Back in the ’90s, the Financial Times referred to the G8 countries and the Washington Consensus they enforced as a “de facto world government.” As if we needed any reminder that such a global corporate regime exists in practice, consider the Trans-Pacific Partnership currently under negotiation. Although in theory the authority of all treaties signed…

Military Artifacts All over the world, landscapes both urban and rural are littered with military artifacts from bygone times. These artifacts have completed their lifecycle as objects of power, force and control, and have either been repurposed or forgotten. Repurposed artifacts gain new meaning in the world, as they take on new roles. The former military…

In their efforts to fight the Affordable Care Act, Republicans in Washington have “shut down” the Federal government to supposedly cut spending due to the costs of the health care legislation. On the first day of the shutdown most of us woke up, had coffee, and went to work. In other words, nothing had really…

Debates over conscription typically take the form of a for-or-against binary with flavors varying according to the inclinations of the participants. Fascists champion conscription as a means of purification while others see it as a means of precluding or at least mitigating the possibility of war. The former perspective deserves no further exploration, but the…

The tenets of the Tao Te Ching express the first anarchist or at least proto-anarchist political philosophy, to my knowledge. The Taoist opposition to government springs from a radical non-interventionist philosophy on all three major branches of philosophy. While Taoism rejects the normative, they recognize a sort of logic about the state of the universe,…

To a large extent, discussion of this issue tends to be dominated either by anarcho-capitalists who think in terms of for-profit protection “firms” or insurance companies, or communists and syndicalists who for the most part don’t frame issues in terms of the “non-aggression principle” or “initiation of force.” So where does that leave those of…

The seemingly unbridgeable ideological gap in America between economic libertarians, on the one hand, and on the other, those who advocate various manners and degrees of redistribution of wealth can be rationally resolved through an understanding of the significance of the concepts of property rights and redistributive justice to those who advocated them in 1640’s…

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew says if Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling — or, as I call it, the debt sky, because apparently the sky is the limit — the government won’t be able to pay all its bills starting October 17. The Congressional Budget Office says that dire condition won’t set in until sometime between October 22…

I suppose it takes a true radical these days to question the progressive’s sacred cow: Ronald Reagan. You read that right. This paradigm of modern conservatism was one of the most important American champions of gun control in recent decades, and so he has become a convenient talking point for liberals who want to argue…

The United States and Russia appear to have reached an agreement over the conflict in Syria. The powers have adopted a diplomatic resolution to bring Syrian chemical weapons under international control. For now, this development has calmed the rhetorical march to war as it is now unlikely to see a U.S. military strike on Syria in the…

Dear Chelsea Manning, The courage and integrity you showed in exposing the moral depredations of the U.S. Government is an inspiration to political radicals everywhere. Your imprisonment is a grave injustice. It represents a crime against basic human decency. The genuine criminals run amok while you are confined to a cage. This inversion of justice…

In the debate on Syria, progressive pundits are letting us know that do-gooders can’t be peaceniks. Recently, pro-war commentators on liberal media outlets have greatly outnumbered the doves, with MSNBC leading the way. These humanitarian interventionists understand what the most famous progressives of all time made clear, that the obligation to rescue the unfortunate comes with an obligation to…

I recently watched Elysium. And in it, like a lot of Hollywood movies, a strong, heroic man saved a helpless woman and child. And as a feminist I felt irritated. But as a woman I felt something else. I realized I saw the appeal in being saved by a strong, heroic man. Those same cultural…

I am told that today is New Zealand’s Father’s Day. I offer this painting by Goya as my opinion of this sort of celebration. To begin with, we should never reverence anything merely for the accident of sheer proximate existence or genetic relation. We should never revere anything on the basis of sex or age….

The online liberty group “Thoughts on Liberty” pumps out some good stuff more often than not. The site is intellectually managed and operated by “a team of ladies writing about freedom” who offer their unique perspective on libertarianism. Like most addressing the liberty movement, the authors usually take a right leaning (or all-out right stance)…

Libertarianism is, in theory, no defender of the rich and powerful who must always be subject to market competition. As a libertarian who has engaged in countless classroom and online debates, I’ve often asked myself why other people cannot see that. However, I’ve come to understand the reasoning behind the intuitive criticism from the Left…

On a rainy day in May of 1915, the first settlers of the Ferrer Colony of Stelton got off their train from New York and walked about a mile to their new homes. The crowd on its way to the old farmstead included 32 children who would be enrolled in the radical school that anchored…

Industrial Utility In the vast arid lands of the Arckaringa Basin in Australia a major shale oil discovery has been made. Linc Energy has discovered across 16 million acres of land an estimated 133 – 233 billion barrels of shale oil that lies beneath the region’s lithology. No matter how much of this oil is…

Two quotations, juxtaposed, summarize the errors into which modern American defenses of ‘free markets’ and capitalism have entered. In the process these errors led to abandoning any real meaning for liberty or human well-being.  Right wing libertarians in particular sincerely believe they are seeking to preserve these values, but they are sincerely wrong. But before…

Power is not to be conquered, it is to be destroyed. It is tyrannical by nature, whether exercised by a king, a dictator or an elected president. The only difference with the parliamentarian ‘democracy’ is that the modern slave has the illusion of choosing the master he will obey. The vote has made him an…