“A defense of liberal institutions is needed now more than ever, and Julian Simon’s work, and the work of the previous winners of the Simon Award, will be crucial in providing it.”
“… for population growth to get translated into economic progress we need liberal institutions.”
Ed. Note: This completes a three-part series on the views of the late Steve Horwitz (1964–2021), the first two being on the climate debate and a carbon tax.
Since 2001, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, along with the Simon family, has presented an annual Julian Simon Award. The first award winner was Stephen Moore, a former research fellow for Dr. Simon (1982–85) who has promoted the Simon worldview ever since.
The most recent award winner was Stephen Horwitz, whose comments follow below.
Fellow professor and classical liberal Peter Boettke shared Horwitz’s remarks below on social media with the comment:
…I do think in the interview so much of what was truly wonderful about Steve comes out.
Professor Desrochers extemporaneous remarks have been revised for publication.
Thank you all and particularly to CEI for this award.
Those of us in the tradition of Julian Simon try to produce work that is based on logic and facts and come up with a compelling narrative.
“We appear to be on the Road to Serfdom, paved with green bricks rather than red bricks…. It is actually likely that the United States is now approaching State ownership of about 50 percent of all its land—a level of socialist land ownership unequalled in the world.”
It is a fabulous honor to receive the Julian Simon Memorial Award. Julian was one of the seminal thinkers of the 20th century—and one of the first to challenge the radical Greens’ attack on freedom and progress.
Simon demolished the limits to growth and the belief that human progress was bound in a Malthusian straitjacket, and limited by the known or presumably known physical supplies of natural resources. He argued that the ultimate resource was the limitless nature of man’s mind—his intelligence, innovation, discovery, and invention, constantly discovering and creating new resources where none had existed before.
…“I might add a prediction—that the hydrocarbon energy age could still be young, even quite young. The much-hyped emergence of a new renewable energy era by mid-century is less our energy future than our energy past…”
I am honored to receive the [2002] Julian Simon award tonight. My thanks go to the Simon family and the Competitive Enterprise Institute for having this annual award to recognize and encourage new contributions in the “sustainable development” field that Simon pioneered.
My appreciation also goes out to a number of groups within the classical liberal “structure of production” that have supported my intellectual development over the last quarter century, and in particular the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, the Cato Institute, and the Atlas Economic Research Foundation.
Julian Simon was very interested in energy and energy-environmental issues.
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