C4SS Feed 44 presents “Labor Struggle in a Free Market” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Kevin Carson, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. The problem is that, to date, bosses have fully capitalized on the potential of the incomplete contract, whereas workers have not. And the only thing preventing workers from doing so…

One of the most common questions raised about a hypothetical free market society concerns worker protection laws of various kinds. As Roderick Long puts it, In a free nation, will employees be at the mercy of employers?… Under current law, employers are often forbidden to pay wages lower than a certain amount; to demand that…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics” read by Erick Vasconcelos and edited by Nick Ford. But treating either the payment of taxes or receipt of government money as a proxy for where one stands on the Producer-Parasite spectrum is ridiculous. Commenter Kirsten Tynan points out the sheer absurdity of asserting that the bottom…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “State Justice Failed Michael Brown. People’s Justice is Just Getting Started.” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. The consequences for cops who draw public attention due to their extreme levels of brutality, in this new age of citizen journalism, is instructive. The people are more than happy to administer…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Chad Nelson‘s “The Inherent Flaw of the Criminal Justice System” read by Dylan Delikta and edited by Nick Ford. The protesters who utter such concerns about the validity of a state prosecution of a police officer have their finger on an issue that market anarchists have long recognized. Government checks and balances are a…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Valdenor Júnior‘s “The Libertarian Struggle of the Black Movement” read by Erick Vasconcelos and edited by Nick Ford. Murray Rothbard attempted to establish a conversation between libertarianism and the New Left through the periodical Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought. Among the articles published, one of the best certainly is Rothbard’s own…

I live in Chicago, where police abuse is a disheartening daily reality, concentrated almost entirely in black communities, ruining lives, splitting up families. The white professionals I know live in good neighborhoods, ensconced either in downtown high-rises or out in the suburbs, safely away from the violence but hearing enough about it to casually blame…

Wayne Price. “Kevin Carson’s Revival of Individualist Anarchist Economic Theory” Anarkismo.net, November 30, 2014. Wayne Price’s overall summary of my approach in Studies in Mutualist Political Economy (also available online) is quite even-handed and fair (unlike some others, e.g. the critique of Markets Not Capitalism, ed. by Charles Johnson and Gary Chartier, by Crimethinc’s Magpie…

On December 22 Maricopa County, Arizona Attorney Bill Montgomery dropped criminal charges stemming from an animal abuse case last summer. In that incident, Green Acre kennel allegedly locked twenty dogs in a sweltering room — in the Arizona summer — leaving them to die of heat prostration and dehydration. Why, you might wonder, would Montgomery drop…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Roderick Long‘s “History of an Idea” read by Jeff Riggenbach and edited by Nick Ford. … Everyone knows about economies of scale; after all, that’s why we have firms in the first place. What Rothbard’s analysis shows is that there are also diseconomies of scale, and that these grow more severe as vertical integration…

The recent trajectory of events leading up to the shooting of NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, and the nationwide police backlash afterward, have made it clearer than ever how police feel about the public they supposedly protect and serve: they’re terrified of us. For more than twenty years, the Drug War and associated…

Dmytri Kleiner. The Telekommunist Manifesto. Network Notebook Series (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2010). Kleiner starts with a materialist analysis of class relations quite similar to Marx’s. Through their access to the wealth that results from the continuous capture of surplus value, capitalists offer each generation of innovators a chance to become a junior partner…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Ryan Calhoun‘s “Jon Stewart, Jester for the Warfare State” read by Erick Vasconcelos and edited by Nick Ford. The difference between Carlin and Stewart is that Carlin was not beholden, he kept nothing as sacrosanct and by the time of his death had at one point offended the sensibilities of every demographic on the…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Thomas L. Knapp‘s “‘Intellectual Property’ is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” read by Erick Vasconcelos and edited by Nick Ford. I came late to the news of Twitpic‘s impending (and thankfully partial) closure and even later to an explanation for it. … That may not seem like a big deal but it was,…

We are fascinated by the image of rebellion. The present generation came of age amidst global unrest and upheaval, from the Arab Spring to the anti-austerity movements in the West. Its immediate impulse has been to identify with those in the streets, even in the case of ill-fated and dubiously progressive movements. The image of…

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…

Recently, in a comment on my short piece, “The Libertarian Road to Egalitarianism,” philosopher and prominent libertarian Tibor R. Machan cited George Orwell’s Animal Farm as an example of what happens when we attempt to do something about inequality. To Machan, inequality is a “fabricated problem,” and Orwell’s fairy story is a cautionary tale on…

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…