The road from Mont Pèlerin
Neoliberalism was born at the Colloque Walter Lippmann in 1938 and only came into its own with the founding of the Mont Pèlerin Society in Vevey, Switzerland in 1947. The book's contributors make heavy use of the original archival materials and make good of the editors' promise to expose the complexity, nuance and polarity of neoliberal thought.
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What Hacker News says
- Interesting that when a criticism which is specific as to associations and reasons is posed, the defence is a belittling ad hom.
Mercatus & GMU an outgrowth of the Mont Pelerin Society of "free-market' economists and propagandists.
<https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Mont_Pelerin_Soc...>
Excellent investigations of these groups include
- Jane Mayer, Dark Money: on political influence by the Kochs and others. <https://archive.org/details/darkmoneyhiddenh0000maye_k2o0>
- Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway, Merchants of Doubt: on climate disinformation by the Kochs and others.<https://archive.org/details/merchantsofdoubt00ores>
- Oreskes and Conway, The Big Myth: on how "free markets" were sold as an ideological fable, by the Kochs and others. <https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/big-myth-9781635573572/>
- Philip Mirowski, The Road From Mont Pelerin" on the emergence and development of neoliberal philosophy and economics <https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674088344>
The Kochs, GMU, Mercatus, the Atlas Network, and many affiliated organisations and individuals are at the heart of disinformation about global warming and challenges on both the resource and environmental impacts fronts, and have been for many decades. Koch Industries itself is a massive oil and gas concern which obviously benefits from rebutting and confounding arguments against usage of fossil fuels, both through scientific investigation and governmental regulation, its two principle bogeymen.
The madness lies on their side, and generally lacks libs.
- The Wrecking Crew by Thomas Frank is good for the lay public.
Much denser is The Road from Mont Pelerin by Philip Mirowski.
- You can thank the Libertarian Mind Virus for much of that.
Much of it is thin cover for promoting precisely that false narrative, and with an exceptionally strong set of corporate backers behind it. I strongly recommend Philip Mirowski's work on the Mont Pelerin Society. Also Robert Proctor on agnotology, and Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway's Merchants of Doubt
http://www.worldcat.org/title/road-from-mont-pelerin-the-mak...
http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=11232
http://www.worldcat.org/title/merchants-of-doubt-how-a-handf...
- That's the thing about propaganda, er, libertarian economics. You have to promote whatever the spin is today, even if it contradicts what you said yesterday. Their followers have etch-a-sketches for brains. Shake them upside down and they are blank again.
edit: I guess I called that guy wrong. Anyhoo, everybody who has read The Road from Mont Pelerin all the way through raise their hands. Only me? The prosecution rests.
- Downvotes for truth, here, I suppose.
You could add in the Mont Pelerin Society,Foundation for Economic Freedom, Atlas Network, and Cato Institute, Mercatus Center, Adam Smith Institute, Mercatus Center.
And personnel: Ludwig von Mises, Leonard Read, Murray Rothbard, Friedrich Hayek, the Kochs (Fred, Charles, David), for completeness.
Mark Ames has an excellent general summary: http://www.alternet.org/visions/true-history-libertarianism-...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Pelerin_Society
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Network
https://www.atlasnetwork.org/partners/global-directory
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_for_Economic_Educ...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato_Institute
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercatus_Center
See, e.g., Philip Mirowski's The Road From Mont Pelerin:
http://www.worldcat.org/title/road-from-mont-pelerin-the-mak...
