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The Department of Business and Economics is hosting its annual Entrepreneurship Speaker Series, and this year they are bringing in Dr. Robert Lawson, a well-known professor from Southern Methodist University.

The lecture will be held on Monday, May 1, at 6 p.m. in Ochre Court. It will be open to Salve Regina community, as well as the general public. There is no need to register in advance, and there is no admission fee.

With regulations and public policies affecting the decision of individuals to operate and grow businesses, there is tremendous overlap between entrepreneurship and economic growth. The annual Entrepreneurship Speaker Series considers a range of topics all centered on what affects a businesss growth, success stories of Rhode Island and New England-based businesses, and challenges facing entrepreneurs in the world.

During the lecture, Dr. Lawson will be discussing his book Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World, which was coauthored with Benjamin Powell, a professor at Texas Tech University. Socialism and socialist programs are popular subjects nowadays, and the book considers what socialism actually is, its inherent problems, and the misconceptions surrounding it.

Socialism Sucks also investigates cases of economic freedom around the world as well as how property rights affect long-run growth and prosperity.

Dr. Robert Lawsons other research focuses on economic freedom, property rights and public policies, and economic growth and development. He is a clinical professor and holds the Jerome M. Fullinwider Centennial Chair in Economic Freedom; he also is director of the Bridwell Institute for Economic Freedom at Southern Methodist Universitys Cox School of Business. He earned his doctorate and masters in Economics from Florida State University and his bachelors in economics from Ohio University. He previously taught at Auburn University, Capital University and Shawnee State University.

Dr. Lawson is a founding co-author of the Fraser Institutes Economic Freedom of the World annual report, which presents an economic freedom index for over 160 countries. Lawson has authored or co-authored over 100 journal articles, book chapters, policy reports and book reviews. Lawsons research has been citedover 12,000 times, according to Google Scholar.

The lecture is on May 1 will be free, and there is no need to register in advance.

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Lecture by Dr. Robert Lawson to address problems with popular ... - SALVEtoday

-OpEd-

BOGOT -- It must be Latin America's favorite warning. Every time there's an election, conservatives warn "socialism" is coming and not just any socialism, but the Venezuelan variety! A vote for this or that candidate, they say, will turn the country into a land bereft of freedoms and prosperity.

Claims like these helped thwart a first presidential bid by Mexico's Andrs Manuel Lpez Obrador in 2006. The opposition said he had contacts with Venezuela's then-ruler, Hugo Chvez, and even forceful denials could dampen the fear of a communist president. The warnings were repeated in 2018 , to little effect as Lpez Obrador was elected, and again in 2021, when former president Vicente Fox called him Lpez Chvez.

In Colombia, the same has been said of President Gustavo Petro who, admittedly, has visited Caracas several times since his election and seems to have cordial relations with President Nicols Maduro. Indeed, we've heard these claims so often in Colombia that many must think it is a matter of time before we morph into our neighbor. But we never hear the right question: how many countries have in fact "turned into Venezuela?"

Well, none perhaps, even if most Latin American governments are leftist now. Some of their leaders are making mistakes and others are despots, like the ruler of Nicaragua Daniel Ortega. But to turn your country into Venezuela requires mistakes and vileness on a galactic scale.

I am not dismissing the fear, mind you. Venezuela is corrupt and dictatorial. It bans criticism and jails opponents, manipulates and fakes elections and has provoked the flight of seven million Venezuelans. Most of the country's people live in poverty, and it boasts the highest inflation rate on the continent and second highest in the world. Chvez and Maduro have failed abysmally. But how many countries have reached such extremes of mismanagement? If the danger is real and imminent, there should have been other examples by now.

Yet the threat persists. Even Donald Trump keeps saying the Democrats will turn the United States into Venezuela. Conservatives in Colombia use it to discredit opponents. The threat has served to dissuade the nation from policies and initiatives that are unquestioned in places like, well, Europe policies like free healthcare and education, social housing or raising taxes on the wealthiest to assure a more equitable distribution of wealth.

There is a chasm between that and Venezuela, and you would need two conditions to get there. First, making grave political errors and picking obsolete economic models. Countries like Bolivia and Argentina seem to be doing that. But the second condition is more difficult, consisting of Venezuela's own, specific situation. The country is almost entirely dependent on crude oil exports, and its institutions are weak, with no checks and balances. Rule of law is feeble in Venezuela, with its tradition of strongmen politicians who have shallow roots, and extraordinary corruption like few other places in the world.

