Eastern Europe

"According to sources, Hans Rausing was happy about his new role after selling his share of ownership. He had proven that he was an industrialist, which had been an important pursuit for him. Money and fame, however, had not been of much importance to him. “Hans never wanted to go down in history as the world’s richest man,” stated a person close to him. He could finally retire to his estate Wadhurst Park in Sussex, England, and use his fortune to do things that truly interested him. One such area was to finance and contribute with expertise and networks to develop companies in Eastern Europe and Russia."

"These insights resonated powerfully with Gibbs. He’d been struck not by how much people knew about the world and the economy, but by how little they knew. How on earth would a few bureaucrats, such as himself as a 26-year-old sitting on the interdepartmental committee deciding what imports to allow into New Zealand in 1966, know what was best? Was it more sardines they needed, or shoes? Surely the millions of voluntary decisions made every day by millions of people in a free and open marketplace were more likely to generate the necessary wisdom than a bureaucratic panel? Gibbs had travelled around Eastern Europe many times and seen many factories built under communism that were empty and abandoned. Either they had been built in the wrong place or their products did not have a market. So much of the planners’ investment was completely wasted because they had not used the market to allocate resources."