Seeing Iain Murray’s title, How the State Keeps You Working Long Hours, got me pretty excited. Especially as I’ve been trying to fuse libertarian concerns with work-critical sentiments for a few years now. And though the post had potential, it ultimately fell flat. For one thing, it mainly comes from a non-anarchist perspective. So the chance…

Imagine the following person. He believes all individuals should be free to do anything that’s peaceful and therefore favors private property, free global markets, freedom of contract, civil liberties, and all the related ideas that come under the label libertarianism (or liberalism). Obviously he is not a statist. But is he an individualist and a…

Muitos dos anarquistas individualistas do século 19, particularmente os pensadores associados ao jornal Liberty, editado por Benjamin Tucker, procuravam combinar uma teoria política baseada na soberania individual e na autopropriedade com uma teoria econômica baseada na teoria do valor-trabalho. Como os marxistas, eles tendiam a condenar o sistema de trabalho assalariado como opressivo e interpretavam…

Wolfi Landstreicher. “Anarchy on the Market? A critical look at Kevin Carson’s Studies in Mutualist Political Economy” Modern Slavery 2 (Fall-Winter 2012/2013). Landstreicher begins with a critique of my approach in defending the labor theory of value in terms of Ludwig von Mises’s a priorism: But what if someone doesn’t accept the a priori assumption that there…

McKay, Iain, 2008 An Anarchist FAQ, Section G: Is Individualist Anarchism Capitalistic? Anarchist Writers, accessed 25 May 2015, McKay, Iain (2012) An Anarchist FAQ: Volume 2 (AK Press) Section G: Is Individualist Anarchism Capitalistic?,   The Anarchist FAQ Collective’s “Anarchist FAQ“ is a massive work, which has been constantly maintained and updated since 1996. The FAQ gives very…

Markets and Motivation Guillaume Paoli’s Demotivational Training (2008, Cruel Hospice) is a tough egg to crack. I spent days of my time putting off reviewing this book, partly because I felt demotivated, but also because Paoli’s writing is fairly dense and hard to fully grasp at first. It’s the sort of book that requires a…

Uber: To Socialize or Not to Socialize? I’d describe myself, at best, as an occasional reader of the quarterly leftist publication, Jacobin. I’m by no means a long-time, consistent or even an enthusiastic reader. Sometimes I find things on their site that I think are interesting, such as their recent take on Thomas Paine from…

Many thanks to the more than helpful edits of Kyler Dineen and Mike Moceri The “Left” in Left-Libertarian The goal of this paper isn’t to convince anyone of the benefits of anarchism or to convince anyone that they should be a left-libertarian. Instead, I’d like to help deepen our understanding of what the position entails and…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Nick Ford‘s “The State Can’t Sink Our Battleship” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. For every site the government tries to take down, another five spring up. And no one in government is going to admit that what they’re doing is futile. They simply don’t have incentives to act rationally. They’re…

Gizmodo informa que la policía sueca allanó a The Pirate Bay el 9 de diciembre, apoderándose de sus servidores y clausurando su sitio web. Mis primeras reacciones fueron de irritación e incluso ira. Pero ahora solo siento ganas de reír. El estado es una organización obsoleta y se vuelve cada más irrelevante en la medida…

Center for a Stateless Society Paper No. 18 (Summer-Fall 2014) PDF Particularity and the Anarchism of Everyday Life Colin Ward was a libertarian communist. He named Pyotr Kropotkin as his primary economic influence, and described himself as “an anarchist-communist, in the Kropotkin tradition.” This was not empty praise. He produced an abridged edition of Kropotkin’s…

Gizmodo reports that Swedish police raided the Pirate Bay, seizing its servers and shutting down its web site on December 9. My first reactions were irritation and even anger. But now I just feel like laughing. The state is an obsolete organization and becomes more and more so as it continuously tries to enforce the unenforceable. At first glance, this…

O capitalismo corporativo como um sistema de privilégios garantidos pelo estado Prefácio Círculos de direita e esquerda concordam em ao menos um ponto principal: o sistema que existe é, basicamente, um livre mercado com leves desvios que o distorcem. Algumas correntes de direita tendem a achar esses desvios negativos; a esquerda, por sua vez, pensa…

David S. D’ Amato discusses the political economy of Benjamin Tucker. Tom Engelhardt discusses how America made ISIS. Peter Harling discusses how ISIS is back in business. Jacob Sullum discusses pot related prisoners of the War on Drugs. Ronald Bailey discusses whether immigrants are more likely to commit crime or not. Kevin Carson discusses Reason…

On July 2nd, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was signed, officially breaking ties between the American colonies and the British empire. It is the idealism behind this document and American independence that folks across the United States will celebrate this 4th of July. The 4th is the central holiday of the summer season and liberty is…

This summer, I joined the reading group for Kevin A. Carson’s daunting, 600 page tome Organization Theory. In the first section, Carson presents a compelling mass of research and careful criticism of cross-ideological views of economies of scale. He argues that top economists, from Ronald Coase to John Kenneth Galbraith and Joseph Schumpeter, “accept ‘economies…

J. Edward Carp has already written a fine piece on Memorial Day, but I see no reason why there isn’t room for another. One might expect an anarchist such as myself to simply trash veterans as stooges of the state, but I have a more nuanced perspective to offer. Memorial Day is often used by…

Steven Reisner discusses a letter to Obama about ending torture once and for all. Ralph Nader discusses a potential left-right alliance. Vincent Navarro discusses the Mondragon worker cooperatives in Spain. James Peron discusses how people who hate gays also hate capitalists in the context of the businesses refusing to discriminate against them. Qatryk interviews Roderick…

In this post, I continue my brief introduction to left-wing laissez faire economic theory. Let’s get started. After discussing Benjamin Tucker’s four big monopolies, the next big thing to discuss is that of contemporary mutualist/individualist anarchist – Kevin Carson. I already made use of some of his stuff, but I want to highlight the innovations…

In my last two blog posts, I responded to Lynn Stuart Parramore’s article titled How Piketty’s Bombshell Book Blew Up Libertarian Fantasies. At the end of the second one, I promised an explanation of the economic theory I used to critique her article. This post will be a brief introduction to said economic theory. Let’s…