Twenty Years Ago The Wall Fell

November 9, 1989 is one of the most important days in modern history. Unfortunately I don't think one out of every ten high school students in the country could tell you why.

Some voices from around the web:

Radley Balko: Today, Berlin celebrates the 20th anniversary of the fall of The Wall. Sadly, much of Europe is already beginning to forget the atrocities wrought by communism. We libertarians regularly make the point that while Nazism is still regularly and justifiably vilified, communism periodically enjoys rebirths of chic. The point can’t be made enough. Not to diminish the horrors of Nazism, but to confront the cultural whitewashing of the horrors of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Il, and the others.

Pete Boettke: Let's remember the sheer joy of that day, and the celebration of life evident in the faces of the young (and old) as the tore down the wall figuratively and literally and reclaimed their basic human freedoms. And let us also remember the intellectual arguments from our discipline of economics and political economy that so thoroughly demonstrated that tyranny fails to deliver the goods, while freedom actually works. Even us cool-headed academics can get passionate about the fact that there is only one economic system that simultaneously delivers individual autonomy, generalized prosperity, and peaceful cooperation among diverse groups. Capitalism is not just ruthlessly efficient, it is civilizing -- must be championed by economists no less than the efficiency properties of a private property order and freedom of exchange. And political capitalism is NOT capitalism, but instead statism that both uses, and is used by, an alliance between business and government to profit some at the expense of others.

Roger Pilon: What does he [President Obama] think? Where does he stand on this fundamental clash of ideas? What meaning is to be drawn from his decision to forgo the commemoration in Berlin today? One can only speculate from what he has said and done, but the record does not inspire.

Matt Yglesias: It’s hard to think of non-cliché things to say on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. But I was interested to learn while in the former East Germany, that in the GDR economic system being a waiter was considered a very desirable job. It was apparently disorienting for some ambitious young East Germans who’d achieved the dream of waiterdom to discover that this is a low-status position in a market economy. The guy I heard about this from at greatest length made the transition okay, however, and now works in PR for Volkswagen.

Tyler Cowen: I first visited Berlin in 1985, while traveling with Randall Kroszner. We drove to West Berlin by car and we were terrified for the few hours we were underway in East Germany. Randy did not drive over the speed limit once. I was hardly a communist sympathizer but still I was unprepared for the day trip to East Berlin. I saw soldiers goose-stepping down one of the main streets. In the stores old ladies yelled and swung their brooms at me. Many buildings still had bullet marks or bomb damage from World War II. In a restaurant we ate a rubber Wiener Schnitzel and shared a table with an East German family; they did not have enough trust in their government to speak a word to us. I was unable to spend my mandatory thirty-mark conversion on anything useful; I carried back some Stendahl and Goethe but didn't want the Lenin. This was in the capital city in the showcase of the communist world.

My biggest impression was simply that I had never seen evil before.