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…

Molly Sauter. The Coming Swarm: DDOS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet (New York, London, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2014). “The aim of this work,” Sauter writes, “is to place DDoS [distributed denial of service] actions… in a historical and theoretical context, covering the use of the tactic, its development over time, and…

Dall’istituzione conservatrice American Enterprise Institute arriva un’altra difesa dello sfruttamento dei lavoratori. A farlo è il professor Mark J. Perry, autodefinitosi difensore della libertà e del libero mercato. In realtà la sua è più che una difesa; è una raccolta selezionata di citazioni e aneddoti che inneggiano alle fabbriche che sfruttano i lavoratori come una…

C4SS Feed 44 presents “Economic Calculation in the Corporate Commonwealth” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Kevin Carson, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. Try as he might, Mises could not exempt the capitalist corporation from the problem of bureaucracy. One cannot define bureaucracy out of existence, or overcome the problem of distributed knowledge,…

Center for a Stateless Society Paper No. 18 (Summer-Fall 2014) PDF Particularity and the Anarchism of Everyday Life Colin Ward was a libertarian communist. He named Pyotr Kropotkin as his primary economic influence, and described himself as “an anarchist-communist, in the Kropotkin tradition.” This was not empty praise. He produced an abridged edition of Kropotkin’s…

The cops who ganged up on Eric Garner, got him into a chokehold, and mashed his face into the sidewalk didn’t intend to kill him. They intended only to show him who’s boss on the streets of Staten Island — and show him in a way he would never forget. As a Facebook friend of…

Last year at Salon Michael Lind asked “The question libertarians just can’t answer” (June 4): “Why are there no libertarian countries?… If libertarianism was a good idea, wouldn’t at least one country have tried it?” He got some answers — the best of them from us free market libertarians of the left, who consider ourselves critics of…

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…

Nota: Questo articolo è stato scritto in occasione della Giornata della Consapevolezza dei Neri in Brasile. Negli anni sessanta, nomi famosi del movimento libertario americano entrarono in contatto con i movimenti di mobilizzazione della Nuova Sinistra che, al contrario della Vecchia Sinistra, era caratterizzata da diffidenza verso le strategie di uno stato centralizzato con ampi…

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…

Nota: Questo articolo è stato scritto in occasione della Giornata della Consapevolezza dei Neri in Brasile. La schiavitù in Brasile, l’ultimo paese americano indipendente che a quei tempi aveva ancora questa istituzione, fu abolita ufficialmente il 13 maggio 1888. Certo non fu una legge firmata dall’aristocrazia a risolvere i problemi della popolazione nera che, per…

Dopo la rielezione di Dilma Rousseff del Partito dei Lavoratori, vediamo ripetersi lo stesso schema che si ripete dal 2006: numerose manifestazioni, molte delle quali offensive e xenofobiche, da parte di abitanti del Sud-est e del sud brasiliano, soprattutto di Sao Paulo, contro il più povero Nord-est che ha votato massicciamente per il presidente uscente….

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…

C4SS Feed 44 presents “Corporations versus the Market; or, Whip Conflation Now” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Roderick Long, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. I don’t mean to suggest that Wal-Mart and similar firms owe their success solely to governmental privilege; genuine entrepreneurial talent has doubtless been involved as well. But given…

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.

Note: this was written for the occasion of Black Awareness Day in Brazil. In the 1960s, notable names from the American libertarian movement established contact with mobilizations of the New Left, which was characterized, as opposed to the Old Left, by a mistrust of centralized and big government strategies, and by their emphasis on the inclusion of segregated…

Note: This article was written for the occasion of Black Awareness Day in Brazil.  Officially, slavery in Brazil, the last independent American country which still had this institution at the time, was abolished on May 13, 1888. However, it wouldn’t be a law signed by the aristocracy that would solve the problems of the black people, who, for centuries, had their labor and…

Sento spesso persone che, senza riflettere, dicono: “Lo stato ha il diritto di tassare”, “lo stato ha il diritto di punire i criminali”, o “lo stato ha il diritto di controllare i confini nazionali”. Dentro di me, provo orrore per la facilità con cui si fanno queste affermazioni, per il fatto che molti considerino queste…

After the reelection of Workers’ Party Dilma Rousseff, we see the same pattern that has repeated itself since 2006: Several manifestations, many of them offensive or xenophobic, from people in the Southeast and South of Brazil, especially in Sao Paulo, against people from the poorer Northeast, who voted massively in favor of the incumbent. And…

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…