Veronique de Rugy, Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, discusses the lessons learned from intellectual giants in the long-running battle over economic ideas. Economist Milton Friedman’s impossible battle for school choice began in 1955, yet today is widely accepted. Friedrich Hayek’s 1952 treatise against authoritarian government economic controls that informed Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s revolutionary economic policies in Great Britain. Ronald Coase’s concept of auctioning the spectrum (thought a joke by the FCC when he testified to it in 1959) became reality under President Clinton in the 1990s.
The pattern in these stories is that (a) it takes time to fight the battle of economic (or any other) ideas, (b) it takes tenacity, and (c) it takes patience to win the battles of ideas that continue today with each of us. She closes with advice to today’s warriors.
Her remarks were recorded at CBLPI’s Florida Women’s Summit in April 2018.