Very few countries in the region combine all these conditions. Most have stronger institutional checks and balances, diverse economies, a solid judiciary or civil societies with a fighting spirit. Voters in Chile and parliament in Peru have acted, for example, to curb presidential initiatives or excesses. These make the Venezuelan scenario much less probable.

So, the Venezuelan alarum is, if not fantasy, at least improbable. It might be time to let it go.

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The Venezuela Bogeyman, How Fear Of Socialism Thwarts Latin American Progress - Worldcrunch

Thomas Alter II

The Texas partys record on black rights was rather poor. It saw how the ruling class used race to divide the working class, yet it offered no specific program to fight racism. Instead, the SP argued that overthrowing capitalism and creating a socialist society would automatically end racism.

Debs called on all workers regardless of race to join the SP on equal terms. However, the Texas SP did not even initially do this. In the first years of its existence, it followed Jim Crow practices with segregated meetings. When the Texas SP created the Renters Union in 1911 to organize tenant farmers, it limited membership to white persons over 16 years of age.

However, the racially exclusive membership policy of the Renters Union did not last long. In 1912, lumberjacks in western Louisiana organized by the IWW were making modest gains against the lumber barons through interracial organizing and direct-action tactics. Inspired by this, the Renters Union, at its 1912 convention, eliminated the word white from its membership requirements and called on black tenant farmers to organize separate local unions. Still, from the available evidence, one does not find black farmers forming their own locals of the Renters Union, and very few African Americans joined the Texas SP.

It is hard to say how the Texas SP would have fared had it truly attempted to stand up for black liberation. Following World War I, black Texas veterans returned home determined to fight for their rights, and militant chapters of the NAACP were formed across the state. By this time, though, the Texas SP had been repressed due to its opposition to the war. And after a brief flurry of civil rights activism, the NAACP in Texas was rapidly repressed as well by the state government.

An interracial alliance of workers in the Texas SP definitely would have made our class and the party stronger. At the same time, it would have attracted the full force of white supremacist terrorism, most likely crushing the movement. Yet even in defeat, a black-white alliance of workers in the Texas SP would have provided a shining example and laid an earlier foundation to put us in a better position to win racial and economic justice in our present.

Continue reading here:
Texas Was Once a Hotbed of Socialism - Jacobin magazine

FOX Business host Larry Kudlow reacts to President Biden's re-election campaign launch on 'Kudlow.'

Joe Biden announced his re-election campaign today through a YouTube video, which as far as I know, has never been done before since most people running for the highest office in the land have given live speeches in front of people, but not Mr. Biden. The big theme is apparently "let's finish this job," which to me is averyscary thought. Just saying.

Most Americans arenotbetter off than they were two years ago and I don't think that's going to change in the next year-and-a-half. Mr. Biden failed to mention inflation in his re-elect video or the fact that real wages or take-home pay for typical working families have fallen essentially every month since he's been president.

Falling real wages arethesource of American pessimism in poll after poll showing the source of unhappiness, and while Mr. Biden didn't mention it in his video, he's going to have to deal with it on the campaign trail. That is, if he ever goes on the campaign trail live and in-person.

The economy in his first full year in office, 2022, grew by less than 1%, while the inflation rate jumped 6.5% after rising over 9% for a good part of the year and to this day it remains the highest inflation rate in fourdecades.

TRUMP SLAMS BIDEN'S 'CALAMITOUS AND FAILED PRESIDENCY' AS PRESIDENT ANNOUNCES 2024 RE-ELECTION CAMPAIGN

President Joe Biden speaks about the banking system in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, Mar. 13, 2023. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik / AP Images)

We are mired in stagflation with a risk of recession, and that's why polls keep telling us Americans are mighty worried about the future and their kids' future and their grandkids' future. Mr. Biden has waged war on fossil fuels based on a far-left Green New Deal ideology that does not comport with the science or the actual facts.

Lately, he wants to end the internal combustion engine and shift everybody to electric vehicles, but at the same time slash electricity power output by as much as two-thirds. Go figure. More electric cars, less electricity, all in the name of radical climate policy.

Fiscally, he's slapped on more federal spending and regulations than anything we've ever seen. Big government socialism, or as Steve Forbes puts it, modern socialism through the regulatory state, unelected bureaucrats.

As former Sen. Phil Gramm put it today in the WSJ, "tilting the scales of cost benefit analysis to social welfare, racial justice, environmental stewardship, human dignity, equity, but no serious economic analysis."

