Author: Brian Carnell

The BBC published a short summary of Fred Jerome’s The Einstein File which documents FBI surveillance of Albert Einstein and Hoover’s efforts to link him to Soviet spy rings. The book claims that from 1933 to 1955, the FBI regularly tapped Einstein’s phone, read his mail and searched his trash.

Einstein was never a supporter of the Soviet Union but he was the most boring sort of statist socialist who, as was the rule, simply ignored the consequences of what he was advocating.

In his 1949 essay for Monthly Review Why Socialism?, for example, Einstein advocated the abolition of private property, the creation of a planned economy, and the overhaul of the educational system to minimize competitive impulses and inculcate socially responsible views. Only in the last two paragraphs does Einstein get around to recognizing what a monster this might be,

A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual. The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching centralization of political and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?

Which is a bit like writing an article extolling nuclear weapons and at the end noting that maybe we need to have more discussion about limiting the deadly effects of radioactive fallout. It is difficult enough to control the growth of bureacracy and attendant loss of freedom in a democratic-capitalist system. It is impossible to preserve it in a system with a planned economy.

Einstein joined a long line of intellectuals who do not see the freedom to act in the economic sphere as a legitimate freedom. In fact, it is a fundamental freedom the lack of which can easily be used to suppress every other freedom available to people.

In the United States, for example, anyone can publish and distribute pretty much any book he or she wants. This is why after the Sept. 11 attacks, Noam Chomsky’s ludicrous book was available almost immediately in my neighborhood bookstore. In Cuba, however, when someone writes a book that Castro might disagree with, publishing it is all but impossible because that person has to beg permission from the state to use the resources of the planned economy to do so.

Unlike the United States, Great Britain has official censors that are empowered to decide which advertisements are acceptable and which are not. For the most part I’ve always thought this was an absurd arrangement, especially since the Advertising Standards Authority tends to be hypersenstive.

On the other hand, I cannnot fathom why a health organization would want to run an ad like this. A woman with a plastic bag over her head — yeah, that’s an image I want my five year old running across.