Knapp: “Privatization” is one of those Humpty Dumpty words that means just what the political class chooses it to mean, neither more nor less.
Kevin Carson: If labor stopped playing by the bosses’ rules and adopted a strategy of full-blown guerrilla warfare, the bosses would be begging us to sign a contract.
Carson: Don’t fall for the line that state functionaries “work for us.” Take a look at where they worked before they entered “public service” and watch where they go back to afterward. Guess what? They’re working there right now, too.
Hummels: Progressives try to put a populist shine on conscription.
D’Amato: [W]hen crisis and disaster inevitably befall [the] doctored, corporatist economy, it is the whole populace which is expected to bail out the policymakers and their corporate masters.
Byas: The Keystone XL pipeline has inspired a lot of controversy. For defenders of freed markets, however, it shouldn’t. Libertarians should emphatically and unequivocally oppose the pipeline.
Knapp: By its very nature, “intellectual property” always represents an assertion on the part of one person of ownership title to the minds, bodies and property of others.
Knapp: Regime uncertainty is the state’s version of herpes: Its eruptions are unpredictable, it makes people think twice about intimate contact with the carrier, and yes, it sometimes literally kills babies.
Nathan Goodman: While politicians repeatedly promise to protect public health, they have long used coercive power to raise medical costs, sacrificing public health for private profits.
D’Amato: Government doesn’t protect us from monopolists; it empowers them to eat us alive.
Carson: Our goal is not to assume leadership of existing institutions, but rather to render them irrelevant. … We do not hope to reform the existing order. We intend to serve as its grave-diggers.
Jason Lee Byas: These tragedies were not random flukes. They were a direct result of political government, its monopoly on “legitimate” violence, and the psychology of entitlement bred by its authority.
Carson: As anarchist Rudolf Rocker pointed out, civil liberties aren’t granted by governments; where governments recognize them, they do so because the people forced them to.
D’Amato: [The state] intercedes in economic affairs not to aid ordinary, working people … but to restrict their opportunities and options so that dominant corporate actors (today’s feudal lords) may prey upon them.
Knapp: The global political class, like it or not (and they don’t, not one bit), is faced with the inverse transparency David Brin predicted in 1998’s The Transparent Society.
Trevor Hultner: “Congressional control” is exactly the opposite of what we want. The military drone program, among other things, needs to be completely dismantled, not “regulated.”
David D’Amato: If you weren’t already terrified by the power that the Obama White House has arrogated to itself and future administrations, this memo ought to do the trick.
Kevin Carson: In every conceivable way — agility, resilience, feedback/reaction loop — the emerging networked successor society runs circles around the old hierarchical corporate and state dinosaurs it’s replacing.
David D’Amato: War is thus inseparable in practice from what we have come to identify as “terrorism,” both designating unjustifiable, invasive hostility against innocents.
Kevin Carson: Too many libertarians on the political and cultural Right instinctively identify with employers, landlords, and service providers on this issue. They are fundamentally wrong-headed to do so.
