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Tom Palmer (born in Moetsch, Germany; 1956 - ) is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and is charged with running Cato University. He earned his B.A. in liberal arts from St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, his M.A. in philosphy from The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and his doctorate in political science from Oxford University, where he was an H. B. Earhart Fellow at Hertford College. He normally uses as his full name "Tom G. Palmer" and maintains a web site at www.tomgpalmer.com, where his curriculum vitae and some of his published articles can be found. In addition to writing on the philosophy of individual rights, globalization and cultural identity, and classical liberal political philosophy, Palmer has published law review articles on intellectual property that have garnered substantial attention within the legal and technological community for his general critique of patents and copyrights and his suggestions of contractual and technological solutions to the problems for which intellectual property rights are usually proposed as solutions.
Palmer has been active in the promotion of classical liberal (or libertarian) ideas and policies since the early 1970s. He has been editor of several publications, including Dollars & Sense (the newspaper of the National Taxpayers Union), Update, and the Humane Studies Review, and has published articles in such newspapers and magazines as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Spectator of London, National Review, Reason, and Slate, and reviews and articles in a variety of journals, including Ethics, Constitutional Political Economy, Cato Journal, Critical Review, Etica e Politica, Hamline Law Review, and the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. Before joining the Cato Institute, he was a vice president of the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University. During the late 1980s and the very early 1990s he worked with the Institute for Humane Studies to spread classical liberal ideas in the countries of Soviet bloc. He smuggled books, photocopiers, and fax machines from an office in Vienna, Austria and traveled throughout the region to hold seminars, set up classical liberal think tanks and clubs, and extend the network of liberal thinkers. He arranged for translation and publication into a variety of central and eastern European languages of textbooks in economics and law, as well as seminal works by Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and other thinkers in the classical liberal tradition. He is currently attempting to duplicate some of his successes in those countries in Iraq and the wider Arab world.
His various political activities include being founding member and National Secretary of the Committee Against Registration and the Draft (1979-81), president of the Oxford Civil Liberties Society (1993-94), and manager or communications director for several political campaigns. Palmer is a member of the board of trustees of the Foundation for Economic Education, a member of the Mont Pelerin Society, and a Freeman of the City of London.
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