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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: D. Long who wrote (678177)	2/23/2019 11:18:39 AM
From: skinowski	6 Recommendations Recommended By AJ Muckenfus Follies garrettjax lightshipsailor quehubo and 1 more member Respond to of 793851

Good idea. "Atlas Shrugged" comes to mind. Also, Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom". The latter takes a bit more work. Socialism is - inevitably - despotism from the moment of its birth. How else can everyone be made "equal" if not by force? Universal Fairness requires a powerful oligarchy with a monopoly on the use of violence.

To: D. Long who wrote (678177)	2/23/2019 11:27:23 AM
From: SirWalterRalegh	Respond to of 793851

America's 30 Year War ..by Balint Vazsonyi published by Regnery 1998

To: D. Long who wrote (678177)	2/23/2019 1:15:00 PM
From: Neeka	1 Recommendation Recommended By Thehammer Respond to of 793851

Arthur Koestler: Darkness at Noon Whitaker Chambers: Witness

To: D. Long who wrote (678177)	2/23/2019 5:18:09 PM
From: Joe Btfsplk	1 Recommendation Recommended By D. Long Respond to of 793851

I'd add von Mises' HUMAN ACTION and SOCIALISM, plus generous doses of Hayek and Friedman. People also need to know why the leftist vision doesn't work and why the Liberal one does.

To: D. Long who wrote (678177)	2/25/2019 11:25:52 PM
From: James Seagrove	10 Recommendations Recommended By Alan Smithee alanrs Bruce L D. Long garrettjax and 5 more members Respond to of 793851

“The power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbour and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest functionaire possesses who wields the coercive power of the state, and on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work.” Frederick Hayek “When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion – when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing – when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors – when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you – when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice – you may know that your society is doomed.” Ayn Rand

To: D. Long who wrote (678177)

2/25/2019 11:27:20 PM

From: James Seagrove

2 Recommendations

Recommended By
Bruce L
Thehammer

Read Replies (3) | Respond to of 793851

What do you think of Alexander Solzhenitsyn?

AYN RAND: I regard him ideologically as lower than the rulers of Russia. He is the worst public caricature of a monster that has emerged in this age, which displays an awful lot of public caricatures and unappetizing characters. Before you speak of Solzhenitsyn or ask anything about him, please read the letter that he sent to the Soviet authorities shortly before he was deported. Read that letter. It has been published; it has been translated. I read it in the original Russian. In it, that man proclaims, in effect, that he is a totalitarian collectivist. He says so openly – though not in those words. He is merely against Marxism. He wants Russia to remain a dictatorship, but a dictatorship run by the Russian Church. He wants Russian religion, the Greek Orthodox Church, to be a substitute for Marxism. In other words, he wants to take Russia back to the stage before Peter the Great, to the seventeenth century or earlier. He is anti-industrial and wants to take Russia back to being an agrarian country. And that horrible, pretentious person is held as some kind of hero of liberation. He doesn’t want to free the world. He is denouncing the West; he is denouncing Western civilization. He is that ancient, chauvinistic aberration: a Slavophile. He says, in that letter of his, that he wants the Russian government – the Communist Party – to keep all its economic and political power; he lists specifically the power over production, trade, and distribution, over foreign relationships, over the army. All he wants is that the government allow people to speak and write freely. Now remember, he’s a writer.

And in the conclusion of this unspeakable document, he says the following (I am quoting from memory): I want nothing for myself, I am sure that you, the rulers, have never seen and cannot imagine a man who is not asking something for himself – well here I am, please look at me. Is this a “selfless” person? Or is this an example of the worst kind of conventional “selfishness” and vanity? Well, that’s as much of a motive as any religious mystic-altruist would ever project. That’s all that his disinterested “selflessness” means: give me freedom to write, and the other human activities and professions can be enslaved, I’m quite willing to put up with it. With ideas of that kind, to come here and posture as a prophet of freedom is really adding insult to injury. Sure, what Solzhenitsyn wrote about the Soviet concentration camps is true. Better people have said it before. We should consider them, not a man who is philosophically the exact opposite of everything the West stands for or should stand for – a man who is a profound enemy of individualism and of reason. That is my opinion of Mr. Solzhenitsyn.

Boston, Ford Hall Forum, 1976.

To: D. Long who wrote (678177)	4/11/2025 11:37:21 PM
From: Maple MAGA	1 Recommendation Recommended By goldworldnet Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793851

Ayn Rand would have disagreed with your sixth choice. What do you think of Alexander Solzhenitsyn? AYN RAND: I regard him ideologically as lower than the rulers of Russia. He is the worst public caricature of a monster that has emerged in this age, which displays an awful lot of public caricatures and unappetizing characters. Before you speak of Solzhenitsyn or ask anything about him, please read the letter that he sent to the Soviet authorities shortly before he was deported. Read that letter. It has been published; it has been translated. I read it in the original Russian. In it, that man proclaims, in effect, that he is a totalitarian collectivist. He says so openly – though not in those words. He is merely against Marxism. He wants Russia to remain a dictatorship, but a dictatorship run by the Russian Church. He wants Russian religion, the Greek Orthodox Church, to be a substitute for Marxism. In other words, he wants to take Russia back to the stage before Peter the Great, to the seventeenth century or earlier. He is anti-industrial and wants to take Russia back to being an agrarian country. And that horrible, pretentious person is held as some kind of hero of liberation. He doesn’t want to free the world. He is denouncing the West; he is denouncing Western civilization. He is that ancient, chauvinistic aberration: a Slavophile. He says, in that letter of his, that he wants the Russian government – the Communist Party – to keep all its economic and political power; he lists specifically the power over production, trade, and distribution, over foreign relationships, over the army. All he wants is that the government allow people to speak and write freely. Now remember, he’s a writer. And in the conclusion of this unspeakable document, he says the following (I am quoting from memory): I want nothing for myself, I am sure that you, the rulers, have never seen and cannot imagine a man who is not asking something for himself – well here I am, please look at me. Is this a “selfless” person? Or is this an example of the worst kind of conventional “selfishness” and vanity? Well, that’s as much of a motive as any religious mystic-altruist would ever project. That’s all that his disinterested “selflessness” means: give me freedom to write, and the other human activities and professions can be enslaved, I’m quite willing to put up with it. With ideas of that kind, to come here and posture as a prophet of freedom is really adding insult to injury. Sure, what Solzhenitsyn wrote about the Soviet concentration camps is true. Better people have said it before. We should consider them, not a man who is philosophically the exact opposite of everything the West stands for or should stand for – a man who is a profound enemy of individualism and of reason. That is my opinion of Mr. Solzhenitsyn. Boston, Ford Hall Forum, 1976. “Solzhenitsyn stood within a tradition for which Westerners have little more love (in many cases less) than for Soviet communism. He wanted a Christian and authoritarian Russia, not a liberal or democratic one, and under Putin's rule he got as much of what he wanted as any idealist should expect; whereas the other dissidents tended to want either a humane socialism, discredited by the Gorbachev experiment, or liberal capitalism, discredited under Yeltsin. The liberalism and communism that he loathed were (as he rightly said) children of the Enlightenment; the conception of state power that he and Stalin shared was the inheritance of the Mongol khans. Russians may rightly prefer his vision to Stalin's; but it was never ours.”