Free Market Road Show

Dan Mitchell is a public policy economist in Washington, DC. His major research interests include tax reform, international tax competition, the economic burden of government spending, and other fiscal policy issues. He is one of the nation’s leading experts on the flat tax, and has been the leading international voice in the fight to preserve tax competition, financial privacy, and fiscal sovereignty. He has decades of experience authoring papers, writing editorials, working with the public policy community, and presenting the free-market viewpoint to newspaper, television, and radio media.

Dan was a Senior Fellow with the Cato Institute for 11 years and spent nearly 17 years as an economist at the Heritage Foundation. Earlier in his career, he served as an economist for Senator Bob Packwood of Oregon and was Director of Tax and Budget Policy for Citizens for a Sound Economy. For more than three years in the mid-1990s, Dan began every day by co-hosting the morning show on NET, the Political NewsTalk Network. The program, “Mitchells in the Morning,” was available in more than 10 million households, and featured in-depth discussion of current events with elected officials, journalists, pollsters, authors, and public policy experts.

A prolific writer, Dan is the author of The Flat Tax: Freedom, Fairness, Jobs, and Growth and co-author of Global Tax Revolution. In addition, Dan’s work has been published in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, Washington Post, New York Times, Washington Post, National Review, Villanova Law Review, Journal of Regulation and Social Cost, Forbes, Emory Law Journal, Public Choice, Journal of Financial Crime, Foreign Policy, Pace Law Review, USA Today, Offshore Investment, Playboy, Investor’s Business Daily, Worldwide Reinsurance Review, and the International Tax Planning Association’s Yearbook. He has appeared on all the major networks, including CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, FOX, CNBC, and C-SPAN.

Dan is also an accomplished public speaker, and has spoken to a wide variety of groups in dozens of cities and more than 50 foreign countries. Audiences have included the American Farm Bureau Federation, the Bermuda International Business Association, the Business Roundtable, the Lithuanian Free Market Institute, the National Federation of Independent Business, the Swiss Bankers Association, the National Association of Manufacturers, and dozens of other groups and organizations.

Dan founded the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, an organization formed to protect international tax competition. He also serves on the editorial board of the Cayman Financial Review. Born in Mt. Kisco, NY, Dan Mitchell holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Georgia and holds a Ph.D. in economics from George Mason University.

John Fund is National Affairs Columnist for and an on-air analyst on the Fox News Channel. He has lived in and reported from Europe and is currently working on a book entitled “The Non-Euro Nations: How Some Countries Dodged a Bullet.”

He previously served as a columnist and editorial board member for The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of several books, including Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy (Encounter Books, 2012) and The Dangers of Regulation Through Litigation (ATRA Press, 2008). He worked as a research analyst for the California Legislature in Sacramento before beginning his journalism career as a reporter for the syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak.

Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill, called him “the Tom Paine of the modern Congressional reform movement.” He has won awards from the Institute for Justice, The School Choice Alliance and the Warren Brooks award for journalistic excellence from the American Legislative Exchange Council.

Nicholas Harris is Director of Public Affairs at JTI based in Geneva, Switzerland. In this role, he oversees JTI’s response to key regulatory challenges, including attacks on branding freedom. Harris’s former positions at JTI include engagement, advocacy and communication roles in Western Europe and the United Kingdom. Prior to that he worked as an advisor in the UK Parliament. Harris holds a BA in Politics and an MA in Political Theory from the University of Sheffield.

As Chairman of The Anker Consulting Group, Inc., Mr. Anker has served as an advisor and owner in several small concerns including the retail, wholesale distribution and service industries as well as the public sector. Presently, Mr. Anker spends much of his time advising small business throughout Indiana on the acquisition of capital from public and private sources. His business interests include Moody Meats, Flat 12 Bierwerks, a Midwestern-based call center and the Anker Receivership Group. Also, Mr. Anker is the Associate Editor and Partner of Current Publishing, LLC. Its holdings include 11 local newspapers youarecurrent.

He is one of the founders of Monument Advisors, LLC (www.monumentadv.com), a mezzanine bank serving the capital and financial services needs of business concerns throughout the Midwest and preferred partner INC a reseller of computer software and services. And, he has served as a Director on the Board of Symons International Group (formerly NASDAC: SIGC), an insurance holding company and IGF, a large multi-state crop insurance concern.

Additionally, he is a member of Mont Pellerin Society, numerous professional training and education seminars and an alumnus of the Stanley K. Lacy Leadership Development and a weekly newspaper columnist.

Richard Teather is the leading British academic specialising in offshore tax jurisdictions.

His writings have been published in three continents, translated into over 10 foreign languages, and cited in over 20 countries, including being quoted in debates in several national parliaments. His book “The Benefits of Tax Competition” is held in government and university collections around the world.

