If right-libertarians have a “comparative advantage,” it’s in writing by-the-numbers puff pieces on “free trade” that borrow the language of Ricardo and Cobden to defend what amounts to a totalitarian corporate lockdown on the world economy. This time it’s Richard Ebeling of the Future of Freedom Foundation (“Free Trade Versus Political Fallacies,” June 15) doing…

An article published in January by the New York Times, “Why Cartels Are Killing Mexico’s Mayors,” gives some harrowing insight on the obviously violent and corrupt nature of governance in Mexico. The beginning of the article details a newly-elected mayor brutally murdered right in front of her family, a sign that her anti-corruption rhetoric didn’t…

The following practices determine whether a state activity can be categorized as genocide according to the United Nation’s Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of…

Guns, if you don’t have a healthy fear of them you probably don’t know much about them. From victims of gun violence to conscientious gun owners, hundreds of millions of Americans are well acquainted with their destructive power and the need for safety in managing their use. However, the fear left unchecked by other external…

Michael Gibson tries to demonstrate the infeasibility of a universal basic income by showing that people actually like to work, as evidenced by the increase of hours relative to increased prosperity witnessed during the 20th and 21st centuries. According to him, a UBI would not work as major disincentives are created, which Gibson shows by…

At a time when government space programs like NASA’s seem to be in permanent retrenchment — shifting to a strategy focused on uncrewed probes, fighting to maintain an “International Space Station” that looks like a joke compared to Golden Age science fiction visions of giant cartwheel stations in orbit — a lot of people see…

If you ask an economist to suggest areas where the state should be involved, one answer you’re likely to hear is that states should provide “public goods.” A public good is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rival. By non-excludable, economists mean that once the good is produced individuals cannot be excluded from consuming…

Free people are prosperous people. When not forced to do otherwise, they work out the best ways for achieving their ends. These ends are often shared or overlapping, so cooperating with others is often a natural way of successfully resisting and overcoming the engulfing harshness of the natural world. When people bring things into the…

Complaints about “entitled Millennials” are practically an entire literary genre in their own right these days, but their younger siblings are coming in for their share of criticism too. At the Washington Post, Laura Hanby Hudgens (“Do teachers care more about schoolwork than your kids do? Here’s how to fix the apathy problem,” May 26)…

In Reason, William Ruger and Jason Sorens seek to offer an alternative to the sort of thick libertarianism to which many of those associated with the Center for a Stateless Society are committed. They seek to defend what they call “virtue libertarianism.” Sometimes, they seem to be concerned with virtues in the narrow sense of…

According to one defense of government, citizens’ use of government services adequately explains and justifies the existence of political obligations. By attending government schools, walking on government sidewalks, and calling 911, citizens “tacitly agree” to taxation, jury duty, and military registration, or so the argument goes. One tempting rebuttal—that enforceable agreements cannot be tacit—fails pretty…

Entrepreneurs, or people who are alert to profit opportunities and act in order to obtain profits for themselves, exist in all societies. But the profit opportunities they seek will vary. Some entrepreneurs may seek to profit by providing consumers with goods they value, such as pizza or beer. Others may attempt to profit by seeking…

Recent events in Brazil have been framed as something of a morality play by both sides. For partisans of Dilma Rousseff and the Workers Party, her impeachment and the installation of Michel Temer as acting President was a neoliberal coup by corporate and landed interests in Brazil, backed by Washington. For those supporting her impeachment,…

In invoking the need for stringent economic regulations, their proponents regularly bring up the case that without these regulations the dumb consumer would fall prey to food poisoning, faulty production and all other sorts of calamities and disasters. In effect, they are saying that the consumer is far too stupid to have the capacity to…

Throughout American history centralized, federally subsidized infrastructure projects have been a recurring theme for plutocratic interests. Under the Whigs (“internal improvements”) and the Gilded Age GOP (railroad land grants) it was promoted by parties that unabashedly identified themselves as advocates for national commercial interests. But with the rise of the Progressive movement at the turn…

Advertising and big data act as two elements with the capacity to end corporate dominance if the necessary steps can be taken. They act as the quasi-independent creations of the government scourge of mass production, born of the system of the factory, emplaced in the wider social factory of commercial neoliberalism that surrounds the modern…

This month marks the 145th anniversary of the violent suppression of the Paris Commune by the French national government. The Paris Commune remains a potent symbol for many people – though what exactly it symbolizes is a matter of dispute. To conservatives, the Commune stands for a reign of terror and mob rule. For many…

The more means by which people can act the easier attack becomes and the harder defense becomes. It’s a simple matter of complexity. The attacker only needs to choose one line of attack, the defender needs to secure against all of them. This isn’t just true of small thermal exhaust ports, it’s true in our…

Jeff Jacoby, in discussing Obama’s visit to Japan (“In Hiroshima, Obama Should Celebrate the Friendship that Hiroshima Made Possible,” Boston Globe, May 14), suggests that — far from simply not revisiting Truman’s atomic bombing decision — Obama should “reaffirm that it was right and just, ultimately saving countless lives, ending a terrible war, and freeing…

Municipal governments across the country are targeting vagrants for “misusing” public property. A couple of months ago, the City of Denver, Colorado, cracked down on “Resurrection Village,” a homeless community built on public land. A month earlier, the City Council of Colorado Springs, Colorado, reduced the number of legal reasons for which people may sit and…