A persistent theme in popular culture, when it comes to issues of technological progress and the future, is that the super-rich will be the main beneficiaries of new technology. Billionaires with artificially augmented lifespans will retreat into their gated communities and anarcho-capitalist enclaves; the rest of us will live lives nasty, brutish and short, subject…

C4SS Feed 44 presents David S. D’Amato‘s “Wage Slavery and Sweatshops as Free Enterprise?” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. The phrase “wage slavery” tends to really pique most free marketeers, who often object that the employer-employee relationship is one of simple voluntary agreement and contract. A legitimate contract, however, assumes that relations, up until…

C4SS Feed 44 presents “Labor Struggle in a Free Market” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Kevin Carson, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. The problem is that, to date, bosses have fully capitalized on the potential of the incomplete contract, whereas workers have not. And the only thing preventing workers from doing so…

What do you call someone who wants to steal your land and subject you to earthquakes? David Koch, who favors these things, calls himself a libertarian. In an interview with Barbara Walters last month on ABC’s “This Week,” he described himself as “basically a libertarian.” That label, as Koch sees it, means “a conservative on…

One of the most common questions raised about a hypothetical free market society concerns worker protection laws of various kinds. As Roderick Long puts it, In a free nation, will employees be at the mercy of employers?… Under current law, employers are often forbidden to pay wages lower than a certain amount; to demand that…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics” read by Erick Vasconcelos and edited by Nick Ford. But treating either the payment of taxes or receipt of government money as a proxy for where one stands on the Producer-Parasite spectrum is ridiculous. Commenter Kirsten Tynan points out the sheer absurdity of asserting that the bottom…

Arriva il 2015 e niente auto volanti. E la tranquillità, la sicurezza economica che, al di là dei balocchi, era la parte più seducente dell’anno 2015 in Ritorno al Futuro – Parte II? Perché mancano, così come mancano i fax e i CD? E perché, nel cinquantesimo anniversario della Fiera Internazionale del 1964-65, il futuro…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Valdenor Júnior‘s “The Libertarian Struggle of the Black Movement” read by Erick Vasconcelos and edited by Nick Ford. Murray Rothbard attempted to establish a conversation between libertarianism and the New Left through the periodical Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought. Among the articles published, one of the best certainly is Rothbard’s own…

C4SS Feed 44 presents “Industrial Economics” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Dyer D. Lum, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. The legalized power given to money determines the difference; it makes it more than the mere instrument of exchange; it becomes an implement of exploitation, having a fictitious value and culling from industry…

Two attitudes, more than any others I have been able to perceive, confuse revolutionary actions in the United States today. First is the demand that revolutionary action have “a goal” and the assumption that, lacking a goal, it must also lack fervor and even practical possibility. Second is the mind-set that says revolutions may not…

It’s 2015. Has anyone seen our flying cars? How about the tranquility and economic security that, beyond the cool gadgetry, created the appeal of the 2015 of Back to the Future Part II? Why do they seem as absent as its faxes and laserdiscs? And why, midway through the half-century anniversary of the 1964-1965 World’s Fair,…

C4SS Feed 44 presents David S. D’Amato‘s “The Libertarian Road to Egalitarianism” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. But we needn’t regard inequality as a weak point in our arguments for economic freedom, or as an issue on which we simply cannot win. Existing economic relations are not the product of freedom of exchange or…

On NAASN, an email list for anarchist academics, Wayne Price (whose review of my book I previously replied to here) responded to someone else’s  proposal to “abolish the state and see if capitalism survives until sunrise” as follows: [This is] what most people probably think anarchists advocate: society just as it is but with no…

C4SS Feed 44 presents “Regulation: The Cause, Not the Cure, of the Financial Crisis” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Roderick Long, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. The grain of truth in the otherwise ludicrous statist mantra that the financial crisis was caused by “lack of regulation” is that when you pass regulation…

Wayne Price. “Kevin Carson’s Revival of Individualist Anarchist Economic Theory” Anarkismo.net, November 30, 2014. Wayne Price’s overall summary of my approach in Studies in Mutualist Political Economy (also available online) is quite even-handed and fair (unlike some others, e.g. the critique of Markets Not Capitalism, ed. by Charles Johnson and Gary Chartier, by Crimethinc’s Magpie…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Roderick Long‘s “History of an Idea” read by Jeff Riggenbach and edited by Nick Ford. … Everyone knows about economies of scale; after all, that’s why we have firms in the first place. What Rothbard’s analysis shows is that there are also diseconomies of scale, and that these grow more severe as vertical integration…

The Molinari Institute is pleased to announce a new interdisciplinary, open-access libertarian academic journal, the MOLINARI REVIEW, edited by me. We’re looking for articles, sympathetic or critical, in and on the libertarian tradition, broadly understood as including classical liberalism, individualist anarchism, social anarchism, anarcho-capitalism, anarcho-communism, anarcho-syndicalism, anarcha-feminism, panarchism, voluntaryism, mutualism, agorism, distributism, Austrianism, Georgism, public…

Dmytri Kleiner. The Telekommunist Manifesto. Network Notebook Series (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2010). Kleiner starts with a materialist analysis of class relations quite similar to Marx’s. Through their access to the wealth that results from the continuous capture of surplus value, capitalists offer each generation of innovators a chance to become a junior partner…

C4SS Feed 44 presents “Big Business and the Rise of American Statism” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Roy A. Childs, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. The purpose of this particular essay is simply to apply some of the principles of libertarianism to an interpretation of events in a very special and important…

The concepts monopoly and aggression are intimately related, like lock and key, or mother and son. You cannot fully understand the first without understanding the second. Most of us are taught to think of a monopoly as simply any lone seller of a good or service, but this definition is fraught with problems, as Murray…