In the early years of the MPS, funds were a perennial source of anxiety. Efforts to raise money to fund travel to conferences frequently failed, leaving the Society dependent on the contributions of small think tanks like the Volker Fund. The conservative businessmen who bankrolled many of the initial think tanks—Lewis Brown of Johns-Mansville, a major roofing and insulation corporation, who founded the American Enterprise Association, and B. E. Hutchinson, a Chrysler executive and NAM regular who gave generously to organizations like FEE—were not interested in the Mont Pèlerin Society. Many conservatives in the business community shared Crane's chariness about giving money to European intellectuals to do nothing in particular except meet and talk to one another. The Rockefeller Foundation declined to make money available to the Society, on the grounds that it would create a precedent for funding requests from “Communist and dirigiste” organizations.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 1454