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.
Christiaan Elderhorst: “We thus arrive at the worrying conclusion that the concept of cooperation has been entirely corrupted by viewing the delegation of authority as a prerequisite for its existence.”
Nathan Goodman reviews the new film from Richard Rowley and Jeremy Scahill.
Darian Worden: Strengthen liberty and autonomy, not government.
Kevin Carson: From its beginnings the state has been an executive committee of the economic ruling class. … I can’t imagine why anyone would expect the state’s gun control policies to display any less of a class character.
Knapp: In Barack Obama’s world, events like the Newtown massacre are a small price to pay for the uncontested ability to do wholesale what Adam Lanza did retail.
Carson: The people who hounded Aaron Swartz to his death did so, not even in the realistic hope of victory, but out of the same vindictive impulse that drives a defeated invader to inflict one more indignity on the violated country on its way out.
Knapp: The old media companies’ only chance of survival is to give up their failed state-created monopolies and protection rackets, and figure out how to generate profits through voluntary trade instead.
Knapp: Shiny badges and expensive offices notwithstanding, ICE is no less a criminal enterprise than Los Zetas or the Gambino family, and its abduction of Andiola’s family no less a crime.
Hultner: The “debate” between CNN host Piers Morgan and talk radio host Alex Jones on Monday may have been entertaining political theatre, but they — and the rest of us — are missing a larger point.
Kevin Carson: Authority enables one actor to maximize her personal utility, while making socially suboptimal choices, by imposing the negative consequences of her choices on other actors with less authority.
Goodman: Eric Hill was attacked by police not because he was suspected of committing aggressive violence, but because he was suspected of refusing to commit aggressive violence.
Knapp: The stateless society isn’t just looking more and more theoretically viable, it is openly emerging as the paradigm of the next long historical cycle.
