In before the ping! :)
It's staggers me to realize how desperately our country needs people like him these days.
Experince, indeed, is what changes one’s mind, rather than “books”. One thing I can’t help telling Libs I finally have to find myself arguing with is “What I have is experience. What Liberals have is “attitudes towards experience”. In the end, there’s no experience there for Libs; they’re always and only too happy to defer to someone else’s experience ( like murderers, rapists, unwed mothers,and all those people Lib candidates tell you they’ve met along the campaign trial, whose stories have
turned their heads around) as if it’s “truer” than their own-—and it is, because they never claim their own experience at all, and are in fact resentful of it.
bookmark
PING FOR LATER
I read Sowell’s autobiography but somehow missed the fact that he was a communist as a young man.
Reference bump
Interesting.
Hayek’s Road to Serfdom influenced me a lot. I am about Obama’s age, and I remember being suspicious of the older kids who were excited about Mao or Castro. I never understood why you would want to give anyone absolute power like that. I remember as a child learning about the absolute monarchs of old. One of my earliest political thoughts was that these communists who demamded power and obedience were more like throwbacks to the ancient monarchs than they were anything new or revolutionary.
btt
"The book that permanently made me a sadder— and, hopefully, wiser— man was Edward Gibbons' The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. To follow one of the greatest civilizations of all time as it degenerated and fractured, even before being torn apart by its enemies, was especially painful in view of the parallels to what is happening in America in our own times.
The fall of the Roman Empire was not just a matter of changing rulers or political systems. It was the collapse of a whole civilization— the destruction of an economy, the breakdown of law and order, the disappearance of many educational institutions."
Certainly the above is what we view in America and the west today. Maybe there are more of us who see it now than saw it in the days of the Roman Empire, AND are willing to do something about it.
It would be interesting to hear more of what it was like for him being a young intellectual at Harvard and Columbia in the 1950s, with the attractions of Marxism, left-wing ideology and the turn away from that.