Hannes H. Gissurarson, Professor Emeritus of Politics at the University of Iceland, was a guest in Gisli Freyr Valdorsson’s podcast, Thjodmal, on 4 March 2024. He said that Western universities had abandoned their traditional and proper purpose which was to be a platform for science as the free competition of ideas. They were never supposed to be motivational meetings or choirs singing to one tune only. At present, the universities had become bastions of cancel culture and wokeism, having turned their back on critical thought, respect for people with different ideas and the toleration which distinguished between accepting and allowing other opinions. Gissurarson recalled when he and a few friends of his operated in the autumn of 1984 an illegal radio station in protest against the government monopoly of broadcasting. For this he was convicted and proud of it. Gissurarson also gave an account of his activities for the last couple of years, including lectures and books. In 2020 the Brussels think tank New Direction had published his Twenty-Four Conservative-Liberal Thinkers in two volumes, from Snorri Sturluson to Robert Nozick, where the longest chapters were about Friedrich A. von Hayek and Milton Friedman, both of whom Gissurarson knew personally. Now his major research project was the conservative-liberal heritage of the Nordic nations.

Hannes H. Gissurarson, Professor Emeritus of Politics at the University of Iceland, first met Antony Fisher (later Sir Antony) in the autumn of 1980 when he invited Gissurarson and other participants at the Mont Pelerin Society meeting in Stanford to a reception at his house in San Francisco. Fisher and his wife Dorian lived in an elegant flat on the eleventh floor at 1750 Taylor Street. Fisher was in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War when his brother was killed. Consequently, he decided to try and make the world a better place. At the end of the War he read an extract of The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich A. von Hayek, published in Reader’s Digest. Hayek argued that Hitler’s national socialism and Stalin’s communism were two branches of the same tree, and also warned against central economic planning which would require a police state.

Fisher asked Hayek for advice, as he was eager to become active politically. Hayek told him that political influence was really wielded by those who set the agenda, decided on the premises of political debate as gatekeepers and wordsmiths. Therefore, Fisher should establish a think tank instead of standing in elections. Fisher took his advice, and in 1955 he founded the Institute of Economic Affairs in London whose task it is to explore where pricing can replace taxing and where problems can be resolved by spontaneous cooperation and not by commands from above. The IEA had a great impact on the political climate in Great Britain and elsewhere.

Fisher was later to repeat this initiative in other countries, and in 1981 he founded the Atlas Network, an umbrella organisation of free-market think tanks. At present, about 500 institutes in about 100 countries belong to the Network which annually holds the ‘Freedom Dinner’ as a kind of harvest feast. In 2023 the Freedom Dinner was held in New York on 16 November, and it was attended by Professor Gissurarson and also by Dr. Birgir Thor Runolfsson, Chairman of the Economics Faculty at the University of Iceland. The Templeton Prize for the effective operation of a think tank was awarded to the Foundation for Economic Freedom in the Philippinese and the Sir Antony Fisher Prize for individual initiative and leadership was awarded to Temba Nolutshungu of South Africa.

Hannes and Malpass.

The Mont Pelerin Society was founded in April 1947 at a meeting in Switzerland of some classical liberal scholars, including the economists Ludwig von Mises, Frank A. Knight, Friedrich A. von Hayek, Milton Friedman, George J. Stigler and Maurice Allais, and the philosopher Karl R. Popper. The purpose of the Society was to revive and revise the liberal tradition of the West, resting on private property, free trade, and limited government, not least against the totalitarian threat. Hannes H. Gissurarson, Professor Emeritus of Politics at the University of Iceland, has been a Member of the Society since 1984 and served on its Board of Directors in 1998–2004.

On 29 October to 2 November 2023 the MPS held a conference on Bretton Woods in New Hampshire about the international monetary and commercial order, almost 80 years after the famous meeting in this place about the future international monetary and commercial order which had resulted in the establishment of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. John Maynard Keynes, Lord Keynes, was one of the chief authors of this order which was supposed to create stability in international markets, but which largely broke down when the United States abandoned the gold standard in 1973. After that the whole world has relied on fiat money which is not guaranteed or backed up by anything of real value.

Besides Professor Gissurarson, Ragnar Arnason, Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Iceland, and Dr. Birgir Thor Runolfsson, Chairman of the Economics Faculty at the University of Iceland, attended the meeting. Discussions at MPS meetings are not to be quoted (the Chatham House rule), but it is not regarded as improper to reveal what has been published elsewhere. There were three highlights at the conference. Professor Douglas Irwin presented solid evidence which showed the immense benefits of international free trade. Phil Gramm, former U.S. Senator and before that professor of economics, demonstrated that the official statistics about income distribution in the United States was deeply flawed because neither taxes nor transfers were included in the calculation of income, both factors significanly reducing inequality. Tyler Goodspeed, economist at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, pointed out that international free trade could possibly harm some groups in the short term, although everybody gained from it in the long term. Gissurarson had the opportunity to describe in detail the 2008 Icelandic bank collapse over dinner with David Malpass, Governor of the World Bank in 1919–2023.

