A recent National Bureau of Economic Research study by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman finds that “the top 0.1% of [American] families now own roughly the same share of wealth as the bottom 90%.” Furthermore, the study shows that the “recovery” we keep hearing about hasn’t reached the middle class, with only those atop the economic pyramid seeing its benefits. With a…

Paul Krugman’s titling of his case against Amazon.com (“Amazon’s Monopsony Is Not OK,” New York Times, October 19) immediately rings alarm bells. The Nobel laureate economist surely understands that monopsony entails a sole buyer, not merely “a dominant buyer with the power to push prices down” in a particular market. Whatever its other faults, Amazon…

Mandatory minimum sentences have been receiving a fair bit of scrutiny lately, largely due to the efforts of Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM). And rightly so. Mandatory minimums remove discretion and context from sentencing, resulting in grossly unjust and wildly disproportionate sentences for minor offenses. Moreover, they’ve caused some troubling shifts in who has discretionary…

This is the second part of my two part series on Lynn Stuart Parramore’s recent article titled How Piketty’s Bombshell Book Blew Up Libertarian Fantasies. Let’s get started. She writes: By 1987, Ayn Rand acolyte Alan Greenspan had taken over as head of the Federal Reserve, and free market fever was unleashed upon America. Alan…

C4SS Feed 44 presents David S. D’Amato‘s “The Libertarian Road to Egalitarianism” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. But we needn’t regard inequality as a weak point in our arguments for economic freedom, or as an issue on which we simply cannot win. Existing economic relations are not the product of freedom of exchange or…

Libertarian equality involves not merely equality before those who administer the law, but equality with them.

Roderick T. Long: “We don’t have the right to subordinate other people to our ends or treat them as objects for our uses.”

Inequality is a scourge that is not going to go away.