There’s a great deal of commonality in critiques of degrowth by left-wing “ecomodernists” and accelerationists like Leigh Philips (see my critique here), and right-wing libertarians like Steven Greenhut. Both are characterized by a high degree of conceptual laziness; this laziness is manifested particularly in a failure to clearly define what degrowth even is, instead playing…

In a 2019 study for Center for a Stateless Society (We Are All Degrowthers. We Are All Ecomodernists), I argued that the debate for and against degrowth was nearly incoherent because neither side clearly defined “degrowth” at all, let alone stuck to any consistent definition. If Paul Crider’s article “Degrowth: Neither Left Nor Right, But…

The right-wing talking point that Black poverty is the result, not of historic injustice, but of “Black culture” — and particularly the effect of Great Society welfare programs on Black culture — dates almost as far back as the Great Society itself.  Daniel Patrick Moynihan, among other things a major early figure of neoconservatism, in…

In the period leading up to Trump’s inauguration, spokesmen for the President-elect repeatedly stressed that he would hit the ground running. Metaphors like “fire hose,” “shock and awe,” and “flooding the zone” were common from those both officially and unofficially associated with Trump.  And hit the ground running, he did indeed. ICE sweeps in Chicago…

As everyone knows, a super common talking point on the right is how undocumented immigrants are stealing jobs from citizens of the US. The common leftist rebuttal is that those jobs that are taken tend to be jobs which Americans tend not to want to work anyways such as difficult farm labor. But what makes…

I will be the first to say that we will never truly win. We will never obtain all of our political goals. Hell, we’ll probably never achieve anarchism…at least not on a mass scale. But that doesn’t justify doomerism. We may never achieve even a third of our goals but we’ll achieve even less if…

Dave Kamper, a past union organizer and writer on labor issues, commented on Inauguration Day that compared to the beginning of Trump’s first term, it feels like most of the institutions we count on to protect democracy are weaker now. The courts. The media. The Democratic Party. One institution, however, is without doubt in a…

…Be a Shame If Somebody Tried to Falsify It The Foundation for Economic Education’s specialty is making “arguments” via the uncritical assertion of right-wing talking points. If anybody’s the go-to guy for that, it’s Walter Block — especially when if it’s the worn-out “minimum wages cause unemployment” talking point (“Will an Increase in the Minimum…

A report submitted to the EU in September, as interpreted by Michael Roberts, casts considerable doubt on the standard right-libertarian party line regarding investment.  The standard right-libertarian talking point is that labor is dependent on investment, that investment — in the form either of credit or equity — comes from previous capital accumulation, and that…

Last month, on Twitter, Bernie Sanders tweeted (Jan. 2):  The main function of the H-1B visa program is not to hire “the best and the brightest,” but rather to replace good-paying American jobs with low-wage indentured servants from abroad. The cheaper the labor they hire, the more money the billionaires make. This is the latest…

Advocates of Basic Income have trotted out a lot of arguments for its benefits, but I never expected John Stossel (“Universal Basic Income Shows Why Giving People ‘Free Money’ Doesn’t Work,” Reason, October 9) to produce such a convincing one. When I was young, If I hadn’t needed to work to support myself, I wouldn’t…

The day after Elon Musk’s infamous use of the Nazi “Sieg Heil” salute in an Inauguration Day speech, Thomas Lecaque — a professor of history specializing in religious violence — pointedly observed: “Elon Musk did a Nazi salute. There isn’t a discussion, there aren’t interpretations, this isn’t a controversy, there are people lying about it…

In the short term, our focus should be on the things C4SS comrade William Gillis discussed eight years ago in the aftermath of Trump’s election to his first term:  minimizing our exposure to harm, and building an infrastructure for support, protection and mutual aid. Kelly Hayes sums up this general approach as well as anyone…

Once again, we’re back in the same situation as eight years ago. Since the nightmare on election night many, myself included, have been catastrophizing the possible scenarios beginning on January 20. We’re all aware of the awful threats from Trump and his agenda: Mass deportation. Attacks on reproductive freedom at the federal level. The use…

If you’re a Trump Voter, the Answer may Surprise you. What Trump Supporters think tariffs are For nearly a decade now, Donald Trump has been promoting tariffs as a tool of choice for solving America’s economic woes, at one point calling them “the greatest thing ever invented.” He has made them a central point of…

At Reason, C.J. Ciaramella (“Tim Scott Says UAW Workers Should Be Fired, Invoking Ronald Reagan”) gives GOP Presidential hopeful Tim Scott two stars for his proposal to fire striking auto workers like Reagan fired striking air traffic controllers and broke PATCO: “He said, you strike, you’re fired. Simple concept to me. To the extent that…

Frank Wilhoit’s definition of conservatism (about which much more below) was not, as you would expect from something so incisive and widely quoted, formulated years ago in a scholarly book or article. It appeared only six years ago, in a lengthy comment by Wilhoit (a composer and music theorist), under a blog post by Henry…

Billy Binion  (“Juneteenth is a Celebration of Freedom,” Reason, June 19) writes that, despite widespread right-wing aversion to Juneteenth as a holiday, the GOP “in some sense still fashions itself as the party of freedom.” Matt Yglesias is most famous these days for his almost daily garbage takes; but years ago, back when the Republican…

I find fodder for op-eds in some of the strangest places. I came across this video (“Politics is NOT a zero-sum game,” by Shai Davidai) in a HIT posted on Amazon Mechanical Turk by Davidai — an academic study in which he gauged viewers’ reactions to it. (For those who don’t know, Mechanical Turk is…

In a column four years ago, I recounted the experience of a friend in academia with the godawful “learning management software” which her institution required for designing exams. She complained that she was trying to create a midterm exam and “blackboard is complete fucking garbage. No intuitive way to break up questions into sections, can’t…