You may be familiar with the role of proprietary automobile diagnostic software in enforcing a repair cartel of the Big Auto manufacturers, dealership mechanics, and auto repair chains and big garages that can afford to license the software. By using closed software that makes it impossible for an independent party to access it, or open…

At Reason, Brian Doherty tears into Bernie Sanders for opposing what the latter calls “unfettered free trade” (“Bernie Sanders Hates The World’s Poor, and Wants to Hurt Them,” April 5). “This wicked man deliberately wants to make it impossible for Americans to do the thing that historically most guarantees helping the truly poor in the…

You’ve probably had one of Those People say (usually after sidling up to you, looking around to see if anybody’s listening, and prefacing it with an “I’m not racist, but…” disclaimer) “Slavery was 150 years ago — they need to get over it!” Or maybe it’s ethnic cleansing episodes like Tulsa (“90 years ago”), or…

In an interview with Cenk Uygur March 23, Bernie Sanders noted, “The media is an arm of the ruling class of this country,” going on to point out its concentrated corporate ownership (for example, Disney’s ownership of ABC, Comcast’s of NBC, etc). This corporate media have a vested interest in not covering real news in…

In a Washington Post article (“What rich countries get wrong about poverty,” March 28), Ana Swanson summarizes an argument by Caroline Freund, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, as follows: “Blaming the super-rich for global poverty would be a mistake.” In fact it might reflect an erroneous “First World mindset.” (Note: I…

At Reason, Steve Chapman (“Bernie Sanders’ Free Trade Mythology,” March 19) faults Bernie Sanders for saying: “Do you know that in 1960, Detroit, Michigan, was one of the wealthiest cities in America? Flint, Michigan, was a prosperous city. But then what happened is corporate America said, ‘Why do I want to pay somebody in Michigan…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “Aaron Swartz is Dead – But Not His Work” read by John Moore and edited by Tony Dreher. “Despite everything the academic power structure and its allies in the U.S. Justice Department could do to Aaron Swartz — including driving him to suicide — the enemies of information freedom…

Despite everything the academic power structure and its allies in the U.S. Justice Department could do to Aaron Swartz — including driving him to suicide — the enemies of information freedom in academia have been in steady retreat ever since. Back in 2011, in his Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto, Swartz defined his revolutionary goal as…

The so-called “sharing economy” is sometimes also called the “gig economy” — arguably a more accurate term, because “sharing economy” carries overtones of cooperation and mutuality that are (to say the least) grossly misleading. In the case of ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft it’s misleading because it suggests the direct sharing of rides between…

In a recent commentary (“Economic Inequality,” January 2016), venture capitalist Paul Graham defends inequality on the grounds that it’s not necessarily the result of a zero-sum game. In fact, he says, it’s usually not. He accuses “the most naive” critics of growing levels of economic inequality of starting out from “the pie fallacy: that the…

In an editorial at the New England Journal of Medicine (“Data Sharing,” Jan. 21), Dan Longo and Jeffrey Drazen have coined an interesting new term: “research parasite.” In theory, the authors say: Data sharing is beautiful. But when you get down to all the practical details, it turns out to be one of those beautiful…

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…

As used by right-wing apologists for “free market capitalism” (an oxymoron if ever there was one), capitalism is the source of everything good in the world — but also something that never existed. And it switches repeatedly back and forth from one to the other, every couple of sentences, in the same argument. I learned…

As if Thomas Sowell weren’t sufficient to demonstrate the intellectual bankruptcy of pro-capitalist apologetics, we now have corporate apologists trolling the #ResistCapitalism hashtag on Twitter. Although most of the people using it today seem to think it’s an original piece of wit they just came up with on their own, the “Lookit them tweeting #ResistCapitalism…

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…

Scrivendo tempo fa su Alternet, Richard Eskow (“Rise of the techno-Libertarians,” 12 aprile 2015) ha fatto un’eccellente critica del modello capitalista dei “tecno-libertari” della Silicon Valley. Gran parte degli argomenti riguarda in qualche modo il modello mirato al profitto dell’industria tecnologica, che tratta i prodotti principalmente come fonte di guadagno (o, meglio, rendita) piuttosto che…

In an article at Alternet a while back Richard Eskow (“Rise of the techno-Libertarians,” April 12, 2015) made some excellent criticisms of the capitalist model of “techno-libertarianism” centered on Silicon Valley. Most of his points relate in some way to the profit-driven business model of the tech industry, which treats products primarily as a source…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “At Reason War is Peace … and TPP is “Free Trade” read and edited by Tony Dreher. Did you know President Obama’s “core legacy” is free trade — and the centerpiece of this alleged “free trade” policy is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)? Neither did I. But that’s what Shikha…

Seemingly John Stossel never sits down to write without the goal of further lowering the bar for qualifying as a libertarian. This time (“My Trump Problem,” Reason, Nov. 11), he’s managed to push the criterion to the all-time low of being somewhat less statist than Donald Trump. Stossel’s first problem with Trump allegedly centers on…

In a preview article at The Guardian last July for his new book Post-Capitalism (“The end of capitalism has begun,” July 17), Paul Mason — following a path previously trodden by John Holloway and by Toni Negri and Michael Hardt — argued that the emergence of a successor system to capitalism would resemble not so…