Joseph Pearce
Wilhelm Röpke developed what was called “humane economics,” which placed the dignity of the human person at the core of economic thought, theory, and practice.
Wilhelm Röpke
In August 1938, as the world teetered on the brink of a second World War, only twenty years after the ending of the previous global conflagration, a group of economists met in Paris to discuss how to address the economic and political crisis of the time. The Walter Lippman Colloquium was named after the famous American journalist, whose recently published book The Good Society had inspired the French philosopher, Louis Rougier, to call the meeting of influential economists.
With patriotism poisoned in Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, and with socialism turning toward totalitarianism in Stalin’s Soviet Union, the group of economists sought to find ways in which the world economy could serve the cause of peace and freedom. Most of those in attendance sought socialist or free market capitalist solutions, many of which have since been tried and found wanting or, which is worse, have laid the foundations for the globalist tyranny which now plagues the world.
There was, however, one economist at the colloquium who spoke with wisdom and clarity. This was Wilhelm Röpke, a German economist who had, with his family, left his native land in 1933 upon the rise to power of the Nazis. At the time of the colloquium, he had a position with the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.
Having rejected the socialism of his youth and the free market ideas of Ludwig von Mises, with which he had once agreed, he developed what was called “humane economics,” which placed the dignity of the human person at the core of economic thought, theory, and practice. He was a political decentralist, mistrusting the power of the state while also rejecting the naivete of believing that the market can ever be free from manipulation by those possessing economic and political power. » Read More
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2024/10/unheeded-wisdom-economic-wasteland-joseph-pearce.html
