'The Alternative To Innovation Is Not Stability. It's Stagnation' Q&A with CEI's Fred Smith

"The alternative to innovation is not stability," says Fred L. Smith, who founded the influential and controversial Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) in 1984. "It's stagnation."

In 2014, after almost 30 years as CEI's president, Smith became director of the group's Center for the Advancement of Capitalism, which champions free markets as the best means to create a fair, prosperous, and future-oriented society. Libertarians, says the one-time federal bureaucrat, have always had a difficulty communicating their ideas to a wider public, even to the entrepreneurs and business leaders who radically improve our lives on a daily basis by providing better and better goods and services at lower and lower prices. "We need to re-calibrate our arguments so they reach the people we need to have as allies. That means businessmen."

Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with Smith to talk about the liberating history of capitalism, the regulatory war on innovation, whether millennials are socialists or capitalists, and the morality of market exchanges. "The market not only creates a web of voluntary economic interactions," says Smith. "It is the best facilitator for creating the social networks that encompass the modern world."

Runs about 30 minutes.

Edited by Ian Keyser and Joshua Swain. Cameras by Todd Krainin and Swain.

For downloadable versions and a transcript go here

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