[This article was originally published February 12, 2021 at Counterpunch.org] Wall Street strategists have called it one of the most extreme of the “sharp short squeezes” in recent decades: at the end of January, shares of video game retailer GameStop skyrocketed, as users of Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum rallied around the stock, which had been a target of…

Tuckered Out? Feeling Greene? Get a Spoonerful of de Cleyrification here! So says Roderick T. Long! Coming up in January, he’ll be hosting a virtual reading group together with Cory Massimino on individualist anarchism in 19th-century America. As you might guess from the tagline, they’ll be covering the big names in the American individualist tradition,…

Monopolies are pretty much universally bad. This perhaps one of the most uncontroversial position amongst anarchists, who principally define themselves in opposition to the state, which Max Weber, in “Politics as Vocation,” defines as the monopoly on force and the approval of the use of force in a geographic area. Benjamin Tucker, the great U.S….

Uma semana antes de escrever este artigo, escrevi outro onde defendia que devíamos privatizar a polícia. Quando as pessoas ouviram isso, pensaram na ideia do anarcocapitalismo com o mesmo nome. A diferente entre essa e a minha é monumental. A ideia AnCap é que as comunidades ou, mais provavelmente, as empresas contratem uma força policial…

A week before the writing of this article, I wrote another that stated that we should privatize the police. When people hear that, they think of the anarcho-capitalist idea of the same name. The difference between that and mine is monumental. The AnCap idea is to have communities or, more likely, corporations hire a police…

Di Asem. Originale pubblicato il 13 aprile 2020 con il titolo Benjamin Tucker’s Four Property Regimes and the Spirit of Capitalism. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna. Molte discussioni sull’economia politica sono reazioni a problemi attuali: aumentare o abbassare le tasse, come imporre le leggi sul lavoro, e questioni simili di centrodestra o centrosinistra, con tutto un…

Most political economy discussions are about crafting contemporary policy responses, such as increasing or lowering tax rates, setting regulatory bodies to enforce labor laws, and other similar center-left and center-right electoral issues, with a class of think tank staffers and media pundits arguing back and forth. In this discussion almost all political fundamentals are agreed…

This November, don’t vote. As difficult as it may be to accept, you don’t have to, and it isn’t somehow morally wrong not to. Sometimes the single most powerful political statement you can make, your best option for expressing your preferences for the future of our country, is simply to lodge a conscientious objection by…

I’ve been writing at my site Abolish Work for a few years now and I’m really encouraged by all of the support that’s come in so many different shapes in sizes. That support has given me the confidence to reach out to Little Black Cart, an anarchist publisher whose books C4SS has reviewed many times,…

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…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “Will Free Markets Recreate Corporate Capitalism?” read and edited by Tony Dreher. And when I say “free markets,” I am not referring to a society in which the majority of economic functions are organized through money exchange (the “cash nexus”) or business firms. By “free market” I mean only…

Introduction The capitalist economy has gone through another shock, and the potential for another, larger one is on the horizon. While it’s seemingly in its death throes, capitalism continues to fuel growth. Under such a system we have seen a vast improvement in general living standards across the globe, despite rigged markets and the omnipresent…

The Attractions of Geo-Mutualism Appraisers Begone! I am neither a philosopher, nor an economist, nor a political scientist, and so I’ve found myself a bit out of my scholarly depth in this symposium. Prior to these exchanges, I had only slight understanding of Georgist land use proposals, and it had not occurred to me that…

The Moral Irrelevance of Rent Jason Byas’s Response to Folvardy, Schnack and Kirchner In my initial response to Kevin Carson, I briefly asserted that rent from land is morally irrelevant in determining property norms. Three of the respondents in particular — Fred Foldvary, Robert Kirchner, and Will Schnack — clearly think differently. Thanks to their…

The following interview with Robert Anton Wilson was conducted in 2002. It’s Part 3 of a 4-Part series. It took place after the publication of Wilson’s most overtly political tract, TSOG: The Thing That Ate the Constiution. (TSOG stands for Tsarist Occupation Government.) Among the topics discussed in this segment: 9/11 and Pearl Harbor as…

Occupancy-and-Use Reflects Moral Imperatives …Implied by Land’s Unique Scarcity, Kevin Carson responds to Jason Byas Jason starts out by accepting my blurred lines between Lockeanism and occupancy-and-use, and agreeing that the difference between them is largely a matter of degree: Non-Proviso Lockeanism is just occupancy-and-use with a higher threshold for constructive abandonment. And the proper…

In the contemporary parlance, it is largely supposed that a capitalist is one who favors a free market economic system, yet this wasn’t always the case. In the nineteenth century, as the descriptor capitalist came into more frequent use, it was virtually always deployed as a term of abuse, in identification of exploiters; it was…

Some anarchists and socialists argue that, even if markets can theoretically be non-capitalist, and non-capitalist market economies can exist, the dynamics of the market will eventually lead to the restoration of capitalism. The argument used by non-market anarchists and socialists is that, in a competitive market — even a competitive market of widespread distribution of…

Imagine the following person. He believes all individuals should be free to do anything that’s peaceful and therefore favors private property, free global markets, freedom of contract, civil liberties, and all the related ideas that come under the label libertarianism (or liberalism). Obviously he is not a statist. But is he an individualist and a…

Illuminating Discord: An interview with Robert Anton Wilson By Jane Talisman and Eric Geislinger (Columbia Region New Libertarian Alliance) (Originally published in New Libertarian Notes/Weekly 39, September 5, 1976; reprinted at RAWillumination.net) CRNLA: Tell us a little about your background. RAW: I was born into a working class Irish Catholic family in Brooklyn 44 years…