All Posts Tagged With: "collectivism"
Walter Lippmann: The Impossibilities of Social Planning
At the beginning of the twentieth century, observed historian A. J. P. Taylor, a law-abiding Englishman’s conscious relations with the government were limited to his contacts with the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked, and if he wanted to travel abroad he could do so without [...]
21Sep2011 | Harold B. Jones Jr. | 2 comments | ContinuedTyranny Afoot: Arthur Koestler’s Communist Chronicles
“You want to stifle the Republic in blood. How long must the footsteps of freedom be gravestones? Tyranny is afoot; she has torn her veil, she carries her head high, she treads over our dead bodies.” —Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon Perhaps no author better chronicled the disastrous, soul-crushing European political experiments of the middle [...]
21Sep2011 | Bruce Edward Walker | 2 comments | ContinuedThe Civil War and the Statist Mentality
On April 12, 1861, the American Civil War began with the Confederate bombardment of the U.S. military’s Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. Nearly four bloody years later to the day, the war ended with Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. This issue of The Freeman is largely devoted to [...]
23Mar2011 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedCommonwealth
Some two decades after the collapse of communism, socialist intellectuals still scramble to rehabilitate Marx and collectivist social theory in general, with Duke University professor Michael Hardt and Italian sociologist Antonio Negri leading the bunch. Academics are attracted to their radical critique of existing capitalist institutions. Non-academics and educated laypersons on the left are attracted [...]
23Mar2011 | David L. Prychitko | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Function of The Freeman
Editor’s Note: The Freeman began publication before it became part of the Foundation for Economic Education in 1956. Its first issue was published in 1950, with Henry Hazlitt, author of Economics in One Lesson, as an editor and FEE founder Leonard E. Read a member of the board of directors. What follows was originally part [...]
22Sep2010 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | ContinuedWilson’s War: How Woodrow Wilson’s Great Blunder Led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin and World War II
It is difficult for many of us to understand the almost euphoric enthusiasm with which millions of Europeans marched off to war in the summer of 1914. For almost a century the people of Europe had, in general, lived through an amazing time in which living standards for practically everyone reached heights never before known [...]
9Jul2010 | Richard M. Ebeling | 3 comments | ContinuedThe Woman and the Dynamo: Isabel Paterson and the Idea of America
It is a curious footnote in the history of the libertarian movement that three of its leading inspirations voted for Franklin Roosevelt for president. The irreverent H. L. Mencken voted as much against Hoover as he did for FDR. Ayn Rand, like many, bought into Roosevelt’s rhetoric of fiscal discipline. But Isabel Paterson knew better, [...]
9Jul2010 | Jude Blanchette | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia
Throughout the 1930s the propaganda machines of the Nazi and Soviet regimes did all in their power to insist that they were ideological enemies, diametrically opposed to each other in every conceivable way. There were critics of totalitarianism who emphasized the similarities in the two systems, but theirs was a minority view among many intellectuals, [...]
9Jul2010 | Richard M. Ebeling | 1 comment | ContinuedWhat Can Friends of Freedom Learn from the Socialists?
On March 14, 1883, a German philosopher living in exile in London passed away. When he was buried three days later in a modest grave where his wife had been laid to rest two years earlier, fewer than ten people were present, half of them family members. His closest friend spoke at the gravesite and [...]
1Jul2010 | Richard M. Ebeling | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Health Care Debate Was “Meaningful”?
Let’s give credit where credit is due. David Brooks does say one true thing in his New York Times column, “The Values Question”, on government health care reform: “The system after reform will look as it does today, only bigger and more expensive.” Brooks is certainly right that no “health care reform” proposal with any [...]
24Feb2010 | Charles Johnson | 1 comment | ContinuedFrom 1944 to Nineteen Eighty-Four
A longer version of this article appears here. I’m inclined to think of George Orwell and F. A. Hayek at the same time. Both showed great courage in writing the truth, undaunted by the consequences. Both valued freedom, though they understood it differently. Orwell, a man of the “left,” could not remain silent in the [...]
18Nov2009 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | ContinuedAre We Really all Healthcare Collectivists Now?
“We have to do something about health care.” The scariest word in that sentence is not something. It’s we. The first-person plural form is not merely a convenience, as in “We’re in for a cold winter.” It indicates that decisions about “the healthcare system” should be made collectively, with one decision binding everyone. That’s collectivism. [...]
23Sep2009 | Sheldon Richman | 7 comments | ContinuedObama's Message to Kids
From Barack Obama’s speech to schoolchildren, which even many conservatives praised: And even when you’re struggling, even when you’re discouraged, and you feel like other people have given up on you — don’t ever give up on yourself. Because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country.
9Sep2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedAre We Really All Healthcare Collectivists Now?
“We have to do something about health care.” The scariest word in that sentence is not something. It’s we. The first-person plural form is not merely a convenience, as in “We’re in for a cold winter.” It indicates that decisions about “the healthcare system” are to be made collectively, with one decision binding everyone. That’s [...]
31Jul2009 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | ContinuedTGIF: Are We Really All Healthcare Collectivists Now?
“We have to do something about health care.” The scariest word in that sentence is not something. It’s we. TGIF is here.
31Jul2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedIndividualism Clashes with Cooperation? It Just Ain’t So!
Individualists get a bad rap in politics these days. That should come as no surprise; politics these days is dominated by electoral politics, and electoral politics is an essentially anti-individualistic enterprise. With free markets and other forms of voluntary association, people who can’t agree on what’s worthwhile can go their own ways. But the point [...]
20Jan2009 | Charles Johnson | 5 comments | ContinuedEimi Mine
E. E. Cummings is one of the most beloved American poets of the twentieth century. He perhaps is best known to contemporary readers for his experimental and playful verse in the Modernist tradition. But he also wrote two important prose works that unfortunately have been relegated to relative obscurity. The first, The Enormous Room, is [...]
1Dec2008 | Bruce Edward Walker | 2 comments | Continued-
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