American Economic Forum

Congressman Jim Banks is a native Hoosier, born and raised. He earned an undergraduate degree from Indiana University and a Master of Business Administration from Grace College. While serving in the Indiana State Senate from 2010 to 2016, he chaired the Senate Veteran Affairs and the Military Committee where he led the charge on many significant pro-growth, pro-family, and pro-veteran reforms.

Congressman Banks currently serves in the U.S. Navy Reserve as a Supply Corps officer. In 2014 and 2015, he took a leave of absence from the Indiana State Senate to deploy to Afghanistan during Operations Enduring Freedom and Freedom’s Sentinel.

Banks was elected in 2016 to represent Indiana’s 3rd Congressional District and currently serves as chairman of the Republican Study Committee for the 117th Congress. Banks serves as a member of the House Committee on Armed Services, the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, and the House Committee on Education and Labor. Additionally, he serves as the Ranking Member of the House Armed Services Subcommittee Cyber, Innovative Technologies, and Information Systems, co-chairs the House Armed Services Committee’s Future of Defense Task Force and sits on the Naval Academy’s Board of Visitors.

He has also received NFIB’s “Guardian of Small Business” award and the FreedomFighter Award from FreedomWorks in recognition of his dedication to economic freedom and personal liberty.

Kevin Roberts, Ph.D., was named president of The Heritage Foundation in October 2021. He succeeded former Heritage President Kay C. James as the seventh president in the organization’s 49-year history.

Roberts previously served as the chief executive officer of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), an Austin-based nonprofit, nonpartisan research institute and the largest state think tank in the nation. Under Roberts’ leadership, TPPF more than doubled in size. He also expanded the Texas think tank’s influence nationwide, opening an office in Washington, D.C., so that TPPF research might better inform federal policy debates. 

A lifelong educator, Roberts earned his Ph.D. in American history from the University of Texas. After several years of teaching history at the collegiate level, Roberts in 2006 left the university to found John Paul the Great Academy, a co-ed, K-12 Catholic liberal arts school in Lafayette, Louisiana. Roberts served as the academy’s president and headmaster for seven years. 

In 2013, he resigned from the academy to become president of Wyoming Catholic College. Under his leadership, the college adopted a policy of refusing to accept federal student loans and grants, lest it be forced to violate Catholic tenets. This independent stance led The New York Times to describe the school as being full of “cowboy Catholics.” 

In addition to his doctorate, Roberts holds a master’s degree in history from Virginia Tech and a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Roberts and his wife have four children. 

Former Ambassador Robert E. Lighthizer was sworn in as the 18th United States Trade Representative (USTR) on May 15, 2017. 

An experienced trade negotiator and litigator, Ambassador Lighthizer has spearheaded several historic trade agreements as USTR. Chief among these accomplishments is the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).  Additional agreements he reached with South Korea and Japan expanded U.S. trade opportunities in those countries.  Ambassador Lighthizer also secured the U.S.-China Phase One Economic and Trade Agreement, a fully-enforceable agreement that addresses China’s discriminatory treatment of U.S. companies, intellectual property theft, and currency manipulation, while maintaining tariffs on key Chinese products and increasing China’s purchases of U.S. goods and services by at least $200 billion over two years.  Additionally, he has brought attention to issues at the World Trade Organization (WTO), placing unprecedented pressure on the WTO’s Appellate Body and working with U.S. trade partners on wider reforms.

Ambassador Lighthizer served as Deputy USTR for President Ronald Reagan and negotiated over two dozen bilateral international agreements, including agreements on steel, automobiles, and agricultural products. As Deputy USTR, he also served as Vice Chairman of the Board of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation.

Samuel Gregg is Distinguished Fellow in Political Economy and Senior Research Faculty at the American Institute for Economic Research. He has a D.Phil. in moral philosophy and political economy from Oxford University, and an M.A. in political philosophy from the University of Melbourne.

He has written and spoken extensively on questions of political economy, economic history, monetary theory and policy, and natural law theory. He is the author of sixteen books, including On Ordered Liberty (2003), The Commercial Society (2007), Wilhelm Röpke’s Political Economy (2010); Becoming Europe (2013); Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization (2019); The Essential Natural Law (2021); and The Next American Economy: Nation, State and Markets in an Uncertain World (2022). Two of his books have been short-listed for Conservative Book of the Year. Many of his books and over 400 articles and opinion pieces have been translated into a variety of languages. He is also a Contributor to Law and Liberty, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, an Affiliate Scholar at the Acton Institute, a Fellow of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University. He also serves as a Visiting Scholar at the Heritage Foundation.

In 2001, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a Member of the Mont Pèlerin Society in 2004. In 2008, he was elected a member of the Philadelphia Society, and a member of the Royal Economic Society. In 2017, he was made a Fellow of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University. He served as President of the Philadelphia Society from 2019-2021.

Phillip Blond is Director of ResPublica an internationally recognized political thinker and social and economic commentator. He founded ResPublica in 2009 and is an academic, journalist, and author.

He is the author of Red Tory (Faber and Faber 2010), which sought to redefine the centre ground of British politics around the ideas of civil association, mutual ownership, and shared enterprise.

His ideas have influenced the agenda around devolution and public services, and have helped to redefine British and international politics. Phillip’s recent reports, such as Restoring Britain’s City States: Devolution, public service reform and local economic growth (2015), The Missing Multipliers: Devolution to Britain’s Key Cities (2015), and Devo Max – Devo Manc: Place-based public services (2014), have driven policy change in city deals and health devolution.

He has written extensively in the British and foreign press including The Guardian, The Independent, The Observer, the Financial Times, Prospect, the New Statesman, and The New York Times. Through both his writing and speaking, he argues for a new economic and social politics based around free association and group formation, new forms of capitalization, and market entry.