In honor of the 24th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s collapse, our guest this weekend is our old friend Dr. Yuri Maltsez, a senior fellow here at the Mises Institute and a professor of Economics at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Yuri is famous for having been a Soviet economist during the Gorbachev era and defecting to the United
The Free Market 14, no. 8 (August 1996) “We Russians are doomed to teach mankind,” wrote philosopher Grigory Chaadayev in 1848, “some awful lesson.” The lesson turns out to be more than proving socialism’s brutality and futility. It is also about the unlikelihood that elections alone will resolve a deep social and economic crisis. After the
Volume 12, Number 1 (1996) Murray Newton Rothbard, eminent economist, historian, and philosopher, unquestionably the most ardent advocate of liberty in this century, did more damage to the cause of socialism than any other Western intellectual. To say that Murray Rothbard was a critic of socialism would be a serious understatement. Rothbard saw
Fidel Castro is dead, and the mainstream media in the US and elsewhere are beside themselves with grief over their fallen hero. If you are not sickened by the disease of Castrophilia, it is obvious that there is nothing good to say about this mass murderer, except that he was lucky enough to live into his 90s. I’ve been to Cuba several times.
The Free Market 12, no. 7 (July 1994) Alexandr I. Solzhenitsyn’s return to Russia has engendered more than the usual amount of scaremongering. The author, we are told, is a Pan-Slavic nationalistic and religious fanatic whose views are outdated and irrelevant. Yet Solzhenitsyn used his first speech and press conference in Russia to promote two
The Free Market 13, no. 3 (March 1995) When a people rebels and declares its independence, a central state can let them go or beat them into submission. With the collapse of the Soviet empire, we’ve seen some of both. In Chechnya, and adjacent Ingushetia, however, the Yeltsin government chose mass murder to maintain its evil empire. Rather than
[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
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
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 —
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
What is the Mises Institute?
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.