Imagine you make your living as a university professor  –  you have a low salary, no health benefits and no retirement benefits. Now imagine that at the end of this semester your career will be suddenly terminated with no due process or severance pay. Now imagine this circumstance is not unique – because it’s not. This circumstance is experienced…

It’s been suggested that market anarchists should feel “grateful” to accused LAX shooter Paul Ciancia for killing TSA agent Gerardo Hernandez and wounding several others. After all, by market anarchist standards, the TSA is a criminal organization, subjecting travelers to intrusive and humiliating rights-violations. The fact that the TSA is a government agency constitutes no…

These are funny times. If some old, obviously doddering anarchist (if they weren’t doddering, they’d never do this!) dares to use the word “libertarian” the way it was used for well over a century, the way it’s still used in many parts of the world, the hip, young anarchists will look at her aghast, all because about…

When I say I am an anarchist, I simply mean that, to the extent that I have the power, I refuse to let anyone or anything dominate me. In other words, I refuse to accept the power of any authority, any institution, any existing or would-be ruler, any ruler, etc., over me. This is why I…

“Reformism” is one of those words that’s hard to pin down sometimes. It’s usually taken to mean advocating for “reform within the system” — in other words, the bad kind of reform. A bad reform operates from the unstated – often unconscious – starting assumptions of the system. It takes the existing institutional framework of…

Of late I have been trying to balance my staunch support of the non-aggression principle (NAP) and self-ownership with my increasingly leftist values. For some anarchists the NAP and property rights are totally and wildly incompatible with anarchism, with the argument going so far to claim that stereotypical anarchism is rooted in a rejection of…

“Need I comment that these capitalists, both in Islam and in Christendom, were friends of the prince and helpers or exploiters of the state? […]” “Thus, the modern state, which did not create capitalism but only inherited it, sometimes acts in its favor and at other times acts against it; it sometimes allows capitalism to…

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…