As well as academic work he also acts as consultant to governmental and industry bodies, gives lectures and conference presentations internationally, and is an accomplished media performer.

His tax policy advice has been followed successfully in several jurisdictions. He advised the Jersey parliament on their biggest tax reforms in sixty years, including the abolition of corporation tax and the introduction of GST. The Teather Report for Cayman Finance showed why an income tax was not a solution to the Cayman Islands’ financial problems. He was described as providing the “intellectual clout” to the successful campaign to prevent an inappropriate VAT being introduced to the Turks & Caicos Islands.

He was one of the experts sent by the European Commission to help eastern European countries in their transition to European Union membership, and worked with the fledgling Tunisian democracy on tax reform.

He is also a chartered accountant, and before becoming an academic he practised as a tax adviser, first with Deloitte and then with top ten ‘City’ law firm Denton Wilde Sapte.

Industry insiders voted him one of the world’s most influential people in global finance, in the Finance Centres International 500 survey. His work on UK tax reform hit the headlines when the UK government tried to suppress its civil servants’ favourable comments on it, and the editor of The Business wrote “rarely has a think-tank publication been this influential so quickly.”

He is Senior Lecturer in Tax Law at Bournemouth University, a Fellow of the Adam Smith Institute, a member of the editorial board of the journal Economic Affairs, and external examiner to the University of Gibraltar.

Dr. Richard Durana is a co-founder of INESS – Institute of Economic and Social Studies, leading Slovak economic think tank. Since its inception in January 2006 he is Director of INESS.

He has published numerous articles published in Slovak and foreign newspapers, magazines and books and he has appeared frequently in broadcast media. He is a co-author of several books and studies and he is a frequent speaker at various domestic and international conferences and lecturer at international forums and local events. Fields of his professional interest include public finance, economic and social policy, and entrepreneurial environment, effects of regulation, labor market, and intellectual property rights.

Dr. Richard Durana holds M.Sc. in organic chemistry and Ph.D. in biochemistry. Prior working at INESS he was working as a research scientist at the Institute of Chemistry, Slovak Academy of Sciences, where he was developing vaccines. He is a member of the Slovak Chemical Society.

Martin works as an analyst in INESS. His fields of interest include health care sector, business environment, and competitiveness. For the past four years, he has been leading initiative Top20, focusing on improving the doing business conditions in Slovakia. He is regular participant in discussions in national televisions and radio stations.

Martin graduated in Economic Policy from the Faculty of Economics and Administration, Masaryk University, and in Economics, Management and International Relations from the Graduate Business School, Aberdeen University.

Peter Gonda is a director and economist of the Conservative Institute of M. R. Štefánik, external lecturer of Economics at the Comenius University and the Slovak Senior Fellow of the Cobden Centre. Presently he is a coordinator and a lecturer of the Academy of classical economy, coordinator of the cycle of lectures of renowned foreign guests in Slovakia in a project Conservative Economic Quarterly Lecture Series (CEQLS) and the coordinator and manager of the project „Breaking down myths about socialism and the welfare state“.

Peter Gonda is the author of the book Eurozone and the alternatives of the European economic integration (2013), the paper Economic consequences of Slovakia’s membership in the eurozone (2014), main author and the supervisor of the publication Reforming the EU and European integration (2018) and (co)author and (co)editor of numerous other publications and papers.

Mr. Ján Oravec is a President of The Entrepreneurs Association of Slovakia. He is a founding member and a member of a Presidium of the National Union of Employers. As Chairman of its´ European Affairs and Foreign Relations Committee he represents Slovak employers in international organizations of employers, in BusinessEurope in Brussels, in BIAC at OECD, and in IOE at the International Labour Organization in Geneva.

In 1999-2002 Mr. Oravec was working as a Chief of Strategy at the Ministry of Economy of the Slovak Republic. During that period he served as a chairman and member of various Supervisory Boards and Boards of Directors.

He is a founding member of The F. A. Hayek Foundation and its long term president (1992 – 2013). In 1997 he established The Slovak Taxpayers Association.

Mr. Oravec graduated in 1987 from Commenius University in Bratislava (Philosophy – Political Economy), The Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia in 1994 (Business Administration) and The Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, USA in 1993-1995 (Bank Management). In 1996 he received his PhD. degree in economics at The Institute of Slovak and World Economy in Bratislava.

He is an economic advisor, he writes articles, gives lectures, TV interviews, and public speeches on various topics. He is married and has two children.

Kai Weiss is a Research and Outreach Coordinator at the Austrian Economics Center and a board member of the Hayek Institute. His main research interests are European and EU politics, philosophy, and technology. His works have been published in various outlets, including CityAM, CapX, The American Conservative, and RealClear.