Some Nordic participants: dr. Nils Karlson, Sweden, Prof. Hannes H. Gissurarson, Iceland, Dr. Lars Peder Nordbakken, Norway, and Otto Lehto, Finland.

Professor Gary Libecap, an internationally acknowledged authority on resource economics, gave a lecture in the Festivities Hall of the University of Iceland on 21 October 2023 about resource utilisation and private property rights. He stated the general arguments for property rights in natural resources and then moved on to their formation. It was relatively easy to form property rights in land and livestock by fencing and branding, he said. It was more complicated but nevertheless possible to form property rights to rivers and lakes, water springs and oil wells, gold and coal mines and fish stocks. When the access to a scarce resource, hitherto a commons with open access, had to be restricted, quite often so-called ‘grandfathering’ was the most efficient way of allocating property rights initially. This meant that those with a hisory of utilising the resource would get rights to it in accordance with their utilisation. This would minimise the disruption to their way of supporting themselves when access had to be restriced. It was also likely to gain their acceptance. In the Icelandic fisheries this would imply that the harvesting rights (catch quotas) being defined would initially be allocated to those who had been fishing according to catch history, which was precisely the rule adopted when the rights, or quotas, were first allocated. Before Libecap gave his lecture, Hannes H. Gissurarson, Professor Emeritus of Politics at the University of Iceland, published an article about Libecap and the idea of grandfathering.

In an interview in Morgunbladid on 1 November 2023 Libecap described his recent research, including the comparison of clearly defined and therefore efficient mining rights in the United States and the much less efficient such rights in Latin America. He also discussed the utilisation of oil and gas, and of the Amazon forest, of fish stocks and of water springs in dry regions. Libecap said that the Icelandic system of fisheries management was widely regarded as the most efficient one in the world and that Ragnar Arnason, the Icelandic Professor of Fisheries Economics, was internationally respected for his contributions to resource economics. Libecap added that natural resources were not being exhausted; the dire predictions by the authors of The Limits to Growth had turned out not to be correct.

From left: Peter Hefele, Marko Milanovic Litre, Harrison Pitt, Hannes H. Gissurarson

The Brussels think tank New Direction held a large conference in Madrid on 20–22 September 2023 where right-wing intellectuals and activists met to discuss issues, as well as to attend the annual Margaret Thatcher Dinner. The speaker this year was Dr. Robin Harris who had been a speechwriter for Thatcher and also written a book about her.

Hannes H. Gissurarson, Professor Emeritus of Politics at the University of Iceland, spoke in favour of cooperation between conservatives and liberals. He suggested that there was a conservative branch of classical liberalism which combined the strong case for free trade, private property, and limited government with the plausible conservative intuition that individuals needed a home, the participation in a group, a sense of belonging, some meaning in life.

A speaker at the conference brought up the well-known ‘tragedy of the commons’ where unlimited access to a limited resource led to its over-utilisation. Gissurarson responded that this was a problem which could often be solved by market transactions, citing the example of the Icelandic fisheries system. He pointed out that in Africa where some elephant and rhino stocks were endangered, with one stroke of the pen poachers could be turned into gamekeepers by defining private property rights to the herds of those animals to the inhabitants of villages nearby. This would imply their effective utilisation instead of an unenforceable ban on doing so.

Gissurarson said that he agreed with conservatives that society was not only an amalgamation of unattached individuals. People needed roots, connections, respect for time-tested customs, conventions and traditions. He however rejected the notion expressed by some at the conference that our moral commitments only extended to other people belonging to the same nation. They extended to the whole of mankind although they were quite limited and consisted mostly in leaving others alone.

Dinner 20 September, with Terry Anker, Barbara Kolm, Robert Tyler, and others.

Gissurarson and Cleverly.

Jamie Borwick, the fifth Baron Borwick, invited Hannes H. Gissurarson, Professor Emeritus of Politics at the University of Iceland, to a reception he held on 28 June 2023 in the Cholmondeley Room at Westminster Palace, the British House of Parliament, on the occasion of Adam Smith’s 300th anniversary. It is not known when exactly Smith was born, but he was baptised on 5 June 1723 which is traditionally considered his birthday. The British Foreign Secretary, James Cleverly, gave a talk at the reception where he argued that Smith’s message about economic freedom was still timely and relevant. He reminded the audience however that freedom had to be defended. It was now being threatened by two bellicose and heavily armed powers, Russia and China.

Gissurarson had a discussion with Cleverly about foreign affairs. He has publicly stated that Iceland should make it a priority to seek friendship and alliance with her North Atlantic neighbours, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and Norway, while maintaing cordial relations with the European Union.

Gissurarson has also described how Adam Smith had presented two powerful ideas that had to be recalled regularly. One was that one’s gain need not be another’s loss. Everybody can gain by the international division of labour if and when different abilities and resources were utilised in free market transactions. The second idea was that there can be coordination without commands. A system can be formed without anybody forming it. Smith used the expression ‘the invisible hand’ about individuals seeking only their own advantages but working unintentionally for the public good.