C4SS Media would like to present Kevin Carson’s Authority is the Enemy of Rationality, read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford.

Kevin Carson: Authority enables one actor to maximize her personal utility, while making socially suboptimal choices, by imposing the negative consequences of her choices on other actors with less authority.

Ken MacLeod: What if capitalism is unstable, and socialism is impossible?

Carson: If I thought “free markets” and “free trade” really meant what neoliberal talking heads mean by them, I’d hate them too.