This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, September 24th, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

It has been two decades since the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in that time current Czech Republic President Voslov

Klaus has seen the intense if surprising resistance to a massive scale transition

away from central planning in favor of markets.

Klaus spoke at the Cato Institute September 21st, 2009.

To mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of communism,

this is the first of two portions of his speech.

It is not by chance that this conference is organized by the Cato Institute on this side of the Atlantic, Cato has been for a long time one of the most important institutions devoted to defending and promoting the principles of

individual liberty, limited government, and free markets. I learned a lot from Cato. When communism collapsed and we were finally free to travel

to the Western world, we found many friends here. I remember my first meeting with

Ukraine and Willniskanen and many of their collaborators not long after the Velvet Revolution.

And as Ed mentioned, I was pleased that Cato published my book, The Rebers of Liberty in the Heart of Europe more than 10 years ago.

As a side remark I saw upstairs that the book is sold there. But I must admit that it's irrelevant and

obsolescence is quite visible because I discovered that it sold at $2 price.

It really demonstrates something and it's good to know.

It may be surprising for some of you but the fall of communism remains to be a rather

controversial topic at least in our part of the world.

There are several competing interpretations, both of the fall of communism in the year 1989 and of the following radical restructuring

of our societies.

That's the reality.

We have to live with the fact that there does not exist any generally accepted theory on the subject.

...