…along with a lot of other things. Back in November, at Future of Freedom, Jacob Hornberger wrote: “America’s welfare state way of life is based on the notion that the federal government is needed to force people to be good and caring to others.” To which I responded:  Um, no. America’s welfare state way of…

Kevin Carson’s Rejoinder to Derek Wall. I appreciate the thoughtful tone of Derek’s response, and I’m certainly gratified by whatever role I may have played in inspiring him to take up brewing beer. And having been strongly influenced by the work of Elinor Ostrom myself, I was pleased to learn that an Ostrom scholar was…

Robert Reich contends that “Big Tech Has Become Way Too Powerful” (New York Times, September 20) — and so, to curb its power, big government must become way more powerful. Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, like the railroad and oil trusts of the Gilded Age, are to Reich the natural result of market consolidation. Retelling the civics-textbook story of…

Cass Sunstein is such an excellent, if unintentional, parody of liberal goo-gooism that it’s hard to tell him from a creation of The Onion. As proof that “our democratic system structures” are not rigged — whatever Gloomy Guses like Elizabeth Warren and Lawrence Lessig may think — Sunstein (“The American System Isn’t Rigged,” BloombergView, August…

In a July 10 article at Reason, David Harsanyi (“Bernie Sanders is the Future of the Democratic Party“) describes the rise of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders as “a completely predictable outcome of the Democratic Party’s trajectory,” and a portent of the party’s “socialistic future.” I’m more worried about what Harsanyi portends for the future…

Recent studies estimate that the federal regulatory burden has impaired the United States economy to the tune of almost $40 trillion, “act[ing] as a hidden tax on individuals.” Precluding new competitors and entrepreneurship, new regulations often favor established firms at the expense of both consumers and economic growth generally. What’s more, left-wing revisionists such as Gabriel…

Patrick Cockburn discusses the bloody history of Baghdad. Kent Paterson discusses the challenging of a militarized police state. Medea Benjamin discusses the broken promises of Obama. Martha Rosenberg interviews Michael Arria. Jeffrey St. Clair discusses the recently passed away, Gabriel Kolko. Justin Raimondo discusses how a CIA backed general recently launched a coup in Libya….

Al Carroll recently penned a piece titled The Moral and Practical Failures of Libertarianism and Small Government Conservatism. This will be a point by point refutation. Let’s begin. Al writes: In economics, both orthodox Communism and Libertarianism are equally wrong, callous, and dangerous examples of ideological blindness, a set of principles taken to an extreme…

Part 1: Kolko at Home An earlier generation of libertarians was interested in Gabriel Kolko, a historian of the Left. Who was he? Born in 1932 in Paterson, NJ, historian Gabriel Kolko studied at Kent State, the University of Wisconsin, and Harvard University (PhD: 1962). From 1970 until his retirement he taught history at York…