[This week marks the one-year anniversary of the death of Yuri Maltsev. Dr. Maltsev had been an economist in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev, and defected to the United States in 1989. This article is an adaptation of a lecture written by Dr. Maltsev for the 2011 Austrian Scholars Conference in Auburn, Alabama.] The opening lines of the state
President Bill Clinton went to Russia, a country whose economy is still crippled by massive state ownership and control, where private property is not secure, contracts are not enforced, and enterprise is free in name only. What did he say? He opened his speech with praise for Stalin’s military victories, which occurred in the midst of the Gulag,
Russia’s ruling elite finds incessant armed conflicts necessary for its own survival. Having claimed that the intervention in Chechnya is meant to “punish terrorism” and defend Russians from Chechen terrorist bombings, Yeltsin’s government is unleashing another genocidal war against Chechnya and other Muslim parts of Russia. This perfectly
The Moscow hostage crisis ended in a way one might expect, through massive violence inflicted by a state that has little regard for human life and an intense focus on displaying power. Russian troops pumped in poison gas that ended up killing 115 of the people the authorities were supposed to be rescuing. Vladimir Putin apologized for the loss of
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, writer, Nobel Prize winner, and the most famous Soviet dissident died at the age of 89 on August 3, 2008 in his home near Moscow. He lived a long and hard life, but he died the way that he wanted to: “He wanted to die in the summer — and he died in the summer,” his wife Natalya said. “He wanted to die at home —
Lenin’s slogan, “Marxism is Almighty Because It Is True,” was displayed practically everywhere in the former Soviet Union. My first encounter with Karl Marx came in the first grade of elementary school in the city of Kazan on the banks of the great Volga River. His picture was printed on the first page of the first textbook I opened. “Dedushka
In 1918, the Soviet Union became the first country to promise universal “cradle-to-grave” healthcare coverage, to be accomplished through the complete socialization of medicine. The “right to health” became a “constitutional right” of Soviet citizens. The proclaimed advantages of this system were that it would “reduce costs” and eliminate the
Mises Institute: What were the origins of what is now called the Tea Party movement? Yuri Maltsev: As we explain in our book, the modern Tea Party movement began with a fundraiser by Ron Paul supporters on December 16th, 2007 (the 234th anniversary of the pre-revolutionary Boston Tea Party) and a backlash against the policies of President George
Patrick Barron, Professor of Austrian Economics at the University of Iowa pointed my attention to the following article: The Chemist’s War: The little-told story of how the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition with deadly consequences. http://www.slate.com/id/2245188/pagenum/all/ Here’s a quote from the article: Frustrated that
Our booming green-industrial complex built up by administrations of both parties in the US is effectively using the United Nations, its thirty two “sister” institutions — such as the World Bank, UNESCO, and numerous “tribunals” — and hundreds of training and research centers. This huge international bureaucratic buildup is already employing over a
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The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.