A tweet jokingly showing James C. Scott centrally planning his small chicken farm.  Even in his devastating critiques of high-modernist central planning, James C Scott acknowledges the benefits to planning and the levels at which it can occur with relative safety. The author M Black also challenges us not to fetishize decentralization in such a…

No, it’s not surprising that the Austin Police Department let the person who killed Garrett Foster go after less than a day. It’s not surprising that they didn’t charge them. It’s not even surprising that the president of the Austin police officer’s union, Kenneth Cassaday, would publicly denounce Garrett Foster on the same day.  Truth…

The most blunt and obvious anti-statist position regarding taxation and consequently public budgets (although the former is not the sole source of the latter) is their reduction or complete abolition, and this is often how it is treated amongst centrist and right-wing libertarians. For example, Murray Rothbard writes that the principled approach should be “to…

Anarchists have long made decentralization a core demand for the structure of our organizations and have placed tremendous faith in the decentralization of our organizations as a means by which to prevent the generation of hierarchies and abuses of power, among other issues. However, this faith is based on very little, and anarchists can stand…

Let me begin by stating how happy I am that this exchange is happening. As information technology has come to saturate our lives over the last two decades we’ve seen the debate over non-market economies remerge. A recent essay published in The Economist1 both summarizes the discourse and speaks to its increasing prominence. In the…

Now it may surprise some, but unlike many fellow freed market anarchists at C4SS, I am not a market anarchist because of the economic calculation problem. While I do think the economic calculation problem rightly points out that top-down command economies cannot adequately produce and distribute goods to meet the needs of society, anarchist economic…

About a decade ago The Third Industrial Revolution was published, and a few years later The Zero Marginal Cost Society came out by the same author, from a mainstream and politically moderate economist who advises the EU and German government, making very radical predictions such as moving to a society without money as a result…

There’s an eerie familiarity to the stay-at-home orders issued during COVID-19. I can’t help but relate this to my experience as an 11 year old during the month-long curfew after the communal riots of Bombay.  Growing up in India, communal life dominated our lives. While the state functioned along the lines of rigid, monopolistic, soviet-socialist…

Introduction: Towards a Combined Anarchist and Communist Approach to the Question of Central Economic Planning This essay deals with the question of central economic planning, or minimum viable economic planning (MVEP) from both anarchist and communist perspectives. The central operative terms will be collectivization, or the process of pooling resources to be shared at the…

Like every other intelligent person, I find violence repulsive. Violence is effectively the definition of “how to do something if you’ve not an ounce of cleverness.” In nature, the symbiotic relationship constitutes the ideal: it generates a sustainable and ecologically sound means of enjoying the little bit of time any one of us has here…

Is it possible for our enemies to discover actual insights? The impulse to deny this is universal. The third reich dismissed special relativity as “Jewish physics” and lost significant advantage. The USSR worried that accepting Darwin’s insights in evolution would open the floodgates to capitalist social darwinism and so they hurt themselves by sticking with…

[Hear an in-depth discussion on this article and its topics in this episode of The Enragés] Radical positions are always a hard sell. To some extent, this is an inherent aspect of advocating any alternative system of social organization, instead of just proposing reform and “bipartisan solutions.” Some, perhaps too many, have attempted to dull…

Note: In order to properly display some of the mathematics in this piece, it’s hosted here as a .pdf. Or, click the image below the introduction. The problem of scale is perhaps the most fundamental problem of anarchism. We all know by direct experience that anarchism works well on a local scale. Most people who…

Note: I’ve tried to minimize the math and computation theory to make this more generally readable but where it gets more complex I just wrote (math paragraph) before the paragraph and you can read or skip it and still understand the piece. I’ll open with a potentially contentious take. Most of the decentralized and left-leaning…

People are taking to the streets with arms to protest government overreach…in a most spectacular display of ignorance.  While I am extremely sympathetic to those out of work and struggling, who expected relief money that never came, and are now worried about not being able to feed their family or even losing their house and…

In 1939, Leonid Kantorovich, a Soviet mathematician, came up with a formulation for optimization problems called linear programming (LP) after being tasked with planning production in the plywood industry during World War 2. A linear program is a constrained optimization problem with a linear objective function that is maximized or minimized subject to linear equality…

The calculation problem, as stated by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, has been central to most libertarian arguments against non-market or non-price forms of economic coordination. The Misesian variant, argued in Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth and Socialism, is based on the role of factor input pricing in allocating inputs among competing uses….

When talking about right libertarianism, many associated with those circles are quick to point out the varying factions of the libertarian movement. The simplest and most well known division is that between the anarchists and minarchists. On the anarchist side, you have your natural rights ancaps, consequentialist ancaps, agorists, individualist anarchists, free market anarchists, geo-anarchists,…

There have long been people in the United States talking about secession or splitting the country into smaller nations. These kinds of discussions seem to be happening more as US states make regional agreements to manage Covid-19 recovery and right wingers fantasize about civil war. Creating smaller American nations will not liberate the people on…

At Reason Ilya Somin, in keeping with his annual practice since 2007, has chosen May 1 — May Day — as his date for  observing “Victims of Communism Day.” Somin cites the “authoritative” Black Book of Communism as his source for a death toll of 80-100 million in the 20th century. To put that “authoritative”…