The recent Forbes article on the Assassination Market marks only the most recent addition to a growing list of online cryptographic and counter-economic projects, but for those familiar with Tim May’s “Crypto-Anarchist Manifesto” or Jim Bell’s “Assassination Politics,” it is the final, cathartic confrontation with a world we all saw coming. As the article details in an…

For years now the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has been trying its best, unsuccessfully, to enforce its “intellectual property” claims upon those who would dare share and distribute media. They are of course not the only ones trying to get IP enforced; we have seen the same trends in music and gaming. Since…

Last time I was in my native Caracas, a couple of years ago, I was shocked by how ubiquitous cosmetic surgery had become among women. Since then, I have given some thought to the plausible origin of the trend and was surprised to find myself in agreement with what William Neuman’s recent piece for the…

Nothing like starting out your day with a laugh — and today I have Matthew Lynch (“12 Reasons Why Obama is One of the Greatest Presidents Ever,” Huffington Post, November 15) to thank for it. About half of Lynch’s points boil down to, “Obama is for x, because he makes speeches talking about x all…

Sweden is often depicted in the international media as a bastion of pluralism, tolerance and progress. This image stands in stark contrast to the lived realities of marginalized people in Sweden who face an increasingly violent and desperate state. Reports of inner border controls in the Stockholm public transportation system have caused anger, fear and…

On November 13 Wikileaks published the leaked “intellectual property” chapter of the draft Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty. The IP section is a bundle of draconian provisions curtailing Internet freedom in the interest of protecting proprietary content industries like movies and music and imposing new restrictions on commerce to enforce corporations’ patent monopolies on genetically modified organisms…

Today we can celebrate the recent relaunch of the Silk Road drug market, named for a predecessor taken down over a month ago by federal agents for its connection with an alleged assassination conspiracy involving alleged founder Ross Ulbricht. The FBI is attempting to tie Ulbricht to the online identity of the Dread Pirate Roberts (DPR), an entrepreneur…

Today I am a somewhat overweight, bearded suburban dad entering a comfortable middle age, but it was not always thus. Seven short years ago I was a lean, clean-shaven, heavily armored combat medic in Iraq, and today, November 11th, everyone is apparently required by law to remind me of the things I did in my…

An October 20-22, 2013, Fox News national poll revealed that the implementation of ObamaCare (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) by the American state has been so chaotic that 60% of registered voters characterize the process as “a joke.” The economic reasons for the incompetence are well known by libertarians familiar with the Austrian tradition…

I recently watched a short presentation by Mark Hendrickson from Grove City College about the free market and Walmart. In the presentation Hendrickson covers in short, but informative detail, how free market mechanisms work. Firms that offer better prices in the market draw away customers from other firms, and the end result is that new…

Easily the most persistent question that arises when we endure another shooting such as the recent one at LAX in which a TSA agent was killed and others injured is “Why?” It appears that the shooter, 23-year-old Paul Anthony Ciancia, had one thing in mind: Killing TSA agents. He did not appear to want to…

A new book (Double Down: Game Change 2012, by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann) claims that  US president Barack Obama told his aides during his last election that he’s “really good at killing people.” He’s right. For example, last Friday a drone strike targeting Hakimullah Mehsud of the Tehreek-e- Taliban Pakistan (TTP) reportedly ended his…

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, “propaganda of the deed” — individual acts of violence intended to inspire revolution — became the signature anarchist activity. Among the prominent casualties were French president Sadi Carnot, American president William McKinley and Italian King Umberto I. Although propaganda of the deed has faded into history as…

I just read that the parents of an autistic high school student arrested in a drug sting operation in Temecula, California last December have filed suit against the school district. The parents were “initially happy their son had made his first and only friend last year at school,” but became suspicious when his “school friend”…

In Washington, D.C., Fully Informed Jury Association activist James Babb has placed informative billboards at Metro stations near the courts. These billboards tell passersby about jury nullification, the ancient right of jurors to judge both the facts and the law. The doctrine has a long and venerable history; the right of juries to ignore the law…

One of the first things I learned in my health care career is that pain is an inherently subjective experience. Different people experience different levels of pain in different situations, and everyone has their own idiosyncratic problem areas — one can’t bear dental pain while another finds back injuries unbearable. Because of this fact, backed…

It’s been the thing lately, among certain establishment liberals, to dismiss libertarians as “Koch-funded shills.” We’ve heard a lot of it from Mark Ames and Yasha Levine at NSFWCorp, for example. This is stupid, first of all, because it’s historically illiterate. Free market libertarianism has its origins in the classical liberalism of two hundred years…

The strongest argument in favor of the fiction of “intellectual property” is consequential rather than moral: Creators of good things — novels, songs, drugs, what have you — we are told, will essentially go on strike if government doesn’t guarantee their profits by vesting them with monopoly “rights” to ideas. Instead of writing that next…

As we learn more and more details regarding government spying, it seems more and more foolhardy to trust our security to third party businesses. The state requires information on its subjects to be effective. From the first census in Egypt more than 5000 years ago, states have sought personal information on their citizens, especially in…

It happens so often these days that it almost passes without notice: A young defendant, accused of some awful crime, is “charged as an adult.” Such is the case of 14-year-old Philip Chism of Andover, Massachusetts. The Danvers High School student, prosecutors allege, followed 24-year-old math teacher Colleen Ritzer into a bathroom, punched her in…