C4SS Feed 44 presents Trevor Hultner‘s “Paul Krugman: “Leave Obama Alone”” read by Christopher B. King and edited by Nick Ford. http://youtu.be/eBs0x9ieCp8 Krugman believes that the president has “[changed] the country for the better,” despite bitter opposition from the GOP in Congress and people from the left, right and center on the outside. Krugman believes that the supposedly…

Nota: Questo articolo è stato scritto in occasione della Giornata della Consapevolezza dei Neri in Brasile. Negli anni sessanta, nomi famosi del movimento libertario americano entrarono in contatto con i movimenti di mobilizzazione della Nuova Sinistra che, al contrario della Vecchia Sinistra, era caratterizzata da diffidenza verso le strategie di uno stato centralizzato con ampi…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “Obama to GOP: Our Billionaires are Better Than Yours!” read by Christopher B. King and edited by Nick Ford. That’s not to say that the plutocratic constituencies of the two parties are identical, or that life might not be more tolerable for working people under one party’s agenda than the other’s. But…

Nota: Questo articolo è stato scritto in occasione della Giornata della Consapevolezza dei Neri in Brasile. La schiavitù in Brasile, l’ultimo paese americano indipendente che a quei tempi aveva ancora questa istituzione, fu abolita ufficialmente il 13 maggio 1888. Certo non fu una legge firmata dall’aristocrazia a risolvere i problemi della popolazione nera che, per…

Dopo la rielezione di Dilma Rousseff del Partito dei Lavoratori, vediamo ripetersi lo stesso schema che si ripete dal 2006: numerose manifestazioni, molte delle quali offensive e xenofobiche, da parte di abitanti del Sud-est e del sud brasiliano, soprattutto di Sao Paulo, contro il più povero Nord-est che ha votato massicciamente per il presidente uscente….

About six months ago, when Uber was first becoming a visible national controversy, I wrote a column (“One Cheer for Uber and Lyft” C4SS, May 16, 2014) in which I argued that Uber, despite being a genuine example of neither peer-to-peer (p2p) nor sharing, was a step in the right direction because it offered at…

The conservative American Enterprise Institute offers yet another defense of sweatshops from a self-styled advocate of liberty and free markets, Professor Mark J. Perry. Indeed it is more than just a defense; it’s a selective compilation of quotes and anecdotes hailing sweatshops as perfectly praiseworthy routes out of poverty. Typical free market defenses of sweatshops focus…

C4SS Feed 44 presents “Corporations versus the Market; or, Whip Conflation Now” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Roderick Long, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. I don’t mean to suggest that Wal-Mart and similar firms owe their success solely to governmental privilege; genuine entrepreneurial talent has doubtless been involved as well. But given…

FFF president Jacob Hornberger and FFF vice president (and C4SS Senior Fellow) Sheldon Richman discuss the hot topics of the day. This week: Uber’s undermining the taxi monopoly.

Note: this was written for the occasion of Black Awareness Day in Brazil. In the 1960s, notable names from the American libertarian movement established contact with mobilizations of the New Left, which was characterized, as opposed to the Old Left, by a mistrust of centralized and big government strategies, and by their emphasis on the inclusion of segregated…

Note: This article was written for the occasion of Black Awareness Day in Brazil.  Officially, slavery in Brazil, the last independent American country which still had this institution at the time, was abolished on May 13, 1888. However, it wouldn’t be a law signed by the aristocracy that would solve the problems of the black people, who, for centuries, had their labor and…

You may be familiar with Murray Rothbard’s article “Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature.” Hans-Hermann Hoppe, beloved eminence grise at LewRockwell.com, takes things a step further and makes belief in human inequality the defining characteristic of right-libertarianism (“A Realistic Libertarianism,” Sept. 30). This isn’t just a hill he’s willing to die on, but a hill…

After the reelection of Workers’ Party Dilma Rousseff, we see the same pattern that has repeated itself since 2006: Several manifestations, many of them offensive or xenophobic, from people in the Southeast and South of Brazil, especially in Sao Paulo, against people from the poorer Northeast, who voted massively in favor of the incumbent. And…

The “privatization” of local government functions under the state-appointed emergency manager in Detroit is lionized by a lot of right-leaning libertarians as an example of “free market reform.” But it’s a lot more accurate to treat it as flat-out looting — what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism.” The so-called “privatization” of government assets, as it’s…

C4SS Feed 44 presents David S. D’Amato‘s “The Black Hole of the American Injustice System” read by Christopher B. King and edited by Nick Ford. And while consumers pay top dollar for the prisoners’ expensive wares — and companies like Colorado Corrections Industries rake in millions — the prisoners themselves often make as little as 60 cents per…

A recent National Bureau of Economic Research study by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman finds that “the top 0.1% of [American] families now own roughly the same share of wealth as the bottom 90%.” Furthermore, the study shows that the “recovery” we keep hearing about hasn’t reached the middle class, with only those atop the economic pyramid seeing its benefits. With a…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “Jeff Madrick’s Misplaced Criticism of Free Trade” read by Christopher B. King and edited by Nick Ford. The centerpiece of the neoliberal agenda is not “free trade” — that is, voluntary exchange of goods and services in which all parties operate on their own nickel and nobody has access to coercive power…

Remember that stupid “We Are the 53%” campaign? Were you hoping you’d seen the last of it? Sorry to disappoint you, but it’s back. This time it’s being resurrected in an even more monstrous form by Stephan Kinsella — a libertarian attorney who, when not writing stuff like this, is actually one of the most…

I’m usually pretty optimistic about the day after tomorrow — I’ve been dismissed more than once as a techno-utopian — but sometimes when I get depressed by NSA surveillance, drones, and the corporate state’s manufactured aura of inevitability, I need a story to cheer me up. Here it is: A Canadian artist copyrighted his land…

I don’t know when this column will see print, but as I write it people all over the world are celebrating — with rightful enthusiasm — the fall of the Iron Curtain 25 years ago. During the Spanish-American War, William Graham Sumner gave a speech on “The Conquest of the United States by Spain,” in…