Acabo de ler que pais de estudante autista do ensino médio detido em operação de cilada de drogas em Temecula, Califórnia, em dezembro último, moveram processo contra o distrito escolar. Os pais estavam “inicialmente satisfeitos com seu filho ter feito seu primeiro e único amigo no ano passado na escola,” mas ficaram desconfiados quando o…

I recently watched a short presentation by Mark Hendrickson from Grove City College about the free market and Walmart. In the presentation Hendrickson covers in short, but informative detail, how free market mechanisms work. Firms that offer better prices in the market draw away customers from other firms, and the end result is that new…

These are funny times. If some old, obviously doddering anarchist (if they weren’t doddering, they’d never do this!) dares to use the word “libertarian” the way it was used for well over a century, the way it’s still used in many parts of the world, the hip, young anarchists will look at her aghast, all because about…

I just read that the parents of an autistic high school student arrested in a drug sting operation in Temecula, California last December have filed suit against the school district. The parents were “initially happy their son had made his first and only friend last year at school,” but became suspicious when his “school friend”…

The Progressive movement at the turn of the twentieth century—the doctrine from which the main current of modern liberalism developed—is sometimes erroneously viewed as an “anti-business” philosophy. It was anti-market to be sure, but by no means necessarily anti-business. Progressivism was, more than anything, managerialist. The American economy after the Civil War became increasingly dominated…

Os disparos, na Colina do Capitólio, contra Miriam Carey, mulher desarmada que desobedeceu a comando de policiais para que parasse o carro, foi situação bem conhecida para qualquer veterano da Guerra do Iraque, com importante diferença — em vez de moverem-se numa escalada progressiva de força para neutralizar a situação, os policiais da Colina do…

It’s been the thing lately, among certain establishment liberals, to dismiss libertarians as “Koch-funded shills.” We’ve heard a lot of it from Mark Ames and Yasha Levine at NSFWCorp, for example. This is stupid, first of all, because it’s historically illiterate. Free market libertarianism has its origins in the classical liberalism of two hundred years…

Tyler Cowen’s thesis is that economic growth is leveling off and rates of return decreasing because we’ve already picked the “low-hanging fruit” (meaning innovations and investments that have high returns). The stagnation in GDP and median income in recent decades means “the pace of technological development has slowed down,” and the general population is benefiting…

“Reformism” is one of those words that’s hard to pin down sometimes. It’s usually taken to mean advocating for “reform within the system” — in other words, the bad kind of reform. A bad reform operates from the unstated – often unconscious – starting assumptions of the system. It takes the existing institutional framework of…

This article won the 2011 Beth A. Hoffman Memorial Prize for Economic Writing. Although critics on the left are very astute in describing the evils of present-day society, they usually fail to understand either the root of those problems (government intervention) or their solution (the operation of a freed market). In Progressive commentary on energy,…

On Tuesday in Santa Rosa, California, two of that city’s “finest” cowered behind a car door and gunned down a thirteen-year-old boy carrying a toy rifle. This little boy, Andy Lopez Cruz, was walking down the street with a fake plastic rifle when the two “heroes” boldly got out of their police cruiser, hid behind the…

C4SS Trustee and Senior Fellow, Gary Chartier, discusses war, peace and the permanent danger of a standing state on C4SS Media’s youtube channel.

Of late I have been trying to balance my staunch support of the non-aggression principle (NAP) and self-ownership with my increasingly leftist values. For some anarchists the NAP and property rights are totally and wildly incompatible with anarchism, with the argument going so far to claim that stereotypical anarchism is rooted in a rejection of…

C4SS Senior Fellow and Molinari Institute Director and President, Roderick T. Long, presenting before the 2013 Students for Liberty Dallas Regional Conference at the University of North Texas. Roderick T. Long particpated in a brief interview regarding his talk, Objections to Libertarianism, Transitioning to Free(d) Markets, and More.

In The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith famously wrote, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” It may seem strange that history’s best-known advocate of the free market would cast such aspersions on business…

Thomas Nestel, the Philadelphia Transit Authority police chief, is aghast over the refusal of bystanders to help a transit cop — Sam Wellington — being beaten up by one of their fellow citizens that he’d been trying to arrest. “I was horrified. I was frightened for my cops.” Well, it’s hard not to sympathize with…

“Need I comment that these capitalists, both in Islam and in Christendom, were friends of the prince and helpers or exploiters of the state? […]” “Thus, the modern state, which did not create capitalism but only inherited it, sometimes acts in its favor and at other times acts against it; it sometimes allows capitalism to…

Libertarianism has nothing to do with national interests. Libertarianism is about individual liberty. The liberty to live your own life, to pursue your own livelihood, and to come and go as you please to anywhere that’s open to you or anywhere you’re invited to go. The implications for immigration policy are obvious: Everyone – not…

Back in the ’90s, the Financial Times referred to the G8 countries and the Washington Consensus they enforced as a “de facto world government.” As if we needed any reminder that such a global corporate regime exists in practice, consider the Trans-Pacific Partnership currently under negotiation. Although in theory the authority of all treaties signed…

C4SS Senior Fellow and Trustee Chair, Sheldon Richman, speaks at the University of Oklahoma on Constitution Day. He posits that perhaps the Articles of Confederation were the altogether superior document. http://youtu.be/k9dM0l1ZxO8 Q and A with $5 worth of prognostication: http://youtu.be/XHruM7Vnsao