When the Cato Institute moved from San Francisco to Washington DC in 1981, I worried. When think tank people get close to politicians, all too often it’s the think tanks, not the politicians, who change the way they think.

That was never true of Ed Crane’s libertarian Cato Institute, however.

My first Cato publication was a monograph on the history of government regulation of medical care. I followed that with Patient Power, in which Gerry Musgrave and I introduced the idea of Health Savings Accounts.

Through the years, Cato was the only Washington-based think tank that never varied in its support for free market health care. That commitment continues to this day.

I can’t remember the Wall Street Journal ever before publishing an editorial obituary about a think tank founder. Ed Crane deserves to be the exception.

In the battle for liberty, we lost a warrior last week. But he left us a legacy that will endure for a long, long time.