All Posts Tagged With: "Communism"
From 1944 to Nineteen Eighty-Four
A longer version of this article appears at the FEE website: www.tinyurl.com/npxxet.
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 [...]
The Sound of Freedom
When I have the chance, I often pose this question to people who have become advocates for liberty: “What was it that first turned you on to these ideas?”
It’s an important question that always produces revealing answers and sometimes some fascinating stories. Liberty, keep in mind, is not automatic or guaranteed. Few people who have [...]
Two Decades Since the Fall
Perspective
Two Decades Since
the Fall
On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall effectively ceased to exist. Remember the sequence: Communist Hungary started letting people pass into Austria and to freedom. Captives of the Soviet bloc left in droves. East Germans, too—thousands of them. The Hungarian government tried to stanch the flow, but the dam had been breached. [...]
A Man Who Knew the Value of Liberty
[This column was adapted from one published first by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy on its website in February 2007.]
A television audience in the millions will feast on the glitz and glamor of Hollywood when the 81st Annual Academy Awards are bestowed February 22. My thoughts will be elsewhere that Sunday night—on a friend [...]
Freedom Works: The Case of Hong Kong
Andrew Morriss is H. Ross and Helen Workman Professor of Law and Professor of Business at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and a regular visitor to Hong Kong. His International Business Transactions students will visit the city in January 2009 as part of a class field trip.
Hong Kong has an impressive reputation for economic freedom [...]
The Soviet Chamber of Horrors: Reminders on the Ninetieth Anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution
In 1842 the German poet Heinrich Heine warned that “Communism, though little discussed now and loitering in the hidden garrets on miserable straw pallets, is the dark hero destined for a great, if temporary, role in the modern tragedy. . . . Wild, gloomy times are roaring toward us. . . . The future smells [...]
1Nov2007 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | ContinuedBook Reviews – 2007/10
- Cannibal Island: Death in a Siberian Gulag
by Nicolas Werth Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling
- Unwarranted Intrusions: The Case Against Government Intervention in the Marketplace
by Martin Fridson Reviewed by Robert Batemarco
- Bully Boy: The Truth About Theodore Roosevelt’s Legacy
by Jim Powell Reviewed by John V. Denson
- Great Philanthropic Mistakes
by Martin Morse Wooster Reviewed by George C. Leef
1Oct2007 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | Continued
Book Reviews – 2007/9
- The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements
by Lynne Viola Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling
- In our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State
by Charles Murray Reviewed by Michael Tanner
- Actual Ethics
by James R. Otteson Reviewed by Tibor Machan
- Black Americans and Organized Labor: A New History
by Paul Moreno Reviewed by George C. Leef
1Sep2007 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | Continued
A Tribute to a Polish Hero
One year ago the world lost a gifted science fiction writer and critic of totalitarianism when Poland’s Stanislaw Lem died in March 2006. Lem was best known internationally as author of the classic Solaris—twice adapted for the silver screen—but the majority of his fiction featured damning allegories against the suppression of the human spirit. Bruce [...]
1Mar2007 | Lawrence W. Reed | 0 comments | ContinuedLudwig von Mises: The Political Economist of Liberty, Part 1
Richard Ebeling is the president of FEE.
Over a professional career that spanned almost three-quarters of the twentieth century, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises was without any exaggeration one of the leading and most important defenders of economic liberty. The ideas of individual freedom, the market economy, and limited government that he defended in the [...]
Novel Economics
Economist Bruce Yandle tells of his first encounter with Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson: “I thought to myself, ‘What arrogance!’” Bruce said. “Here was I, fresh from surviving four years in a rigorous economics Ph.D. program, and I run across this slim book in which a journalist announces that he’s going to teach economics [...]
1Nov2004 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 0 comments | ContinuedEstonia Moves to Liberty
Contributing editor Norman Barry (norman.barry@buckingham.ac.uk) is professor of social and political theory at the University of Buckingham in the U.K. He is the author of An Introduction to Modern Political Theory (St. Martin’s) and Business Ethics (Macmillan).
We have read a lot about former Soviet regimes struggling to shake off the last remnants of communism. It [...]
A Museum You Don’t Want to Miss
More than 150 years ago Karl Marx predicted that communism was inevitable. History, he claimed, was marching inexorably toward a communist paradise. In hindsight it would appear that if anything about communism was inevitable, it was that it would sooner or later be relegated to the status of museum relic. In the capital city of a formerly communist country in eastern Europe, that’s exactly what has happened.
1Mar2004 | Lawrence W. Reed | 0 comments | ContinuedFederal Surveillance: The Threat to Americans’ Security
Contributing editor James Bovard is the author of Terrorism & Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice, and Peace to Rid the World of Evil (Palgrave Macmillan, September 2003).
Since the terrorist attacks on 9/11 the Bush administration has launched many new surveillance programs in the name of homeland security. When critics raised questions about the potential abuses of [...]
The Lessons of Another Tolstoy
Daniel Hager is a writer and consultant in Lansing, Michigan.
This is the tale of another Tolstoy—not Leo, the nineteenth-century Russian count, novelist, and social reformer. This Russian came later, in the twentieth century, and was not of the nobility. His first name is obscure. His good friend Vladimir V. Tchernavin, who recounted his story,referred to [...]
Book Reviews – December 2003
Stalin’s Other War: Soviet Grand Strategy, 1939–1941
by Albert L. Weeks
Rowman & Littlefield • 2002 • 201 pages • $60 hardcover; 24.95 paperback
Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling
For most of the period since the end of World War II the general interpretation about the role of the Soviet Union in the events leading up to the beginning of the war in 1939 [...]
The Pentagon Ramps Up the War on Privacy
David Brown is a freelance writer and editor. This is the first of two parts.
[Editor's Note: As we went to press the U.S. Congress had hampered the Defense Department's ability to carry out the threat to privacy discussed in the following article. Under the provision adopted the Pentagon cannot proceed until it assesses for Congress [...]
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The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy–If We Let it Happen
By Arthur B. Laffer, Stephen Moore, and Peter J. Tanous
