This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Sopranos11 (talk | contribs) at 19:55, 6 March 2006 (An encyclopedia entry is not the place for personal insults and non-neutral points of view.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
Revision as of 19:55, 6 March 2006 by Sopranos11 (talk | contribs) (An encyclopedia entry is not the place for personal insults and non-neutral points of view.)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)Tom Gordon Palmer (born 1956 in Moetsch, Germany) is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and is director of the Institute's educational division, Cato University.
Palmer earned his B.A. in liberal arts from St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, his M.A. in philosphy from The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and his doctorate in political science from Oxford University, where he was an H. B. Earhart Fellow at Hertford College.
Palmer has been active in the promotion of classical liberal (or libertarian) ideas and policies since the early 1970s. He has been editor of several publications, including Dollars & Sense (the newspaper of the National Taxpayers Union), Update, and the Humane Studies Review, and has published articles in such newspapers and magazines as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Spectator of London, National Review, Reason, and Slate, and reviews and articles in a variety of journals, including Ethics, Constitutional Political Economy, Cato Journal, Critical Review, Etica e Politica , Hamline Law Review, and the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy.
He continues to teach political economy and legal and constitutional history for the Institute for Humane Studiesand the Institute for Economic Studies -- Europe. He also works with such organizations as the Liberty Fund, the Council on Public Policy, and the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, which designated him in 2005 a member of their "International Freedom Corps."
Involvement in Eastern Europe
Before joining the Cato Institute, he was a vice president of the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University. During the late 1980s and the very early 1990s he worked with the Institute for Humane Studies and other organizations to spread classical liberal ideas in the countries of the Soviet bloc. He smuggled books, photocopiers, and fax machines from an office in Vienna, Austria, and traveled throughout the region to hold seminars. He arranged for translation and publication into a variety of central and eastern European languages of textbooks in economics and law, as well as seminal works by Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and other thinkers in the classical liberal tradition.
Involvement in Arab World
He is currently attempting to duplicate in Iraq and the wider Arab world some of the work he did in Eastern Europe. He has commissioned translation into Arabic and publication of works by Frederic Bastiat, F. A. Hayek, James Madison, and other classical liberal thinkers, and has published essays in Arabic on such topics as "Challenges of Democratization" and "Religion and the Law." In April of 2005 Palmer addressed members of the Iraqi parliament in the parliamentary assembly hall on constitutionalism.. He has also promoted the creation of a libertarian web site in Arabic where a number of additional translations are being published and started an Arabic publishing venture. His efforts to spread classical liberal ideas in the Arab world has been applauded by some and criticized by others .
Works
Palmer has published essays on the philosophy of individual rights (e.g., in this essay from Individual Rights Reconsidered, edited by Tibor Machan ), a substantive response to G. A. Cohen's attack on property rights), several responses to the theories of Cass Sunstein and Stephen Holmes, and essays on multicultural politics, on globalization, on globalization and personal and cultural identity, and on classical liberal political philosophy. Palmer also published an extensive bibliographical essay on libertarianismin The Libertarian Reader, ed. by David Boaz. He has published law review articles on intellectual property that have garnered substantial attention within the legal and technological community for his general critique of patents and copyrights and his suggestions of contractual and technological solutions to the problems for which intellectual property rights are usually proposed as solutions.
Political activities
Palmer's political activities include being founding member and national secretary of the Committee Against Registration and the Draft (1979-81), president of the Oxford Civil Liberties Society (1993-94), and manager or communications director for several political campaigns. Palmer is a member of the board of trustees of the Foundation for Economic Education (created in 1946 by Leonard E. Read), a member of the Mont Pelerin Society, and a Freeman of the City of London. His trips to Iraq -- where he acted as an informal advisor to the Iraqi government, where he has met members of the Iraqi parliament and the minister of education -- have caused some to criticize him.
External links
- Biography of Tom Palmer, Cato Institute.
- tomgpalmer.com, Tom Palmer's personal weblog
- On the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe, Palmer's 1990 essay on Eastern European affairs
- Palmer critiqued by Antiwar.com on Iraq
- Palmer response to critique by Antiwar.com
- "What's Not Wrong With Libertarianism" a response to Jeffrey Friedman's critique of libertarianism
- "The Libertarian Straddle: Rejoinder to Palmer and Sciabarra", a critique of Tom Palmer's philosophy of rights by Jeffrey Friedman
- Palmer, "Lew Rockwell's Vienna Waltz"
- Ralph Raico on "Who Is Tom Palmer, Anyway?"
- Palmer, "For Mises' Sake"
- "Will the Real Tom Palmer Please Stand Up?" (.PDF) from the Libertarian Forum, August, 1982.
- Institute for Humane Studies biography and publications