Andrew Galambos

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Andrew Joseph Galambos (1924-1997) was a libertarian who developed a concept of absolute property ownership.

Andrew Galambos was born Joseph Andrew Galambos in Hungary in 1924. His family moved shortly thereafter to New York City where he grew up. He is noted in Harry Browne's eulogy to have served in World War II, and then to have attended and earned a master's degree from Carleton College in Minnesota. In the fifties, while working in the aerospace industry, he developed the method of preliminary design (now called systems analysis) for the two-stage propulsion system for the rocket engines used in all American rockets. He was never properly accredited with this achievement, according to his lectures in Free Enterprise, given in Southern California.

Andrew J. Galambos was born with this name. He changed his name to Joseph B. Galamos to honor his father. He later changed it BACK to Andrew J. Galambos so not to obscure his fathers accomplishments.

In the early 1960s, he stopped working in this field and began pursuing activities in libertarianism. Some claim he changed his name from Joseph Andrew Galambos to Andrew Joseph Galambos because, in his philosophy, using the name created by his father required him to pay his father royalties; in his lectures, he explained that he did not wish to have the achievements of his father conflated with his own achievements. He met with Ayn Rand and others in her circle, but did not become associated with them. In 1961, he founded the Free Enterprise Institute. He spread his message about absolute property rights through a series of paid lectures, which required attendees to sign a non-disclosure agreement, releasable only after publication of his theory. His motivation for the theory, called "volitional science," was to properly assign credit for the achievements of each individual (volitional being), as a form of property right. As an astrophysicist, respect for property rights was the only route he could envision for mankind to take, in its manifest destiny en route to the cosmos: Sic Itur Ad Astra (This is the way to the stars).

Some also claim that Galambos took his ideas to extreme lengths, for example, in addition to changing his name to avoid infringing his identically-named father's rights to the name, and requiring his students not to repeat his ideas, he is reported to have adopted the habit of dropping a nickel in a fund box every time he used the word "liberty," as a royalty to the descendants of Thomas Paine, the alleged "inventor" of the word "liberty".p. 18 He has been referred to as "one of the oddest characters in the shadows of libertarian history"[1].

By the 1980s, Galambos had developed Alzheimer's disease. He died on April 10, 1997.

Andrew J. Galambos was an astrophysicist by education, the son of a Hungarian immigrant. He was the creator of the Science of Volition, founder of the Free Enterprise Institute and the Liberal Institute of Natual Science and Technology.

In 1952, Andrew J. Galambos changed his name to Joseph A. Galambos in order to honor the memory of his late father, Joseph B. Galambos, whose influence, more than any other, inspired the younger Galambos' achievements. He retained this name until 1964, when, realizing that he actually might be obscuring his father's place in history, he changed his name back to Andrew J. Galambos.

Professor Galambos earned degrees in physics from the College of the City of New York and the University of Minnesota. Professor Galambos has taught physics at New York University, Brooklyn College, Steven Institute of Technology, the university of Minnesota, Carleton College, and Whittier College. He is founder of the Liberal Institute of Technology in Los Angeles, California.

In 1961, Galambos founded the Free Enterprise Institute (FEI), the name of his school. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Galambos gave a series of courses, or lectures in the Orange County/Los Angeles area. V-50 was the introductory course and was required if you wanted to proceed further into other courses. "V" stands for volition--the act of choosing. Once a person completed the V-50, he was able to sign up for further studies.

His definitions and concepts of property were the foundation of his science. Galambos would introduce several authors and books for his followers to read. Among them were: Frederic Bastiat's The Law, Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson, and Ludwig von Mises' Planned Chaos. He was a great fan of Thomas Paine and promoted the idea, which several scholars and historians also hold, that Paine was the actual author of the Declaration of Independence.

It was Galambos' belief that while he saw mankind achieving huge technological advancement, as a society, we were barely out of the cave. His belief was that if we could develop a society based on natural laws such as we have in physics, we could then mature culturally and as a social species.


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