Major political parties in the United Kingdom are so far divorced from market anarchism as to render them a homogeneous mass of irrelevance. That said, it’s worth examining the policy announcements in Wednesday’s Autumn Statement by Chancellor George Osborne, if only to clarify the anarchist position and provide a critique of what many Brits incorrectly…

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…

C4SS Feed 44 presents David S. D’Amato‘s “Blue or Red, They’re All About the Green” read by Christopher B. King and edited by Nick Ford. To glimpse the true relationship between big business and the State, we need only briefly examine the data on how the political action committees (PACs) of the nation’s largest and most influential companies…

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…

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…

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.

The talking point popular among right-leaning libertarians that the Plymouth colony is an example of the failure of the commons has been dealt with on C4SS. But it takes a list to make clear just how often the same piece has been rewritten: Tom Bethell, “How Private Property Saved the Pilgrims”, the Hoover Institution’s Hoover…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Joel Schlosberg‘s “Crashing the Party of Lincoln” read by Christopher B. King and edited by Nick Ford. A closer look at the party’s history instead corroborates Kevin Carson’s assessment that from its inception, “the Republican Party is the direct heir to a long line of Hamiltonians, all seeking to use state power to promote…

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…

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…

China just announced a regional infrastructure plan to promote the integration of Asian markets under Chinese leadership — sparking predictably hypocritical outrage from the United States (“China’s Pouring $40 Billion Into a New ‘Silk Road,’” The Blaze, November 9). Chinese President Xi unveiled the Silk Road Fund to leaders of Bangladesh, Cambodia, Laos, Mongolia, Myanmar, Pakistan and Tajikistan as…

David Graeber. Debt: The First 5000 Years (Brooklyn and London: Melville House, 2011). David Graeber, as we already saw to be the case with Elinor Ostrom, is characterized above all by a faith in human creativity and agency, and an unwillingness to let a priori theoretical formulations either preempt his perceptions of the particularity and…

Science and innovation are chaotic, stochastic processes that cannot be governed and controlled by desk-bound planners and politicians, whatever their intentions.  Good scientists are by definition anarchists. –Theo Wallimann, ETH Zurich Abstract Although profitable, cancer therapy has failed to live up to the promises of the War on Cancer waged since 1971. Modern chemotherapy can…

C4SS has teamed up with the Distro of the Libertarian Left. The Distro produces and distribute zines and booklets on anarchism, market anarchist theory, counter-economics, and other movements for liberation. For every copy of Kevin Carson‘s “Millennial Liberty” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Kevin Carson‘s “Millennial Liberty“. $1.00 for the first copy. $0.60 for…

A recent Pew Research study surveys 44 countries, revealing that the Chinese are even friendlier to free markets than Americans. Katie Simmons, a senior researcher at Pew, “notes that China has enacted numerous reforms to open up the country’s economy since the 1970s.” It probably shouldn’t surprise us that people living under the Communist Party of China’s rule…

There’s a certain kind of economic technocrat who tosses around the term “economies of scale” like a Young Earth creationist tosses around the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This is true of legacy liberalism, obviously, which is still defined by the mid-20th century mass-production paradigm of Joseph Schumpeter, John Kenneth Galbraith and Alfred Chandler. It’s also…

Discussing Prime Minister Narendra Modi in The Economic Times, businessman Gurcharan Das worries that “[t]oo many Indians still believe that the market makes ‘the rich richer and the poor poorer.’” Modi, Das argues, has an opportunity to “transform the master narrative around” free market reform, convincing Indians that a free market system helps ordinary Indians, not…