“Texas’s prisoners are the slaves of today, and that slavery affects our society economically, morally and politically,” stated the five-page letter put out by the Industrial Workers of the World’s Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC) announcing the prison strike. “Beginning on April 4, 2016, all inmates around Texas will stop all labor in order to…

Local currencies in their praxis have many shortcomings when it comes to economic applications. Issues of supply chains and the adequacy of developed economies of scale are lacking in many local currency systems. However, such an economistic view ignores the actual political ramifications of local currencies. Certainly local currencies have issues when it comes their…

My BHL colleague Chris Freiman has three questions for left-libertarians concerning how we reconcile our “commitment to workplace democracy” with the “other commitments that libertarians are inclined to have.” Here I suggest some answers. Does workplace democracy really eliminate bosses? Most libertarians, Chris notes, “would deny that granting all citizens a vote in a political…

A new Harvard poll shows 51 percent of Millennials do not support capitalism (compared to 42 percent who do). An older Reason-Rupe poll found “socialism” beat “capitalism” in popularity 58 to 56%, but the “free market” was overwhelmingly more popular than a “government-managed economy.” The spin-meisters are quick to frame this as Millennial confusion about…

When looking at history for examples of the establishment of anarchist societies we often think of the Spanish anarchists in Catalonia or the efforts of the Zapatista army in Mexico. These are both examples of groups using tactics of revolutionary armed conflict against the state and capitalism in an attempt to establish an autonomous stateless…

People who want to live in a society organized on the basis of peaceful, voluntary cooperation don’t want to be ruled by monopolists — by states. State authority is illegitimate, unnecessary, and dangerous. But that obviously leaves open the question: what do we do now, while we’re still under the state’s rule, to make our…

To attribute to money a concept of bestowing freedom upon an individual owner may well exist as a theoretical possibility. Yet ownership is itself a contested concept. As is freedom. By bestowing freedom on the owner, it effectively prompts the dominance of certain types of power to come to the fore of monetary and economic…

Last week, I attended a local Fight for $15 rally with some fellow Wobblies and other union organizers and supporters. Echoes of rally cries demanding, “$15 and a union,” filled the streets outside of a local McDonald’s as fast food and child services workers from the Tampa and Orlando, Florida area, mostly workers of color,…

For almost five years now, Reason has been shilling for a corporate-owned charter cities project (Zones for Economic Development and Employment, or ZEDE) in Honduras. A whole body of articles by Senior Editor Brian Doherty takes a consistently boosterish approach to the project, repeatedly using such language as “a freer economy or better legal institutions,”…

The next few hours are going to define how Dilma Rousseff will leave office (the later vote in the Senate, if called upon, will be pro forma), but the rule of the Workers’ Party in Brazil undoubtedly has come to an end. The result of impeachment vote is of little importance: we already know that…

The rise of Donald Trump has led to a growing interest in what is generally called the “alternative right” in the United States — a group that could be more simply labeled “literate racists.” The “alt-right” resembles the French New Right and the German conservative revolutionaries in that they are not obsessed with corporate welfare,…

At Reason, Brian Doherty tears into Bernie Sanders for opposing what the latter calls “unfettered free trade” (“Bernie Sanders Hates The World’s Poor, and Wants to Hurt Them,” April 5). “This wicked man deliberately wants to make it impossible for Americans to do the thing that historically most guarantees helping the truly poor in the…

Capitalism’s relation to spiritual attitudes and ideologies has historically been hostile. The use of magic and the holding of pagan beliefs in peasant communities in the transition from feudalism to capitalism was mercilessly crushed, as they were seen as a belief systems that removed control from the mercantile elites and prevented the mechanistic control needed…

You’ve probably had one of Those People say (usually after sidling up to you, looking around to see if anybody’s listening, and prefacing it with an “I’m not racist, but…” disclaimer) “Slavery was 150 years ago — they need to get over it!” Or maybe it’s ethnic cleansing episodes like Tulsa (“90 years ago”), or…

One important point my colleague Kevin Carson has emphasized repeatedly is that the prevailing labor relations in our society are not just a natural outgrowth of voluntary exchanges in a free market. Instead, they have resulted from pervasive state intervention that constrains the options of workers, thus leaving them in a worse position to bargain…

Every so often, the call for African-American reparations re-emerges in full force. The Atlantic author Ta-Nehisi Coates is perhaps the most prominent pundit to issue the call in recent years, pointing to America’s shameful history of slavery and segregation as grounds for restitution. Because American depravities placed black people at an economic disadvantage, he reasons,…

The consensus view of both pro-gun and anti-gun people in America is that our gun culture protects gun rights. I believe this needs to be questioned. Individuals who face the highest risk of being violated are the most likely to not have full gun rights. American gun culture is joined at the hip with attitudes…

The rally against Trump in Fountain Hills, Arizona, on the 19th of March, 2016, was met with great resistance and critique from both the Left and the Right largely using arguments about “freedom” and “violence.” As these are important and seemingly misunderstood themes, I’ve chosen to weave analyses of them through this report-back. Freedom is…

In a Washington Post article (“What rich countries get wrong about poverty,” March 28), Ana Swanson summarizes an argument by Caroline Freund, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, as follows: “Blaming the super-rich for global poverty would be a mistake.” In fact it might reflect an erroneous “First World mindset.” (Note: I…

The dominant belief in our society is that prisons are a necessary tool to fight crime. Prisons are often thought to counter crime in at least three ways: 1. Deterrence: The expectation of a prison sentence increases the perceived cost of committing a crime, thus creating incentives not to commit crimes. 2. Incapacitation: By coercively…