Editor's note: a tribute to William A. Niskanen.

• Author: Dorn, J.A.

This issue of the Cato Journal is dedicated to William Niskanen, who passed away on October 26, 9.011, at the age of 78. From 1985 to 2008, Bill served as chairman of the Cato Institute and a full-time economic scholar. He continued working as chairman emeritus and distinguished senior economist until his death. He was also on the editorial boards of Regulation magazine and the Cato Journal.

During the span of more than a quarter of a century, he helped establish Cato as one of the leading free-market think tanks in the world. Like Adam Smith, he believed in "peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice."

Nobel laureate James M. Buchanan regarded Bill as "one of the stalwarts of modern classical liberalism." Bill was interested in big ideas--particularly the question of how to achieve "order without direction." He sought to understand the rules (both formal and informal) that would most likely generate social and economic harmony. Thus, he explored the intersection between economics and politics. He was a pioneer in public choice and constitutional political economy. His first book Bureaucracy and Representative Government (1971) remains a classic.

Bill evolved from a technocrat to a political economist. He began his career at the RAND Corporation in 1957, moved on to the Office of Systems Analysis in the Department of Defense in 1962, and then joined the Institute for Defense Analyses in 1964, where he hired Gordon Tullock and worked on developing the theory of bureaucracy. In 1970, he left the IDA to accept a position as assistant director for evaluation in the Office of Management and Budget under George Shultz. Next, he accepted an appointment as a professor in the newly established Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he began teaching in the fall of 1972.

In July 1975, Bill gave up his tenured position at Berkeley to become director of economics at the Ford Motor Company. As is well known, Bill was fired at Ford for his principled stand against protectionism. He refused to go along with import quotas on Japanese cars, which he called "immoral." Bather, he recommended that Ford concentrate on meeting consumer preferences for fuel efficient cars and exceed the quality of Japanese cars.

After leaving Ford, Bill briefly took another academic position, this time at UCLA's Graduate School of Management. In 1981, he left academia for good after being appointed to President Ronald...