The Volker Fund bankrolled FEE as a libertarian propaganda outlet

Evidence

In 1946, Leonard Read, a businessman and important figure in the postwar right, had obtained a loan from the Volker Fund to purchase property in Irvington, New York and create the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), an organization the Volker Fund subsidized for many years. Read tended to see the world in black and white, which was why he had earned Luhnow’s trust: “There was no big tent in Read’s world. There was only a core group of ideas. You could either take them or leave them … .” Not surprisingly, Read advocated an inflexible stratagem for defeating socialism: “to move beyond denunciation to ‘upholding its opposite … expertly, proudly, attractively, persuasively’” (quoted in Hoover 2003, 188). Apparently, the late Simons was not judged sufficiently infused with political virtue for Read, because he would shortly criticize Simons’s posthumously published Economic Policy for a Free Society: Some of us here have carefully gone over the galleys of “Economic Policy for a Free Society” by Henry Simons. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 758

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the funding networks story running through the book and to Read as a key organizer of the postwar right. — connects to: The Volker Fund replaced its support for the MPS with its own conference program. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 321; The Volker Fund redirected a charity into American conservative intellectual politics — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 716; Volker Fund wanted an American Road to Serfdom pitched at near-literacy level — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 738 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Volker Fund wanted an American Road to Serfdom pitched at near-literacy level #expands (0.85) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 738
• Volker Fund pushed neoliberal reformulation to serve corporate Cold War interests #expands (0.80) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 762
• Capitalism and Freedom originated as a Volker Fund project delivered a decade late #corroborates (0.80) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 793
• The Chicago School was founded by Simons and Hayek with Volker Fund money #expands (0.80) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 155
• Business funding of libertarian academia was contested over membership composition #expands (0.75) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1457