ISI Weaver Fellow Brings Lessons of Liberty to Financial Planning

“I guess I was born conservative,” said Neil Nobel on a hot, sunny day in his desert city of Phoenix, Arizona. Neil NobelThousands of miles away from his native state of Pennsylvania, Nobel is yet another ISI success story— an ISI Weaver Fellow turned successful financial planner, ISI donor, and (though not intentionally) ISI fundraiser.

Some might think that the life of a scholar is not compatible with the life of a businessman, but Nobel’s life demonstrates otherwise. Nobel never lost his fervor for the ideas central to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, even after practical circumstances stood in the way of his dream to become an economics professor, and led him instead to enter the world of financial consulting.

ISI and the foundations of liberty have been important to Nobel since his undergraduate years at Arizona State University, where he also attended graduate school. Nobel began reading periodicals such as National Review, Human Events, American Opinion, and The Freeman when he “started having a consciousness” about political thought and the bias in academe. He read books by conservative economists such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, as well as a book on income tax by ISI ’s founder Frank Chodorov. He was president of ASU’s Young Americans for Freedom, and with friends he started a right-of-center satirical newspaper named Fidelio. But Nobel’s primary influence in college was one of his professors, James Kearney, whom Nobel describes as “really reaching out” to him. In graduate school, Nobel became Kearney’s teaching assistant and wrote his graduate thesis under his supervision.

Today, like a true academic, Nobel asks new clients a very important question when they sit down in his office for the first time. He does not start preaching his own dogma“It all starts with education. We need to build an elite force of educated people who understand liberty.” of how a person should think, as can be all too common in universities today. Instead, he asks, “What do you want your money to do for you?” Nobel said people are rarely prepared for that question, and start to sputter. It is not a question of dollars, cents, and interest rates, but a philosophical inquiry with profound implications. Nobel said he pays attention to world events and history because “it all boils down to how that’s going to affect people. What’s that going to do to my money?” Overarching questions like these are at the heart of ISI’s mission, and reveal Nobel’s long-standing ISI connections.

One client who took Nobel’s question to heart was a man by the name of Bill McMeekin. A native Arizonan, small businessman, small investor, and wildly successful entrepreneur, this humble man found himself a multimillionaire in his old age. He had spent his life finding profitable opportunities in real estate — and in a Phoenix fruit stand that sold cactus jellies, fruit, and other delectable items.

Being a man who was accustomed to thinking for himself, Nobel was surprised one day when Mc- Meekin turned the question of what he wanted his money to do for him back to Nobel. The well-read financial planner gave the elderly man a careful answer, describing the things he himself valued and towards which he would apply his money to good use. It was the first of many serious discussions the men had in a business relationship that lasted several decades, until McMeekin’s death two years ago.

Their conversations centered around education. Remembers Nobel, “One day he came to me and asked ‘What would you do?’ He was very concerned. ‘Where are the leaders, playwrights, editors [of the future] coming from?’” Nobel likely responded with something like he said after McMeekin’s death: “It all starts with education. We need to build an elite force of educated people who understand liberty.” The former fruit-stand owner was not an intellectual, said Nobel, but he was someone who understood the need for it. “We talked once a week for over thirty years,” Nobel explained. “You learn things about people when you talk that often.”

But one thing Nobel never discovered until McMeekin died was that his friend took nearly every piece of financial advice his planner had given to him. “He directed a good portion of the trust to things that were important to me,” remarked Nobel with humble awe. “We need to identify and educate scholars for liberty, and Bill McMeekin really grasped that.” As such, ISI received a very generous gift from the McMeekin Trust at the time of his death. Fittingly, he directed the funds towards ISI ’s Richard M. Weaver Graduate Fellowships. Nobel feels that through McMeekin’s generosity and his own career in a field that was his second choice, he has finally repaid his debt to ISI for his own Weaver Fellowship. His life as a scholar and a businessman has literally paid off, and he is satisfied.