Pictures of the Socialistic Future

The most amazing thing about the Berlin Wall is that the world didn’t see it coming.

It’s easy to dismiss this as hindsight bias. But at least one man – the brilliant German classical liberal Eugen Richter – saw the Wall coming over sixty years before it went up. In 1891, decades and revolutions before Orwell’s Animal Farm, Richter published Pictures of the Socialist Future. It’s a dystopian novel about what happens to Germany after a socialist takeover.

I just finished reading the aforementioned book; it’s available as a free PDF here; it really is astounding that Richter, in 1891, was able to foresee so accurately and well. Via The Writing on the Wall, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty.