 Now now that I've become a professor of economics and started lecturing to undergraduates Both at Loyola University and in the summer months for through a variety of educational outreach programs students often assume that I came to Loyola explicitly to study Austrian economics with Walter, but admittedly I didn't know what libertarianism was. I didn't know what Austrian economics was and I didn't know who Walter Block was The only reason why I selected New Orleans and Loyola University to study economics Was because well first I chose the school because upon visiting with my parents a minivan filled with naked women Drove by us on Bourbon Street, and I turned to my mother and said I found where I want to study And I chose I chose economics as a major after I received a 62% on my midterm grade in principles of microeconomics taught by Bill Barnett Which depressed me greatly until I found out that the average grade was 12 I didn't change majors and fully embrace Economics until my junior year when I took both law and economics and economics in the environment with Walter Block Recently we we had a lecturer come to Loyola to speak to some of our students a libertarian philosopher by the name of James Stacey Taylor And he said that if you're not fully offended by something that one of your professors says in the course of your undergraduate Education that you should demand your money back Well, that was Walter's class in a nutshell Here I was a sort of 19 year old with a sort of Left of center Social consciousness I was concerned about inequality. I was concerned about things like racism in society I was concerned about the environment and I was concerned about civil liberties. I Was woefully unsatisfied with the conventional solutions to these sorts of problems that I was being taught by other professors and other disciplines and Rather than sort of tweaking the standard corpus of recommendations Walter's class Denied their applicability all together and recommended Radical alternatives things that I had never heard before Rather than things like voting and redistribution and regulation Walter recommended exactly the opposite He recommended private property rights free markets and technological innovation as solutions to the social Problems that seriously plague our world His explanations were radical But they were consistent and they were fun and his general personality was welcoming supportive and inviting Every day I'd go to class and argue as Walter mentioned And then every evening my inbox would be filled with an email and various attachments of publications that were relevant to the topics that we argued in class and Typically, all of them were authored by none other than Walter Blogg And so repeatedly I found myself saying who is this guy I Didn't really realize who is this guy until I attended my first Mises Institute event as Under the invitation of Walter. He took a number of us students to Auburn, Alabama to attend the Austrian Scholars Conference and there was another group of students from Washington University or Washington University in St. Louis where Walter had given a invited lecture the week before And once this group of students found out that I studied at Loyola and worked with Walter Couldn't help but sort of swarm and ask a number of questions and they said wait Wait, so so how much time do you actually get to spend with Walter Blogg in like the course of a week? I was like, uh, well, I have a class with him That meets for like an hour twice a week and then we have econ club that meets like an hour every other week And then he keeps office hours where normally I go by to ask him like what would happen if someone surgically implanted a monkey on you and libertarian theory All of these students their faces dropped when I mentioned that Walter Blogg keeps office hours and they literally said that in Inquisitive exclamation Walter Blogg keeps office hours. You're so lucky And it wasn't until then that I realized that it was a truly lucky and and opportunistic experience to have studied at undergrad economics under Walter Blogg It wasn't necessarily Because of the radicalism or the consistency or even the fun or the welcoming and supportive nature of Walter's teaching style that I really think Was most impressive But rather the fact that he genuinely believes the ideas that he professes in the classroom It's an incredibly refreshing experience as an undergraduate to be taught by people who actually Indigenize the theories that they espouse into their personal worldviews More often than not faculty distance themselves from the material that they cover in class and Attempt to appear objective while failing to actually be so I Think that Enclosing I would like to merely suggest that Walter's model of teaching be considered Not only worthy of a lifetime achievement award like the schlar bomb prize But rather it set the standard with which all Austrian scholars and all libertarian academics judge themselves against The fact of the matter is is that if we don't instill the appreciation and the ideas of liberty and free markets in future generations of scholars if every schlar bomb winner in the future doesn't also have a panel of former students now Dedicated to promoting these ideas like Walter has then we won't necessarily be able to influence the world for social change in the way That we deem fit something far more at stake then a