Dear Friends of Liberty!

I would like to invite you for a fabulous study tour with friends to Italy, France, Spain and Tunisia departing on December 30, 2010 and back January 15, 2011.  

We will explore Rome, Vatican and Civitavecchia, meet with fellow libertarians, classical liberals and anarchocapitalists  and then cruise  Mediterranean on fantastic Italian ship Costa Magica.  We will visit Italian, French, Spanish and Tunisian ports. I would be glad to send you our fascinating itinerary.

Fee of $2,500 per person includes airfare from Chicago (airfare could be lower or higher  from other airports) to Leonardo da Vinci Airport in Rome, fabulous Mediterranean cruise, the New Year Eve dinner, accommodations at 4-5 Stars hotels, transfers, local transportation, travel insurance, entrance fees and all breakfasts and all meals aboard. Similar itineraries are offered by universities and travel organizations for two-three times more! We could reduce our costs by directly contacting travel vendors and friends in Italy rather than going through the middlemen – the U.S. – based travel agencies.

You will never forget New Year’s 2011!  The big night is just one highlight of a non-stop trip through Italy, France, Spain and Tunisia! Amazing food, rich history, world-class art, excellent nightlife… it’s no wonder people love Italy. Get your fill of shops and museums, bars and clubs, and all those famous postcard sights. We already have a great group of people devoted to individual liberty and free markets. 

If you would like to join us – please send a deposit of $150 to Midwest University Travel, 406  71 Street, Kenosha, WI 53143 by November 10.  Please email or call me with any questions: ymaltsev@carthage.edu Your friends and relatives  are also welcome to join us for the trip. We already have several families signed up. Everyone is welcome!

Hope to see you on board!

Yuri

Yuri N. Maltsev

Statues of Joseph Stalin have been torn down all over Europe. I have witnessed how happy Lithuanian youth were peeing on his fallen monument in the Park of Fallen Foibles in their capital Vilnius in 1991. Stalin killed more people than Lenin, Hitler, Mao, Castro and led the world in the worst socialist crimes.

To commemorate his “part of our history”, a statue of Stalin is included in the National D-Day Memorial dedicated in Bedford, Virginia, this Sunday, June 6. It is unbelievable how the idea of putting up a monument to a monster would come to anyone’s mind and – especially in Virginia – the cradle of our freedom! Sure enough erectors of the Stalin’s bust are soliciting funds from Obama and Virginia Governor Kaine to defray the cost of the monument to the mass murderer who exterminated millions of innocents in Europe and Asia and hated this country with such a passion that under his watch thousands of Americans were also killed in the dreadful Gulag. How can we void this?

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 people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

And another quote:

By mid-1927, the new denaturing formulas included some notable poisons—kerosene and brucine (a plant alkaloid closely related to strychnine), gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone. The Treasury Department also demanded more methyl alcohol be added—up to 10 percent of total product. It was the last that proved most deadly.

Soviet government used exactly the same tactics against its own people and murdered even more citizens. “This was an evil act by our government, done for our own good, of course,” writes professor Barron.

www.patrickbarron.blogspot.com

Keep in mind that it was a “Great Humanitarian” Herbert Hoover under whose watch this was done.

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 against speaking ill of the dead. I shall not. Paul Samuelson was a witty, humorous and very friendly and pleasant man. He was the only one I knew that rivaled Murray Rothbard in the elegance of wearing bow ties.

When I was learning economics in the USSR in the 1970s Samuelson was the only Western economist whose textbook was translated into Russian. I remember his famous graph depicting dynamics of per capita GNP in the Soviet Union and the United States according to which the USSR would surpass the US in the standard of living by 1990. He frankly admitted to me that that was mistake. “Who could know that it was all fake?”

His “Economics” was the most widely used college textbooks in the history of the world. First published in 1948, it was translated into 22 languages, and was selling over 50,000 copies a year making his author the richest economist after Ricardo.

Mr. Samuelson, an uncle of Lawrence Summers, influenced and advised famous mainstream economists and Nobel laureates Robert Solow, Paul Krugman, George Akerlof, Robert Engle III, Robert C. Merton, Lawrence Klein, Franco Modigliani and Joseph Stiglitz.

Robert M. Solow, a fellow Nobel laureate and colleague of Samuelson’s at M.I.T. pointed out that when economists “sit down with a piece of paper to calculate or analyze something, you would have to say that no one was more important in providing the tools they use and the ideas that they employ than Paul Samuelson”.

Samuelson was fully aware of his world-wide influence. He declared that “I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws — or crafts its advanced treatises — if I can write its economics textbooks”.

In his textbook he praised central planning and predicted the future higher standard of living in the communist world. Murray Rothbard reviewed the book in the following words:

“Samuelson’s Economics differs from its rivals largely in being bigger, more indigestible, and filled with the flip and unsupported wisecracks with which Samuelson is wont to dismiss deviant economic views.”

Paul Samuelson’s legacy is overwhelming – he will not write any more textbooks, but he will still command thoughts and deeds of academics and government officials. As Paul Krugman, his best and brightest student and admirer wrote: “It’s hard to convey the full extent of Samuelson’s greatness. Most economists would love to have written even one seminal paper — a paper that fundamentally changes the way people think about some issue. Samuelson wrote dozens: from international trade to finance to growth theory to speculation to well, just about everything, underlying much of what we know is a key Samuelson paper that set the agenda for generations of scholars.”

Paul Samuelson translated incomprehensible Keynesian scribble into plain English and made it official ideology of American government, other world leaders, and American Economics Association. He advised the Department of the Treasury, the Federal Reserve Board, the Bureau of the Budget and the President’s Council of Economic Advisers.

Samuelson was asked by Kennedy, Johnson and Carter to become their chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. He refused, in principle, to take any government office because, as he admitted, he did not want to put himself in a position in which he could not say and write what he believed. Unfortunately for all of us, almost everything that this truly gifted and talented man said, wrote and believed in resulted in less freedom, bigger government and widespread poverty here and around the world.

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 “waste” that stemmed from “unnecessary duplication and parallelism” — i.e., competition.

These goals were similar to the ones declared by Mr. Obama and Ms. Pelosi — attractive and humane goals of universal coverage and low costs. What’s not to like?

The system had many decades to work, but widespread apathy and low quality of work paralyzed the healthcare system. In the depths of the socialist experiment, healthcare institutions in Russia were at least a hundred years behind the average US level. Moreover, the filth, odors, cats roaming the halls, drunken medical personnel, and absence of soap and cleaning supplies added to an overall impression of hopelessness and frustration that paralyzed the system. According to official Russian estimates, 78 percent of all AIDS victims in Russia contracted the virus through dirty needles or HIV-tainted blood in the state-run hospitals. FULL ARTICLE