The Chilean Example

Whether by luck or foresight, the Mont Pelerin Society gets full symbolic value from the spots it chooses for its conferences. The general meeting in 1980 was held at the Hoover Institution in Palo Alto, which happens to be next door to California’s Silicon Valley, whose traffic in computer chips had given the lie to those who said American inventiveness was through. The 1976 commemorative meeting in St. Andrews, Scotland, in honor of the two-hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Wealth of Nations, still lingers in the memory with every order Don Lipsett gets for his Adam Smith neckties, a thriving free enterprise if there ever was one. But the biggest symbolic break occurred toward the end of 1981, when Senator Pedro Ibañez, speaking for the Mont Pelerin Regional Organizing Committee, welcomed some two hundred members and guests of the society to a regional meeting in Viña Del Mar on the breathtakingly beautiful Pacific coast of Chile.

There was some irony in this locus for a Mont Pelerin Society meeting. Chile is still run by a military junta, and Ludwig von Mises, one of Mont Pelerin’s earliest champions, had said that if he were to be appointed a dictator the first thing he would do would be to abdicate. But, given circumstances that would surely have turned Chile into a Castroite appendage of the Soviet Union, it was fortunate for Mont Pelerin economic principles that the junta had taken over. Even more than Hong Kong, site of the Mont Pelerin general meeting in 1978, or Salamanca, Spain, where Mont Pelerians in 1979 learned that Spanish economists had anticipated the Austrian school as far back as the sixteenth century, Chile is a living teacher of Mont Pelerin economic principles.

JC

About the Author

John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain (1903–1995) was an American writer.

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Whether by luck or foresight, the Mont Pelerin Society gets full symbolic value from the spots it chooses for its conferences. The general meeting in 1980 was held at the Hoover Institution in Palo Alto, which happens to be next door to California’s Silicon Valley, whose traffic in computer chips had given the lie to those who said American inventiveness was through. The 1976 commemorative meeting in St. Andrews, Scotland, in honor of the two-hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Wealth of Nations, still lingers in the memory with every order Don Lipsett gets for his Adam Smith neckties, a thriving free enterprise if there ever was one. But the biggest symbolic break occurred toward the end of 1981, when Senator Pedro Ibañez, speaking for the Mont Pelerin Regional Organizing Committee, welcomed some two hundred members and guests of the society to a regional meeting in Viña Del Mar on the breathtakingly beautiful Pacific coast of Chile.

There was some irony in this locus for a Mont Pelerin Society meeting. Chile is still run by a military junta, and Ludwig von Mises, one of Mont Pelerin’s earliest champions, had said that if he were to be appointed a dictator the first thing he would do would be to abdicate. But, given circumstances that would surely have turned Chile into a Castroite appendage of the Soviet Union, it was fortunate for Mont Pelerin economic principles that the junta had taken over. Even more than Hong Kong, site of the Mont Pelerin general meeting in 1978, or Salamanca, Spain, where Mont Pelerians in 1979 learned that Spanish economists had anticipated the Austrian school as far back as the sixteenth century, Chile is a living teacher of Mont Pelerin economic principles.