All Posts Tagged With: "Soviet Union"
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 | ContinuedAn Impossible Job
Conventional wisdom has it that the more complex a nation’s economy, the more government oversight and regulation are needed to keep it from spinning out of control. It follows that government must grow in size and complexity along with the economy. Apparently, however, our government has become so vast and complex that it may have [...]
24Feb2011 | Richard W. Fulmer | 2 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 | 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 | ContinuedCommon Versus Government Property
A central contribution of Elinor Ostrom, which earned her a share of the 2009 Nobel Prize in economics, was to reclaim the commons as a legitimate form of property. (For more detail, see Peter Boettke’s December 2009 Freeman article.) Organization theorist Dick Langlois always makes it a practice in his European economic history class to [...]
19Apr2010 | Kevin A. Carson | 52 comments | ContinuedDangerous Historical Myths
One of the most powerful influences on human affairs is historical myth—beliefs about the past that are simply wrong. Some historical myths have far-reaching and baleful effects because they shape the way people understand not only the past but also the present, leading them to make harmful or even dangerous decisions. This seems to be [...]
5Jan2010 | Stephen Davies | 6 comments | 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
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 Tribute to the Polish People
The cause of liberty saw memorable highs and unconscionable lows in 1989. Surely that year will be best remembered as the year Soviet hegemony over central Europe disintegrated, paving the way for the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself in 1991. Free people everywhere should toast the brave people of one nation in particular–Poland–for the [...]
23Sep2009 | Lawrence W. Reed | 7 comments | ContinuedBook Reviews – September 2007
- 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
Ludwig von Mises: The Political Economist of Liberty, Part II
Mises’s defense of classical liberalism against the various forms of collectivism was not limited “merely” to the economic benefits of private property.
1Jun2006 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | ContinuedWhen Safety Nets Fail
An elderly woman sat on the stone steps of the St.
Alexander Nevsky Cathedral clutching a small
handful of wildflowers picked from a field
somewhere. She offered them up to any passerby, hoping
to earn just a few cents for them.The air in Sofia was
frigid, but at least the rain had finally stopped. I wondered
if she had sat there in the rain the day before. I suspected
she was there every day.
Vorkuta to Perm: Russia’s Concentration-Camp Museums and My Father’s Story
My father, Arcadi Berdichevsky, was executed at Vorkuta on the Arctic Circle in the Soviet Union on March 30, 1938. Last October I visited the former concentration-camp town. Copies of files detailing his arrest, indictment, and execution order were sent to me by the FSB, successor to Russia’s notorious KGB (formerly OGPU secret police). Incredibly, [...]
1Jul2005 | Jon Basil Utley | 2 comments | ContinuedI, Liberal
In October a few of us at FEE traveled all the way to Tbilisi, Georgia, one of the former Soviet Union’s imperial possessions, to put on a two-day student seminar in the political economy of freedom. Georgia is a scenic country with gracious people. We enjoyed warm hospitality throughout our visit. The Georgians are struggling [...]
1Feb2005 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedWhy Socialism Is Impossible
In the nineteenth century, critics of socialism generally made two arguments against the establishment of a collectivist society. First, they warned that under a regime of comprehensive socialism the ordinary citizen would be confronted with the worst of all imaginable tyrannies. In a world in which all the means of production were concentrated in the [...]
1Oct2004 | Richard M. Ebeling | 2 comments | ContinuedThe Lasting Legacy of the Reagan Revolution
Former President Ronald Reagan passed away June 5 at the age of 93. Both while he was in office, from 1981 to 1989, and in the years since, Reagan has been loved and adored by many on “the right” and hated and ridiculed by most on “the left.” During his years as president he represented [...]
1Jul2004 | Richard M. Ebeling | 1 comment | Continued-
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