired prof (two trips to Santa Fe for opera, dining, and wine and spriits tasting; Tosca, Peral Fishers, and Maometto II), prevented us from meeting until last week.
What a delightful lunch. Nearly two hours of discussion with a well informed non-economist! The Dr. had discovered Tom Woods on a Youtube video which lead him to mises.org and its vast amount of educational resourcers on economics and liberty. Besides lots of reading on his own, he had taken several of the new ‘courses’ available at the Institute. His knowledge and understanding was impressive and he commented on how the delivery was innovative and effective, especially relative to tradition delivery in higher ed.
It was a real pleasure to meet him and see, if only in one person, the impact of easy access in multiple formats of resources that were so hard to come by even for a PhD student 30 years ago when I began my journey into Austrain economics after Fred Glahe handed me 2-3 pages of notes on Hayek-Keynes with the instruction – turn this into a dissertation.
In a follow up, the Dr. wrote, “I enjoyed meeting a living Austrian economist. Hopefully, Americans, or anyone, will recognize the value of … [the] knowledge and principles”.
Daniel Sanchez recently argued (http://mises.org/daily/6181/The-Real-Ron-Paul-Revolution) in the “real Ron Paul Revolution” that
“Ron Paul’s legacy is not in his legislative record but in the number of minds he changed. The way to perpetuate his legacy, then, is to continue — and ramp up — the “Paulian” educational campaign. And the most Paulian nonprofit educational organization in the world is the Ludwig von Mises Institute.”
My recent lunch was positve feedback to me that my support of the Institute has born fruit and how important continuing support is if the Instutue is to stay the leader moving forward.
Per Daniel, “We [mises.org] have a lot of exciting things planned (overhauling the website, new ambitious programs, and more), but we need your support to see them through. Please help us finish what Ron Paul started. Help us bring to fruition an ideological revolution for liberty, property, and peace.”
I have. I hope you will too!
