Galbraith Was Wrong Again

During a 1961 lecture in India, where he was then U.S. Ambassador, John Kenneth Galbraith said: “Not long after the end of World War II a sizable number of deeply concerned scholars from the United States and Western Europe gathered on a mountaintop in Switzerland to form an organization devoted to international opposition to planning. It never developed any great influence, partly, I am told, because of an ideological schism over whether navies should be socially owned or privately provided on a lease-hire system by the private sector.”

Galbraith, whom no one could accuse of being opposed to government planning, was chiding the Mont Pelerin Society, even though—given his oft-repeated hostility toward advertising—he couldn’t bring himself to mention it by name. His description no doubt brought a hearty laugh in Galbraithian circles. But when the 36 economists, political scientists and historians from the Western world met atop Mont Pelerin in 1947 “to discuss the future of the world, the free society” (as F. A. Hayek phrased it in his address to the opening session of the 1970 MPS conference here in Munich), another Harvard economist, the late Joseph Schumpeter, remarked that all the surviving liberals of the world were meeting at that very moment on a mountaintop in Switzerland.

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Edwin McDowell

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During a 1961 lecture in India, where he was then U.S. Ambassador, John Kenneth Galbraith said: “Not long after the end of World War II a sizable number of deeply concerned scholars from the United States and Western Europe gathered on a mountaintop in Switzerland to form an organization devoted to international opposition to planning. It never developed any great influence, partly, I am told, because of an ideological schism over whether navies should be socially owned or privately provided on a lease-hire system by the private sector.”

Galbraith, whom no one could accuse of being opposed to government planning, was chiding the Mont Pelerin Society, even though—given his oft-repeated hostility toward advertising—he couldn’t bring himself to mention it by name. His description no doubt brought a hearty laugh in Galbraithian circles. But when the 36 economists, political scientists and historians from the Western world met atop Mont Pelerin in 1947 “to discuss the future of the world, the free society” (as F. A. Hayek phrased it in his address to the opening session of the 1970 MPS conference here in Munich), another Harvard economist, the late Joseph Schumpeter, remarked that all the surviving liberals of the world were meeting at that very moment on a mountaintop in Switzerland.