As part of his larger campaign to warn the Western world about the imminent threat of left-wing totalitarianism, Friedrich Hayek (then still an economist at the London School of Economics) delivered a lecture at the Economic Club in Detroit, Michigan on April 23, 1945.1 He was on a book tour promoting his surprise best-seller, The Road to Serfdom (1944). In Detroit he proselytized: “I think there is a great educational task to be fulfilled. We must make the masses of people learn and understand the problem that is before us, make them capable of discriminating between methods which will achieve the end and methods which are empty promises, and particularly tell them that there may be desperate palliatives like inflationary measures which in the short run may keep employment high, but in the long run make the situation much more difficult than it was before.” Within two days of the event, Hayek met with the businessman Harold Luhnow—then president of the Volker Fund—in Chicago. Luhnow offered to provide financial support for Hayek in his educational quest, since he too had been searching for intellectual weapons to curb the power of government in the postwar era.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 715