Stephen Hicks

Activism backlash at Oberlin College will lead to more speech restrictions

Summary: Oberlin College students (and some administrators) behaved badly. The local business they targeted responded with a lawsuit for damages.  The court agrees, ordering Oberlin to pay $11 million. The down-the-road response? Colleges everywhere will take note, and worried number-cruncher administrators will urge further restrictions on campus speech and action. So: (1) Bad ideology on

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Socialism and the surveillance state, Lenin’s 1917 version

Socialism and the surveillance state, Lenin’s 1917 version: “Only socialism will be the beginning of a rapid, genuine, truly mass forward movement, embracing first the majority, and then the whole of the population, in all spheres of public and private life. … [Then] the escape from this popular accounting and control will inevitably become so

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Socialism in 1803—Saint-Simon’s religious-authoritarian version

“Anybody who does not obey the orders will be treated by the others as a quadruped …. All men will work; they will regard themselves as laborers attached to one workshop whose efforts will be directed to guide human intelligence according to my divine foresight. The Supreme Council of Newton will direct their works.” (Source:

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