Word: czechs
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Recent speakers include Harold Varmus, directorof the National Institutes of Health, in 1996;Vaclav Havel, president of the Czech Republic, in1995; Vice President Al Gore '69, in 1994 andGeneral Colin Powell, former chairman of the JointChiefs of Staff...
...drama that unfolded last Saturday night at the men's Olympic hockey final in Nagano, in which the Czech Republic beat Russia 1-0 in a hair-raising game, had symbolic meaning well beyond awarding the gold medal to the underdogs. It closely reflected the role the Czechs, armed only with their ideas, played in destroying the Soviet Union...
After the Soviet Union died, the Czechs once again were relied upon by decent-minded Russians to make sure communism never returned. The victorious Russians, fresh from overthrowing their Soviet overlords in 1991, realized that the best way to make sure the communists never returned was to quickly privatize all government-owned businesses and housing. This way, common citizens would have private property and an incentive to defend it. How do you privatize a Stalinist economy quickly? Well, the Czechs had been doing it for two years with the "voucher" system, devised by Jan Svejnar, a Czech-American economist...
...Russians copied from the Czechs all they could to free themselves of the worst tyranny ever known to man. When I asked Gorbachev's former top economic adviser, Stanislav Shatalin, why Russia did not just carbon-copy all the Czech commercial and tax codes, instead of endlessly debating how to reinvent the wheel, he replied, "Because the Czechs solve their differences in a bar over a beer, while we use knives...
...Czech hockey goal that humbled the Russians before the entire world in Nagano was a victory of ideas over simple raw power, much like the political relation of the two countries for the past 50 years. How sweet it is that the player who scored the winning goal was named Svoboda. His name, in both languages, means freedom...