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I\u2019ve had little time during the past few days to write or to blog, which will likely continue.\u00a0 And, for the moment, jet lag has left me even less mentally capable than I usually am.\u00a0 So I\u2019m intending to occasionally reuse a few prior entries over the next while.\u00a0 This one, for example, is a modified and somewhat expanded version of something that I wrote in September 2022 while sailing on the North Sea toward Edinburgh:<\/span><\/p>\n We spent last night in a suburb of Edinburgh, Scotland, and had a simple lunch today in St. Andrews.\u00a0 Doing so reminded me of what I believe to have been my first visit to Edinburgh, and what was certainly my first visit to St. Andrews.\u00a0 The latter, of course, is probably best known to many people worldwide as the \u201chome of golf\u201d \u2014 the location of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews (simply \u201cThe Royal and Ancient\u201d or even the \u201cR&A\u201d), which was founded in 1754 and which, until 2004 (that is to say, for a full quarter of a millennium), bore responsibility as the \u201cworld governing body\u201d for the rules of the game around the globe (excepting only the United States and Mexico).\u00a0 But, although I eventually spent a fair amount of time in the vicinity of the Royal and Ancient, it was certainly not the principal attraction there for me<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Sometime\u00a0in 1975, I learned that the National Federation of Independent Business was sponsoring an essay contest in honor of the bicentennial of Adam Smith\u2019s classic text on economics, The Wealth of Nations<\/em>.\u00a0 The winner of the contest would receive $2000 (fairly serious money in 1975!), as well as an all-expense-paid trip to the United Kingdom that would include a week-long tour of England and Scotland and that would then conclude with the victor\u2019s attendance at the week-long 1976 meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society<\/a> \u2013 a premiere international group of conservative economists \u2013 to be convened at the University of St. Andrews.\u00a0 This was irresistible to me.\u00a0 <\/span>St. Andrews and its famous university carried a special allure for me because that was where the then well-known conservative thinker Russell Kirk<\/a> had earned his doctorate.<\/p>\n I immediately decided to seek the prize and, curiously, I was always serenely confident that I would win it.\u00a0 I simply knew that I would.\u00a0 This despite the fact that I had no idea how many contestants would participate nor who the judges would be.\u00a0 (I still have no idea.)\u00a0 One of the principal approach paths to LAX passed far above my parents\u2019 house in California and, as I sat out in their backyard writing my essay over the 1975 summer break, every plane that passed overhead \u2014 and they passed regularly and very frequently, albeit high and therefore soundlessly \u2014 reminded me of my upcoming trip to Great Britain.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Winning the essay contest \u2014 and I did<\/em>, in fact, win it \u2014 allowed me to mingle socially with such figures as Friedrich von Hayek, who had won the first-ever Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974, as well as with Milton Friedman, who would win the 1976 prize just a few months later.\u00a0 I met future laureates like James Buchanan (1986) and Ronald Coase (1991), and spent a long afternoon exploring the superb used bookshops of St. Andrews with George Stigler, who would win the 1982 prize.\u00a0 One afternoon, I walked around the Royal and Ancient with the journalist and business historian John Chamberlain<\/a>, whom I greatly admired.\u00a0 I suppose, since I was far and away the youngest person in the group, that I must have seemed a bit like a pet or a mascot to them.<\/span><\/p>\n It was heady stuff for an undergraduate Greek major, and I almost shifted my studies to economics.\u00a0 (Flatteringly, several of the economists I met tried to persuade me to do just that. Armen Alchian<\/a>, of UCLA, and another fairly young economist from Dartmouth \u2014 whom I can vaguely picture in my mind but whose name eludes me after nearly half a century \u2014 were\u00a0 the most persistent.)<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I remember one late-night session in the hallway of a St. Andrews dorm where some of us argued U.S defense policy with the famed libertarian economist Murray Rothbard<\/a>, who coined the phrase \u201canarcho-capitalism\u201d and, for that matter, pretty much embodied it himself.\u00a0 He was contending that America didn\u2019t really need federal-government military forces, but that \u2014 on the analogy of the privateers who served the role of an American navy during the Revolutionary War \u2014 free associations of citizens could, if they wanted, band together and purchase intercontinental ballistic missiles of their own.\u00a0 (I\u2019m not altogether sure that he was joking.\u00a0 I envisioned a neighborhood in West Covina deciding to take out, say, Alhambra or South Pasadena over a disputed call in a high school football game.)<\/p>\n One evening, my next-door neighbor in the university dorm where we were staying \u2014 an economics professor from the University of Colorado at Boulder, I think, whose name I\u2019ve sadly forgotten \u2014 suddenly dragged me off to a late-night gathering of something called \u201cThe Invisible Hand Society,\u201d the main point of which seemed to be alcohol and bonhomie<\/em>.\u00a0 There were about ten or twelve of us there, including Milton Friedman and a few others.\u00a0 The fellow who invited me had warned me at the last minute to put on the Adam Smith necktie that each attendee at the Mont Pelerin meeting had been given and that, it turned out, each member of the Invisible Hand Society was supposed to wear.\u00a0 This was lucky for me, because one poor soul showed up without it and was immediately fined ten pounds by the chairman.\u00a0 (And he had to pay.)\u00a0 At one point, each of us in the room had to tell what we had done during the past year for the cause of the free market.\u00a0 I felt hopelessly inferior, because I was just an undergraduate student (in classics, no less), and all that I had done was to write my essay.\u00a0 But that was generously deemed sufficient, and I passed.\u00a0 Another member of the group reported that he had debated John Kenneth Galbraith at Princeton.\u00a0 He was fined twenty pounds for mentioning Galbraith\u2019s name.<\/p>\n One day, we made a pilgrimage to Canongate Kirkyard, on Edinburgh\u2019s Royal Mile, where we were to place a wreath on Adam Smith\u2019s tomb.\u00a0 But it turned out that nobody had actually brought the wreath.\u00a0 Everybody had thought that someone else<\/em> had it.\u00a0 So, later that afternoon or early evening, we gathered on the battlements of the ruined St. Andrews Castle to watch Friedrich von Hayek cast the wreath into the surf below, expressing the hope, just before he did so, that Adam Smith\u2019s famous \u201cinvisible hand\u201d<\/a> would take the wreath where it needed to go.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/a>