On April 28-29, Atlas held its most successful Liberty Forum to date, attracting 224 participants from 40 countries and introducing more than three dozen new intellectual entrepreneurs to the free-market think tank network.
Atlas began holding its annual Liberty Forum in 2001, as a lead-in to The Heritage Foundation’s Resource Bank. Together, the meetings have become one of the year’s best networking and learning opportunities for market-oriented leaders from all over the world. Perhaps even more than that, many participants remarked that the Liberty Forum boosted their spirits, as they meet scores of freedom champions from around the world. Frances Johnson (International Property Rights Working Group, Washington, DC) remarked: “This is the most amazing gathering of international free-market ideas entrepreneurs that I have been to.”
The inspiring tone of the meeting was apparent from early on, leading Linda Whetstone – daughter of Atlas’s late founder Sir Antony Fisher – to remark at her table during the opening lunch, “If my father was here, he would be absolutely delighted!”
The highlights of the formal program are recounted in this article, but they are not the only successes of the meeting. Behind the scenes, participants that previously did not know one another were finding new ways to collaborate. One fruitful result was the formation of the latest in a series of “regional resource banks” with Atlas’s encouragement.
Liberty Forum also generated a great deal of interest in specific Atlas programs. For instance, the winners of the Templeton Freedom Awards program were recognized at Liberty Forum, and several representatives of winning institutes were featured as session speakers, including: Alberto Mingardi ( Istituto Bruno Leoni, Italy), Leon Louw (Free Market Foundation, South Africa), Ugnius Trumpa (Lithuanian Free Market Institute ), Cristian Larroulet (Libertad y Desarrollo, Chile), Martin Chren (Hayek Foundation, Slovakia), Parth Shah (Centre for Civil Society, India), Ozlem Caglar Yilmaz (Association for Liberal Thinking, Turkey), and Michel Kelly-Gagnon (Montreal Economic Institute, Canada).
Larry Reed of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy (Michigan) devoted his luncheon address to Atlas’s International Freedom Corps (IFC) program, for which he had recently visited China, Korea and Vietnam. (to read his Liberty Forum speech click here).
The evening keynote address on globalization was given by Fred Smith of Competitive Enterprise Institute (Washington, DC), doing an impressive job of substituting at the last minute for Stephen Goldsmith (former Indianapolis mayor and Bush advisor, and current Harvard professor) who was prevented from attending by travel complications.
In keeping with past Liberty Forums, one half of the program was devoted to sessions on think tank strategies and the other half to issues in a particular region. In addition to the TFA winners mentioned above, June Arunga (Inter Region Economic Network, Kenya) and Helen Disney (Stockholm Network, UK) gave presentations within the panels on “The Freedom Movement’s Next Generation” and “Communication Strategies,” respectively.
The second day of the program was devoted to policy discussions of how to expand free trade in the
Americas. Allan Gotlieb (Donner Canadian Foundation) reviewed the impact of NAFTA after ten years, judging it a success on the terms on which it was created. He suggested that policy-makers should build upon NAFTA to further integrate the North American countries as a community of laws.
Rigoberto Stewart (INLAP, Costa Rica) explained that the anti-trade viewpoints of many Latin Americans are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the policy question. The public must learn that free trade benefits consumers. As long as trade debates are seen as solving “production needs,” they will be biased toward protectionism. Fred Smith (CEI) continued on this theme stressing the need for efforts at popularizing trade among the people, so progress can be made while bypassing world governing bodies that are beholden to narrow interests. Cristián Larroulet (LyD) offered the Chilean experience in unilateral reductions of barriers to trade as a model for other nations to follow.
During the final session of the 2004 Liberty Forum, Juan Carlos Botero (Colombia) discussed a new study he co-authored, showing that labor standards in the U.S. actually tend to be lower than in other countries. This runs contrary to rhetoric used by U.S. labor leaders to justify blocking free trade agreements until there is a “level regulatory playing field.” Joe Olson (Amerisure Insurance Companies) provided an informative overview of the importance of the insurance industry to the prospects for increased international trade, and the necessity of a stable legal climate for its proper functioning. Finally, Margaret Tse (Instituto Liberdade, Brazil) discussed the special case of Brazil, which in recent years has undermined the advance of trade agreements in the Americas.
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