The Plan to End Planning

IN the aftermath of World War II, when Friedrich Hayek assembled some three dozen like-minded American and European scholars on the slopes of Mont Pelerin above Lake Geneva, the outlook for freedom could hardly have been more bleak. Churchill had coined the phrase “Iron Curtain” to mark the apparently permanent division of Europe between East and West. Some of the German participants at this first Mont Pelerin Society meeting had difficulty getting travel passes to Switzerland. Marshall aid had yet to be launched for the reconstruction of shattered economies. In April 1947 the new Deutsche Mark was more than a year away, and cigarettes still served as the general medium of exchange. As a grim omen for the future, Hayek’s new classic The Road to Serfdom (1944) was banned throughout Germany, not only in the Soviet zone, but also by the three Western powers of occupation.

Exactly 50 years later, some eighty of the now five hundred members of the society gathered at Mont Pelerin, a few hundred yards from the smaller hotel at which the first meeting was held, to mark the anniversary and review progress. On the face of it, the world around had been transformed in a direction that would have rejoiced our anxious founders. How far can we conclude, therefore, that the objectives of the Society are well on their way to being fulfilled?

RH

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Ralph Harris

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IN the aftermath of World War II, when Friedrich Hayek assembled some three dozen like-minded American and European scholars on the slopes of Mont Pelerin above Lake Geneva, the outlook for freedom could hardly have been more bleak. Churchill had coined the phrase “Iron Curtain” to mark the apparently permanent division of Europe between East and West. Some of the German participants at this first Mont Pelerin Society meeting had difficulty getting travel passes to Switzerland. Marshall aid had yet to be launched for the reconstruction of shattered economies. In April 1947 the new Deutsche Mark was more than a year away, and cigarettes still served as the general medium of exchange. As a grim omen for the future, Hayek’s new classic The Road to Serfdom (1944) was banned throughout Germany, not only in the Soviet zone, but also by the three Western powers of occupation.

Exactly 50 years later, some eighty of the now five hundred members of the society gathered at Mont Pelerin, a few hundred yards from the smaller hotel at which the first meeting was held, to mark the anniversary and review progress. On the face of it, the world around had been transformed in a direction that would have rejoiced our anxious founders. How far can we conclude, therefore, that the objectives of the Society are well on their way to being fulfilled?