C4SS Media presents Thomas L. Knapp‘s “When Killer Cops Get a Pass, There are Consequences,” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. “The jury’s acquittal of Ramos and Cicinelli was a vote for the latter outcome. It was also a vote for continuing and escalating police lawlessness. The less the specifically guilty individuals pay for…

Should the government coercively sanction business owners who, out of apparent religious conviction, refuse to serve particular customers? While such behavior is repugnant, the refusal to serve someone because of his or her race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation is nevertheless an exercise of self-ownership and freedom of nonassociation. It is both nonviolent and nonviolative of…

California is in its third year of a severe drought. Some scientists believe this will be the driest year in the last five hundred. Among other measures for dealing with the water shortage, the state has announced it will not provide subsidized irrigation water from dams this year. The large-scale capitalist agriculture model touted by…

The following article was written by Colin Ward and published originally appeared in “Patterns of Anarchy,” 1966. You may think in describing anarchism as a theory of organisation I am propounding a deliberate paradox: “anarchy” you may consider to be, by definition, the opposite of organisation. In fact, however, “anarchy” means the absence of government, the absence of authority. Can…

C4SS Media presents Kevin Carson‘s “On The Worship Of Authority,” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. “Until most people abandon their state-inculcated respect for uniformed authority, and their willingness to treat officially defined outsiders as the “other,” the Rodney King and Kelly Thomas verdicts — and uncounted such verdicts yet unnamed — will continue.”

Uma cobertura jornalística mais razoável do colapso do Mt.Gox, um dos maiores mercados de Bitcoin, seria mais ou menos assim: “Uau! Um dos maiores mercados de Bitcoin da internet acaba de desaparecer e, em vez de entrar em colapso, o Bitcoin ainda é comercializado por cerca de US$ 500! Que moeda robusta e resistente! Que…

Sane news coverage of Bitcoin exchange Mt.Gox‘s collapse would look something like this: “Wow! The Internet’s largest Bitcoin exchange just vanished into thin air … and instead of collapsing, Bitcoin is still trading at about $500! What a robust, resilient currency! What a success story! Wow! Wow!” Sanity in news coverage? Well, not so much….

Know how southern Republican politicians who support “right to work” laws claim they’re not against unions as such — just against closed shop contracts that force workers to join a union as a condition of employment? They’re liars. The negative outcome of the recent UAW certification vote at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga proves that,…

About 10 years ago, back in the days when I worked for Republican politicians battling Democratic Presidents, constant harassment by the Internal Revenue Service caused me to snap my twig and just stop paying taxes altogether. I won’t go into the tedious details, but I will note that I announced my decision to the I.R.S….

MR. EDITOR: [by “B”] The discussion which occurred between Mr. Burleigh and Rev. Mr. Kimball, at the recent meeting at Framingham, though brief, was quite interesting and suggestive, and I had hoped to see the subject more particularly alluded to in THELIBERATOR. A doubt as to the correctness of Mr. Burleigh’s position occurred to me, which perhaps will need…

C4SS Media presents Natasha Petrova‘s “Walter Block’s Wrong Headed Anti-Unionism,” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. The final aspect to be discussed is whether unionism is compatible with the normative philosophical principles of libertarianism. An emphatic yes is the answer. Left-libertarian market anarchist unionism involves a voluntary association of free and equal workers working…

James Tuttle alerted me to an appendix discussing Hayek’s conception of coercion in Murray Rothbard’s, The Ethics of Liberty. It serves as the jumping off point for a broader discussion of what constitutes coercion. Let us begin by contrasting the definitions of coercion employed by Hayek and Rothbard. Rothbard defines coercion thus: the invasive use…

Libertarians are used to being accused of racism. This is often due to their position on civil rights legislation. The basis for that particular stance is to be found in the libertarian conception of property rights, freedom of association and non-aggression. Uninformed critics will miss this and attribute the libertarian position to racism. That having…

The 2008 global financial crisis has had far-reaching implications, depressing markets for years. Charged with US monetary policy, the Federal Reserve Bank, with its mantra of “too big to fail,” is empowered to manage the economic downturn. The central bank’s monetary policies effectively redistribute wealth to the upper tiers of society — and the proof is…

Transfer of Power Arguably the most powerful person in the United States (even rivaling the POTUS), Ben S. Bernanke, has left the Federal Reserve. Since 2006 he has sought to make the economy his marionette. Fed policies, under his direction, worked to manage a collapsed housing market, busted mortgage industry and the 2008 global financial crisis –…

In the 19th and early 20th century, anarchism was in many ways making strides into mainstream culture and thought. It was not through theory that this occurred, but rather through immediate expressions of one’s autonomy. This revolutionary method was known as direct action. Direct action emphasizes the right or duty of each individual to insist on the…

Humans are social beings. We organize ourselves into groups, build relationships, enjoy creative labor and seek fellowship. From childhood to adulthood, who we are greatly depends on our relationships with those closest to us. We are also heavily influenced by the social, cultural and institutional circumstances of our lives. Institutions, then, have major implications for our rights,…

“From Crossbows To Cryptography: Techno-Thwarting The State” [PDF] was written by Chuck Hammill and presented for Future of Freedom Conference, November 1987. Public Domain: Duplicate and Distribute Freely You know, technology—and particularly computer technology—has often gotten a bad rap in Libertarian circles. We tend to think of Orwell’s 1984, or Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, or the proximity detectors keeping East…

Carlton Hobbs recentemente desafiou a tendência da corrente principal dos libertários, defensores do livre-mercado e anarco-capitalistas a favorecer a corporação capitalista como modelo primário de propriedade e atividade econômica e a assumir que qualquer sociedade de livre-mercado futura será organizada no padrão do capitalismo corporativista. Como alternativa a essa forma de organização, Hobbs propôs a…

Carlton Hobbs recently challenged the tendency of mainstream libertarians, free marketers and anarcho-capitalists to favor the capitalist corporation as the primary model of ownership and economic activity, and to assume that any future free market society will be organized on the pattern of corporate capitalism. As one alternative to such forms of organization, Hobbs proposed…