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…

Riding a wave of backlash to social and legal gains made by trans individuals and a misinformation campaign based on unfounded fears, North Carolina’s legislature hurriedly passed a sweeping, unprecedented anti-LGBT law. The law overrides any laws at the local level to bring legal protections for LGBT individuals to parity with those already existing for…

The border that separates the United States and Mexico has been the cause of many controversies and constant violence. When a wall of separation is created to notify where a certain territory begins and ends, whether they oppose each other or not, there are bound to be complications. One group that is literally in the…

Everyone loves learning. The thing is that not everyone likes studying and what’s even more frustrating is to be told how we should study, why we should study etc. Making education available to everyone is benevolent but making education compulsory for everyone is something that we are so used to that we do not see…

Some critics of mass incarceration see the contemporary carceral state as a result of the abolition of state-run mental hospitals. For example, German Lopez of Vox recently wrote that “America’s criminal justice system has, in many ways, become a substitute for the US’s largely gutted mental health system.” Yet when the mental health system was “gutted,” what…

Last Sunday (March the 13th) I attended the protests against president Dilma Rousseff in Rio — and all was not well. My friends and I were violently antagonized by a subset of the protesters and the police had to intervene for our safety.  This is my side of the story, accompanied by my thoughts on what…

“In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be…

If the American Revolution was in some large measure a tax rebellion, we should appreciate the bitter irony that the U.S. Constitution was in some large measure a reaction to a tax rebellion. It’s another reason we can reasonably view the move toward the Constitution — toward, that is, the concentration of power in a…

I would like to emphasize that abolitionism is not a strategy that proposes an all-or-nothing stance or one that refuses cooperation and coalitions with non-abolitionists. It’s a particular theoretical framework for viewing social change and I think it can help libertarians and anarchists be better strategists. That said, there are, in my mind, three major,…

The response to the 2011 UK riots fits into an unfortunate paradigm of ignoring structural and underlying causes. These are easy explanations that characterise the outbreaks as race riots or as pure criminality. Issues such as entrenched poverty, ghettoisation and marginalisation from economic and political spheres are left by the wayside. But to understand the…

It’s generally conceived that the entrepreneur is the lone economic wolf in the economy, bringing together the morass of labour, capital and resources and placing it under his/her will. This picture of rugged individualism usually serves little purpose other than to justify large expansions of wealth by corporate CEOs and ignores the actual picture of…

Supranationalism and the EU The polymath philosopher, activist and Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell was a radical left iconoclast who made major contributions to mathematical logic and nearly every other discipline he touched. Many libertarians admire him, but one major disagreement stands out: In his later years he advocated world government in order to prevent the…

The U.S. Constitution can reasonably be seen as a massive tax and mercantilist trade-promotion program. However, there’s a third leg to this stool. It was a national-security program as well — almost a proto-PATRIOT Act. Indeed, these three elements formed an integrated project: it gave the new central government independent power to raise revenue by…

In a recent open letter to the mayor (Julia Carrie Wong, “San Francisco tech worker: ‘I don’t want to see homeless riff-raff,’“ The Guardian, Feb. 17), entitled tech bro Justin Keller whined that the sight of homeless people ruins his enjoyment of the local atmosphere in San Francisco. And when his family comes to visit,…