Liberty Fund announced today that Senator Phil Gramm and Professor Donald Boudreaux have been named the inaugural recipients of The Liberty Fund Prize for Advancing Economic Liberty, presented by The Neal and Jane Freeman Foundation. Through decades of teaching, writing, and public discourse, both honorees have deepened the public's understanding of how competitive markets sustain a free society. The prize was presented during a ceremony at Liberty Fund headquarters in Carmel, Indiana, on Monday, October 12, 2026.
INDIANAPOLIS and CARMEL, Ind., Oct. 14, 2026 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Liberty Fund announced today that Senator Phil Gramm and Professor Donald Boudreaux have been named the inaugural recipients of The Liberty Fund Prize for Advancing Economic Liberty, presented by The Neal and Jane Freeman Foundation. Through decades of teaching, writing, and public discourse, both honorees have deepened the public's understanding of how competitive markets sustain a free society. The prize was presented during a ceremony at Liberty Fund headquarters in Carmel, Indiana, on Monday, October 12, 2026.
Established to honor those who have illuminated the foundations of free markets and advanced them in the wider world, the prize reflects a principle long held by Liberty Fund and shared by Neal B. Freeman: That competitive markets are not merely instruments of material progress but expressions of human liberty itself, and that their defense requires both clarity of thought and steadfastness of purpose. Together, the two recipients are honored for lifetimes of work that have shaped how the world understands economic liberty.
Senator Phil Gramm began his career as an economist, spending more than a decade at Texas A&M University teaching and writing on monetary theory, private property, and the economics of natural resources. Over a long career in public service, he became a prominent advocate for fiscal restraint, competitive markets, and economic freedom while serving in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. He continues to write and speak on economic policy as a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Professor Donald Boudreaux has devoted his career to helping his students and the broader public better understand the principles of economics. Through George Mason University, the Mercatus Center, the Foundation for Economic Education, and his writings, he returns consistently to trade, prices, competition, property, and how markets work. At the blog Café Hayek, Boudreaux examines claims people encounter in newspapers, political speeches, and public debates through an economic lens. In books including The Essential Hayek and Globalization, he has worked to make difficult economic ideas accessible to readers beyond the academy.
"Phil Gramm and Don Boudreaux have spent their careers doing the essential, unglamorous work of explaining, again and again, why free people and free markets remain the surest engine of human prosperity," said Mitch Daniels, former Governor of Indiana. "At a moment when those arguments are too often taken for granted or shouted down, their clarity and persistence are exactly what the cause of economic liberty needs, and there could be no more fitting pair to inaugurate this prize."
"Pierre F. Goodrich called the free market one of the necessary pillars of liberty, and he founded Liberty Fund in the conviction that the ideas and institutions of a free society must be studied and understood in every generation," said Nate Feltman, Chairman of Liberty Fund's Board of Directors. "In honoring Phil Gramm and Donald Boudreaux, we recognize two people who have made the case for economic freedom to students, readers, and the wider public in every decade of their working lives. They have advanced the public's comprehension of economic liberty in a manner that transcends any single generation, contributing to an intellectual inheritance that will endure well beyond their years."
In recognizing Phil Gramm and Donald Boudreaux, Liberty Fund and the Neal and Jane Freeman Foundation honor not only two remarkable careers but the enduring case they made: That competitive markets are inseparable from a free society, and that their defense demands both clear thinking and courage.
A recording of the recipients' fireside chat will be made available at a later date.
About Liberty Fund
Liberty Fund was founded in 1960 by Pierre F. Goodrich, an Indianapolis businessman and lawyer. Liberty Fund conducts its own educational programs to encourage research and discussion on the values and institutions of a society of free and responsible individuals. These programs focus on the place individual liberty has in an intellectual heritage evident from ancient times and continuing through our own times. As a non-profit, private operating foundation, Liberty Fund's purposes are educational, fulfilling this mission through its conference program, web properties and by publishing books pertaining to liberty. For more information about Liberty Fund, visit https://www.libertyfund.org/
Media Contact:
Cassandra Karnick
Liberty Fund
[Official Statement from Neal B. Freeman, Chairman, The Neal and Jane Freeman Foundation]
THE LIBERTY FUND PRIZE FOR ADVANCING ECONOMIC LIBERTY
The American experience has been one long demonstration of the power and efficacy of free markets. Success has bred one success after another. Yet here we find ourselves on our 250th birthday knocked back on our heels by what Professor Hayek would have called "the Socialists of all parties." How could that possibly have happened?
Part of the problem, surely, is rhetorical. While the friends of freedom are obliged to make complex and counterintuitive arguments – most famously, that the general prosperity is best served by empowering individuals to pursue their private interests -- the statists offer no alternative intellectual construct, only rough appeals to human reflex. While the friends of freedom are obliged to make their case with cogency and constantly freshened formulations of our timeless proposition, the statists have only to tease our hopes and stoke our resentments. That is a debate not easily won.
Then comes the hard part. Friends of freedom must present evidence of their success to a jury of their superiors – to the cultural overlords, including well-placed statists and lightly educated members of the media. The standard by which the free economy is then judged is not its real-world performance, but how it measures up to ideologically aspirational tropes about income gaps and wealth inequality.
It seems to be the lot of the free economy that it must perform successfully, over and over. And then it must re-justify its existence, over and over.
It is thus with a mixture of admiration, affection and relief that we recognize our champions, Drs. Phil Gramm and Donald Boudreaux, for their brilliant and tireless efforts in advancing economic liberty.
Neal B. Freeman
Chairman, The Neal and Jane Freeman Foundation
Media Contact
Cassandra Karnick, Liberty Fund, 1 5026489330, [email protected], https://www.libertyfund.org/
SOURCE Liberty Fund
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