successful academic career or even a prestigious publication is Held in the balance. It's the the fate of human civilization itself is What is dependent upon effective teaching and communicating these ideas? Walter, I really can't think of anyone more deserving than this lifetime achievement award than you Congratulations The next speaker is Jenny Dermoyer who got her bachelor's at Loyola in 2002 and her PhD in economics at George Mason in 2009 she is now an assistant professor of economics at Hampton Sydney I forgot to mention that Dan D'Amico is an assistant professor at Loyola now Jenny is a rotten kid She ruined absolutely ruined my initial Interview for a job at Loyola What I do when I given in most places when you interview for a job they ask you to teach a class and to give a Lecture to this fellow professors of a more substantive nature So I was giving a class and Jenny was in the class and I was going to try to work with them You know asking why are certain countries rich and other countries poor and the right answer is some countries have free enterprise Others don't but the wrong answer. There are many wrong answers population human capital Resources this that and the other and I can usually get four or five kids to say the wrong things and then I sort of subtly Steer them in the right direction. So I asked this question and this rotten kid. She ups and says economic freedom So I she sort of took half of my my lecture away from me I think my reaction was to yell at her for doing this I forget exactly what I did but that's what I felt like doing the other story I have to tell you about Jenny is every once in a while I'll invite some guest speaker to my classes and I invited a Jesuit priest. There was a class on economics and religion and This guy was going off about how the minimum wage law is important How we need the minimum wage law how the minimum wage law social justice how it's the only thing that stands between us in poverty And I don't like to ambush people that I invite to speak unless it's a formal debate And I hadn't had a formal debate with him, but fortunately Jenny redeemed herself. She started she was like a tiger She was after him. It was just horrible to see what she did to this poor guy She said well, how about this? How about a seventy five dollar out a minimum wage? How about you know, she was just after him the poor guy after a while said yes, you're right I don't know anything about what I'm talking about You know You want to see professorial blood on the floor, but this was horrible and disgusting So without any further ado, I give you my friend and former student Jenny Dermoyer Thank you, Walter After that kind and generous introduction, I really feel like my remarks are going to be entirely too nice So it is a little bit daunting to be asked to represent someone's legacy Especially someone as accomplished as Walter Block. There is a big upside though I was asked in fact, I was urged to talk about myself a little bit, which is nice So I'll tell you a little bit about what I've been up to since I left Walter I am an assistant professor of economics and I am the director of the Center for the Study of Political Economy at Hampton Sydney College Our mission is to find students who love ideas who are interested in ideas and give them the guidance and the tools Necessary to turn this love of ideas into a meaningful life And in particular my role is student development So I've sort of crafted a career for myself as little miniature Walter Block In which I go out and I try to find and and create this future panel of students for my lifetime achievement award, right? And I'll tell you that that my method has been a very systematic and Basically organized version of what Walter had us do as students I we have a lecture series where we have six speakers a year come in and give students an idea of what these Concepts look like in different aspects. We have three reading groups a semester We have a blog where both students and faculty contribute using economics to understand the world in society We have a writing workshop. We have student research grants And the results have been pretty much if I do say so myself phenomenal We have students who are publishing regularly not only in the student newspaper at Hampton Sydney College But are getting letters to the editor published in the Richmond Times Dispatch, which is our local big newspaper We have students that are competing in undergraduate research competitions every year and winning some undergraduate research competitions every year using the ideas of free market economics and liberty in their research We have five students now at Hampton Sydney College on the track to become PhDs in economics This is a huge increase in the last 15 years at Hampton Sydney College We had five students and now we have five students in the last two years who are on this track So we have in effect basically generated a program that will get students From the point where they just are interested in this and to the point where they can actually make this their life and and my method Has been to take three very important lessons that Walter taught me none of them about economics Because obviously you heard I already knew all that by the time I met him All right, I'll tell you the full story in a minute So but three very important lessons not about economics that Walter taught me about being a mentor Number