The United States recently experienced its first wave of large-scale anti-immigration raids following the election of Donald Trump, who made the mass deportation of “illegal” immigrants a central part of his campaign. Although ICE officials claim that these raids targeted individuals with criminal records, immigrant rights groups dispute this claim, arguing that law-abiding people were…
Remember the Oxfam report early last year that found sixty-two individuals owned as much wealth as the entire bottom half of humanity put together? It’s gone down to only six — that’s right, six — in the past year: Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Amancio Ortega, Mark Zuckerberg, and Carlos Slim Helu. The total wealth held…
As Donald Trump demonstrated in his first address to Congress, no matter how loathsome a ruler may be, he can bring an assembly of politicians to its feet and disarm some critics simply by invoking the quasi-secular faith — Americanism — and eulogizing the latest uniformed war-state employee to sacrifice his life for it. Trump has…
The debate over President Trump’s travel ban and the debate over gun control look surprisingly similar – except for who’s on which side. In each case, supporters of the policy argue that it’s necessary in order to prevent incidents of lethal violence, while opponents argue, first, that the policy’s likely impact on such incidents is…
The Center for a Stateless Society represents a diversity of views and approaches toward our shared goal of eliminating coercion in political, economic, and social spheres of individual life. Many of us brand ourselves as anti-capitalists because of the popular associations that the word “capitalism” has in contemporary discourse. Rejecting capitalism as the way to…
If you keep up with right-libertarian media, you’ve probably seen more than one puff piece on how much global capitalism has improved things for people in the Third World: higher per capita GDP, longer life expectancies, and so on. But if average standards of living have gone up, according to an article at the Guardian…
I’m one of those “clicktivists,” I guess. I sign petitions and send emails in response to most pleas for causes I consider worthy, on the calculation that it won’t hurt and might even help just a tiny bit. I recently sent Arkansas Governnor Asa Hutchinson an email asking him to do everything in his power…
Milo Yiannopoulos, who writes for the “alt right” (i.e. white supremacist or neo-fascist) website Breitbart.com, is a master at victimizing other people and then claiming victim status for himself when he’s hit back. For example, he actually took advantage of a position in the White House Press Corps to whine to former President Obama about…
With the recent hubbub about fake news I couldn’t help but think about the fact that most of the news we have consumed throughout our lives has been intentionally misleading and spun to fit the narrative of government officials and corporate sponsors. At no point was this more apparent to me personally than watching the…
Last week’s brutal massacre of Illona Mitchell’s animal companions in Spain by bloodthirsty huntsmen reminds us that hunting needs to be stopped, period. The executions of several of Mitchell’s dogs, and the gouging of a horse’s eye, came as retribution for Mitchell’s refusal to allow Spanish hunters to carry out their dastardly deeds on her…
With Trump’s recent declaration that construction of a border wall between the united states and Mexico is to begin immediately, many are left wondering how to respond. Such a wall, while being a seemingly insurmountable task to construct and practically ineffective, would not only cause diplomatic issues (indeed, it already has) but also environmental issues….
If you didn’t already hear, Vermin Supreme was recently inaugurated as President of the United States on January 20th, 2017 and the celebrations couldn’t have been more festive. Tens of thousands of people or more showed up to show their support with fireworks, musical performances, cannabis, campfires, and more. But there was another man trying…
In a recent commentary at The Future of Freedom Foundation, Richard Ebeling celebrates the “triumph of free trade” in 19th century Britain (James Mill, David Ricardo and the Triumph of Free Trade,” Jan. 23). As Ebeling frames it the British political elite, under the influence of classical liberal economists like Mill and Ricardo, realized that…
The sun has not yet set on Donald Trump’s first week as President of the United States, and already he has made good on several major campaign promises. He has signed executive orders that pave the way for the forceful restructuring of the ACA, begin construction on both the Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipelines,…
On the libertarian Right — including Reason, the magazine for “free minds and free markets” — you hear a lot of lip service to opposing something called “crony capitalism.” And they periodically trot out the Ex-Im Bank or federal insurance for beach homes as their standard throwaway examples. But for the most part they love…
A recurring theme in recent commentary on the Dakota Access Pipeline is that it’s becoming an increasingly high-risk investment, and that all the political controversy and uncertainty in the news surrounding the pipeline will result in investor flight — in the end, leaving the unfinished pipeline as a “stranded asset.” In the specific case of…
There’s a lot of disagreement in American politics — from Berniecrats, to the centrist neoliberal establishment, to right-libertarians, to nationalist reactionaries like Trump and his followers — on TPP and other trade agreements. But there’s one thing they all agree on: calling it “free trade.” And they’re all wrong. At Reason (“The Neoliberal Era is…
As I’ve argued many times, there are plenty of reasons why people who believe in human freedom and free markets should oppose so-called “right-to-work” laws. And University of Arkansas Professor Michael Pierce, in a recent article for Labor Online (“The Origins of Right-to-WorkVance Muse, Anti-Semitism, and the Maintenance of Jim Crow Labor Relations,” Jan. 12),…
Former Nestle CEO Peter Brabeck is famous for denying that access to drinking water is a human right. But based on the company’s actions, its management seems to believe that Nestle Corporation has a human right to free water. All over the world, including in some of the most destitute and water-poor countries on earth,…
The cultural Right was in a furor recently — whether sincere or feigned — first over Drexel University Professor George Ciccariello-Maher’s Christmas Eve tweet that “All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide,” and then over Drexel’s Dec. 29 decision not to fire him. The real outrage, though, is that Drexel wasted both Cicciarello-Maher’s time…
