Jim spent more than 30 years as a U.S. State Department Foreign Service officer, retiring with the rank of minister counselor. Indeed, when his friend brought him to that first Cato Policy Forum, he was located in Washington, D.C., serving as executive director of the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs. His major overseas assignments included stints at embassies in Brasília and Bogotá, as well as in Berlin. He speaks fluent Portuguese and Spanish and claims “some German.”
Since that fortuitous first Policy Forum, Jim has attended multiple sessions of Cato University, a week-long intensive program exploring the principles of libertarian thinking. He likes to recall that Tom Palmer, the director of Cato University, succinctly summed up the libertarian outlook by saying that “folks should not hurt other people and should not steal their stuff.” He has also been able to attend several Benefactor Summits. Given that he now lives in Palm Beach, he is especially looking forward to the 2010 Summit in Palm Beach.
Jim enjoys the wide range of policy analysis provided by Cato’s scholars. However, he has something of a special fondness for legal issues and was particularly outraged by the Kelo decision, a U.S. Supreme Court decision which sanctioned the use of eminent domain powers for a “taking” that clearly served private interests.
Jim’s long-term support of Cato reached a new plateau in 2008 when he entered into a charitable gift annuity contract with Cato. Gift annuities are a popular financial planning device with a simple, straightforward structure: a donor transfers property to Cato (or other charity) in return for a promise to pay a stream of income, called an annuity, for life. At the donor’s death, the charity retains the remaining principal. So gift annuities provide for a guaranteed income stream for life plus an immediate gift tax deduction for the gift portion of the transfer. Jim has been pleased with his Cato charitable gift annuity and commented that “it was easy to do and all the explanations were complete, forthcoming and forthright.”
For our part, Cato thanks Jim and all our Sponsors for their magnificent support which allows us to stand in the forefront of the struggle to defend our heritage of liberty. Our Sponsors make it possible for us to speak against the tide of statism and to speak for the rule of law and the Constitution.
