The scene occurred several times at different venues, but an encounter with Fred Smith was an occasion to be vividly remembered.
“Sit!” the founder of the Competitive Enterprise Institute commanded me when I last ran into him at Washington, D.C.’s storied Morton’s Steakhouse on Connecticut Avenue. Fred and wife Fran and a few friends were at his usual table on the patio, where he could smoke his signature cigar and pontificate on the evils of regulation.
When I finally pleaded I had to go or would be late for dinner, Fred relented, but admonished me to “write about this stuff and warn people before it’s too late. OK?”
Fred Lee Smith died Nov. 23 at age 83. Having founded CEI out of a small office above a bakery in Washington in 1984, he proceeded to turn it into one of the preeminent repositories of libertarian firepower and took on presumed-sacrosanct idols as the validity of climate change, the importance of subsidies and “sweetheart contracts” from government to private business, and, of course, whether government could regulate smoking (which, as Smith often said with a puff on his cigar and a twinkle in his eye, “was perfectly legal the last time I checked”).
In so doing, Smith did so with hard-hitting research and humor. One of his favorite pieces of advice was, “Don’t manage” — translated to mean research an issue, offer the alternatives solutions, and let the free market work out the final answer. Another Smithism was, “People are stupid because they’re smart,” which onetime CEI intern Andrew Langer explained was “a humorous but insightful observation that people focus on their personal lives rather than policy details, trusting organizations like CEI to safeguard their freedoms.”
With his rapier wit, ever-present charm, and his beard, Fred Smith was a libertarian leprechaun. He was always going to upset the system but do so with humor and a sense of fun that even political opponents appreciated.
Born in Alabama, the young Smith was raised in the segregated South and came to hate and oppose discrimination. He earned a degree in Theoretical Mathematics and Political Sciene Tulane University (La.) where he earned the Arts and Sciences "Dean's Medal" — Tulane’s highest academic award — and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
Because of his passion for civil rights, Smith considered himself a liberal who felt government had good answers to some of our problems. He went to work for the fledgling Environmental Protection Agency, but soon Smith came to see firsthand how government solutions had a negative effect on the individual and private business. He realized how, in Andrew Langer’s words, “well-intentioned policies could stifle innovation, harm communities, and impede progress. This realization spurred his transformation from a government insider to a fierce advocate for free-market solutions.”
His conversion to free-marketeer culminated in the founding of CEI. Within a short time, Smith and CEI were jousting with the federal government that once employed him over what it considered overregulation and threats to the free market. His most famous battles were over climate change (formerly known as “global warming”) and he often voiced his own contrarian view that changes in the climate were “possibly good, possibly bad.”
Businesses that felt threatened by the federal government’s increasingly heavy hand in the climate change issue responded through organizations that raised skepticism. Between 1998 and 2005, ExxonMobil, a major target of the government on the climate change issue, gave more than $16 million to climate-change skeptics — among them CEI. Asked if there was something untoward about this, Smith remonstrated: “Firefighters’ budgets go up when the fires go up.”
By the 21st century, CEI was a nationally-recognized pro-free-market organization whose research on regulation and deregulation were inevitably sought out by the press. This year, at its 40th anniversary gala, an overflow crowd looked on at the presentation of the Julian Simon Award, named after the freedom-loving economist, and a lifetime achievement award named for columnist George Will.
As his health declined, Fred Smith was also honored by many who knew him — and that’s a lot of people because he seemed to know everyone. Some folks may have been appalled by libertarianism, but they nonetheless loved the libertarian leprechaun. Smith regularly attended cocktail parties by political opposites and, as usual, made a political debate entertaining and laugh-filled.
Joe Hunter, onetime top aide to the late Rep. Bill Emerson, R-Mo., and a self-styled “small-l libertarian,” told Newsmax: “"For those of us of a certain political generation, Fred was a force of nature who helped embed classical liberalism into policy and debate for decades. And, he made it fun."