Happy Birthday, Rose Wilder Lane

Timothy SandefurIt was on this day in 1886 that the journalist and authorRose Wilder Lane was born in a  little house on the prairie that she and her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, would later make famous. A brilliant, moody, and independent spirit, Rose was eventually to become one of the most important voices of American liberty, and in 1943, publishedThe Discovery of Freedom, a  pathbreaking book that helped spark the revival of interest in free markets and individualism in the later 20th century.Ironic, then, that she started out as a  socialist.Lane grew up hating the life on the farm, and decided at an early age to become a  journalist and traveler. In the 1920s, she went to Europe to report on the Red Cross’s efforts to help refugees in the wake of World War I, but during her travels, she was horrified by what she witnessed in the new Soviet Union. Bolshevik chiefs had begun confiscating food and forcing the people of Armenia and Georgia into manual labor to get it back. “We intend to redistribute it to the neediest,” one Soviet soldier told her. “We will see that they are the most needy by making them work for it.” After witnessing collectivism in action, Rose returned to the United States prepared t o rethink everything she thought she had known about economics and politics.In 1926, she arrived back at her parents ’ farm, and dove into works on politics and history. In a letter to the journalistDorothy Thompson, whom she had met in Paris, Lane descri...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs