Wall Street Journal Europe, January 25, 1987. Bartering Across East Bloc Borders by James Bovard Socialism makes bad neighbors. This past summer, a Czech border guard stopped a Polish family leaving Czechloslovakia and ordered a Polish kid to take off his new Czech shoes “because taking children’s shoes out of the country is prohibited.” The […]
Update: Here’s a more recent piece I wrote on the World Bank continuing to finance tyrants. A U.N. Special Rapporteur reported in 2015 that the World Bank’s approach “to human rights is incoherent, counterproductive and unsustainable. For most purposes, the World Bank is a human rights-free zone.” Mises Institute, December 13, 2021 Raiding the World […]
Thomas Szasz, the great Hungarian-American champion of freedom, was born 100 years ago today. Tom was one of the great heroes of liberty of the modern era. Scholar Sheldon Richman aptly labeled Szasz “the most underappreciated libertarian.” His work had severed the chains on vast numbers of people wrongfully incarcerated because officialdom did not approve […]
Vox is whooping up the wacky notion that “sex was better under socialism.” Tell that to Romanian women forced to undergo monthly gyno exams to outlaw abortions because the government proclaimed in 1985 that “the fetus is the socialist property of the whole society… Those who refuse to have children are deserters.” Women’s reproductive lives […]
Millennials like Communism?!? I was vaccinated against it when I traveled to Romania, dodging secret agent hookers, surly clerks, and gullible guards with machine guns. I avoided arrest and whacked hell out of the regime in the New York Times after I returned. Two years later, an uprising ended with the execution of the country’s […]
Some folks think that I have only recently become cynical. Actually, my skepticism has a long pedigree… xxx New York Times, December 20, 1987 BUSINESS FORUM: ECONOMIC COLLAPSE; Eastern Europe, the New Third World By JAMES BOVARD IN the wake of the summit talks between President Reagan and the Soviet leader Mikhail S. […]
Mises Institute, November 20, 2017 The Daily Hell of Life in the Soviet Bloc by James Bovard This month is the 100th anniversary of the Communist Party’s seizure of power in Petrograd, Russia. British Guardian columnist Paul Mason recent declared that the Soviet revolution provided “a beacon to the rest of humanity, no matter how […]
