A Nation Of Serfs

Reflect on this: You work hard; maybe you work two jobs. You do your best to pay the mortgage or the rent, not to mention other bills. You could use a few extra bucks for your kids' sports or education. In short—you're responsible. Shouldn't the people in charge of governments and taxes be the same? Instead, a separatist sympathizer is chosen as Governor-General, political appointments expect entitlements, and too many politicians elected in one party opportunistically jump ship to another. The same people pass laws to prevent citizens from speaking up—at election time! While this happens, the same political-bureaucratic-judicial axis can't get tough on crime. A Nation of Serfs?: How Canada's Political culture Corrupts Canadian Values is a tart, opinionated call for Canadians to re-think their politics, their dependencies, and the mistaken belief that nothing ever changes. But it can. It starts with truth-telling. It starts with remembering our history. It starts with this book. "Nothing like this book has ever appeared in Canada. My favourite chapter is the one devoted to exploring some of Canada's true roots as a principles of limited government as any in the world." —Terence Corcoran, Editorial Page Editor, The Financial Post "This book is a must-read. Mark Milke makes the moral case against dependency for its own sake. On the right, the fallacy of government subsidies to corporate Canada is exposed; so too is the culture of apathy, entitlement and opposition to sensible reform, which is relentlessly encouraged by the political left. A Nation of Serfs? will open the eyes of average Canadians; it will hand them the 'ammo' to confront many tax-happy politicians and the rainbow of special-interest groups that cheer them on." —John Williamson. Federal Director, Canadian Taxpayers Federation

The abolition of Russian serfdom in 1861 and American slavery in 1865 transformed both nations as Russian peasants and African Americans gained new rights as subjects and citizens. During the second half of the long nineteenth century, Americans and Russians responded to these societal transformations through a fascinating array of new cultural productions. Analyzing portrayals of African Americans and Russian serfs in oil paintings, advertisements, fiction, poetry, and ephemera housed in American and Russian archives, Amanda Brickell Bellows argues that these widely circulated depictions shaped collective memory of slavery and serfdom, affected the development of national consciousness, and influenced public opinion as peasants and freedpeople strove to exercise their newfound rights. While acknowledging the core differences between chattel slavery and serfdom, as well as the distinctions between each nation's post-emancipation era, Bellows highlights striking similarities between representations of slaves and serfs that were produced by elites in both nations as they sought to uphold a patriarchal vision of society. Russian peasants and African American freedpeople countered simplistic, paternalistic, and racist depictions by producing dignified self-representations of their traditions, communities, and accomplishments. This book provides an important reconsideration of post-emancipation assimilation, race, class, and political power.

In The Road to Serfdom F. A. Hayek set out the danger posed to freedom by attempts to apply the principles of wartime economic and social planning to the problems of peacetime. Hayek argued that the rise of Nazism was not due to any character failure on the part of the German people, but was a consequence of the socialist ideas that had gained common currency in Germany in the decades preceding the outbreak of war. Such ideas, Hayek argued, were now becoming similarly accepted in Britain and the USA.On its publication in 1944, The Road to Serfdom caused a sensation. Its publishers could not keep up with demand, owing to wartime paper rationing. Then, in April 1945, Reader's Digest published a condensed version of the book and Hayek's work found a mass audience. This condensed edition was republished for the first time by the IEA in 1999. Since then it has been frequently reprinted and the electronic version has been downloaded over 100,000 times. There is an enduring demand for Hayek's relevant and accessible message.The Road to Serfdom is republished in this impression with The Intellectuals and Socialism originally published in 1949, in which Hayek explained the appeal of socialist ideas to intellectuals - the 'second-hand dealers in ideas'. Intellectuals, Hayek argued, are attracted to socialism because it involves the rational application of the intellect to the organisation of society, while its utopianism captures their imagination and satisfies their desire to make the world submit to their own design.

“It was the arbitrary nature of the serfholder’s power that weighed on serfs like Nikitenko, for as they discovered, even the most benevolent patron could turn overnight into an overbearing tyrant. In that respect, serfdom and slavery were the same.”—Peter Kolchin, from the foreword Aleksandr Nikitenko, descended from once-free Cossacks, was born into serfdom in provincial Russia in 1804. One of 300,000 serfs owned by Count Sheremetev, Nikitenko as a teenager became fiercely determined to gain his freedom. In this memorable and moving book, here translated into English for the first time, Nikitenko recollects the details of his childhood and youth in servitude as well as the six-year struggle that at last delivered him into freedom in 1824. Among the very few autobiographies ever written by an ex-serf, Up from Serfdom provides a unique portrait of serfdom in nineteenth-century Russia and a profoundly clear sense of what such bondage meant to the people, the culture, and the nation. Rising to eminence as a professor at St. Petersburg University, former serf Nikitenko set about writing his autobiography in 1851, relying on his own diaries (begun at the age of fourteen and maintained throughout his life), his father’s correspondence and documents, and the stories that his parents and grandparents told as he was growing up. He recalls his town, his schooling, his masters and mistresses, and the utter capriciousness of a serf’s existence, illustrated most vividly by his father’s lurching path from comfort to destitution to prison to rehabilitation. Nikitenko’s description of the tragedy, despair, unpredictability, and astounding luck of his youth is a compelling human story that brings to life as never before the experiences of the serf in Russia in the early 1800s.

A classic work in political philosophy, intellectual history and economics, The Road to Serfdom has inspired and infuriated politicians and scholars for half a century. Originally published in 1944, it was seen as heretical for its passionate warning against the dangers of state control over the means of production. For Hayek, the collectivist idea of empowering government with increasing economic control would lead not to a utopia but to the horrors of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. This new edition includes a foreword by series editor and leading Hayek scholar Bruce Caldwell explaining the book's origins and publishing history and assessing common misinterpretations of Hayek's thought. Caldwell has also standardized and corrected Hayek's references and added helpful new explanatory notes. Supplemented with an appendix of related materials and forewords to earlier editions by the likes of Milton Friedman, and Hayek himself, this new edition of The Road to Serfdom will be the definitive version of Friedrich Hayek's enduring masterwork.

Offering a broad interpretive history of the Russian Empire from the time of serfdom's codification until its abolition following the Crimean War, Wirtschafter considers the institution of serfdom, official social categories, and Russia's development as a country of peasants ruled by nobles, military commanders and civil servants.

It's bad for most of us these days. Low incomes, high expenses, a Congress that seems more like a playpen full of unruly and somewhat stupid children. It's all George's fault, right? He did preside over the financial debacle at the end of his unfortunate term. Some think it's Obama's fault, but the truth is, he inherited problems too big for one man to fight alone...and he has been, mainly, alone. It is time to put the blame where it belongs, on the single generation that, like an architect drawing plans for a huge building that must not fall, wrote the blueprint for all our problems. Who? The generation Tom Brokaw gorrmlessly glorified as the Greatest. In fact, it was the greediest, from having too many kids with no regard for them or the planet, to ensuring their golden years would glow with a light provided by their children's and grandchildren's rising taxes and diminishing paychecks.. Indeed, looked at rationally, it was the so-called Greatest Generation that has made us all A Nation of Serfs. In just nine chapters, A Nation of Serfs explains it all for you.