Book Description

“It is the bitter lesson of history that society cannot rely on the scruples of a powerful ruler to restrain him from exercising his power over the lives of his subjects. The only safeguard of liberty is the restraint of power itself.”~G. Warren Nutter Economist G. Warren Nutter provided one of the lone dissenting voices to challenge what had become a matter of conventional wisdom among Sovietologists. Whereas others perceived vibrancy and vitality in the socialist society’s industrial growth, Nutter recognized its long-term economic decline concealed behind a politically crafted veneer of propaganda about socialist industrial prowess. From 1956 until its first publication in 1969, he labored on providing a statistical corrective that painted a picture of a society gradually succumbing to the weight of its own central planning in The Strange World of Ivan Ivanov. Though generally well-received in the Cold War environment of its publication, Ivan Ivanov, drifted from memory along with its own Soviet subject matter. In this new edition, the text is accessible again—both as a record of the daily personal hardships experienced under an actual Marxian-socialist state and a warning for a time when socialism’s reputation has become detached from its own track record. The poverty, fear, and coerced subordination of Ivan Ivanov’s life were not aberrations of a socialist revolution gone astray—they were the entirely predictable results of that same socialist system. And as its human toll stretches from the Eastern Bloc to China to Cuba to Venezuela, they continue to repeat with alarming certainty whenever and wherever socialism is attempted. The American Institute for Economic Research in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, was founded in 1933 as the first independent voice for sound economics in the United States. Today it publishes ongoing research, hosts educational programs, publishes books, sponsors interns and scholars, and is home to the world-renowned Bastiat Society and the highly respected Sound Money Project. The American Institute for Economic Research is a 501c3 public charity.