Lane rejected the idea that donors should not dictate recipients’ views

Evidence

Crane to Rose Wilder Lane, November 21, 1957. JCP, box 52. This note was in response to a long missive from Lane, with whom Crane kept up a voluminous correspondence, in which she berated him for having any sense that “it is improper for the man who pays the fiddler to dictate the tune.” It was, she said, “a fallacy promulgated by the eggheads—who get the money, but because they cannot earn it in a free market, must affect to despise money, and money-earners, in an effort to protect their own self-respect.” Lane to Crane, November 15, 1957. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1525

Categorization

• XREF: Directly bears on the funder-influence question running through the whole neoliberalism historiography — who actually controlled the network’s intellectual direction. — connects to: MPS members resisted donor interference in program decisions — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1466
• CANDY: A pithy, quotable exchange — ‘the man who pays the fiddler dictates the tune’ as an open funding philosophy.
• SHARE: For anyone following the Mont Pelerin funding controversy (Van Horn/Mirowski work on Crane and the Volker Fund).