All Posts Tagged With: "socialism"
Gulag: 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 | 2 comments | 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 | ContinuedFriedrich Hayek
In this first full-length biography of Friedrich Hayek—economist, thinker, Nobel laureate, and political philosopher of the rule of law, liberty, and limited government—Alan Ebenstein offers a veritable intellectual travelogue of Hayek’s journey through life. As a student, we learn, Hayek was mildly socialist. However, Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises’s devastating critique, Socialism(1922), “fundamentally altered [his] [...]
30Jun2010 | Bettina Bien Greaves | 0 comments | ContinuedR. C. Hoiles and Public Schooling
In a letter dated May 23, 1946, the libertarian publisher R. C. Hoiles wrote to Leonard E. Read, who would establish the Foundation for Economic Education later that same year. Hoiles advised Read on what he believed was the underlying cause of America’s alarming shift from individual liberty toward socialism: I am inclined to think [...]
20May2010 | Wendy McElroy | 2 comments | ContinuedIs Obama a Socialist?
President Obama is not a socialist, at least not in the usual ways that term is used. However, that hardly means his ideas are not of concern.
22Apr2010 | Steven Horwitz | 56 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 | ContinuedCapitalism versus the Free Market
My lecture “Capitalism versus the Free Market,” sponsored by the Future of Freedom Foundation and held at George Mason University Monday night, can be viewed here. Economic Liberty Lecture Series: Sheldon Richman from The Future of Freedom Foundation on Vimeo.
2Mar2010 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | ContinuedTGIF: The State of Obama’s Union
Despite what some popular right-wing talk-show hosts claim, Barack Obama is not pushing Marxism, revolutionary or otherwise. He’s pushing good old American progressive-corporate elitism. Read TGIF here.
30Jan2010 | Sheldon Richman | 2 comments | ContinuedIs the Name “Capitalism” Worth Keeping? Part 2
The deeper problem with the terms “capitalism” and “socialism” is that they don’t indicate the institutional arrangements under the systems would operate
7Jan2010 | Steven Horwitz | 21 comments | ContinuedSenate Reaches Deal on Public Option
“After days of secret talks, Senate Democrats tentatively agreed Tuesday night to drop a full-blown government-run insurance option from sweeping health care legislation, several officials said, a concession to party moderates whose votes are critical to passage of President Barack Obama’s top domestic priority.” (AP, Wednesday) It’s not over til the Senate votes. FEE Timely [...]
9Dec2009 | Mike Van Winkle | 0 comments | ContinuedMonsieur Bastiat, Call Your Office
In September I lectured at the Liberty Weekend Dedicated to the Life and Legacy of Frédéric Bastiat, sponsored by the Polish-American Foundation for Economic Research and Education (PAFERE) in Warsaw. Preparing for my visit, I reread Bastiat’s great book The Law. Oh do we need Bastiat today! The Law is the kind of book you [...]
18Nov2009 | Sheldon Richman | 5 comments | ContinuedNot with a Bang But a Whimper
Social change can be revolutionary, sudden, and swift. More commonly it moves at a glacier pace. Yet glaciers work great change, and great damage, given enough time.
3Nov2009 | Ross Levatter | 2 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 | ContinuedFrustrating Michael Moore
Whether he realizes it or not, Michael Moore favors a system in which an elite necessarily would make critical decisions for the rest of us. He’d be incredulous to hear that, but if he ever comes to understand it, libertarians might end up with an unlikely ally.
16Oct2009 | Sheldon Richman | 3 comments | ContinuedFrom 1944 to Nineteen Eighty-Four
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 awaiting them. Both valued freedom, though they understood it differently. Orwell, a man of the “left,” could not remain silent in the face of the horrors of Stalinism. [...]
4Sep2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued-
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