The recent Forbes article on the Assassination Market marks only the most recent addition to a growing list of online cryptographic and counter-economic projects, but for those familiar with Tim May’s “Crypto-Anarchist Manifesto” or Jim Bell’s “Assassination Politics,” it is the final, cathartic confrontation with a world we all saw coming. As the article details in an…

Anarchists who intend to act as though we didn’t live in a dystopic world must find themselves perplexed at every moment. With the ecosystems of civil society so atrophied and virtually every surviving institution of value captured and beaten into participating in the bloody circus of statism, who do you call? What do you do…

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.

Recentemente assisti a uma apresentação por Mark Hendrickson da Faculdade da Cidade do Pomar acerca do livre mercado e da Walmart. Na apresentação Hendrickson cobre em sucinto, mas informativo detalhe, como funcionam os mecanismos do livre mercado. Firmas que oferecem melhores preços no mercado subtraem clientes de outras firmas, e o resultado final é que novas empresas…

Today we can celebrate the recent relaunch of the Silk Road drug market, named for a predecessor taken down over a month ago by federal agents for its connection with an alleged assassination conspiracy involving alleged founder Ross Ulbricht. The FBI is attempting to tie Ulbricht to the online identity of the Dread Pirate Roberts (DPR), an entrepreneur…

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…

I recently watched a short presentation by Mark Hendrickson from Grove City College about the free market and Walmart. In the presentation Hendrickson covers in short, but informative detail, how free market mechanisms work. Firms that offer better prices in the market draw away customers from other firms, and the end result is that new…

“Virtually everything about these people’s livelihoods, social organization, ideologies, and (more controversially) even their largely oral cultures, can be read as strategic positionings designed to keep the state at arm’s length. … The huge literature on state-making, contemporary and historic, pays virtually no attention to its obverse: the history of deliberate and reactive statelessness. This…

In Washington, D.C., Fully Informed Jury Association activist James Babb has placed informative billboards at Metro stations near the courts. These billboards tell passersby about jury nullification, the ancient right of jurors to judge both the facts and the law. The doctrine has a long and venerable history; the right of juries to ignore the law…

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…

“Reformism” is one of those words that’s hard to pin down sometimes. It’s usually taken to mean advocating for “reform within the system” — in other words, the bad kind of reform. A bad reform operates from the unstated – often unconscious – starting assumptions of the system. It takes the existing institutional framework of…

On October 20th, Amia Srinivasan, proffered four questions for anyone dependent on a technical language of free(d) markets. C4SS Senior Fellow, Charles Johnson, has five answers for her: The Nozickian outlook is often represented as moral common sense. But is it? Here I pose four questions for anyone inclined to accept Nozick’s argument that a just…

Military Artifacts All over the world, landscapes both urban and rural are littered with military artifacts from bygone times. These artifacts have completed their lifecycle as objects of power, force and control, and have either been repurposed or forgotten. Repurposed artifacts gain new meaning in the world, as they take on new roles. The former military…

In their efforts to fight the Affordable Care Act, Republicans in Washington have “shut down” the Federal government to supposedly cut spending due to the costs of the health care legislation. On the first day of the shutdown most of us woke up, had coffee, and went to work. In other words, nothing had really…

Jon Hochschartner’s article in Salon on Saturday argues that the classic video game “The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time” is a mess of classist, racist, and sexist tropes. He will get no argument from me on the sexism score — the entire series is focused on rescuing the princess, again and again. But on the…

Throughout the US government “shutdown,” Democratic politicians have compared their Republican rivals to “anarchists” and argued that the “shutdown” proves government necessary. A recent speech by US Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) on the Senate floor exemplifies this trend. Misconceptions run rampant in Senator Warren’s speech. She conflates cooperation and government, stating “In our democracy, government is…