Welcome to the Reason Roundtable, your weekly libertarian podcast that has a dedicated YouTube channel that you should stop what you're doing right the hell now and go and subscribe.

I'll wait.

I am Matt Welch,

joined by Nicholas B. Peter Sutterman and Catherine Mangu Ward. Happy short week, everyone.

Howdy. Hey, Matt. Happy Turkey week. Before we go full doge, I just wanted to pause a moment and commemorate, Mark the passing of a man who was dear to us all.

Fred Smith, the founder and longtime head of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which works on regulatory reform in Washington, D.C.

passed away over the weekend at age 83. He was an absolutely effusive and

really knowledgeable defender of capitalism in all of its forms. Peter, I know you worked for him in the

past. Do you want to lead us in a little round of talking about old Fred? Yeah, so he was a great

warrior for liberty, perhaps the happiest of happy warriors for liberty that I've ever met. And I have met a few in my time. Yeah, so he was a great warrior for liberty, perhaps the happiest of happy warriors

for Liberty that I've ever met, and I have met a few in my time.

So Fred Smith was a policy entrepreneur who started a think tank back when that was an unusual

thing to do.

The think tank he started in the 1980s was the Competitive Enterprise Institute or CEI.

It was the first think tank devoted first and foremost to exploring

and sort of describing the costs of regulation. The initial focus was on energy policy,

transportation, but over time, CEI expanded to many issues beyond that. And their message was

always the same, which is that regulation,

even smart regulation, the kind, you know, by really well-meaning, high-minded smart technocrats,

it always has costs. There are always tradeoffs. And it is often a tool for entrenching

the interests of the powerful rather than cracking down on them. So CEI over the years was often cast as a villain.

You're just a defender of industry.

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