In the wake of the murder of Christmas shoppers in Breitscheidplatz public square in Berlin comes Mises Institute President Jeff Deist’s tragicomic article Market Borders, not Open Borders. After some correction that the suspect was Tunisian rather than Pakistani (making no difference to Deist), it takes him all the way up until the second sentence…

Well, it seems that any lingering question on whether or not the happenings on social media platforms are truly politically relevant can finally be put to rest. While most of us prefer the edge of communication media that cuts away from the dynamics of power, president-elect Trump has managed to do quite the opposite by…

Anarchists tend to pose our core differences with marxists in terms of degrees of radicalism or rootedness. One of the classic ways this gets stated is that marxism deals with the political whereas we deal with the ethical. These terms to the disagreement, once posed, are almost always immediately acknowledged and indeed embraced by both…

In what seems to be becoming an annual tradition, neoconservative grey eminence Bill Kristol tweeted in December 18, “When I first saw Star Wars in 1977, I was inclined to root for the empire. 25 years later, @JVLast proved me right.” Kristol authored a similar series of tweets in October of last year, and praised…

At times I think back to the days of George W. Bush’s wayward administration and find it hard to believe it ever happened. The nepotism was so flagrant, with each and every move so unabashedly self-serving. Don’t get me wrong, Obama’s presidency was not devoid of its own revolving doors and conflicts of interest; we…

Secular and religion-based political systems can bear an uncanny resemblance. Observing their respective dogmas, catechisms, and sacraments, we might even wonder, with William Cavanaugh, whether the divide is as sharp as we commonly think. Recent events certainly call the distinction into question. We see that a secularist can be as much a fanatic who is…

Centennial  I’ve lived in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains for most of my life. I cannot thank my parents enough for taking me on excursions to the park. Among the parks wild waters, forested canopy, steep slopes and rugged terrain I learned at a young age to respect the natural environment. This respect…

There is a general feeling in the academic world: things could be done in a much better way. But what exactly has gone wrong? I would argue the main problem is that we have allowed ‘irrational authority’ (also known as hierarchy) to take over reason and knowledge. To start, let me differentiate between rational and…

Should free-market advocates applaud the deal Donald Trump brokered to keep some Carrier jobs from being transferred to Mexico? I believe the right answer is no. A virtue of the market process is precisely its impersonal nature. People are free to engage in exchanges subject only to the freedom of others to refuse offers they…

For decades, Antiwar.com has been the leading voice of the anti-war movement, injecting a consistently anti-authoritarian message into the conversation about foreign conflict and foreign policy. Their journalism has been celebrated among independent media and legacy media alike over the years, and their commentators are unmatched in their commitment to peace, liberty and the end…

I confess my reaction on Election Night, when it first looked like Trump might get in the White House, was sheer panic. It was a bit like Philip K. Dick’s “Black Iron Prison” closing down. On a personal level, I was about as terrified as the night I was arrested and put in jail. Now,…

Anarchism in and of itself is a bit of a conundrum. The term means many different things depending on who one talks to. In popular circles anarchism is equated with violence, chaos and a total disregard of any form of cultural or social order. In philosophical circles, however, anarchism is something very different. Anarchism is…

There has been much speculation and justified anxiety concerning how advances in Computer Science (in the field of Artificial Intelligence – AI – in particular) and Robotics could result in mass unemployment due to automation. However, the fact that compulsory education exacerbates this especially problematic aspect of technological progress is largely neglected in such discussions….

One of the more annoying things about our norms of discourse is that we tend to collapse our talk of the future into singular predictions rather than arrays of different possibilities each with different probabilities. It’s easier to pretend like we each have one singular future that we’re betting on. We more or less commit…

I had the pleasure of appearing before the Amherst Political Union (Amherst College) this week to discuss the election of Donald Trump as president and the future of liberty. What perhaps pleased me even more was meeting with a group of young libertarians eager to explore the nature and implications of natural-law free-market anarchism. The…

In June of 2014 the United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) detailed an audacious proposal to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants. The usual fall-out unfolded. Agency favorable Democrats and environmentalists smiled while Industry favorable Republicans, suits and the national conservative right cried: “Green is the new Red!” Now a regime change…

This essay argues that markets are an ideational construct, constructed through a milieu of ideologies, power structures and authority relations. Rather than modern markets being spontaneously ordered mechanisms that have evolved naturally from the progressions of history, they are in instead constitutions of power and ideas, acting as a semiotic mechanism for underlying socio-economic realities….

While presidents almost always expand the power of their office and of the government, Donald Trump is likely to enact a degree of barefisted authoritarianism the modern United States is totally unprepared for. Even if the corrupt and limp political elites that have so far utterly failed to stand against him unexpectedly rally a steadfast…

There currently exist two very real and ever wicked threats to human civilization. Those threats are a looming environmental crisis and nuclear war. As different as the two appear, these threats are not isolated from one another — they are congruent. The growing environmental crisis is well documented, but the root ills are not well…

In a PBS segment Oct. 24, Judy Woodruff asked “What will Dakota Access protesters do if final pipeline restrictions are lifted?” Her guest William Brangham, who’s been covering the confrontation for PBS Newshour, elaborates: People don’t exactly know what’s going to happen. If the Army Corps agrees to this last permit and says to the…