C4SS Feed 44 presents David S. D’Amato‘s “The Libertarian Road to Egalitarianism” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. But we needn’t regard inequality as a weak point in our arguments for economic freedom, or as an issue on which we simply cannot win. Existing economic relations are not the product of freedom…

Josiah Warren, “A Brief Outline of Equitable Commerce,” The Boston Investigator, XXI, 50 (April 14, 1852), 3. Mr. Editor: — Believing that the suggestions contained in the following article will be of service to those persons who interest themselves in the subject of Social Reform, and whose desire is to find a method of securing…

Content Warning: Brief mentions of suicide, rape and general discussions of transphobia. Recently there’s been laws among several states that unfairly target the trans community, most notably in South Dakota. South Dakota not only has a bill that targets the transgender community in public schools, but has had this bill passed in both the House…

P-J Proudhon’s understanding of democracy is a classic example of the concerns about the representative democratic process which many classical liberals expressed. The following was written a few weeks after the February (1848) Revolution in Paris had replaced the constitutional monarchy of King Louise-Phillipe with that of a nominally democratic republic. The illusion of democracy…

That’s right, I’m back! You can once again get your weekly dose of prison abolitionist opinion and analysis right here at the Center for a Stateless Society. Throughout my absence, my C4SS colleagues have presented excellent prison abolitionist commentary. For example, Nick Ford argued that despite Tutwiler Prison’s formal demise, the rape-filled prison system it represents…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Nick Ford‘s “The Individualist Anarchist and Work” from the Students for a Stateless Society‘s Volume 1, Issue 2 of THE NEW LEVELLER read and edited by Nick Ford. The individualist anarchist may first notice in this situation that the individual is crushed not only by the political arrangements but the systematic…

Anarchist characters are a rarity on television. (Sorry, the “Sons of Anarchy” aren’t actually anarchists.) But the CW’s popular show “Arrow,” based on the DC Comics character Green Arrow, recently introduced a new character, Lonnie Machin, whose outlook is explicitly presented as anarchist. So how does Machin’s anarchism manifest itself? Well, he’s only appeared in…

C4SS Feed 44 presents David S. D’Amato‘s “The Libertarian and Catholic Social Teachings” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. Free markets don’t have to mean the particular incarnation of corporate world dominance we see all around us today. For an entire tradition, an individualist anarchism that once blossomed in the United States,…

A recent study conducted by The National Registry of Exonerations found that in 2015 there were a total of 149 people who were exonerated for a myriad of reasons. The exonerations revolved around convictions that were based on police misconduct, false confessions and in some cases, the fact that no crime had occurred. In addition,…

In a Feb. 1 article at Reason, Adrian Moore outlines his solution for the poison water crisis in Flint. He states his proposal straightforwardly enough in the title: “Here’s How to Fix Flint’s Water System: Privatize It.” This strikes me as curing the disease with more of the same disease. Some right-libertarians are sure to…

Anarchism: What It Is and What It Is Not by Joseph A. Labadie So you want me to tell you what Anarchism is, do you? I can do no less than make the attempt, and in my own simple way try to make you understand at least that it is not what the uninformed and…

Back in August 2014 a man named Michael Brown was shot by a police officer, Darren Wilson. Brown was unarmed and found himself in the hostile climate that exists between people of color and the police. His resulting death was the spark that lit the fire. Protests for #BlackLivesMatter began in earnest, people rallied for…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Gary Chartier’s “The State and Personal Freedom (Part 2 of 4), read by Christopher B. King and edited by Nick Ford. …excerpted from Gary Chartier’s The Conscience of an Anarchist, available for purchase here. You can make a Bitcoin donation to Christopher King here: 1PGZrRrebdM8YZfc7bbyKPqbqgGLRcL6yE Raw Feed: http://c4ss.jellycast.com/podcast/feed/2 Stitcher: http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/smash… Feed 44:…

If you believed the talking heads, you might think concern with inequality in our society was just a product of envy and economic ignorance. That’s another reason not to believe the talking heads. The fact that someone has more wealth than I do doesn’t injure me or make me worse off. And the economy isn’t…

I am mystified that so many libertarians still see the U.S. Constitution as a landmark achievement in the struggle for liberty. On principle alone, they should have become wary in time. A document that is adored at virtually every position in the political firmament should arouse suspicion among libertarians. Moreover a smattering of historical knowledge…

Flint is among many cities in Michigan, like Detroit, that have lost their luster since the automotive industry slowed down. This caused people within the community to move and the economy to suffer as a result. One way in which Flint is different from other cities is its unclean water. Though the news headlines are only now…

Government is more than a territorial monopoly on aggressive force. It’s also the heir to a centuries-old manufactured mystique, reinforced through its schools and other institutions, regarding its sanctity and sacrosanctity. The mystique is generated by and tends to manifest itself in the dogma that one’s State is uniquely virtuous and deserves to be judged…

Introduction by Nick Ford Voltairine de Cleyre remains a timeless inspiration to me. There have been days where I’ve felt lost, confused, or even depressed and reading her has brought me peace. There have been countless debates where her words proved useful if not downright perceptive, even if she could never have anticipated today’s events. There…

Paul Mason. Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future (Allen Lane, 2015). Based on Mason’s preview of Postcapitalism in his article at The Guardian, I was predisposed to like it. And having read the book itself, I can’t say I’ve changed my mind much. Mason occupies a niche where there is plenty of room for more…

As if Thomas Sowell weren’t sufficient to demonstrate the intellectual bankruptcy of pro-capitalist apologetics, we now have corporate apologists trolling the #ResistCapitalism hashtag on Twitter. Although most of the people using it today seem to think it’s an original piece of wit they just came up with on their own, the “Lookit them tweeting #ResistCapitalism…