La procedura seguita dal gran giurì riguardo Darren Wilson, l’assassino di Michael Brown, dimostra quanto sia fittizia negli Stati Uniti la separazione dei poteri. Gli unici a farlo notare, purtroppo, sono quelli che protestano per le strade nel Missouri… sempre che abbiano la fortuna di poter dire la loro per due minuti in un’intervista da…

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…

Oltre tre mesi dopo la morte di Michael Brown, avvenuta per mano di Darren Wilson in pieno giorno a Ferguson, nel Missouri, ecco che arriva il verdetto del gran giurì. Non ci sarà un processo, nessuna giustizia per il suo crimine dai tribunali di stato. Wilson non sarà processato mai, tanto meno condannato. Ma nel…

Michael Brown. Eric Garner. Akai Gurley. These are just the latest in a line of minorities who have been killed by the police in excessive force cases where no scrutiny was even applied to the cops. While protests arise in the memory of these fallen human beings, I find myself asking a question in their…

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…

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…

About six months ago, when Uber was first becoming a visible national controversy, I wrote a column (“One Cheer for Uber and Lyft” C4SS, May 16, 2014) in which I argued that Uber, despite being a genuine example of neither peer-to-peer (p2p) nor sharing, was a step in the right direction because it offered at…

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.

The grand jury proceedings for Michael Brown’s killer, Darren Wilson, show us just how fictional the United States government’s system of checks and balances is. Unfortunately, the only ones who appear to be pointing this out are the protesters on the ground in Missouri — that is when they’re lucky enough to secure two-minute- interviews…

More than three months after Darren Wilson executed Michael Brown in broad daylight in Ferguson, Missouri, the grand jury’s decision is in. No state prosecution, no justice from the state’s court system, for his crime. Wilson will never be tried, let alone convicted. But in the real justice system, this is not the end for Wilson — it’s only…

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…

You may be familiar with Murray Rothbard’s article “Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature.” Hans-Hermann Hoppe, beloved eminence grise at LewRockwell.com, takes things a step further and makes belief in human inequality the defining characteristic of right-libertarianism (“A Realistic Libertarianism,” Sept. 30). This isn’t just a hill he’s willing to die on, but a hill…

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…

C4SS Feed 44 presents David S. D’Amato‘s “The Black Hole of the American Injustice System” read by Christopher B. King and edited by Nick Ford. And while consumers pay top dollar for the prisoners’ expensive wares — and companies like Colorado Corrections Industries rake in millions — the prisoners themselves often make as little as 60 cents per…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “Jeff Madrick’s Misplaced Criticism of Free Trade” read by Christopher B. King and edited by Nick Ford. The centerpiece of the neoliberal agenda is not “free trade” — that is, voluntary exchange of goods and services in which all parties operate on their own nickel and nobody has access to coercive power…

David Graeber. Debt: The First 5000 Years (Brooklyn and London: Melville House, 2011). David Graeber, as we already saw to be the case with Elinor Ostrom, is characterized above all by a faith in human creativity and agency, and an unwillingness to let a priori theoretical formulations either preempt his perceptions of the particularity and…

A recent Pew Research study surveys 44 countries, revealing that the Chinese are even friendlier to free markets than Americans. Katie Simmons, a senior researcher at Pew, “notes that China has enacted numerous reforms to open up the country’s economy since the 1970s.” It probably shouldn’t surprise us that people living under the Communist Party of China’s rule…

There’s a certain kind of economic technocrat who tosses around the term “economies of scale” like a Young Earth creationist tosses around the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This is true of legacy liberalism, obviously, which is still defined by the mid-20th century mass-production paradigm of Joseph Schumpeter, John Kenneth Galbraith and Alfred Chandler. It’s also…