Images circulated, in the aftermath of Dylann Roof’s racially motivated mass shooting at the historically black Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, included not only numerous pictures of Roof brandishing the Confederate battle flag but one of him squatting over a rumpled U.S. flag and trampling it underfoot. His disrespect to Old Glory suggests that he…

In Free Market Fairness [1] John Tomasi lays out a way in which the gap between broadly libertarian (or classical liberal) and high liberal (or liberal egalitarian) political philosophies can be bridged. Since F. A. Hayek’s methodologically individualist rejection of the concept of social justice, and Robert Nozick’s liberty-based rejection of egalitarian distributive justice, there…

Republican presidential aspirant and U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio gave a major foreign-policy speech recently, and the best that can be said is that he did not claim to favor small government and free markets. What he wants in a foreign policy couldn’t possibly be reconciled with any desire to limit government power. Rubio is for…

Anarchists usually don’t get too hot and bothered about general elections. While a change of command can no doubt mitigate some of the harms inflicted by particular governments, it makes no meaningful step towards the better world that anarchists want to see. We don’t feel any great victory if and when the lesser of two…

As an anarchist, I avoid doing anything that expresses consent to being governed, or an endorsement of any government; I am therefore a principled ballot-spoiler. However, this time around I was secretly rooting for a Labour victory (or at least a Conservative defeat). The Conservative Chancellor has been sustaining and inflating the housing bubble, particularly…

As the Reason Foundation’s Emily Ekins wrote back in February, “A recent Reason-Rupe poll asked Americans to rate their favorability towards capitalism, socialism, a free market economy, and a government managed economy.” Quite unsurprisingly, of these choices, Americans most favored free markets, with almost 7 out of 10 respondents reporting a positive opinion of a…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Chad Nelson‘s “I Don’t Love America Either, Rudy” read by Trevor Hultner and edited by Nick Ford. “The America Giuliani loves is the one made up of, first and foremost, its government, which Giuliani and his fellow American exceptionalists claim have “allowed” for the greatest freedom and prosperity in mankind’s history. Giuliani and his…

Georgetown philosophy professor Jason Brennan, by his own estimation the soul of reasonableness, has decided that now — when adjunct outrage has reached the boiling point over universities replacing 75% of their faculty with low-paid temporary workers while the numbers and salaries of administrators explode — is the perfect time to give adjuncts the Bronx…

We speak of the blowback that results from American foreign policy, the senseless, heinous acts of terror that represent an unfocused and irrational rebellion against American imperialism. We understand that calling it what it is, blowback — pointing out the causal relationship between American foreign policy and terrorism — is not an attempt to exculpate…

Kevin Carson recently wrote in support of the Fight for $15 movement. While usually associated with the modern fight for a state mandated minimum wage, Carson rejects that argument and instead turns to other methods by which the labor movement fought for better conditions and wages in the 19th century, such as “information and pressure campaigns against employers”…

Lottare per la libertà significa opporsi all’uso della forza per frenare lo scambio pacifico e volontario. Questo però non significa che dobbiamo chiamare “capitalismo” un sistema basato sullo scambio pacifico e volontario. Certo ci sono persone che pensano che “capitalismo” significhi proprio questo. E io non sono in grado di dimostrare che si sbagliano, perché…

Saturday Night Live ’ın Citizen Kane parodisinde Charles Foster Kane yavaş bir haber gününde diyorki, “Haber yoksa, biz yaparız”, ve insanları rastgele gazete ofislerinin camlarından atmaya başlıyor. Okuduğum zaman ilk aklıma gelen California’daki iki sivil polis –yağmacılığı başlatmaya çalışınca! — Oakland ve Berkeley’deki jurinin silahsız siyah erkekleri öldüren polisleri suçsuz bulma kararına karşı gelen yürüyüşteki protestocular tarafından kendilerini ele geçirttiklerinin raporu. Evet, doğru, yağmayı başlatmak için teşebbüs — yanlış okumadınız. Gösteriden…

Il sette aprile, il New York Times (Bernice Dahn, “Yes, We Were Warned About Ebola”) ha fatto questa rivelazione: l’epidemia di Ebola in Liberia era stata adeguatamente annunciata, ma nessuno era giunto alla giusta conclusione e nessuno aveva agito di conseguenza perché le informazioni necessarie erano nascoste in un articolo a pagamento pubblicato da una…

The Fight for $15 movement is usually identified with the fight for a $15 minimum wage. A call for government legislation is not the sort of thing you’d normally expect an anarchist to endorse. But in fact the movement to pay workers $15 or more is quite compatible with anarchist principles. Back in the late…

The New York Times revealed April 7 (Bernice Dahn, “Yes, We Were Warned About Ebola“) that there was adequate prior warning of an Ebola outbreak in Liberia, but nobody drew the proper conclusion from the data and acted on it because the necessary information was all hidden behind academic journal paywalls. An article in Annals…

Il decreto sul razionamento dell’acqua che il governatore della California Jerry Brown ha approvato il primo aprile (Executive Order B-29-15) ha ricevuto molti elogi immeritati dagli ambienti di centrosinistra. A leggere bene la proposta, si capisce che non riduce i consumi del 25%, anche se questa è l’impressione che se ne ricava leggendo i titoli….

California Governor Jerry Brown’s April 1 decree (Executive Order B-29-15) for rationing water has gotten lots of undeserved positive coverage on the center-left. If you read the fine print, it doesn’t actually reduce the state’s total usage by 25% (although that’s the impression you’d probably get just reading the headlines). It only applies to “potable…

According to the received version of “interest group pluralism” in J.K. Galbraith’s book American Capitalism, there’s supposed to be a sort of check-and-balance system (Galbraith called it “countervailing power”) between big business, government regulatory agencies and organized labor. But what usually happens in the real world, when the allegedly “opposing” centers of power are so…

James R. Otteson. The End of Socialism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Otteson’s book is an eloquent defense of an economic system which maximizes decentralism and autonomy; it’s just not, as he supposes, a defense of capitalism. Likewise, it’s a good critique of centralized planning and top-down authority — but not of “socialism.” Otteson…

This election cycle’s crop of uninspiring presidential hopefuls, now including Texas Senator Ted Cruz, must be a relief to those favoring mass disillusionment with electoral politics. No candidate, Rand Paul included, represents a convincing alternative to the status quo. Contrast this with the current president, whose appeals to “hope” and “change” convinced many Americans of…