one what we do matters and so this is something that we tell we have to tell ourselves often because you know we do operate in a very difficult position where as You know Bob was saying most people disagree with us right? We're Johnny walking We're the only ones that think that we're in step right But what we do matters as Dan so eloquently put the fate of civilization is upon our shoulders, right? we it is important that we Recognize that ourselves and that we tell our students this right I always every time someone writes a paper for me And I say why do I care they look at me like because I wrote it you know That's they say you know listen what we do matters use that I don't want some this is interesting because if you have to tell me It's interesting. It's not interesting, right? So you know we have to as Walter says always and everything that we do We have to make sure that it's relevant to the world and to society and no sort of ivory tower Ruminations are necessary, right what we do matters. Let's actually use it number two. We need to invest in our students So I think that before I came to Hampton Sydney College We had a fantastic faculty actually and they've been extremely supportive and wonderful and there are seven No less than seven faculty that are actively engaged in what we're doing at the CSP, which is kind of outstanding But at the same time I think that they were not Focused in the same way that I was when I came in on building this student Involvement in my army, right? And I think the reason that I was is because I had this example of Walter to say listen you can Invest in students you can get students involved in the same kind of things that you are for two reasons number one This is a great life Right. We have great lives We do what we love, right? We're always passionate. There's always something new and number two the world needs it, right? We need to find the solutions that will actually create a better society Right and if we believe and if we look at our students and we say you can be part of this And we want you to be part of this you'll be amazed at the kind of reaction that you get right? So investing in your students is absolutely Foundational to what I do all right For myself, I was sort of like Dan I was and actually sort of like Walter when he was a young pup if you can imagine that I was very liberal I was such a fantastic liberal actually that I thought about but did not campaign for Al Gore when he was running for president and I was very interested in social justice. I was you know all for the minimum wage as a matter of fact and Solving all the problems of inequality and then I took a intermediate micro Economic course with Doug Walker who's not here, but who is a fantastic economics professor? And I discovered lo and behold that minimum wage actually hurts people instead of helping them and the next day I was a libertarian and And then the next month Walter came for his interview so he unfortunately got me right in the middle of some real Converter zeal, right? and so, you know I That was my first little step toward this process but then he came in my Walter came in my junior year and I was gung-ho economics in the middle of dropping my Marketing major despite the fact that I only had two courses left because some costs were sunk right and marketing sucks And then I was you know going to be a CEO somewhere. I don't know I don't come from an academic family. My mother graduated college the same year. I did and my father graduated the year after I did So I it this is you know academics whatever I'm going out and making some money you know do the world some good and Walter looked at me one day in the hallway and I can still remember What it was like and I was sitting there in my college student uniform of ratty jeans flip-flops and an old t-shirt And he said you should go to graduate school and I like turned around Who is he talking to you know? Yeah, you should go to Harvard. He said well. I did him one better I went to George Mason, which is obviously better than Harvard but you know this was something that I had never even considered and I look at my students and I say you know this might be something you have never even considered But this is if you love ideas. This is a life that that could be very fulfilling And lastly I'll tell you the last lesson in the most important lesson that Walter taught me Is to be relentless? He makes these jokes about what I was like when he first met me But really this is the kind of person that I became over the course of two years knowing him and Be relentless has a corollary a very important corollary and this called don't take it personally Right. So my favorite story about this is when I was at Auburn for Mises you We were at a pizza shop. There had been a little wine consumed. I believe and We were arguing about the wage differential between men and women and being a 21-year-old woman at the time and extremely intelligent and Very fond of wine. I had I had really gotten into this sophisticated argument about how The there was no such thing as perfect competition in the market and wage differentials could in fact be explained by Prejudice brought upon by the lack of competition or something. I'm not sure exactly what it was, but it was good. I'll tell you that and Walter being typically Obstinate Was claiming that in fact if there was a wage differential that was not brought