Bauer’s policy for progress suggested funding policies that were diametrically opposed to the recommendations of the alleged new orthodoxy: minimize state ownership and planning, and promote private (foreign) investment instead of suppressing it. He called for professions of faith in the world economy. Strong signs of rebounding world trade and the West’s significant investment in the former colonies augured well for progress. Even more important than trade and investment was what “the people do for themselves”: freed from restrictions, Bauer trusted that “middle-class or ‘bourgeois’ virtues” would prevail.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 1321