I’m hearing a lot of negativity — constructive negativity, but negativity nonetheless —  from my comrades on the libertarian left, concerning the US federal government’s “shutdown.” As the Center for a Stateless Society’s Kevin Carson notes with reference to “furloughed” government employees, “[S]ome of what government workers do — for example cops who enforce drug…

Cory Doctorow, guest of honor at the upcoming FenCon science fiction convention in Dallas, notes (“During the shutdown, some scientists can’t talk about science,” Boing Boing, October 4) that some of his fellow speakers will be unable to speak if the government shutdown continues. Because they’re government space scientists, they fall under the purview of the…

Em 399 antes da Era Cristã, pelo crime de “corromper os jovens” e debilitar a crença nos deuses tradicionais de Atenas, Sócrates foi sentenciado a beber taça de cicuta. Se o objetivo era silenciar a voz de Sócrates, é seguro dizer que o tiro saiu totalmente pela culatra. A história de Sócrates só fica em…

The tenets of the Tao Te Ching express the first anarchist or at least proto-anarchist political philosophy, to my knowledge. The Taoist opposition to government springs from a radical non-interventionist philosophy on all three major branches of philosophy. While Taoism rejects the normative, they recognize a sort of logic about the state of the universe,…

The government shutdown is teaching us a lot about the “public sector” — mainly that it doesn’t exist. For many folks Autumn is a season for getting out into the wild, for viewing fall colors, building camp fires, breathing in the still sweet air and plainly enjoying the great outdoors — “our” public lands. With…

On the 28th of September four European classical-liberal and libertarian parties signed the Utrecht declaration and covenant of European Classical liberal and Libertarian parties which provides the foundation for the new European Party for Individual Liberty (EPIL). The coming years will show if the EPIL can bring a new perspective on the principle of liberty…

The seemingly unbridgeable ideological gap in America between economic libertarians, on the one hand, and on the other, those who advocate various manners and degrees of redistribution of wealth can be rationally resolved through an understanding of the significance of the concepts of property rights and redistributive justice to those who advocated them in 1640’s…

In 399 BCE, for the crime of “corrupting the youth” and undermining belief in the customary gods of Athens, Socrates was sentenced to drink a cup of hemlock. If the goal was to silence Socrates’ voice, it’s safe to say that plan backfired in a big way. The story of Socrates stands second in the…

How many times have you heard a politician, addressing some issue of regulatory policy, speak of “all the stakeholders” being at “the table?” That phrase has become popular recently, in particular among sponsors of maximalist copyright law proposals like SOPA and ACTA. “All the stakeholders had seats at the table — the RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft…

The long-awaited Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2013 report is now making headlines. The report is designed to inform the global community about the current state of climate science — the scientific debate, consensus and (most importantly) data. We will learn of the latest scientific projections of temperature increase, sea level rise and extremes in weather. The report is seven…

Every once in a while a government functionary slips up and inadvertently lets out the truth about how things work, in tones so frank it leaves us shaking our heads and wondering if we really heard correctly. That’s what happened when Blake Ewing, an Austin area assistant DA, expressed his true feelings (“Breaking Bad Normalizes…

Libertarian Harry Browne famously wrote that government “knows how to break your legs, hand you a crutch, and say, ‘See, if it weren’t for the government, you wouldn’t be able to walk.’” But with deficits and recessions looming, governments have been getting stingier when it comes to handing out crutches. The U.S. House of Representatives recently…

C4SS Trustee and Senior Fellow, Gary Chartier, participates in a discussion of the terminology of “capitalism,” the desirability and practicability of a free society and the centrality of peace with the crew of The Annoying Peasants Radio Show. New Politics Internet Radio with The Annoying Peasants on BlogTalkRadio

  The purpose of ReadLiberty.org is to transcribe, preserve and spread all 403 issues of Liberty, Not the Daughter But the Mother of Order, an individualist anarchist periodical originally edited and published by Benjamin Tucker from 1881 to 1908. As part of our activities we have decided to publish the whole Volume I of Liberty in the…

Recently someone on an email discussion list I follow pointed out that authors or publishers of copyrighted pieces may be reliant on royalty income for their subsistence. The alternative to proprietary information might be that “only people with income from other sources (such as academic salaries) [would] be able to make their voices heard.” I…

The Argument for Market Failure A public good, as economists define the concept, is any good from whose enjoyment non-contributors cannot be excluded. The theory of public goods is of interest to libertarians for two reasons: first, because a great many things we care about – highways, education, law enforcement, fire protection, national defense, etc. – are widely thought…

Robert Reich (“Syria and the Reality at Home in America,” Nation of Change, September 7), noting that the share of the population either working or seeking work was at a thirty-year low, writes “A decent society would put people to work — even if this required more government spending on roads, bridges, ports, pipelines, parks…

En todo el mundo, la gente protesta contra la intervención de EE.UU. en Siria. Los sondeos muestran un escepticismo generalizado ante la amenazante guerra. En lugar de aumentar la seguridad de los estadounidenses, es probable que la intervención apoye a fuerzas vinculadas a al Qaida. No obstante parece inevitable que el Gobierno de EE.UU. lance…

In his classic essay, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” F.A. Hayek explains the concept of distributed knowledge. Every individual has unique knowledge shaped by their experiences and preferences, knowledge that may not be accessible to others, no matter how well educated they may be. Hayek writes: “Today it is almost heresy to suggest that…

Forbes contributor psychiatrist Dale Archer asks whether America’s wealth gap could lead to a revolt. Highlighting recent fast food workers’ strikes and the struggle for a “living wage,” Archer observes that “disparity between the nation’s top earners and the bottom 80 percent has grown exponentially over the past three decades, and it’s been exacerbated by…