It’s a common observation that polls can produce virtually any response desired, depending on how the questions are worded. Emily Ekins, ostensibly reporting on the political and economic attitudes of millennials (“Are Millennials Far Left on Economics? No,” Reason, August 18), displays almost total conceptual incoherence in framing the results of a Reason-Rupe poll of “millennials” (young Americans age…

About the only thing A. Barton Hinkle gets right about the Industrial Workers of the World in “Meet the Left-Wing Extremist Running for U.S. Senate” is not calling them the “International Workers of the World”. Although at least Reason likening the “Wobblies”, whose founding antedates the Russian Revolution by over a decade, to “warmed-over Lenin” is not the…

The Keystone XL pipeline is something no libertarian can support if consistency with free market principles matters. But that doesn’t stop a lot of right-leaning self-proclaimed libertarians from instinctively defending it — after all, anything that promotes fossil fuel use and gets environmentalists bent out of shape has to be “libertarian,” right? Thus A. Barton Hinkle’s “Get…

“It takes money to make money.” An old, oft-repeated saying, it is certainly true enough as a statement describing the functioning of capitalism. The idea is that once one possesses capital, she can loan it to others for interest or rent, or else invest it in some productive enterprise to earn profits, sitting back and…

With another fall election season picking up steam, The New Yorker’s Sam Wang wonders whether the 2014 election will “be a wave or a ripple.” A wave, Wang says, occurs when “one party makes massive gains and overturns the existing power dynamic.” But notwithstanding Wang’s intended point, the “existing power dynamic” in the United States…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Roderick Long‘s “Poison as Food, Poison as Antidote” read and edited by Nick Ford. But it is an all-too-common mistake – and this tendency to underestimate the chasm between free markets and corporatism is enormously beneficial to the state, enabling a slick bait-and-switch. When free markets and government grants of privilege to…

The following article was written by Max More and published with The Freeman, February 1, 1999. Max More is president of Extropy Institute in Marina Del Rey, California. Large Corporations Will Not Come to Dominate the Economy Giant corporations controlling national governments. Corporate behemoths regimenting their workers, controlling their customers, and obliterating their smaller competitors. The rich get richer…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Carlos Clemente‘s “Vulture Funds vs. Argentina” read by Christopher King and edited by Nick Ford. The most outrageous fallacy in this line of reasoning is the conflation of the political class of a country with its citizenry at large. Whenever vultures succeed in collecting the full value on defaulted government bonds, the…

The political economy of Benjamin Tucker represents an alloy of its major influences, synthesizing the work of radical thinkers such as Josiah Warren, William B. Greene, Ezra Heywood, and Lysander Spooner to create a mature, comprehensive individualist anarchism. From Heywood came Tucker’s trademark analysis of the wrongs of rent, interest, and profit, “follow[ing] closely the…

The book I will discuss below develops and defends the idea of law without a state. The book’s blurb tells us the following: This book elaborates and defends the idea of law without the state. Animated by a vision of peaceful, voluntary cooperation as a social ideal and building on a careful account of non-aggression,…

Why am I an Anarchist? That is the question which the editor of The Twentieth Century has requested me to answer for his readers. I comply; but, to be frank, I find it a difficult task. If the editor or one of his contributors had only suggested a reason why I should be anything other…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Dawie Coetzee‘s “There is More to Industrial Enclosure than Patents” read and edited by Nick Ford. I wonder about the motivation in forgoing these patents, given that many are relatively toothless. Tesla obviously wishes to play the heroic underdog, to imply solidarity with the open-source movement despite operating in an industry legally…

Today is Labor Day, a federal holiday in the United States designed to promote a sanitized history of labor organizing. As Charles Johnson puts it, “the federal holiday known as Labor Day is actually a Gilded Age bait-and-switch from 1894. It was crafted and promoted in an effort to throw a bone to labor while erasing the radicalism implicit in May…

C4SS Feed 44 presents David S. D’Amato‘s “Avowals of Selfhood: Review of Egoism” read and edited by Nick Ford. For the egoist, individualism must precede anarchism, for the affirmation of self is the source of the denial of all authority — individualism being the more general thing, anarchism a specific implication. Any anarchism that sets itself…

I love to backpack, surf, hike and climb. When I’m not able to engage in these pursuits, I sometimes find myself watching video of others adventuring in beautiful, remote locales. It helps me to hold on to some of those joyous and motivating travel feelings. I enjoy footage from decades past, when things were wilder,…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Nathan Goodman‘s “‘Jobs’ as a Red Herring: The Dangers of Make-Work Bias” read and edited by Nick Ford. Still, many people measure an economy’s health in terms of employment, a phenomenon economist Bryan Caplan calls “make-work bias, a tendency to underestimate the economic benefits of conserving labor.” And there are obvious economic…

The term “market anarchism” may give some people the mistaken impression that market anarchists envision a society organized primarily around the cash nexus. In part this is because one definition of the term “market” itself equates to the market as an institution: The sphere of exchange. It may also reflect the fact that many anarcho-capitalists,…

The Foundation for Economic Education has an enviable history. For over half a century, it has sought to share the conviction that society can and should be organized on the basis of peaceful, voluntary cooperation. It has treated the key terms in its name, economic and education, with appropriate breadth — focusing not only on…

Pope Francis’s remarks on poverty, inequality and capitalism — most recently at his open air mass in Seoul — don’t sit well with many conservatives and right-leaning libertarians. The Pope’s remarks include criticism of growing economic inequality and a call to “hear the voice of the poor.” Among those who take issue with the Pope’s statement is…

In a recent piece in the New York Times, Paul Krugman arraigns libertarians for “living in a fantasy world,” telling us that there is usually a “very good reason” for bureaucrats to substitute their judgment for our own. When one asserts that he is opposed to an untrammeled free market, all he is really saying…