George Gilder Wins Leonard E. Read Book Award

FreedomFest, “the world’s largest gathering of free minds,” is pleased to announce that George Gilder has won the Leonard E. Read Book Award for his new work Knowledge and Power (published by Regnery).  This annual award is granted to the “libertarian book of the year” which best advances the principles of liberty.

“Knowledge and Power is a revolutionary work in the tradition of Hayek’s famous essay ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’ and Thomas Sowell’s influential book Knowledge and Decisions,” states Mark Skousen, economist and producer of FreedomFest.  “Gilder makes the argument that decision-makers must reject the deterministic/mechanistic systems of human behavior and build their policies and economic models on the concepts of human creativity, free will and the unexpected.”  His entire book is built around his thesis that “the freer an economy is, the more this human diversity of knowledge will be manifested….Capitalism is not chiefly an incentive system but an information system.”

The Leonard E. Read Book Award will be presented to Mr. Gilder at this year’s FreedomFest, July 10-13, 2013, in Las Vegas.  The award also comes with a gift of a one-ounce American eagle gold coin, valued at approximately $1,500.  For more information on the annual conference, which attracts over 2,000 attendees each year, go to www.freedomfest.com.

About Leonard E. Read

The Read Book Award is named after Leonard E. Read, the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), the first modern free-market think tank in the United States, and its monthly publication The Freeman.  Mr. Read (1898-1983) is the author of hundreds of essays, his most famous being “I, Pencil.”  He was a voracious reader and his FEE library contained thousands of books.  For more information on the Foundation for Economic Education, go to www.fee.org. (Note:  This award is not affiliated with FEE, and the selection of the Read Book Award is exclusively a decision by FreedomFest.)

About George Gilder

George Gilder is one of the original pillars of supply-side economics and author of several bestsellers, including Sexual Suicide, The Spirit of Enterprise, Microcosm, and the Israel Test.  His 1981 bestseller, Wealth and Poverty, had a major influence on the Reagan Administration in the 1980s.  He is editor of the Gilder Technology Report, and a senior fellow at Seattle’s Discovery Institute, where he directs Discovery’s program on high technology and democracy.  Gilder is a frequent writer for major business publications, including Forbes and the Wall Street Journal.