When I was researching my recent article on Nathaniel Branden, who died last month, I came across an audio file of a talk Branden gave at the 1979 Libertarian Party national convention in Los Angeles. I was at the convention, but I don’t remember attending the talk. I might have been busy with other things;…
Recently, the all-woman’s college Mount Holyoke in South Hadley Massachusetts decided to cancel the play production The Vagina Monologues. This, in turn stopped a tradition of having the play performed on Valentine’s day to raise awareness of violence against women. They cited the play as, among other things, transphobic and having an overly narrow and reductionist view…
Last week’s bloody events in Paris demonstrate yet again that a noninterventionist foreign policy, far from being a luxury, is an urgent necessity — literally a matter of life and death. A government that repeatedly wages wars of aggression — the most extreme form of extremism — endangers the society it ostensibly protects by gratuitously making enemies, some…
I hate when people support violence, but claim to advocate non-violence. We see it when a liberal condemns protesters for rioting but then advocates laws that enable armed police officers to arrest and armed guards to cage people for possessing firearms. We see it when presidents who use cluster bombs against civilians condemn violence by protesters and…
A persistent theme in popular culture, when it comes to issues of technological progress and the future, is that the super-rich will be the main beneficiaries of new technology. Billionaires with artificially augmented lifespans will retreat into their gated communities and anarcho-capitalist enclaves; the rest of us will live lives nasty, brutish and short, subject…
Words can hardly convey the grief and disgust felt at Wednesday’s executions of the editor, cartoonists, and others — 10 people in all — at France’s satirical weekly magazine,Charlie Hebdo. Two policemen also were killed, and 11 other people were wounded by the three fanatics who reportedly declared they were avenging the prophet Muhammad, founder of…
This morning, there are twelve people who are dead who should not be. Nine journalists, a maintenance worker and two police officers were killed at the Paris headquarters of French satire newspaper Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday. Eleven more were injured; four are still in critical condition as of this writing. Here is a list of the…
Some of my fondest childhood memories are with my parents hiking around the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. One memory is particularly vivid. I was six and on the trail to Abrams Falls after a summer rain moved through the forest. The sun was just again peaking through the canopy. As my folks and I…
On NAASN, an email list for anarchist academics, Wayne Price (whose review of my book I previously replied to here) responded to someone else’s proposal to “abolish the state and see if capitalism survives until sunrise” as follows: [This is] what most people probably think anarchists advocate: society just as it is but with no…
The recent trajectory of events leading up to the shooting of NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, and the nationwide police backlash afterward, have made it clearer than ever how police feel about the public they supposedly protect and serve: they’re terrified of us. For more than twenty years, the Drug War and associated…
The concepts monopoly and aggression are intimately related, like lock and key, or mother and son. You cannot fully understand the first without understanding the second. Most of us are taught to think of a monopoly as simply any lone seller of a good or service, but this definition is fraught with problems, as Murray…
In the wake of an uprising in Ferguson, Barack Obama requested hundreds of millions of dollars to arm the police with cameras. This, he thought, was a way of holding police accountable. And he was right, it feeds into the system of “accountability” already in place in local justice systems. It holds them accountable to…
We are fascinated by the image of rebellion. The present generation came of age amidst global unrest and upheaval, from the Arab Spring to the anti-austerity movements in the West. Its immediate impulse has been to identify with those in the streets, even in the case of ill-fated and dubiously progressive movements. The image of…
The cops who ganged up on Eric Garner, got him into a chokehold, and mashed his face into the sidewalk didn’t intend to kill him. They intended only to show him who’s boss on the streets of Staten Island — and show him in a way he would never forget. As a Facebook friend of…
Last year at Salon Michael Lind asked “The question libertarians just can’t answer” (June 4): “Why are there no libertarian countries?… If libertarianism was a good idea, wouldn’t at least one country have tried it?” He got some answers — the best of them from us free market libertarians of the left, who consider ourselves critics of…
If you shoot a person dead, you are rightly held accountable for their death. What happens if you press a button to initiate a machine that shoots a person, are you just as responsible? How accountable are you, if you are in the room at the same time that the process is occurring and you…
Right libertarians tend to be brilliant defenders of wage labor, but often overlook the wage system. They are right as far as they go about wage labor, but ignore the structural inequality that affects the kinds of employment opportunities that people have — the kind that relies on political power. Wage labor is fine. The…
Recently, in a comment on my short piece, “The Libertarian Road to Egalitarianism,” philosopher and prominent libertarian Tibor R. Machan cited George Orwell’s Animal Farm as an example of what happens when we attempt to do something about inequality. To Machan, inequality is a “fabricated problem,” and Orwell’s fairy story is a cautionary tale on…
Recently, a law was passed in California that redefines how sexual relations happen on college campuses. The law states that affirmative consent must be given throughout sex. Past relationships between the two individuals cannot be taken as consent and neither can consent be presumed when people are incapacitated from drugs or alcohol, unable to communicate, or…
About six months ago, when Uber was first becoming a visible national controversy, I wrote a column (“One Cheer for Uber and Lyft” C4SS, May 16, 2014) in which I argued that Uber, despite being a genuine example of neither peer-to-peer (p2p) nor sharing, was a step in the right direction because it offered at…
