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,…

“You are not lady like.” — Mexican Marxist and former employer. “YOU YOU YOU YOU KNOW YOU ARE NOT FEMININE!” — Canadian former child star, drunk, trying to navigate a stick shift while … drunk. “Why do you work here if you hate men?” — Shit bag and strip club general manager. “BITCH..BITCH..BITCH” — former…

The so-called “sharing economy” is sometimes also called the “gig economy” — arguably a more accurate term, because “sharing economy” carries overtones of cooperation and mutuality that are (to say the least) grossly misleading. In the case of ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft it’s misleading because it suggests the direct sharing of rides between…

Classical liberalism recommends, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, “a wall of separation” between church and state. In his case for religious toleration, John Locke argued that separation protects people from the “compulsive force” of individuals trying to inculcate “certain doctrines” through “fire and sword.” Robert Audi later added that “if the state prefers one or more…

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security announced today that the government will forbid the television news media from covering the conflict in the Middle East because “displays of U.S. military operations there have the potential to radicalize Americans against the Obama administration’s foreign policy and provoke terrorism in the United States.”…

It speaks volumes that the dirtiest word in the Republican and conservative lexicon is amnesty. At a minimum, it exposes as a flagrant lie the claim that Republicans and conservatives want to expand liberty and limit government power. One cannot consistently praise the principle, central to the supposedly beloved Declaration of Independence, that “all men…