All Posts Tagged With: "socialism"
Not Just What, But How
Only in a free-market economy, characterized by the private ownership of capital, could we figure out not just what to produce, but how best to produce it.
12Jan2012 | Steven Horwitz | 4 comments | ContinuedThe Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism
What do the following have in common: hungry Venezuelans, starving North Koreans, ecological devastation in the former Soviet Union, and functionally illiterate students in Washington, D.C., high schools? Give up? They are all consequences of socialism. In his book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism, economics professor and National Review editor Kevin Williamson gives the [...]
4Jan2012 | George C. Leef | 4 comments | ContinuedHayek and the Presumption of Goodwill
In a world of heated ideological differences and partisan political conflict, it’s tempting to paint our opponents as stupid and evil. We need to get past that. We need to keep learning.
13Dec2011 | Sandy Ikeda | 13 comments | ContinuedBack on the Road to Serfdom: The Resurgence of Statism
Since the housing bubble burst in 2007, America’s social and economic troubles have mounted rapidly. Unemployment remains high, saving and investment low. The federal government is desperate to suck in enough money to pay its enormous tab for welfare and warfare a bit longer. Our politics have become increasingly vicious. About two-thirds of the people [...]
30Nov2011 | George C. Leef | 2 comments | ContinuedEconomics as Ideology: Keynes, Laski, Hayek, and the Creation of Contemporary Politics
Why do people hold the views that they do, including and especially their political and ideological views? That question has generated a vast library of what has generally come to be called “psychobabble,” wherein the author attempts to “deconstruct” his biographical subject and demonstrate why the subject’s upbringing and social circumstances made him the way [...]
20Oct2011 | Richard M. Ebeling | 1 comment | ContinuedLiberty and the Power of Ideas
A belief that I stress again and again is that we are at war—not a physical, shooting war, but nonetheless a war that is fully capable of becoming just as destructive and just as costly. The battle for the preservation and advancement of liberty is a battle not against personalities but against opposing ideas. The [...]
25May2011 | Lawrence W. Reed | 9 comments | ContinuedThe New Holy Wars: Economic Religion Versus Environmental Religion in Contemporary America
We all, like sheep, have gone astray. We have sinned. We must humble ourselves. We must repent and turn from our wicked ways. These are the messages of our modern-day secular religions: economic religion and environmental religion. Throughout The New Holy Wars, Robert H. Nelson uses theological reasoning to explore them. His book is an [...]
21Apr2011 | Art Carden | 1 comment | 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 | ContinuedCoercion is What Makes the Difference
This past weekend, the New York Times ran a story on the Park Slope Food Co-op in Brooklyn, NY. It seems some of the members of the cooperative grocery store are hiring their nannies or other non-family members to work the occasional shift at the store as required by its by-laws. What follows is a [...]
22Feb2011 | Carl Oberg | 4 comments | ContinuedWhy Not Socialism?
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Soviet Union collapsed, the Berlin Wall came down, millions were lifted out of oppression, and the Mises/Hayek critique of socialism was (supposedly) vindicated. As the world slogs through the continuing recession, however, dissenting voices grow louder. The late G. A. Cohen, an iconic political philosopher of the [...]
22Dec2010 | Art Carden | 6 comments | ContinuedThe Great Money Binge: Spending Our Way to Socialism
“Can we do it again?” asks Amity Shlaes in her introduction to this book. She is asking about the Reagan revolution of the 1980s. In his final chapter George Melloan answers yes. But it won’t be easy because of the great expansion of government in 2008-09. He calls for a new vision of “Supply-Side Prosperity.” [...]
24Nov2010 | Gerald P. O'Driscoll, Jr. | 0 comments | ContinuedScotland: Seven Centuries since William Wallace
I am an American of Scottish extraction, and few things stir my blood more than the colorful history of my ancestral homeland. Through the centuries, rugged Scots stand tall among those heroes who gave every ounce of their lives for such noble ideals as liberty, independence, and self-reliance. Mel Gibson’s epic film Braveheart, released in [...]
24Nov2010 | Lawrence W. Reed | 7 comments | ContinuedWho’s Afraid of Socialism?
It is not obvious to me a priori that the American variant of the welfare state is superior in every respect to the European variant.
13Aug2010 | Sheldon Richman | 48 comments | 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 | 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 | ContinuedFree Markets Blossom in Vietnam
Americans think of the Vietnam War as the first armed conflict in our history that we lost. Tanks and troops from the communist North captured the South’s capital of Saigon on April 30, 1975, renamed it Ho Chi Minh City, and ended decades of war. Who can forget the scenes of the last frenzied evacuation [...]
7Jul2010 | Lawrence W. Reed | 0 comments | ContinuedTariffs are Legal Plunder
Everybody has an issue he reacts to most intensely. [Frederic] Bastiat’s was tariffs. And his most barbed comments were directed against those who favored governmental protection of national industry from foreign competition. He thought this legal method of cheating consumers by keeping prices above the market was a perfect example of how governments plunder their [...]
7Jul2010 | Dean Russell | 1 comment | Continued-
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