A Liberating Economic Journey: Post-Communist Transition - Essays in Honour of Ljubo Sirc (Occasional Paper) - Hardcover

Brzeski, Andrzej

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0948027371 ISBN 13: 9780948027376

Publisher: Centre for Research into Post Communist Economies, 2001

Synopsis

ESSAYS ON THE ECONOMICS OF TRANSITION IN POST COMMUNIST COUNTRIES There could be no more fitting tribute to Ljubo Sirc -now entering his ninth decade - than this lively and penetrating collection of essays by leading authorities on the prolonged, cruel and failed experiment in Marxist economics across Central and Eastern Europe. I first met the young Ljubo in London as a political refugee half his lifetime ago. As the years have flown by, I have come increasingly to admire his courage, faithfulness and single-minded dedication to the noble cause of human freedom. An early mystery was how someone of such a gentle, modest nature could ever have survived the cruel, wholly unjustified persecution of himself and his family in post-war Yugoslavia. Yet instead of giving himself over to negative and unproductive bitterness, he struck back positively where he was strong and his communist tormentors weak, namely in the intellectual sphere of rational argument and incontrovertible evidence. Through his tireless, unwavering lectures and writings, Dr Sirc earned his share of the credit for the growing acceptance of Hayek's central proposition that comprehensive central planning is logically incompatible with both economic progress and political freedom. Only those in the battle can know the barrage of ridicule and contempt thrown at us by the entrenched apostles of the Marxist dream - right up to its collapse into the disorders of the 1990s. Alas, our enemy have underscored Shakespeare's truth: the evil they have done is not interred with their bones, but lives on after them. Hence the concern of the authors of this symposium with the transition to freedom, what Dr Sirc in The Failure of Communism called 'the damage decades of communist economic mismanagement had done'. Our best tribute must be fearlessly to follow his example in cheerfully keeping before us his vision of a liberal economic order based on dispersed initiative operating under the impartial rule of law. Ralph Harris November 2000

About this edition

• Publisher: Centre for Research into Post Communist Economies
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0948027371
• ISBN 13: 9780948027376
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 379
• Editor: Winiecki Jan