upon by labor Productivity then some entrepreneur would have found a way to profit from this at which point I have in my head You know an entrepreneur with this harem of women doing I'm not sure what exactly kind of Work here, but you know, we were arguing back and forth and it got to be very frustrating at some point. I put my wine down on the table leaned in and said Walter I cannot wait till all you sexist jerks. I didn't say jerks die And I got up and I stormed off and I went to have a cigarette I got my wines turned up and went to have a cigarette and then you know ran away basically in the next day. I'm like, oh my god I'm looking around the corners, you know We're at the Mises Institute and I'm like trying to make sure I don't run into Walter as I just told my mentor that I can't wait till he dies and We had come out of some seminar and I ran right into him and I'm standing there Hi Walter And he says Jenny, how come you didn't finish the conversation last night? And at that moment I said I didn't have anything to say but I remembered I remembered that forever actually because One of the most important lessons that we can teach ourselves on a daily basis and teach our students as well as That you can never stop the argument. You need to be relentless Right, but don't take it personally because this is not about my ego or your ego It's about actually trying to find the truth, right? And Walter taught me that and I try on a daily basis to insult my students in order to teach them that you can't take it Personally, it's actually a really nice perk of the job So I would like to say thank you Walter for teaching me that what we do matters to invest in my students and Above all to be relentless. I will tell you that the literature and history departments at Hampton Sydney College are very very happy that you have done that Thank you very much Thank You Jenny I forgot to mention that she and I are co-authors of an article called poverty dignity economic development and the Catholic Church Which came out of a term paper in this course? Economics and religion that has appeared in the Journal of Markets and Morality The next speaker on this panel is an old friend of mine also Andy Young An earlier cohort He was not a student of mine at Loyola where I've been at since 2001 rather He was a student of mine at Holy Cross. He graduated from Holy Cross with a bachelor's degree in 1997 and he got his PhD at Emory University. I Remember when he was a student he was very straight-laced sort of the opposite of Dan D'Amico and now look at him I mean Ponytail of course, he's got gray hair, which is a little different than than those days He is perhaps the most accomplished of all of my students because it's the only former student of mine who has taught at a research University and teaching at a research university is sort of the apex of an academic He used to teach at Ole Miss and now he's an associate professor with tenure at West Virginia University West Virginia He and I are also co-authors of a piece called enterprising education doing away with the public school system Which appeared in the International Journal of Value-Based Management Andy Well, thank you very much Walter, and it's truly a pleasure to be here to have you win this award which is so deserved and To be able to talk about your influence on myself and my career and through me hopefully on my students as well I am a professor at West Virginia University. We have an up-and-coming class A few classes of great free market-oriented students there in a PhD program and So hopefully thanks to Walter who have two economists at Holy Cross I can say that Those two made me an economist and of those two Walter made me the type of economist that I am today When I first Experienced Walter, and that's the only way to say it is you experience Walter I Think the only way I can sum it up is to basically use at least paraphrasing Milton Friedman's words in a correspondence with Walter These are not the arguments of a sane man These are the rantings of a fanatic FAA Hayek in his classic article the use of knowledge of society says that says the reader I'm using the word Marvel here and describing the price system You mean I'm using the word Marvel to shock you out of your complacency Walter is the ultimate master of shocking students out of their complacency You know most free market-oriented economists will talk about something like pollution and they'll say it's all really about when It's a problem It's when property rights aren't well-defined and enforced and maybe they'll use the example of the ocean for example Walter on the other hand Would look right into the eyes of environmentalist leaning students and retell a tale about an in-law I believe on a fishing trip when Walter basically threw an empty can of Pepsi into the water and basically challenged him to see Is anyone gonna pick this up? No because property rights are not well-defined or enforced When we talk to our students about taking to account the relevant opportunity costs not the opportunity cost that you or I might Face in our own lives particularly in America people love to use the child labor example and Say well, we can't compare what they're getting to what we would expect in this country because the opportunity costs are so much different Walter would use that example But he would also try to talk to students about situations where a parent