The drastic long-term drop in Americans’ trust for government since the 1950s periodically evokes pearl-clutching on the center-left. Liberal radio talk show host Leslie Marshall recently tweeted, as apparent cause for concern, a Pew Research poll finding the percentage of the public that trusts government to “do the right thing” most of the time or “pretty…

As far as it went, the Supreme Court generally got it right in the Hobby Lobby-Obamacare-contraception case. Unfortunately it didn’t go nearly far enough. The court ruled that “closely held corporations” whose owners have religious convictions against contraceptives cannot be forced to pay for employee coverage for those products. I wish the court could have…

(Inspired by a comment from James Tuttle) SCOTUS has been dancing its way down a “whatever it takes to keep things from collapsing under the weight of their own contradictions” tightrope with ACA. First they affirmed its dubious constitutionality, now they’re carving out exceptions for entities which claim to be acting on orders of a…

For various reasons (well, mainly money), the fourth issue of the Molinari Institute’s left-libertarian publication The Industrial Radical has been delayed for nearly a year; but today it is finally at the printer. Issue I.4 features articles by William Anderson, B-psycho, Jason Byas, Kevin Carson, Nathan Goodman, Irfan Khawaja, Tom Knapp, Smári McCarthy, Grant Mincy,…

When the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision came out Monday, I had a lot of negative feelings about it, and I’ve been mulling column ideas in my head ever since. But all my attempts to organize my thoughts into a coherent statement and put them in writing — including this one — have been less…

Lincoln Unbound: How an Ambitious Young Railsplitter Saved the American Dream — and How We Can Do It Again by Rich Lowry (HarperCollins 2013), 390 pages. One of the central themes in James Scott’s Seeing Like a State is the ideology he calls “authoritarian high modernism”: It is best conceived as a strong (one might even say muscle-bound)…

I’m neither a Christian, nor religious in any of the other ways that one might be. I find contraception, abortion and all kinds of sexual activities between consenting adults to be completely unobjectionable and well within the rights of any individual who chooses one or all of these things. Nevertheless, as a free market anarchist…

If you want a glimpse into the US bipartisan foreign policy establishment’s Heart of Darkness, you need look no further than Robert Kagan. He, along with his father and brother, was a signatory of the Project for a New American Century’s manifesto “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” — something normally associated with the neoconservative circles around George…

Recent studies estimate that the federal regulatory burden has impaired the United States economy to the tune of almost $40 trillion, “act[ing] as a hidden tax on individuals.” Precluding new competitors and entrepreneurship, new regulations often favor established firms at the expense of both consumers and economic growth generally. What’s more, left-wing revisionists such as Gabriel…

Se seguite le notizie, sentite parlare solitamente di trattati – Uruguay Round del Gatt, Nafta, Cafta, Tpp – descritti come “Accordi di Libero Scambio” che hanno l’obiettivo di “ridurre le barriere commerciali”. È una bugia. Senza alcuna eccezione, questi accordi in realtà rafforzano quella forma di protezionismo che più di ogni altra è vitale per…

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…

A call to raise the minimum wage is happening all over the United States, a call Michigan just answered. The way Michigan went about implementing the raise is a different story, which may also shine light on how other states may implement their changes. Michigan’s Public Act 138 of 2014 to raise the minimum wage is…

If you follow the news, you regularly hear of various treaties — GATT’s Uruguay Round, NAFTA, CAFTA, TPP — described as “Free Trade Agreements” whose purposes are to “reduce trade barriers.” This is a lie. Without exception, such agreements actually strengthen the one form of protectionism most vital to safeguarding corporate interests against competition in…

Left-libertarianism has been getting a lot of buzz recently in the broader American libertarian community. The term “left-libertarian” has been used many ways in American politics, and there seems to be some confusion within the libertarian community itself as to who left-libertarians actually are. The basic ideas of left-libertarianism, as we at the Alliance of…

“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…

A couple of recent news items demonstrate once again — if such a demonstration is necessary — that “consent of the governed” as a source of legitimacy for representative democracy is absurd and impossible. In North Carolina, governor Pat McRory signed the Energy Modernization Act, which includes a provision criminalizing (reduced in the final version,…

Discussions of technological change in the media are generally coupled with discussions of technological unemployment and the increasing polarization of wealth. A good example is a piece by Eduardo Porter in the New York Times (“Tech Leaps, Job Losses and Rising Inequality,” April 15). Amid talk of all the technological wonders issuing from Silicon Valley,…

El Puño de Hierro Tras la Mano Invisible El Capitalismo Corporativo como Sistema de Privilegio Garantizado por el Estado por Kevin Carson Introducción Comúnmente, se reconoce que el feudalismo se fundó sobre la base del robo y la usurpación; una clase dominante se estableció por la fuerza, y luego obligó a los campesinos a trabajar…

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…