Liberty Fund

I have heads of think tanks and advocacy organizations saying like, "We're actually not okay with the direction that the Republican Party and the conservative movement has been trending over the last ten years, and we wanna try to do something about that." Um, the fact that you saw a whole exodus from Heritage Foundation last year when it sort of became apparent to a lot of people that the, the current head of that, uh, conservative think tank had kind of gone all in on the Tucker Carlson approach to conservatism and a whole bunch of people, both scholars there, um, board members, and donors all suddenly went, "You know what? We're not okay with this, and we're gonna, we're gonna pull out, and we're gonna go support, you know, we're gonna go take our, our resources somewhere else, um, to, to work on behalf of free markets and rule of law and that sort of thing." So I, I mean, I guess I, I feel like there's, believe it or not, an abundance of really good stuff happening.

If you go to Liberty Fund's website, Law & Liberty, I think everything they publish, virtually everything they publish there is worth your time.

Um, and it's really, um, deep engagement at an ideas level with the stuff that's happening in our world, um, in the sort of br- again, bl- broad right of center environment.

Um, people like Rachel Lu, who's an editor there, somebody like Brad Birzer at Hillsdale I really like, and he seems to manage to somehow write a new book every other year or something.

To the extent that I have to, when I explain this, I will refer to the constitutional order in both systems, but I will mainly refer to the American one because I am aware that you have your own system and your audience is primarily American.

I will caveat that with whilst I am a lawyer, I am not an American lawyer, but I am a senior writer for a US think tank, Liberty Fund, and I write for Law and Liberty, which is the legally focused magazine that Liberty Fund owns.

So my main role for Liberty Fund's purposes and for the Law and Liberty magazine is to explain the two legal systems where I am a lawyer, which is the United Kingdom, and I am qualified in both English and Scots law because they have different legal systems.

Scotland is a mixed system, England is a common law system, and also Australia.

So I talk about those three because I've worked in those jurisdictions and I'm qualified in those jurisdictions.

I hope you enjoyed this conversation.

And if you did, you will enjoy Helen in all of her various public manifestations.

She is a writer for Liberty Fund.

So.

I think that was probably about 15 years ago that I started down that path of really reading a lot of the books I have come from Liberty Fund.

I've been involved with Liberty Fund.

Because I've been in D.C., I've been fortunate to be really embedded in the network of free market conservative and libertarian and classically liberal, broadly speaking, intellectual institutions over the years.

I had a lot of them also really encouraging me and pressuring me to do this book, actually.

Welcome to the Future of Liberty, a project of Liberty Fund, hosted by Mitch Daniels.

Welcome, and I hope for most of you I'm saying welcome back to The Future of Liberty, a product of Liberty Fund, an organization devoted for 60 years to the promotion and the protection of the freedoms for which America is best known.

And today our guest is a scholar, an historian, an activist, and I'm proud to say a friend for a very long time.

Chris DeMuth, longtime head of the American Enterprise Institute and still a very important thought leader on the American public scene.

What led them to the prosperity that they'd found was not just capitalism writ large but a program of decentralized power and competition that affected our political founding not just by enabling the making the revolution a possibility but by giving us a structure that is is highly competitive in important ways.

We're used to the separation of powers.

And we can, people at the Liberty Fund can, and the founders could quote John Locke and Montesquieu on the proposition.

But at least as important to our success as a nation was the principle of federalism.