The summer is officially over, and with it, 22 years of FREE seminars for federal judges and religious leaders. This year we successfully hosted a diverse representation from both groups during our two weeklong seminars (July 15-19 and August 19-23). Below is an historical sketch leading to this success.  It occurred neither by accident nor luck.  Rather, amply funded work guided by a strong philosophical gyroscope produced a contagious intellectual adventure.  

 

FREE has played a major role in producing an intellectual revolution in thinking about natural resource and environmental policy.  Today no responsible, well-informed analyst assumes that a top-down, statist, command-and-control will produce solutions to resource problems.  Negative second and higher order consequences too often trump, dominating outcomes.  

 

In sum, solar socialism and forest fascism share pathologies with their namesakes.  This is not due to evil managers but rather the knowledge and control assumptions underlying their design.   However necessary in emergency situations such as forest fires, bureaucracies rarely excel at coordination and innovation.   Rather, they usually censor and distort market signals--and this normally causes multiple problems.  

 

No serious scholar today defends the conventional wisdom fully dominant when my colleagues and I began our work at MSU in the early 1970s. The New Resource Economics (NRE), as it is now called, is a successful venture in intellectual entrepreneurship. It has been continuously refined and elaborated, largely by two Bozeman think tanks and the visitors they bring to Montana.  The basic NRE architecture remains consistent throughout. Here is the logic.

 

When a nation grows wealthy and well educated, it becomes ever more Green.  This describes post WWII America and the West more generally.  This is one reason why so many successful Americans are attracted to places with Bozeman's attributes.  They are drawn to what my MSU colleague Jerry Johnson calls America's "Green Coast".    

 

As people become more Green, unless they understand a little political economy they are usually seduced by the attractive mirage of statist "solutions".  This means regulation, command-and-control, and bureaucratic management of natural and environmental resources.  Due to this orientation, conventional environmentalism is antagonistic to private property rights, and the market process.  Hence, it inhibits wealth-enhancing entrepreneurship.  (The Breakthrough Institute is a welcome exception, largely because it applauds arrangements fostering creativity.)

 

The bureaucratic approach gradually undermines prosperity, resilience, and multiple dimensions of mobility.  It wastes environmental and economic resources; consider corn ethanol. While responsible environmental regulation is essential for the control of pollution and the abuse of common property resources, the most constructive role of government is to monitor, not manage.  This is a central message of the New Resource Economics (NRE).

 

Government has a positive role in supporting basic research but not in allocating among competing claims for the results.  The ethical and economic pathologies that flow from the federal mandate to convert one third of America's corn production to ethanol are extreme but illustrative.  This result is a predictable outcome of political management of resources.  It's a great example of crony capitalism, fascism in the field.

 

Founders of the NRE began with this cheerful presumption: as a nation grows wealthy and well educated, the environmental sensitivities of its citizens increase.  Hence, citizens demand and expect a safer, more pleasing environment.  The questions are how to best achieve it.

 

We knew that decisions are largely determined by information and incentives--and that institutions generate both.  In addition, coming from economic anthropology, I understood why culture matters a great deal; beliefs and values are strong incentives.  

 

FREE colleagues and associates also believe responsible liberty, modest prosperity, and environmental quality are requisites of a good society.  The challenge is to discover and advance institutional arrangements fostering these values.   The major contribution of the NRE is the guidance it provides those seeking constructive institutional reforms and creative responses to opportunities.

 

Participants judged FREE 's 2013 conferences and smaller gatherings successful.  Next, we will explore new arenas for the NRE's contributions to culture and policy.  Here are three for 2014.

 

First is a lecture series applying the NRE to an emerging environmental problem, conserving parks and wild lands as budgets bite.  This begins with a presentation at Harvard Law on November 5, then Duke and other schools in the Research Triangle. 

 

Second are two books, perhaps in an electronic format.  One is Mapping the DNA of the NRE, the other Bozeman, Gateway to Wisdom. The first describes and advances the logic and application of the NRE.  The second explores the economic anthropology of the "Third Coast", the new entrepreneurial and Green West.   

 

The third consists of complementary YES programs.  Yellowstone Economic Seminars will be for new federal judge clerks.  These are individuals who have just graduated from law schools (always in the top portion of their classes) and are about to begin clerking for Article III judges.  

 

Complementing the clerk offering is our Yellowstone Entrepreneurial Salon, another YES.  The salon brings highly successful entrepreneurs to FREE's Gateway office to explore an intellectually challenging topic.  

 

Our September 12-15th YES was "Getting to America 3.0".  A possible topic for 2014 is "Surmounting Scarcity".  This will begin with a clear but rarely understood fact; scarcity has yet to win a race against creativity when property rights are secure and the market process free to operate.

 

Here is a change for 2014.  By January 1, FREE will be in its original Gallatin Gateway office.   This has multiple advantages including lower overhead; Gateway rents are cheap.  We expect a few costs, some unknown; not all good things go together.  Our web address and phone numbers will not change.   And of course we will be even more appreciative of visitors.   Please come see us--and call first.  We are likely to be out on the ranch writing in one of our cabins.