This year is FREE’s 25th anniversary. The initial focus of our work was on the economics and policy analysis of contentious natural resource issues. Our goal was to show how to harmonize environmental quality with America’s founding ideals of liberty and responsible prosperity.

Twenty-five years ago environmental problems were addressed almost exclusively through command and control regulation. This blunt instrument produced many accomplishments but also posed compelling threats to America’s traditions of property rights, individual responsibility, and reliance upon markets for social coordination. Our task was to show that these traditions need not impede environmental quality, but could actually improve it.

I included federal judges in our conferences soon after founding FREE. These programs focused on tensions among ecology, liberty, and responsibility. Five distinguished Federal Circuit Court judges serve or have served on FREE’s board of trustees and many others offer valuable counsel.

FREE hosted the 1991 Mont Pelerin Society meeting at Big Sky. Several Nobel Prize winners, including Hayek, Friedman, and other distinguished scholars and civic leaders founded this international group in 1947. All were devoted to classical liberal and libertarian principles. At the Big Sky meeting my judge friends suggested we initiate a conference series for federal judges. This has become FREE's core activity.

In 1980, a few top law schools including Chicago, UCLA, Virginia, and Yale included economics in their classes. Fortunately the economic approach to law, the Law and Economics perspective, is now incorporated into the curriculum of all major and most other law schools. Further, hundreds of federal judges have enrolled in economics seminars. We’ve won the intellectual battle recognizing economics as central to better environmental policy.

Equally encouraging, an appreciation of the economic perspective is now central to the policy proposals of major environmental groups. For example, two noted environmental leaders who have lectured in several of our judges conferences recently launched a major policy project, “Breaking the Environmental Logjam.” Dick Steward of Harvard, and now NYU, had been chairman of the Environmental Defense Fund and David Schoenbrod of NY Law School was with the Natural Resources Defense Council. Their work relies on sound economics and entrepreneurship rather than rigid commands. Theirs is but one of many examples of economics guiding constructive environmental reform.

Now, however, Americans face new threats to our traditions of social coordination through voluntary, cooperative means. Much silliness in Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb and Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance seems central to the core belief system infecting America’s governmental czars and the major media. An underlying drive toward ever increasing governmental direction and coordination of society permeates current federal policies and proposals. This poses huge ethical and economic threats.

Many, perhaps most, thoughtful observers fear America faces a cultural war. The conflict and its potential amelioration involve opinion leaders more than judges. The opportunity to improve understanding motivates FREE’s new program for seminary professors and other religious leaders. Judges have demonstrated interest in the religious leaders program and, of course, we always welcome judges at these conferences.

Questions of climate, environmental and social justice, personal behavior impacts on health care, responses to natural disasters, and governmental deficits all trump our more limited concerns of two decades ago. Despite their abiding concerns, few religious leaders are comfortable dealing with these complex and contentious policy issues. Many default to collectivist “solutions,” many of which have terribly perverse consequences. Examples include policies subsidizing corn and palm oil bio-fuels.

Unfortunately, religious leaders often become unwitting accomplices to political favor seeking by special interests looking for subsidies or protection from competition. To foster better understanding of policy consequences, FREE is developing new programs for religiously involved opinion leaders and judges.

America faces a host of compelling problems—and opportunities for constructive reform. FREE’s mission is to offer sound intellectual perspectives and analysis to address these challenges and foster reforms. As opportunities evolve, so do we. Foundations of Religion, Ethics, and Economics remain ever important.