He has addressed many prominent organisations,[4] including the US Congress hearings on apartheid, the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, the Hoover Institute, and the United Nations.

[citation needed] Louw experienced a "philosophical shift" during his early twenties when he was an article clerk at one of South Africa's leading law firms.

After telling him that it was "none of their business", his employer reluctantly allowed Louw to work pro bono for illegal street vendors, taxi operators and cottage industries.

It was at this point that Louw first found himself questioning Marxism, which he would later abandon, by virtue of what he observed "in the real world",[6] as he puts it, and under the influence of a colleague who introduced him to Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy.

His work entailed representing street vendors in court cases, reclaiming their confiscated merchandise, seeking injunctions against illegal raids, arrests and brutality, confronting and obstructing police who were harassing small enterprise owners, and organising or joining protest action.

[12][13] In the same year, at a symposium in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. in Atlanta, Georgia, Louw said that a peaceful solution to apartheid South Africa's race conflict would be to include blacks in the freedoms whites had until that point enjoyed.

Louw met and got to know many South African and foreign intellectuals from politics and business, including Thabo Mbeki, his father Govan Mbeki, Jacob Zuma, FW de Klerk, Dr Anton Rupert, Harry Oppenheimer, Clem Sunter, Marinus Wiechers, Sam Motsuenyane (now President of the FMF), Helen Suzman, Alan Paton, Nthato Motlana, Albertina and Walter Sisulu, Chief Buthelezi, Dirk Hertzog, Jan S Marais, Andreas Wassenaar, Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, Hendrik Verwoed Jr, Coretta Scott King, Thomas Sowell, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, James M. Buchanan, Israel Kirzner, Margaret Thatcher, and Walter E. Williams.

[citation needed] When asked which prominent thinkers influenced his beliefs and principles the most, Louw lists (chronologically) Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Friedrich Hayek, Thomas Sowell, Donald Symons, and Matt Ridley.