Besides shutting down the car business and the fossil fuel industry, Mr. Biden's regulators have gone after airlines, trucking, railroads, energy, communications, student loans, banks, credit cards, childcare mandates, family benefits, paid leave, unions, even recently punishing middle-class homebuyers who have good credit in order to reward high-risk borrowers like the ones that brought down the financial system 15 years ago.

Mr. Biden has gone way beyond the Obama administration, and that's why we face continued below-2% economic growth, instead of the 3.5% that governed the U.S. for roughly 70 years after World War II.

Mr. Biden has spent and borrowed something like $6 trillion in just two years, alongside the regulatory binge he has proposed a $5 trillion tax hike on the most productive job creators in society.

His social policies have attacked parents in schools, left open the southern border to millions of illegals, along with an epidemic of drugs and crime. His foreign policy was a disgrace as he fled Afghanistan and he has supported an unheard-of politicization of the legal and justice system.

The video accused MAGA Republicans of tax cuts for the rich, denying freedom, denying equity, denying love, burning books, allfabulous stuff although unsupported.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, gives his take on the Hunter Biden laptop scandal on 'Kudlow.'

BIDEN CAMPAIGN VIDEO: MAGA extremists are lining up to take on those bedrock freedoms: cutting Social Security that youve paid for your entire life while cutting taxes for the very wealthy, dictating what health care decisions women can make, banning books, and telling people who they can love, all while making it more difficult for you to be able to vote.

He hasn't lifted a finger to help blue collar workers or traditional families. He has supported the most extreme gender and sex education anybody has ever seen. There's virtually nomeritin Mr. Biden's socialist economic system. No merit whatsoever. It's all about diversity, equity, inclusion, along with his big government socialist economics. Whether in-person or on video, it'snotgoing to work, Mr. Biden, so I'll just end by saying: Save America. Retire Joe Biden.

This article is adapted from Larry Kudlows opening commentary on the April25, 2023, edition of "Kudlow."

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LARRY KUDLOW: There is virtually no merit in Mr. Biden's socialist eco-system - Fox Business

Does the socialist-patriot George Orwell offer a model for us today? Specifically for the youngof left or rightfor whom Peter Stanskys book is likely meant to serve as an introduction of sorts?

The Socialist Patriot: George Orwell and War by Peter Stansky (130 pages, Stanford University Press, 2023)

Less a brief biography than a lengthy essay, this study by Orwell scholar Peter Stansky should give those on the left and right much to ponderand not just about Orwell the writer, but about Orwell the example as well. For Orwelland Peter Stanskylife as a socialist patriot was neither a contradiction in terms nor an oxymoron. Today it is. Especially for the young.

During the Cold War both left and right of all ages sought to stake a claim to Orwell. So which was he? Here Orwell and Dr. Stansky are in complete agreement. Whether as Eric Blair (his birth name) or George Orwell (his pen name), Blair-Orwell was decidedly a man of the left.

As an occasionally frustrated Peter Stansky concedes, Blair-Orwell changed his mind more than occasionally about many things. But at base he had been an English patriot for as long as he could remember, and he was a self-proclaimed democratic socialist of one sort or another for much of his published writing life.

Here Dr. Stansky considers Orwells thoughts and actions in the context of four wars: the Great War of 1914-1918, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Cold War.

Born in 1903, Eric Blair was too young to have had any direct involvement in the Great War, but he was not too young to defend Englands role in it. Nor was he too young to think, nay to know, that England was worth defending.

Dr. Stansky captures the Blair-Orwell attachment to pre-1914 England with a line from Cyril Connolly, an Orwell compatriot and fellow Etonian: Mr. Orwell is a revolutionary who is in love with 1910. To be a bit more specific, that would be the England of 1910.

Dr. Stansky borrowed that line from a Connolly review of Animal Farm, which was published just after the end of World War II. That would be a time when the author was seriously struggling with questions that he could never resolve and which might well be irresolvable. Here they are: Could truly revolutionary reform be achieved without violenceand without any violence to a nations past, as well as to its commitment to genuine democracy? Secondly, could those who achieve such reforms remain committed to genuine equality and willingly surrender power?

Dr. Stansky contends that Orwell wrote his fable as a warningand not just to those who sought power, but to those who would be asked/required to live under it. And yet the author remains convinced that Orwell remained convinced that his desired vision could be achieved without those in power abusing their power.

