VWW: TURBOCAPITALISM - BORN IN WIEN!

Vienna is a left-wing city. And yet another kind of liberalism was created here. The Austrian School of economists developed a radical new way of driving the world economy, with small government, free markets, and low taxation. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were influenced by this approach to liberalising trade. Centred around Nobel prize winner Friedrich von Hayek, Oskar Morgenstern and Ludwig von Mises at the University of Vienna, but actually evolving out of a much earlier group created in 1871, and part of the Vienna Circles of intellectual debate and interdisciplinary thinking, these big thinkers went on to influence western capitalism in profound ways. They should be better known by the Viennese.

There is speculation now that we have passed peak capitalism, with tariffs and protectionism, but free markets have led us to individualism, selfishness, and endless choice. While capitalism is problematic for ecologists, and leaves many countries suffering with inequality and brutal wage cuts, still we have not found a successful alternative. Free markets are associated with freedom itself, and democracy, but they have led us to loneliness, climate collapse and a lack of collective feelings. Growth relies on exclusion of some groups and even some developing countries. Seeing the source of our food, clothes, oil or rare earth minerals is shocking and uncomfortable. For most of us in Western Europe, neoliberalism is all we have ever known, since the 1980s. And indeed there is now just one left-wing government left in the EU (Spain).

So these men have shaped the modern world. Come and learn more about them, and their wild new visions.