I just went to New Delhi to a meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society. I flew from Washington 12,000 km in a matter of hours. To India from Britain once took many weeks, on a ship. To get nice exposure to the sun for people who were rich enough to have windows, their cabins were “port out, starboard home.” So the British word “posh“ describes the fancy folk. Yet a decidedly non-posh American can get to her meeting and back in ten days. It's one sign that we’re vastly richer than our ancestors. Gale Pooley noted recently that a ballpoint pen that sold in 1945 for 25 hours of labor now sells for 27 seconds.
And that’s what the several hundred members of the Mont Pelerin Society know. They are “liberals” in the sense I’ve been using here. They know that a good society, and a rich one with long flights and cheap ballpoints, comes out of an ideology of an adult liberty of permission. It doesn’t come out of the crazy levels of childish regulation, protection, planning, and building projects that modern states undertake, in your country and mine. The state’s sludge,” as Cass Sunstein calls it, shows us down. But to some degree we liberated adults get around it, and keep on innovating. Good for us.
The enthusiasts for childish policies, though, portray the Mont Pelerin Society as a deep, dark conspiracy of the 'neo-liberal' posh—conservative and powerful. I’m the oncoming President of the Society, for a term of two years, and I can tell you that it’s not a conspiracy. It’s a meeting to encourage liberalism. It’s private merely to allow candid exchange of views, under what the British call “Chatham-House rules.” Nor is “neo-liberal.” Our friends on the left use the word to mean “hating the poor,” say, and “willing to call out the army.” Wrong again. The members are not conservative in their evil sense, and certainly not powerful. Non posh.
The Society was founded in 1947 by a little group of liberal thinkers, mainly academics such as Friedrich Hayek, the first president, and Milton Friedman, the 9th. Manuel Ayau, Ramón Diaz, Pedro Schwartz, and Gabriel Calzada have also served.
Real discussions of real liberalism. Good for us.
Weekly column in Folha de São Paulo, Brazil
Translated into Portuguese for the newspaper.
I continue to envy the members of the Mont Pelerin Society. I know that my mind is not worthy, but my heart is.
"To get nice exposure to the sun for people who were rich enough to have windows, their cabins were “port out, starboard home.”"
Etymologically, I agree that's where "posh" comes from. However, it allowed to face the east along the coast of Africa both ways, having more shade than sun during the day. So, "nice exposure to the sun", if not completely false, is a bit of a stretch.