Commentary
Fort Bliss: Agorists in Action or Cartel Cronies?
Recently two US soldiers were arrested attempting to smuggling undocumented Mexicans over the border. Marco Nava, Jr. and Joseph Cleveland had successfully done this once before and when arrested during their second run, they opted to snitch on the entire operation. It seems that either only a few facts are known or the details of…
The Double-Edged Sword of Political Representation
On June 28th 2016 history was made when not only one but two openly transgender candidates won their respective congressional primaries. The victories were even more momentous given the current climate and opinions about the way that trans folks should live their lives. Whether it is about which restrooms they use, the protections they do…
The Short Happy Life of Free Broadcasting in Italy
A common assumption among many people, included many of those who describe themselves as libertarians, is that we live in a free market world. That the market is free and dominated by freely exchanging actors seems a given. Every “market failure” is commonly seen as a market flaw that needs be corrected by the action…
Colonial-Era Debt and Free Banking
The injustice of developing countries having to pay back extortionate rates of interest that emanate from sovereign debt with colonial-era roots is often rightly made due to the oppressive nature of imperialistic regimes of the time. However, one may wonder why such colonial-era debt cannot be feasibly defaulted upon? The standard argument suggests that this…
Police Raid the Sharing Economy
The “sharing economy” is all the rage these days ever since the likes of Uber, Lyft, AirBnb, and others took the market by storm. Sharing economy style apps and services are slowly beginning to pop up for more and more services from food sharing to tool lending and now apparently policing. Recent budget cuts to…
Brexit: Which Kind of Dependence Now?
Is Brexit a move toward British independence? Some Leave and Remain partisans may believe so, differing only over whether that’s good or bad. But, as usual, things are more complicated. We should hope that, in one respect, Britain’s exit from the EU will create a kind of dependence that did not exist while it was…
A Lazy Anti-Anarchist Meme That Needs to be Purged
I see there’s another upcoming installment in The Purge series of films — a franchise whose basic premise is that there’s one night each year in which all crime is legal and police and rescue services are unavailable, setting the scene for lots of dramatic action footage of terrified people barricading themselves in their houses…
Supreme Court Ruling is Admissible Evidence of Police State
On Monday, June 20, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that evidence police find during illegal stops is admissible in court. As long as the officer can find some outstanding warrant in your name, the court will excuse the officer’s illegal stop. The Supreme Court’s decision would be disappointing if you expected the Supreme Court to…
An LGBTQ Renunciation of State Propaganda
I woke up on the morning of June 12th in Portland, Oregon, feeling well and content that I was able to spend some time with my family visiting from the East Coast after finishing school at Portland State University. After I received the news of the shooting at a gay bar in Orlando, killing at…
Equal Access to the Draft is Equality Not Worth Having
The New York Times recently reported that the Senate has voted to require women to register for the draft, with few Senators in opposition. This bill comes as no surprise given the military has been increasingly opening its doors to women. This culminated in last December when “…Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said in December…
Austin Inadvertently Promotes Open-Source Ride-Sharing
Austin voters, in a referendum last month, rejected a measure to overturn local regulations of so-called “ride-sharing” services. Although the main backing for the regulations was the legacy taxicab monopolies (which resented having to compete with even proprietary monopolies like Uber and Lyft), the result of leaving them in place has been to promote the…
Brock Turner’s Lenient Sentence is a Feature, Not a Bug
(CW: This article will include discussions of rape and sexual assault) On January 18th, 2015, Brock Turner was discovered on top of an unconscious woman. The woman had her underwear removed and her dress pulled up and Brock was making sexual advances on her. Brock had been discovered by two students at Stanford, where Turner…
Worst Corporate Welfare Criticism Ever
Right-libertarians are routinely awful on economic issues, acting as though big business were — in Ayn Rand’s famous phrase — “a persecuted minority.” But leave it to someone at the Cato Institute to write a column attacking corporate welfare on the grounds that it victimizes the recipients! That’s literally the title: “Corporate Welfare Harms Corporations”…
Harambe isn’t Your Excuse for Adult Supremacy
On May 28th a tragic incident happened at the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden where a 3 year old boy managed to get into an enclosure with a gorilla named Harambe. Although the boy wasn’t seriously injured the zoo keepers felt it necessary to shoot and kill Harambe for the safety of the child. Some…
No, It’s NOT “the Soldier”
Every Memorial Day and Veterans’ Day, Americans are subjected to endless reruns of an “inspirational” (cringingly stupid) poem by Charles Province, written in 1970: “The Soldier.” “It is the Soldier, not the minister, who has given us freedom of religion.” The poem restates the same basic principle in regard to a series of other freedoms: …
Neoliberalism Infects the EU Debate
As a libertarian anarchist, I will most likely vote to leave the EU on June 23rd. The EU, with its supranational corporatism and affirmation of legislation writ-large, goes against my fundamental principles, that of popular litigiousness expressed through common law and a belief in freed markets and radical decentralism. However, none of these principles are…
Authoritarianism Means Never Having to Apologize over Spilled Milk
In Virginia a middle school student named Ryan Turk was arrested and then suspended from school for allegedly stealing a $0.65 carton of milk. Officials claim that the student tried to conceal the carton of milk and are also charging him with larceny. This charge could impinge Turk’s record which could also lead to further…
Mussolini or Nixon? Don’t Bother Voting. Prepare to Resist
The next President of the United States will be one of the worst. If September 11th was a gunshot that allowed the Bush Administration to take off sprinting, the Obama administration grabbed the baton and charged forward even faster. No one spends years pursuing political power only to walk into the Oval Office and suddenly…
Let the People Fight Their Own Wars
As the War on Terror wages on and the threat of ISIS seems to constantly loom over us, threatening our very safety at every turn according to most mainstream news sources, Americans are left wondering how we are to fight this very real monster that the U.S. government helped to create. While some folks toe…
“Intellectual Property” Keeps Right On Killing
Habitual apologists for agribusiness like Reason‘s Ron Bailey gushingly cite studies that show glyphosate, the “active ingredient” in Roundup, is unlikely to cause cancer in the concentrations that appear in supermarket produce. But as it turns out, the focus on glyphosate may actually have been a distraction. There’s evidence (“New Evidence About the Dangers of…
Anarchy and Democracy
Fighting Fascism
Markets Not Capitalism
The Anatomy of Escape
Organization Theory