might reasonably prostitute their child Because of the relevant opportunity costs Not the arguments of a sane man The rantings of a fanatic I will say that Well, I'm not sure if I cross certain lines He has certainly molded the way I try to teach especially with undergraduates especially with undergraduates I teach a one-eleven class which is basically a Intro for non majors and hopefully to get some of them excited and become majors WBU and I assigned to them What I term defending the undefendable essays Okay, which of course is an homage to Walter's book and the idea is to get them to use positive economic analysis to at least To force themselves to justify some characters in our economy who might not be entirely savory Just last week because it was Halloween. I assigned them To watch the movie and tell me if I've seen this one repo the genetic opera Now repo the genetic opera is made by the same people who make saw yeah that type of movie and being a big horror movie But the entire premise of this film is that in some distant dystopian future there is a company which basically sells poor people in In an age where health has declined significantly organs But poor people being well poor they have to finance them That's when you have a repo man Okay, and if you don't of course pay for the organ in time the repo man will show up and by the way, it's a musical It is an opera so just imagine it's it's I mean certain like people sing opera in it So just imagine a repo man on film basically repossessing an organ while singing opera And as my students came up to me after viewing this in class and questioning my sanity I Said to myself Walter would be proud Walter would be proud that I said now this is a character that's good for society Now I used to also admire Walter just simply for the amount of time he put in With his students and I always felt like he gave each and every one of us Who wanted it? Okay, all the attention all the resources all the time that he could Until one day I realized that really what he was just running was a very self-interested paper mill With entirely unregulated labor Some of which was legally child labor and I said wait a minute. This is a good gravy train. I Have also tried to emulate you in that Walter is the only man with a straight face That has ever called me a commie I have a witness Bob Subrick GMU from GMU will test to this because Bob looked at me and said did he just call you a commie? And I said I believe so. I didn't know I was that type of anarchist But Walter all the time I have known him has also managed to call Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman both commies So I do feel like I'm in good company I Just like to end quickly and say that you know my only wish going forward as an educator Is that I can inspire as many students as Walter has When I just sort of try to tabulate in my head How many students that he's basically Urged on to graduate school and who have become defenders of free markets at a different level It's hard for me to count that high and granted I have a fairly weak mind Okay, that comes from Walter who once told me see Austrians do use numbers this paper has page numbers on every single sheet But I just hope that I can inspire students Half or even a quarter as well as you inspired me and I'm just so very glad that you're getting this award Walter Thank you very much. Thank you, Andy young The last speaker on this panel is another friend of mine and former student of mine bedroom vuk bedroom got his undergraduate degree at Loyola in 2007 and will soon receive his Masters in finance from Johns Hopkins Every time bedroom came to my office He invariably said I have three ideas for articles and we would talk about three ideas And he wasn't one that would have ideas for articles and didn't write them. He would write them, too one time we Drove up together just the two of us from New Orleans to Auburn for an Austrian scholars conference or one of the events I forget what it was and We came out with 55 articles 55 ideas for articles many of which we subsequently wrote I'm co-authored with him of victory in Iraq and Another article a car trip to Auburn Where we mentioned all 55 of these articles and hopefully other people could pick up from that Vedran is a senior author for a Doug Casey in his finance Newsletters and it's my great pleasure to introduce my colleague and friend Vedran Vuk As Walter just said I took a slightly different route D and Jenny and Dan by becoming a financial writer and like Walter said Currently, I'm the editor of Casey's daily dispatch for Casey research and I write about four or five articles a week So this year I've done close to 200 articles every day I essentially have to come up with a new idea and Walter helped me kind of build that foundation of ideas currently To keep them coming even I recount things that we talked about over the years Even today for the publication but like Dan I came to Leola and Had no idea that I wanted to do Austrian economics Until I literally ran into Walter by accident I was studying for a final exam for one of the only Keynesian professors at Leola And I studied a night before and I had one last question to ask her so I Was looking for her office Like 15 minutes before the test and I finally get there and she's not there So I have to find another economics professor quickly And I see that Walter's door is open. It's like