This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, November 1st, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Cato Institute lost its longtime chairman last week.

William A. Niskanen has been described as blunt when it came to

communicating economic ideas, but he preferred to be known simply as a political

economist.

Jim Dorn, Vice President for Academic Affairs at the Cato Institute, talks about his longtime colleague.

Bill came to Cato in 1985 after he was on the President's Council of Economic Advisors,

but I knew Bill before that and I had come to Cato in

1982 and I ran a conference shortly thereafter at Bozeman and Bill came out to it. He was the dinner speaker and we had been horseback riding all day and

Bill started off his talk by saying this is off the record and he said

Being an economist in Washington is kind of like riding a horse a pain in the ass and of course what he meant that in

official Washington he was quite limited what he could actually say and of course anybody that new

bill knows that he was very outspoken he and he thought carefully about the

analysis and if he thought the analysis was wrong, he would want to say something different.

And that's, of course, what he did at Ford Motor Company that got him fired because he was a free trader,

and Ford went over on the side of protectionism.

So that was the type of person that he was and it was a privilege to know him all these years and work with him. He was not only a friend but a good mentor.

How did he come to Cato?

Well, to the credit of Ed Crane, Ed's a real entrepreneur and you know Cato was a small think take at the time we only had seven or eight people on the staff only a few policy analysts

We had started out in San Francisco a few years earlier back in the late 1970s and we were, you know, we were getting a good reputation and Bill knew about us and he had been at our events as I mentioned.

So Ed tried to persuade him when he was over in the old executive office building.

...