C4SS Feed 44 presents David S. D’Amato‘s “Open the Borders Now and Forever” read and edited by Nick Ford. Free and open movement is the natural, unconditional right of every single individual, a prerogative that precedes governments and their arbitrary borders and policies. Confronted with this fact, even some self-styled libertarians will cavil and complain, puling that…

I’m not, in any way, a Noam Chomsky fan. However, I couldn’t help be struck by his description of anarchism in a recent interview. Primarily it is a tendency that is suspicious and skeptical of domination, authority, and hierarchy. It seeks structures of hierarchy and domination in human life over the whole range, extending from,…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Ryan Calhoun‘s “The Libertarian Virtue Of Slack” read and edited by Nick Ford. The common libertarian nowadays is of the same non-interventionist temperament as the Taoists. They endorse individual preference, spontaneity and self-interest. They loathe the State and central planners of all kinds. Most libertarians identify, also, as individualists — both methodologically and…

Market anarchism is grounded in the sovereignty of each individual and the simple idea that all relationships between adults ought to be voluntary and consensual, permitting everyone the freedom to do anything she wishes, as long as she respects the identical right of all others. The “market” in market anarchism refers to the fact that…

Having netted a half-billion dollars and counting for Disney, Maleficent is the latest proof of just how lucrative successively building upon established properties can be in today’s economy. The film benefited from being uniquely able to draw on all the elements of Disney’s perennially popular animated feature version of Sleeping Beauty, which in turn overtly incorporated both the melodies…

Barney Frank’s statement, “Government is simply a word for the things we decide to do together,” is getting a lot of recirculation lately in goo-goo circles desperate for a glib answer to those who view government as a threat. Anyone who says a damfool thing like this and seriously means it is a gullible idiot…

“Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.” This blithe, sunny-sounding phrase, attributed to former Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank, is frequently called up in the service of the advancing march of the American state. It sounds very nice. Certainly government is one of the things people do together….

Al Jazeera recently covered Chattanooga, Tennessee’s high-speed Internet service (“As Internet behemoths rise, Chattanooga highlights a different path,” June 6). The “Gig,” as it’s affectionately known, operates at one gigabyte per second — about fifty times the U.S. average — charging each customer about $70 a month. It uses a preexisting fiber-optic infrastructure originally built…

Few reading this will find it in anyway a novel insight that the Drug War has always been about control. The elimination of drugs was a useful narrative, but it’s one which has fallen into disfavor. As we learn what little threat these banned chemicals pose, all that is left is the gripping fist of…

Robert Anton Wilson’s 203-page mindbender, Quantum Psychology: How Your Brain Software Programs You and Your World, is more than meets the eye. The subtitle suggests a self-help book, and it appears to be just that in many respects. But twenty pages in, one realizes that there is no labeling this one. It is a psychedelic…

« Alors qu’Apple se prépare à se défendre dans une affaire de violation de brevet en Europe qui pourrait lui couter des millions, la compagnie et son rival Google sont tous les deux aller demander à la Cour Suprême des USA de permettre d’infliger des pénalités sévères à l’encontre des plaintes triviales » selon Apple Insider. Eh bien,…

Center for a Stateless Society No. 17 (Winter-Spring 2014), download this study PDF Introduction: The Primacy of Everyday Life David Graeber chose, as the epigraph to his book Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, a quote from Pyotr Kropotkin’s article on Anarchism for the Encyclopedia Britannica. In it Kropotkin stated that, in an anarchist society, harmony…

If I had to describe “The Conscience of an Anarchist” in one word, it would be beautiful. Gary Chartier’s 100 page anarchist manifesto concisely and elegantly explains the way anarchists analyze public policy discussions, such as foreign policy, the drug war, regulation, subsidies, education, the two party system, infrastructure, the criminal justice system, police violence,…

When a descriptive term carries a negative connotation, there is a widespread tendency to associate the term with its worst referents. When critics of Obamacare call it “fascist,” for example, they are regularly accused of absurdly likening Obamacare to the Nazis’ campaigns of mass slaughter. Yet “fascism” is a word with a meaning, and the…

Two researchers at Utah State University have discovered a factor which may be silently impacting the much-discussed, but poorly understood, gender wage gap. Lindsey McBride and Grant Patty examined the gender bias of occupational licensing requirements. What they found is that —  at least at the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder — women are…

L’artiste la plus célébrée et controversée de l’année est, sans aucun doute, Miley Cyrus. Miley a rapidement et parfaitement transformé son image enfantine des années 2000 à la rebelle corporate. Miley a captivé les audiences avec ce que beaucoup considèrent comme un comportement choquant qui embrasse l’hédonisme et en se moquant des valeurs puritaines. Alors…

In one of my blog posts; I discussed property rights and the Civil Rights era sit-ins. This post is a further exploration of the subject. I said the following in the previous post: These bills make an Orwellian use of terms like freedom. The ability to exclude people for irrational and arbitrary reasons is not…

C4SS Media presents Christiaan Elderhorst‘s “Bitcoin Must Self-Regulate — The State Can Only Destroy” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. “Currently there is no system by which Bitcoin marketplaces can be held accountable. Resorting to government legal systems might indeed be the only way by which Mt.Gox customers can receive the restitution they deserve. What…

C4SS Media presents Thomas L. Knapp‘s “The Problem Isn’t ‘Patent Trolls.’ The Problem Is Patents.,” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. “Apple’s complaint, in its essentials, is that patent “trolls” just buy up patent “rights,” then search for infringement to cash in on, rather than going to the trouble of making real products. But why…

It can’t be easy living in Russia’s shadow, and I envy no one in that position. Given its long history and, consequently, the temperament of its leaders (and a good part of its population), Russia for the foreseeable future will be a regional power with an attitude. Thus it will ever be concerned with what happens…