The Obituary ($$) in this week’s Economist is of Ralph Harris — or Lord Harris of High Cross as he became late in his remarkably productive life. Along with the late Arthur Seldon, Harris made Britain’s Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) an intellectual powerhouse showing the benefits of markets and freedom under the rule of law.
I met Harris only once, in 1999 at the Summer University in Aix-en-Provence. We sat together in the hotel lobby one morning sipping coffee. (Or perhaps he had tea; I don’t recall.) He was elegant yet spirited, his smile ready and his wits sharp. I liked him very much.
Here’s a passage from The Economist‘s fine obit:
To critics, the ideas of the IEA were all
the worse for being “German”. Their source was Friedrich Hayek, in fact
an Austrian. Mr Harris, fresh down from Cambridge in 1947, had fallen
under the spell of Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom”. Serfdom was all
around him then: ration books, travel restrictions, the persistent
shadow of wartime central planning, and most of all the depressing
disposition of people to do what they were told and to suppose that
this was modern life. He never believed it. The way to freedom was to
unleash the millions of individual actions that made up a working
economy, and never to seek to control them.
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