Hello and welcome to the Cato podcast. I'm Ian Vasquez, Vice President for International Studies here.

Last week, Ed Crane, the co-founder of the Cato Institute and its longtime president from its beginnings in 1977 to 2012 when he retired, passed away.

Ed leaves behind a huge legacy,

both in terms of building Cato into a leading think tank

and in terms of the broader classical liberal movement.

I will be speaking about Ed and his legacy

with my colleague Jim Dorn,

Cato's senior fellow emeritus and a long-time editor of the Cato Journal. Welcome, Jim. Thank you, Ian. And I'm also joined by Aaron Steeleman,

Cato Senior Fellow and Policy Advisor. Welcome, Aaron. Thanks, Ian. All three of us knew Ed for decades and work with him in various capacities for many years,

with Jim Dorn going back the furthest in time. Before we talk about Cato's founding in the 1970s, I thought I would ask Aaron to tell us a little bit about what the libertarian scene was like in the 1970s, or at least what was Ed Crane doing before starting the Cato Institute.

Yeah, there wasn't much of a libertarian movement at all when Ed entered it formally.

I should say that Ed went back to the Barry Goldwater campaign in 1964. That's when he first

got active in or interested in electoral politics, but he had been sort of converted, I should say, to libertarianism by

Roosevelt, or Lane and I'd Rand previous to that. He fell, he kind of fell out of electoral

politics until 1971 when the Libertarian Party was formed, and he was one of the, I think there were fewer

than 100 people who attended the first convention in Denver.

And the Libertarian Party actually was, the Libertarian Movement was so small at that point that

the LP had offered the nomination to Murray Rockbard,

and he just hung up on them thinking that they were a bunch of cranks. It's like, why would we possibly form a Libertarian Party at this point?

It turned out that John Hosbers actually got one electoral vote that year from a defector,

someone who had pledged to vote for Richard Nixon.

And that was Roger McBride.

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