Professor Yuri Maltsev has passed away. I had the pleasure of getting to know him, and he will be missed.
Yuri was born in the Soviet Union and studied economics there with the intention of becoming a professor. During his student days, however, he came across the forbidden writings of the advocates of economic liberalism, such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman. He combined their insights with his own observations on how poorly the Soviet system worked for everyone except those at the top to conclude that Marxism was a disaster. Not wanting to teach students ideas he knew to be false, he managed to escape.
Yuri found a home at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wis., where he taught until his death.
He was a terrific raconteur, and a story he especially liked to tell was that, as a Soviet academic, he had a military rank. The funny thing was that, after he had fled the Soviet Union, he kept on being promoted.
Among the many aspects of statism that Yuri attacked was control over healthcare, as Jeffrey Tucker relates here. If current trends are not resisted, there is a danger that the U.S. might go down a path that could see our own health-care system increasingly Sovietized, making it more like the the system Yuri Maltsev fled.