We the Living — VOICES for REASON

The election of Scott Brown to the United States Senate has a lot of pundits clamoring about a resurgence of the Republican Party. Let’s hope not. The last thing this country needs is a resurgence of the same Republican Party which, as Don Watkins noted on Monday, has become virtually indistinguishable from the Democratic Party in its fundamental philosophy. Although there’s presently a lot of tension between the two political camps, most of what President Obama is doing was already done by President Bush, and Republican “alternatives” to Obama’s proposals are typically nothing more than watered-down versions of Democrat bills.

What is that philosophy? As Don notes, it’s the idea that “the government has the right to force us to sacrifice our freedom, interests, and desires for the sake of the ‘common good.’”

If you want a sense of what’s wrong with this idea, I recommend Ayn Rand’s first novel, We the Living, which is set in Communist Russia—a society that implemented the idea of sacrifice for the “common good” as its fundamental principle. You’ll get a wrenching depiction of the misery and oppression of a totalitarian society (as well as a moving, plot-driven story filled with the heroic figures typical of an Ayn Rand novel), and a preliminary understanding of why life beneath a government wholly dedicated to the “common good” has to be so horrific. Read the rest of this entry »

Today is the 20^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, arguably the most famous event signaling the fall of Communism. In the days following November 9, 1989, the world saw residents of East Germany—a satellite state of the supposedly great and powerful Soviet empire—flee en masse to West Germany, revealing how hellish life under Communism truly was. The sight of Germans literally breaking down the wall is an inspiring one that should be remembered as a great landmark of the 20^th century—as Yaron Brook and Onkar Ghate explain in this must-see interview.

As we celebrate an event that revealed to the world the oppression of Communism, it is important and instructive to note that for the seven decades of the Soviet Union’s existence, many journalists, authors, and intellectuals in the West evaded the atrocities of Communism, even as Communist states were racking up death tolls in the tens of millions.

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