- You can get the humor in this page by looking at some of the harmful "honorable mentions" which almost made the list, such evil screeds as Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa, and Darwin's The Origin of Species.
- I was really surprised to see that Hilary's It Takes a Village did not beat out Mein Kampf.
- All kidding aside, I wish they would do the most harmful books of all-time. I would love to see what they include. Have they forgiven Galileo yet?
Thursday, June 02, 2005
The Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. (As defined by conservatives.)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
As I see it, the great flaw of Communism is that it is not a complete economic system. It simply ignores the reality of how and why wealth is created in the first place.
ReplyDeleteIt would be perfectly OK to distribute wealth more fairly if it could be done without impairing the very mechanism by which wealth is created.
But all socialist theories ignore the possibility that a communist system might result in a reduction of the total amount of wealth available, and therefore that a more equitable distribution of less wealth may not really benefit anyone in the long term.
Socialism works fine, for example, in Norway, where they don't have to worry about generating wealth. They have a vast amount of wealth to spread around, a culture of integrity, and a very small population. Hard to see how socialism could do much harm.
Their economy is stagnant, but that doesn't matter because growth is unnecessary. They simply have enough for everyone, and nobody is stealing very much.