Global warming - international organizations promoting free society - NR's Guide to the New Majority

National Review, Dec 11, 1995 by Edwin J. Feulner, Jr.

THE friends of freedom are alive and well all over the world.

Consider The Mont Pelerin Society: What began on a Swiss mountain in 1947 when Friedrich von Hayek assembled 36 economists, philosophers, and entrepreneurs with a shared commitment to the free society, is now an international network of more than five hundred academics, polemicists, and entrepreneurs of ideas from forty countries.

Now we see these same ideas politically dominant everywhere we look. In Western Europe, for example, the intellectual revolution sparked by the original Mont Pelerin Society gathering has been carried on for nearly forty years by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), a group of academics led for many years by Lord Harris of High Cross and Arthur Seldon, and now ably guided by John Blundell.

Using the IEA model, the late Sir Anthony Fisher, and more recently his successors Alex Chafuen and Leonard Liggio, have helped establish more than one hundred think tanks around the world, all involved in developing and propagating conservative ideas.

It is no coincidence that the institution in America most closely identified with Hayek, the University of Chicago, has led the global revolution in economic thinking -- a revolution that has earned the Chicago school more Nobel Prizes in economic science than any other institution in the world.

The Chicago Boys, as they are affectionately known, have changed the economic face of the world. After the ouster of Salvador Allende, General Pinochet called in the Chicago Boys and gave them carte blanche to fix the country's Marxist economy. After they had done that, they showed Chile how to replace its government social-security system with a private system that is today the envy of the world (and should be a model for reform here in the United States). The local architects of the Chilean miracle later established the Instituto Libertad y Desarrolo in Santiago, which under the leadership of Christian Larroulet has set new standards for the advancement of the free society.

There are now numerous institutions where a conservative education can be had south of the border as well, starting with the Universidad Francisco Marroquin, a private university in Guatemala, founded by Manuel Ayau. In Mexico, the Center for Free Enterprise Research (founded by Luis Pazos and now ably led by Roberto Salinas) and the Ludwig von Mises Institute (headed by Carolina de Bolivar) both have helped change the terms and tone of Mexico's national political dialogue, influencing not only the conservative party, PAN, but also the long-entrenched ruling party, the PRI. UCLA's Clay Laforce lends his considerable expertise to promoting sensible policies throughout the region.

Argentina and Brazil also have free-market institutes, including the Centro Estudios Sobre Libertad in Buenos Aires and the Instituto Liberal de Rio in Porto Alegre, as do Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Paraguay, and several other countries. In Peru, Hernando de Soto has been studying entrepreneurship, especially what the scholars like to call the "micro-enterprise," (a/k/a the "little guy," trying to eke out a living despite the many obstacles thrown in his way by government).

In the Pacific region, Greg Lindsay's Centre for Independent Studies is the dominant free-market institution in Australia and New Zealand. In fact, New Zealand -- a social basket case just a few years ago -- now has one of the freest economies in the world, according to the Heritage Foundation's annual "Index of Economic Freedom." It has earned this honor by becoming one of the world's most aggressive privatizers, by deregulating the labor market, and by loosening the government's control over the economy. There, too, ideas that a decade ago were considered anathema are now broadly accepted across the political spectrum.

IN ASIA, while many academics and intellectuals are strong advocates of the free society, there is not yet an institutional framework to promote these ideas. Even in a huge country like India, which has a strong Western tradition and now understands the dynamics of privatization and entrepreneurship, there is no dominant free-market research institute.

South Africa is a pleasant surprise. There, the Free Market Foundation, led by Leon Louw and Temba Nolutshungu, has been helping for more than a decade now to design a real market economy for the new government. In Israel, plagued by a ponderous, bureaucratic socialist economy, the intellectual opposition is led by Robert Loewenberg's Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (whose economic-studies program is directed by the Hoover Institution's flat-tax guru Alvin Rabushka) and Daniel Doron's Israel Center for Social and Economic Progress. The two Israeli think tanks keep reminding the Israeli government and people what needs to be done to fix the economy; the government just doesn't do it.

In the Czech Republic, Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus's vigorous privatization program followed the Thatcher model. By making the Czech people shareholders in the newly privatized enterprises, Klaus has given them an important stake in the new system. Jiri Schwarz's Liberalni Institut provides the intellectual underpinnings. As a result, the Czech Republic is to the former Soviet Empire what Chile is to Latin America.