oh, he's an economics professor so Perhaps you'll know the answer to my question So I go in this long rambling question Which just happens to be about the velocity of money and whether a new banking law would increase it or decrease it and After this long rambling question. There's a bit of a pause and Walter says I don't believe in KD economics So I didn't know what to say at first, you know, this is not the answer I was expecting so I Caught my wits for a second and said well, suppose you did believe Have a test in five minutes So you know I have to figure this out So Walter told me the correct answer and went on with the test and This kind of really set the tone for knowing Walter over the years because he's so passionate about what he does at all Times, you know, this is any other professor They would have just told me the correct answer regardless of what they believed and you know Not made any comment or not try to teach me anything in the spot and this passion has led him to you know, publish 400 academic journals thousands of fall pet articles and He just works absolutely non-stop. I remember another final exam time I was a Leola studying in the library. That's right next to the business school and I went outside just to get some fresh air after a few hours of studying and believe it was actually a Friday night About 10 o'clock and I look over at the business school and there's only one light on and it's Walter's office light I thought nice. He's not Seriously there at 10 o'clock on a Friday night But I knew that the business school was open and so I went in and surely enough Walter was there And I asked him a few article ideas that I was thinking off at the time And so he held office hours at 10 o'clock at night. I've I've met dedicated professors before but you know, 10 hour o'clock Office hours is really going beyond the call of duty and Walter's caring is what really made me become a writer as I got to know more started attending economics clubs at Leola and the red defending the undefendable and one day I had an idea For just about actually the economics of restaurant tipping and I wrote this two or three page Letter to Walter about this idea and now that I'm a writer It's it's the exact sort of email that I don't like to get Because it's three, you know, maybe you wrote a page-long article and somebody gave you a three page response And you want to respond, but you can't write an article for every response But Walter responded and at length and told me my ideas were good And the fact that my writing was pretty good and that should consider Publishing the article and at Leola some of the students here now. It's a very Writing intensive school pretty much any class you take your writing essays and nobody had really told me before You know that my writing was any good or Although looking back I looked at other papers. I was like, hey, it wasn't actually that bad So it's Walter's passion is one of the big reasons that I'm here and all of us are here but another reason is that he's What I would say like an intellectual weapon of mass destruction But I'd like you to think about how that term is used also. What if he was in the wrong hands? And in the sense of opportunity cost think about if there was somebody like Walter who was keeping office hours till 10 o'clock at night writing every day had 400 mainstream Journal articles, you know the top ten journals doing mathematical stuff I mean he would be on a short list for the Nobel Prize for that sort of effort He'd probably be offered post at the Fed at the White House You know if he had really put that much effort into and he probably wouldn't be teaching at Leola, but Harvard and those sorts of places and That's one of the last things that helped me later on in my career was This example from Walter that you know It's always an uphill battle when you're an Austrian economist are doing these things and he got me started on writing But then later on in my career. I worked in DC and you start seeing These opportunity costs become very real when you see people Who you know bend under principles a little bit or maybe they read Hayek, but they support the warfare state and You see that that's a very easy way to improve your career And even you can look at articles on like Huffington Post these some of these things are amazingly badly written or have logical inconsistencies things are a lot easier if you're bending your principles and That's one thing that Walter always reminded me. It might be an uphill battle, but you can stick with it and You know they can't keep a good man down So I'd like to you know Thank Walter for starting me in this career and you know keeping me in the right path and as an example where you know I've seen others stray and I wouldn't even say that he's partially responsible for my career But as a writer but a hundred percent and I couldn't think of a better person to receive the award tonight I just want to say a word about my present students. There may be a half dozen or a dozen of them in the room now and Every class I have I ask them to give a speech and when they first start giving a speech They're very nervous and I give him hints on how to give a better speech and I could see in my present students my former students or When my present students give a speech I can see my former students giving speeches Poorly when they started but look at them now aren't they beautiful