Paul Anthony Samuelson (May 15, 1915 – December 13, 2009), first American Nobel Prize laureate (1970) has died, at the age of 94. I was lucky to meet him at the M.I.T on the glorious day of November 9, 1989, the day of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the day that symbolized the end of the world system of the communist slavery. We are all advised
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 27, no. 10 (October 2009) 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
Volume 11, No. 2 (2008) Making Poor Nations Rich is a serious attempt to further develop the theory of entrepreneurship. Fourteen chapters of the book cover the most important issues of our time: wealth and poverty of nations, the role of entrepreneurship in economic and human development, economic performance of transitional economies with the
The Free Market 8, no. 8 (August 1990) The Soviet Union was the first country to introduce a fully nationalized healthcare system. To the cheers of Western “progressives,” Lenin signed a decree in 1919 stating that every Soviet citizen had a right to free medical care. Looking at the history of Soviet health decrees, it appears as if the system
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 The author, we are told, is a Pan-Slavic nationalistic and religious fanatic whose views are outdated and irrelevant.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
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
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.