One Mind at a Time

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, I received an email from a former colleague from Metro State asking if I would be willing to meet him for lunch with a physician friend of his. Rigors of a schedule of a retired prof (two trips to Santa Fe for opera, dining, and wine and spirits 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 doctor had discovered Tom Woods on a YouTube video that led him to Mises.org and its vast amount of educational resources on economics and liberty.

Besides lots of reading on his own, he had taken several of the new courses available at the Mises Academy.

His knowledge and understanding was impressive and he commented on how the delivery was innovative and effective, especially relative to traditional delivery in higher education.

It was a real pleasure to meet him and see, if only in one person, the impact of easy access in multiple formats to resources that were so hard to come by even for a PhD student 30 years ago, when I began my journey into Austrian economics after Fred Glahe handed me 2–3 pages of notes on Hayek-Keynes with this instruction: Turn this into a dissertation!

In a followup, the doctor 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 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 positive feedback to me that my support of the Mises Institute has borne fruit and how important continuing support is if the Institute 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!