By 1981, the fund raising was successful enough for Fisher to establish the Atlas Foundation for Economic Research. He took its name from Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand's novel of 1957 depicting the vital role played by experts and men of ideas and the virtues of the right of private property and of a self-interested individualism threatened by the powers of government (see Mühlbauer 2006). The foundation's goal was to coordinate activities and corporate funding among the network of European and American think tanks and to extend it by developing and financing a group of neoliberal organizations outside Western Europe and the United States. De Soto was to be the first and most successful outcome of this initiative.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 1943