Last Sunday (March the 13th) I attended the protests against president Dilma Rousseff in Rio — and all was not well. My friends and I were violently antagonized by a subset of the protesters and the police had to intervene for our safety.  This is my side of the story, accompanied by my thoughts on what…

Neither Bernie Sanders, the self-described democratic socialist, nor Donald Trump, the self-described terrific businessman, knows squat about economics. If their polices were enacted, regular working people would be harmed. This is most clear with trade. Sanders and Trump are flaming protectionists, which means they peddle perhaps the oldest, most-thoroughly discredited economics doctrine ever spoken. (An…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Jeff Ricketson‘s “Markets and Law” from the Students for a Stateless Society‘s Volume 1, Issue 1 of THE NEW LEVELLER read by Stephen Ledger and edited by Nick Ford. Instead, if a market were allowed to provide security, the firms protecting individuals’ rights would have every reason to provide the protection their clientele could and would pay…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Gary Chartier’s “The State and Personal Freedom (Part 2 of 4), read by Christopher B. King and edited by Nick Ford. …excerpted from Gary Chartier’s The Conscience of an Anarchist, available for purchase here. You can make a Bitcoin donation to Christopher King here: 1PGZrRrebdM8YZfc7bbyKPqbqgGLRcL6yE Raw Feed: http://c4ss.jellycast.com/podcast/feed/2 Stitcher: http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/smash… Feed 44:…

If you believed the talking heads, you might think concern with inequality in our society was just a product of envy and economic ignorance. That’s another reason not to believe the talking heads. The fact that someone has more wealth than I do doesn’t injure me or make me worse off. And the economy isn’t…

The Lego corporation, popular producer of interlocking miniature toy bricks, has recently been making increased efforts to market its toys to girls. Some of these efforts have met with criticism from feminists, who worry about toys that are stereotypically “girly” in a way that reinforces traditional gender roles. In a recent piece titled “Un-PC Lego…

Conservative pundit Laura Ingraham has a strange understanding of small government. Unfortunately, she’s not alone. When Nikki Haley delivered the GOP response to Barack Obama’s final State of the Union address, expressing concern about xenophobia and border paranoia, Ingraham was disappointed. She tweeted: “Too bad @NikkiHaley missed her oppty to stand w/ working ppl who…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “Libertarian Self-Marginalization” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. Go to the average mainstream libertarian venue on any given day, and you’re likely to see elaborate apologetics for corporate globalization, Wal-Mart, offshoring, Nike’s sweatshops, rising CO2 levels, income inequality and wealth concentration, CEO salaries, Big Pharma’s profits, and Microsoft’s…

The High Pay Centre has garnered a lot of attention in the British media over the last few days, reporting that on January 5th — what they have dubbed “Fat Cat Tuesday” — average high-earning CEOs’ pay will have already surpassed the annual pay of the average British worker. The High Pay Centre claims more…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s contribution to Part 7 of Markets Not Capitalism: “How ‘Intellectual Property’ Impedes Competition,” read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. The levels of invasiveness required by “intellectual property,” in the digital age, cannot be exaggerated. The intrusive DRM embedded in proprietary media, and the draconian legislation criminalizing…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Nick Ford‘s “Cut Out the State, Free Entrepreneurship” read by John Moore and edited by Tony Dreher. If we want entrepreneurship to flourish, let’s treat it as a type of direct action. Direct action subverts the state’s supposed legitimacy without its approval. Entrepreneurship does much the same. And it reaffirms the…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Gary Chartier‘s “The State, Big Business and Economic Privilege” (Part 2 of 7), read by Christopher B. King and edited by Nick Ford. …excerpted from Gary Chartier’s The Conscience of an Anarchist, available for purchase here. Feed 44: http://www.c4ss.org/ http://www.youtube.com/user/c4ssvideos https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/c4ss-media/id872405202?mt=2 http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/smash-walls-radio/c4ss-media?refid=stpr https://twitter.com/C4SSmedia Bitcoin tips welcome: 1N1pF6fLKAGg4nH7XuqYQbKYXNxCnHBWLB

Considerato che quel poco di libertà di cui ancora godiamo in occidente deriva in gran parte da istituzioni legali in concorrenza tra loro che operavano entro di giurisdizioni sovrapposte secoli fa, è curioso il fatto che tanti libertari pensino ancora che un tale ordine, caratteristica essenziale dell’anarchismo basato sul libero mercato o sul diritto naturale,…

In a video produced by the Future of Freedom Foundation (“The Libertarian Angle: Do Libertarians Really Hate the Poor?“), Jacob Hornberger and Richard Ebeling obviously intend a smashing, unanswerable rejoinder to the left-wing stereotype of right-libertarians as “pot-smoking Republicans” who hate the poor. Sadly, it only reaffirms that stereotype. It’s exactly what left-wing critics of libertarianism…

Considering that what liberty we continue to enjoy in the West is a product in large part of competing legal institutions operating within overlapping jurisdictions hundreds of years ago, it’s curious that so many libertarians still believe such an order — an essential feature of free-market, or natural-law, anarchism — would be inimical to liberty. Why wouldn’t…

Mercato nero e agorismo sono parte integrante di come le persone libere salveranno il mondo dalla perenne oppressione economica e dal disastro ambientale. In cosa consiste l’attività del mercato nero? Cos’è l’agorismo e come fa a sovvertire il potere statale? Come fa l’agorismo a promuovere la sostenibilità ecologica? La risposta migliore viene dall’opera monumentale del…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “Reason’s Misplaced Condescension” read by Mike Godzina and edited by Tony Dreher. The Pope, Slade writes, “condemns the market-driven economic development that has lifted a billion people out of extreme poverty within the lifetime of the typical millennial.” As evidence of his “lack of understanding of even basic economic…

We could use a radical in the presidential race — someone who really challenges the status quo — but Bernie Sanders isn’t it. Sanders of course calls himself a democratic socialist, but that tells us almost nothing. One gets the impression the socialist label was pinned on him and after resisting it, Sanders decided “socialist”…

So, going through the final rounds of work on Markets Not Capitalism with Gary Chartier and the rest of the Collective has really been reminding me that I’ve accumulated a lot of occasional and fragmentary writing — papers, paragraphs, notes, etc. — that I really ought to have been collecting for this blog and sharing more…

Black markets and agorism are an integral part of the way free people are going to save the world from unrelenting economic oppression and environmental damage. What constitutes black market activity? What is agorism and how does it subvert the state? How does agorism promote ecological sustainability? These questions are best answered by looking at…