All Posts Tagged With: "Communism"
What We Don’t Know about History Can Hurt Us
“It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us into trouble. It’s the things we know that just ain’t so.” That famous line, attributed to many authors but apparently said by humorist Henry Wheeler Shaw (aka Josh Billings), applies to history as much as anything. What liberates oppressed people? I was taught [...]
26Oct2011 | John Stossel | 3 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 Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History
In my M.B.A. economics class I emphasize the Austrian view of entrepreneurship, noting that successful entrepreneurs are rewarded for moving resources from lower-valued to higher-valued uses in a free market. Alas I also spend time explaining “political entrepreneurship”: exploiting connections with “the right people” to profit by moving resources from uses consumers would value highly [...]
22Jun2011 | William L. Anderson | 5 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 | ContinuedConfessions of a Secret Marxist
After 33 years of writing articles and columns about capitalism and freedom for The Freeman, I’ve decided to confess. I’m a Marxist, and have been from a very early age. I’m not the kind of Marxist that you normally think of when that term is used. I have nothing in common with Karl. I am [...]
22Sep2010 | Lawrence W. Reed | 15 comments | ContinuedMao: The Unknown Story
In their new book, Mao: The Unknown Story, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday estimate that under Mao Zedong’s rule in China at least 70 million people were killed in one way or another in the name of making a socialist utopia. Jung Chang was a youthful victim of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and [...]
12Jul2010 | Richard M. Ebeling | 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 | ContinuedGulag: A History
Siberia. The word has had a chilling connotation for people around the world for 200 years. Long before Lenin and the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, the tsarist regime had used the vast area that stretches from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific and Arctic Oceans as a place of exile and forced labor [...]
7Jul2010 | Richard M. Ebeling | 1 comment | ContinuedOrient Express to Hell
In 1986 and 1987 I slipped behind the Iron Curtain a few times to study economic perversity and political slavery. In November 1987 I flew into Hungary before heading on to the most repressive regime in Europe. The train from Budapest to Bucharest, Romania, was called the Orient Express. The original Orient Express began in [...]
20May2010 | James Bovard | 4 comments | ContinuedThe Wisdom of Nien Cheng
Nien Cheng, author of Life and Death in Shanghai (1986), died in Washington last November at the age of 94. She was an incredibly courageous woman and the embodiment of grace and wisdom. She loved traditional Chinese culture, but her world was shattered on August 30, 1966, when the Red Guards ransacked her home and, [...]
24Mar2010 | James A. Dorn | 4 comments | ContinuedThe Continuing Fallacy of Government “Creating Jobs”
Adam Smith said it best when he noted that "consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production." Unlike what Reich claims, an economy cannot be oriented solely toward production or solely toward consumption.
25Nov2009 | William L. Anderson | 2 comments | 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 | ContinuedThe 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 [...]
18Nov2009 | Lawrence W. Reed | 3 comments | ContinuedTwo Decades Since the Fall
From “Perspective,” The Freeman, November 2009: 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 [...]
8Nov2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedTwo 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 [...]
23Oct2009 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | ContinuedA 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 [...]
20Jan2009 | Lawrence W. Reed | 7 comments | ContinuedFreedom Works: The Case of Hong Kong
Hong Kong has an impressive reputation for economic freedom and classical-liberal virtues. In a series of articles, Milton Friedman used Hong Kong to show how the power of free markets combined with little else can create wealth, pointing out that its per-capita income rose from 28 percent of Britain’s in 1960 to 137 percent of [...]
1Nov2008 | Andrew P. Morriss | 6 comments | Continued-
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