Discussing Prime Minister Narendra Modi in The Economic Times, businessman Gurcharan Das worries that “[t]oo many Indians still believe that the market makes ‘the rich richer and the poor poorer.’” Modi, Das argues, has an opportunity to “transform the master narrative around” free market reform, convincing Indians that a free market system helps ordinary Indians, not…

C4SS has teamed up with the Distro of the Libertarian Left. The Distro produces and distribute zines and booklets on anarchism, market anarchist theory, counter-economics, and other movements for liberation. For every copy of Sheldon Richman‘s “Class Struggle Rightly Conceived” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Sheldon Richman‘s “Class Struggle Rightly Conceived“. $1.00 for the…

C4SS has teamed up with the Distro of the Libertarian Left. The Distro produces and distribute zines and booklets on anarchism, market anarchist theory, counter-economics, and other movements for liberation. For every copy of Kevin Carson‘s “What Is Left-Libertarianism?” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Kevin Carson‘s “What Is Left-Libertarianism?“. $1.00 for the first copy….

C4SS Feed 44 presents Elizabeth Tate’s “Identities & Individuals” from the Students for a Stateless Society‘s Volume 1, Issue 3 of THE NEW LEVELLER read by Erick Vasconceols and edited by Nick Ford. In oppressed groups, libertarianism can seem similar to ideas that have oppressed them over time. The idea of a liberty movement may even be laughable to groups…

The election season is upon us, and we’re hearing the usual political promises about raising wages. Democrats pledge to raise the minimum wage and assure equal pay for equal work for men and women. Republicans usually oppose those things, but their explanations are typically lame. (“The burden on small business would be increased too much.”)…

Paul Krugman, in denouncing the excessive market power of Amazon (“Amazon’s Monopsony is Not OK,” New York Times, October 19), proclaims that the Robber Baron Era ended when “we as a nation” put an end to it. There’s a powerful story in the book of 2 Samuel about the prophet Nathan confronting King David after…

Links-libertarisme krijgt de laatste tijd veel aandacht in de bredere Amerikaanse libertarische gemeenschap. De term links-libertarisme is op vele manieren gebruikt binnen de Amerikaanse politiek, en er lijkt enige verwarring te zijn binnen de libertarische gemeenschap over wie die links-libertariërs nou werkelijk zijn. De basisideeën van links-libertarisme, zoals wij ze bij Alliance of the Libertarian…

At the Washington Post‘s Wonkblog, Jason Millman argues that expensive drugs are often worth the cost (“Why extremely expensive drugs are often worth the cost,” October 6). Although expensive specialty drugs like Sovaldi for Hepatitis C cost thousands of dollars a month, they may provide significantly greater benefits than traditional drugs — including “treatments for complex diseases…

My good friend Ciaran, who introduced me to the insights of free market libertarianism (Particularly the works of Frederic Bastiat and Ludwig von Mises), expressed his confusion at the notion of free market socialism. As the concepts are typically considered polar opposites, I figured I would offer some glimpses at various strains of free market…

If you accept your enemy’s conceptual categories, you’re apt to wind up with a badly framed debate in which both sides are unsatisfactory. Jeff Madrick’s article “Our Misplaced Faith in Free Trade” (New York Times, October 3) clearly demonstrates this. The corporate state and its stooges in both major political parties and the commentariat are heavily…

I often hear people make casual remarks like, “Well, the State has a right to collect taxes,” “the State has a right to punish criminals,” or “the State has a right to controls its borders.” Inside, I am always somewhat horrified at how very easily these kinds of assumptions are made, at how obvious the…

It’s no secret that economists and libertarians have developed a bad habit of assuming things about history and other societies on first principle without actually checking archaeological or anthropological findings. On occasion the divide can be quite stark. David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years gets a lot of momentum by attacking a widely circulated…

A recent story in the Wall Street Journal highlights the “growing roster of countries” that now want a say in the world’s major corporate mergers. Given the interconnectedness of today’s global economy, it is no wonder that more than 100 international jurisdictions now claim antitrust authority to examine deals, all “embracing different approaches for evaluating…

Crowd-sourcing is a novel way of organizing our society these days. Whether we’re trying to fund projects through Kickstarter or GoFundMe or editing the next big Wikipedia article, crowd-sourcing is a big part of what makes the internet great and a potential source of freedom for everyone. But just because something is largely peer-to-peer orientated doesn’t…

Parsing Political Divides in the Mainstream and in Anarchism CNBC describes the Corporate Perception Indicator as “a far-reaching survey of business executives and the general population from 25 markets,” “research firm Penn Schoen Berland survey[ing] 25,012 individuals and 1,816 business executives.” The results of the survey show quite unsurprisingly that the general public associates government…

Marx had no monopoly. Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk (1851-1914), the second-generation giant of Austrian economics, famously refuted the theory, most commonly associated with Marx, that the employer-employee relationship is intrinsically exploitative. Less well known is that Böhm-Bawerk had an exploitation theory of his own, which he expressed in his 1889 masterpiece, Positive Theory of Interest, volume…

Big is not beautiful when it comes to economics. This is the key message of Kevin Carson’s “Industrial Policy: New Wine in Old Bottles“. His essay makes compelling arguments in favour of an anarchist society based on small-scale community manufacturing, peer-to-peer production and decentralised production. Carson sets out the ways in which the state concentrates economic…

Both nationalism and isolationism are incompatible with libertarianism. They emanate from the idea that the national collective is the basic moral unit of existence. If either flourishes, individualism and liberty suffer. Individual freedom can’t survive people being subordinated to a mystic national social super organism. Neither can it flourish when individuals limit the scope of…

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…

Though many Americans know that prisoners often work while behind bars, the conditions under which they toil may be less than clear. Fortune magazine made waves this summer when it reported that “[p]rison labor has gone artisanal,” revealing a multimillion dollar business that puts convicts to work making everything from specialty motorcycles to goat cheese sold at…