Historically speaking, Orwell was aware that Stalin and Stalinism were serial abusers of power. Neither was to be emulated or admired, and both could be avoided. Still, for Orwell, democratic socialism remained not just a realistic goal, but one that offered the best vision of a decent society as well.

Decent was an important word for Orwell. He meant it not just in reference to how people should treat one another, but also in regard to how a nation-state ought to be organized and how its leaders should treat its citizenswho are just that, citizens, rather than subjects or clients. More than that, he associated decency with some version of political and economic equality.

For Orwell, that version meant some never-quite-defined version of state imposed equality, as opposed to simply the minimal safety net of a welfare state. It certainly included state ownership of the major means of production and distribution.

From the mid-1930s to his death, Orwell wrestled with the dilemmas involved in achieving such a goal, while maintaining a decent democracy. He never resolved this dilemma, and he never abandoned it. Reading between the lines, it seems to remain a dilemma for Peter Stansky as well, if only because he is not about to criticize either Orwells goal or his continuing to wrestle with it.

Orwells commitments to both socialism and democracy were heightened by two compelling experiences in the mid-1930s: his road to Wigan Pier and his participation in the Spanish Civil War.

The road led him to the coal mining district of England, as well as to an even greater appreciation for the English working class. And his road to Spain opened his eyes about Stalin and the Soviet Union.

Orwell, the socialist, rather than Orwell the patriot, went to Spain not just to observe, but to fight. And fight he did, even to the point of taking a bullet in the neck. Luckily, he survived the wound, but any thought he might have had that the Soviet Union was a force for good in the world did not survive.

During World War II, Orwell soldiered on the English home frontand in alliance with Moscow, while rallying support for the war and for a fully socialized England. In fact, it was during this war that Orwell, the patriot, and Orwell, the democratic socialist, were on fully united display. For him, this was a doubly good war, both because it would preserve England and because it would advance socialism.

There seem to have been moments when Orwell couldnt decide whether a socialized England would be a better ally or whether a victory in the war would better assure a socialized England. But no matter. Peter Stansky is convinced that Orwell had convinced himself that a socialist England would still be the same England of his youth. Specifically, Orwell believed that that the pre-World War I England (of his memory) and the post-World War II England (of his hopes and dreams) would essentially be the same England.

Orwell lived long enough to see the Labor Party come to power and take the first steps toward building his idealized England. Of course, he didnt live long enough to see his ideal realized, much less to witness the rise and fall of Thatcherism. And the England of today? Its not likely that he would recognize an England that is at once increasingly distinct from the England of his youth and not yet anywhere close to the England of his hope and dreams.

Orwell died believing that a truly democratic England and a fully socialized England remained a single realistic possibility, as well as one that could actually be achieved. On this crucial matter George Orwell did not change his mind at all during the last decade of his life. He lived those years as a socialist patriot, and he died a socialist patriot.

As such, does he offer a model for us today? He seems to be just that for a ninety-year-old Peter Stansky. But otherwise? Specifically the young for whom this book was likely meant to serve as an introduction of sorts?

Those who are young and on the right might read him and try to heed his warnings against permanently centralized permanent political power. Those on the left might read him and seek to advance his dream of democratic socialism.

But could either be interested in emulating Orwell, the socialist patriot? Those on the American left and right have witnessed Orwells treasured, working-class drift to the right, while simultaneously being dismissed and/or abandoned as deplorables by their erstwhile allies and patrons. More than that, those on the left dont much care for the past of their country. That would be the very past that Orwell treasured about his own country. For them, it is a past to be destroyed or at least transcended, rather than preserved.

At the same time, those on the right have no interest in using war as Orwell sought to use World War II. Like Orwell, they might well treasure their countrys past, but they would have no interest in transforming or transcending it. Lastly, given Orwells example, they would be less inclined to risk what Orwell was willing to risk: namely that a socialized England would remain his England of old. As a result, today George Orwell, the socialist patriot, standsand likely will remaina very lonely figure on this side of the ocean, Peter Stanskys admirable effort notwithstanding.

Author John C. Chuck Chalberg once performed a one-man show as George Orwell.

The Imaginative Conservativeapplies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politicswe approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please considerdonating now.

The featured image, uploaded by JRennocks, is a photograph of the statue of George Orwell at BBC Broadcasting House, taken 14 April 202. This file is licensed under theCreative CommonsAttribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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The Socialist Patriot: George Orwell and War - The Imaginative Conservative