The end of apartheid in South Africa was neither the first nor the last people’s revolution to be betrayed by its own victorious leadership. Perhaps the premier example was Russia’s Bolshevik victory in 1917. Compare the party’s policies after the October Revolution to its rhetoric before. Lenin’s book “State and Revolution,” written to appeal to…

As the White House struggles to rouse itself from its self-induced ObamaCare public relations nightmare, the primary excuse — at least regarding the canceled health insurance portion of the fiasco — has been to claim that the relevant policies were “substandard” and, therefore, harmful to individual consumers. Ergo, the “substandard” plans needed to be abolished…

On the November 10 episode of the Stossel Show, libertarian commentator John Stossel had an exchange with anarcho-capitalist writer David Friedman on the possibility of “privatizing everything” (i.e. all government functions). When they got to military functions, their discussion shed considerable light on what “privatization” means to a lot of the libertarian Right. “Much of…

Welcome to my 6th review! Time to begin. Graham Peebles discusses the oppression of Ethiopian migrants in Saudi Arabia. Alexander Cockburn discusses the parallels between JFK and Obama. Ivan Eland examines JFK’s actual record. Jonathan Carp proposes a revolutionary alternative to raising the minimum wage. Jacob Hornberger discusses the post-911 dilution of civil liberties. Sarah…

Chris Dillow, a heterodox economist who owns Stumbling and Mumbling blog, attacks managerialism from a position decidedly on the Left. But it’s a Left that’s friendly to markets, decentralism, and self-management, and hostile to the New Class version of bureaucratic socialism that dominated Britain from the Webbs to Harold Wilson. The central focus of Dillow’s critique of…

Sean Gabb, successor to the late Chris Tame as Director of the Libertarian Alliance, is very much a man of the Right: a composite of Burkean and Little Englander, roughly equivalent to the Old Right or paleolibertarians on this side of the Atlantic. In his critique of managerialism and the corporate state, however, he has much…

Advocating liberty means opposing the use of force to restrain peaceful, voluntary exchange. But it doesn’t have to mean calling a system of peaceful, voluntary exchange “capitalism.” Some people, of course, think this is obviously what “capitalism” means. And I can’t prove they’re wrong, because the word means different things to different people. I’m confident, though, that…

In the airport-turned-town of Seatac, Washington, a ballot proposal to institute a $15/hour minimum wage clings to a narrow lead and faces a certain recount, while in Seattle a state socialist candidate has won election to the city council on a platform including a $15/hour minimum wage for the entire city. Across the United States,…

C4SS Senior Fellow and Lysander Spooner Research Scholar, Nathan Goodman, took part in and represented C4SS on the Salt Lake City, Utah, Trans-Pacific Partnership Welcoming Committee coalition and protest. Salt Lake Residents Resist the Trans-Pacific Partnership! Salt Lake City, UT November 19, 2013 Delegations from twelve national governments are meeting this week at Grand America…

For years now the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has been trying its best, unsuccessfully, to enforce its “intellectual property” claims upon those who would dare share and distribute media. They are of course not the only ones trying to get IP enforced; we have seen the same trends in music and gaming. Since…

Naomi Klein, to a casual reader, might seem to hate the free market. Or at least she hates what most people think of as the free market, based on the conventional use of that term by mainstream politicians and journalists. And the usual vulgar libertarian suspects (see here and here and here) have reacted with exactly the kind of by-the-numbers polemics you’d…

On November 13 Wikileaks published the leaked “intellectual property” chapter of the draft Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty. The IP section is a bundle of draconian provisions curtailing Internet freedom in the interest of protecting proprietary content industries like movies and music and imposing new restrictions on commerce to enforce corporations’ patent monopolies on genetically modified organisms…

This week I had the great pleasure of talking with Ben Stone, the Bad Quaker, about a wide range of important topics. We discussed left-libertarianism, the IP attacks against C4SS from earlier this fall, the symbiotic relationship between corporations and government, the dangers of bigotry, and much more. The podcast can be found here.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth (Belknap, 2009). This third installment in Hardt and Negri’s trilogy, which began with Empire and continued with Multitude, is concerned mainly with the forms taken by the successor society emerging from the decaying corpse of corporate capitalism. This quote is as good a statement of the general theme as…

An October 20-22, 2013, Fox News national poll revealed that the implementation of ObamaCare (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) by the American state has been so chaotic that 60% of registered voters characterize the process as “a joke.” The economic reasons for the incompetence are well known by libertarians familiar with the Austrian tradition…

Imagine you make your living as a university professor  –  you have a low salary, no health benefits and no retirement benefits. Now imagine that at the end of this semester your career will be suddenly terminated with no due process or severance pay. Now imagine this circumstance is not unique – because it’s not. This circumstance is experienced…

In a syndicated column last October, television journalist John Stossel lamented the downgrading from sixth to eighth place—“behind Canada!”—of the United States on the Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal Index of Economic Freedom. The Index is based on several metrics, including freedom of movement of capital, the degree of business regulation, and levels of taxes and spending….

The Progressive movement at the turn of the twentieth century—the doctrine from which the main current of modern liberalism developed—is sometimes erroneously viewed as an “anti-business” philosophy. It was anti-market to be sure, but by no means necessarily anti-business. Progressivism was, more than anything, managerialist. The American economy after the Civil War became increasingly dominated…

It’s been the thing lately, among certain establishment liberals, to dismiss libertarians as “Koch-funded shills.” We’ve heard a lot of it from Mark Ames and Yasha Levine at NSFWCorp, for example. This is stupid, first of all, because it’s historically illiterate. Free market libertarianism has its origins in the classical liberalism of two hundred years…

Tyler Cowen’s thesis is that economic growth is leveling off and rates of return decreasing because we’ve already picked the “low-hanging fruit” (meaning innovations and investments that have high returns). The stagnation in GDP and median income in recent decades means “the pace of technological development has slowed down,” and the general population is benefiting…