We hear about how millennials favor socialism. This is bad news. Yet, at the same time, more young people than ever are listening to the story of economic freedom.
As you are reading this, there are 800 college students and young professionals attending a two-day seminar in the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Atlanta. They are listening to a series of lectures on free-market economics. It is being sponsored by the Foundation for Economic Education. It is called FEECon. It is an annual event.
I visited the hotel the night before the seminar began. I was meeting with my old friend, Mark Skousen. He was the president of FEE in 2002. He was scheduled to deliver two lectures the next day. He and I were both astounded at what we saw. There were students everywhere. They were meeting in small groups, all showing signs of enthusiasm.
FEE has spotted a niche market: high school students and college students. There are a lot of conservative and libertarian think tanks these days. They target adults, graduate students, and maybe some college students. But the idea of targeting high school students is unique to FEE. When I was director of seminars at FEE in 1972, I would have liked to have done this. I thought this would be a great niche market. But FEE ignored this market back then.
Today, FEE runs 70 seminars a year. This means over one seminar a week. Some are one-day seminars, some are three-day seminars. They are held all over the United States. This is extraordinary.
THE BAD OLD DAYS
In 1972, a large FEE seminar was about 50 people. This was a week-long summer seminar. There were four every summer.
There were almost no high school students at all. There were almost no college students. There were high school teachers. There were four seminars held at FEE's headquarters in Irvington, New York. The attendees were mostly public school teachers or teaching nuns getting a free vacation that was approved by a mother superior. FEE's hope was this: these teachers would share the message. But we had little feedback about what those teachers did after his seminar.
I did not believe that these pleasant people could have inspired students to change their minds about anything. I don't think they had enough knowledge imparted in one week for them to go back to those classrooms and revise their lectures and reading assignments to match the worldview that they received in a one-week seminar. I frankly thought the strategy was a waste of time. Fortunately, Leonard Read let me off the hook. About halfway through the year, he said I did not have to run those seminars any longer. My heart was not in it.
My heart would certainly be in it today if I were 30 years old and running a seminar program like FEE's. I would be able to see triumphs every week. I would be getting the message into the minds of the actual targets, not trying to do it indirectly by means of pleasant but undistinguished high school teachers.
I seriously doubt that FEE in 1972 had 800 students on its total mailing list of about 30,000 people. The idea that FEE could have held a conference to bring in 800 students would have been inconceivable. It would have been inconceivable for any libertarian organization in the country. That was because there were only about four of these organizations, and their mailing lists were not as large as ours was.
In 1972, there were also half a dozen weekend regional seminars a year. They targeted potential donors: gray heads. Maybe 50 people would attend. Students rarely attended.
My point: there was nothing like this in 1972 at FEE or anywhere else.
Things were better in 1972 at FEE than they were in 1958. I became a reader of FEE's monthly magazine, The Freeman, in 1958. I was in high school. I was one of maybe a hundred high school students nationally who read it. I was unaware of any FEE seminars. I certainly would not have been invited to one. I am sure I could have benefited from one.
I was completely alone in 1958. In college, I never found anyone who shared my ideas regarding the free market. I never met anybody on campus who had read Ludwig von Mises or F. A. Hayek. I had been introduced to these authors by FEE.
I did attend a two-week seminar held by the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists in 1962. There were about three dozen college students in the West Coast who attended. I think there were three of these seminars held around the country.
Things were a little better by 1962 than in 1958. Goldwater was becoming better known in conservative circles. Young Americans for Freedom began in 1960. About 100 students attended the first meeting. They issued a statement, which became known as The Sharon Statement. It was a mixture of conservatism and free enterprise. YAF was still very small in 1962. On the West Coast, it was invisible.
FEE'S MESSAGE
The new president of FEE grew up in Communist Lithuania. He is enthusiastic about the program.
He also understands that FEE has to demonstrate the moral case for freedom. It's not good enough to show that the free market is efficient. That was Read's message, too.
I’ve learned that, first, you have to show that your ideas are not only beneficial, but also morally correct. You can push a policy reform legislatively or use litigation to block a bad policy proposal in the courts, but if you fail to demonstrate that what you are proposing is the right thing to do, then your changes are going to be temporary at best.
I am glad to see that he is still proclaiming it.
I think we are seeing something being played out today that C. S. Lewis wrote about in 1945. Lewis understood that there is a fundamental moral conflict going on in the world today. He believed it is escalating. He wrote a novel, That Hideous Strength, in which he described this confrontation. He had one of the characters make the following statement.
"If you dip into any college, or school, or parish, or family--anything you like--at a given point in its history, you always find that there was a time before that point when there was more elbow room and contrasts weren't quite so sharp; and that there's going to be a time after that point when there is even less room for indecision and choices are even more momentous. Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse: the possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing. The whole thing is sorting itself out all the time, coming to a point, getting sharper and harder."
We are seeing a generation of young adults called millennials who are moving in the direction of what they think is socialism. Basically, it is simply the welfare state with higher taxes. It is an extension of what their great-grandparents, their grandparents, and their parents voted for, beginning in 1932.
In reaction, we are seeing a growing number of people in this same age group who are responding positively to the message of freedom. Ron Paul tapped into this group in 2008 and 2012. It exists. It does not get a lot of publicity. It is not featured in articles in the mainstream media. But it is there.
As the conflict escalates fiscally and politically, there is going to be a comparable conflict escalating in the realm of ideas.
CONCLUSION
Leonard Read always taught that bad ideas produce bad results. The bad ideas associated with the welfare state have produced fiscal policies that are going to bankrupt the federal government. There will be a time when people will listen to those of us who have an alternative message to the welfare state ideology that dominates Washington politics.
In the meantime, we need well-trained young people who understand the case for freedom, and who can articulate it. Today, FEE is getting that idea to more students than I would have believed possible in 1958, 1972, or 2002.
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