There’s an old saying that when you see a turtle on top of a fencepost, you know it didn’t get up there on its own. In the official capitalist ideology — especially the version that prevails in neoliberal America — great wealth is seen as the reward for superior entrepreneurship, foresight and personal drive. As…

My BHL colleague Chris Freiman has three questions for left-libertarians concerning how we reconcile our “commitment to workplace democracy” with the “other commitments that libertarians are inclined to have.” Here I suggest some answers. Does workplace democracy really eliminate bosses? Most libertarians, Chris notes, “would deny that granting all citizens a vote in a political…

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…

The repeated denunciations of the “coup media,” which supposedly favors the impeachment (a “coup,” in the government’s supporters language), is interesting because it shows how short everyone’s memories are (“Novos discursos, o mesmo golpismo“, Carta Capital, April 4; “Deputado Paulo Pimenta publica roteiro de golpe jurídico-midiático em 13 passos“, Jornal do Brasil, March 25). Nobody…

One important point my colleague Kevin Carson has emphasized repeatedly is that the prevailing labor relations in our society are not just a natural outgrowth of voluntary exchanges in a free market. Instead, they have resulted from pervasive state intervention that constrains the options of workers, thus leaving them in a worse position to bargain…

Neither Bernie Sanders, the self-described democratic socialist, nor Donald Trump, the self-described terrific businessman, knows squat about economics. If their polices were enacted, regular working people would be harmed. This is most clear with trade. Sanders and Trump are flaming protectionists, which means they peddle perhaps the oldest, most-thoroughly discredited economics doctrine ever spoken. (An…

On Facebook, Doug Henwood — author of Wall Street and editor of the Left Business Observer — recently pointed to the U.S. Arpa-E agency’s development of an advanced storage battery as an example of the “public sector” outperforming the “private sector” (March 3 at 10:48AM).  “While VC is funding the world’s first stabilized action camera,”…

In most American political discourse, freedom and equality are treated as inversely related:  that is, economic freedom can only be increased at the expense of raising inequality, and economic equality can only be increased at the expense of reducing economic freedom. But at Stumbling and Mumbling blog, Chris Dillow (“Inequality against freedom,” Feb. 23) shows…

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…

A think piece by Walter Frick at Harvard Business Review (“Understanding the Debate Over Inequality, Skills, and the Rise of the 1%,” Dec. 21) draws a line in the inequality debate between those (mostly CEOs and other corporate apologists) who see it as resulting from a mismatch between the supply and demand for certain skills,…

All’American Enterprise Institute, Mark Perry (“Yes, America’s middle class has been disappearing… into higher income groups,” 17 dicembre) spiega la contrazione della classe media e la crescita della disuguaglianza economica citando un recente studio del Pew Institute, dal quale risulta che, dell’11% per cento di americani che non fanno più parte del ceto medio, il…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “Will Free Markets Recreate Corporate Capitalism?” read and edited by Tony Dreher. And when I say “free markets,” I am not referring to a society in which the majority of economic functions are organized through money exchange (the “cash nexus”) or business firms. By “free market” I mean only…

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…

At the American Enterprise Institute, Mark Perry (“Yes, America’s middle class has been disappearing… into higher income groups,” Dec. 17) justifies the shrinking middle class and growing economic inequality by citing the finding of a recent Pew Institute study that of the 11% shrinkage in the American middle class, 7% have gone to the top…

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…

Questo articolo è stato pubblicato originariamente su The Freeman il 24 agosto 2011 con lo stesso titolo. Il movimento progressista sorto a cavallo tra Ottocento e Novecento, dottrina da cui nasce la moderna sinistra americana, viene talvolta visto erroneamente come una filosofia “anti-aziendale”. Certo era contro il mercato, ma questo non significa che fosse necessariamente…

Land Allocation Rules are Necessary Kevin Carson’s Rejoinder to William Gillis As an alternative to what Will regards as the typical approach in advocating for a set of property rules — basically a sales pitch promoting the features of one compared to all the others — he proposes “one where we don’t exclusively compare prefigurative…

In a video produced by the Future of Freedom Foundation (“The Libertarian Angle: Do Libertarians Really Hate the Poor?“), Jacob Hornberger and Richard Ebeling obviously intend a smashing, unanswerable rejoinder to the left-wing stereotype of right-libertarians as “pot-smoking Republicans” who hate the poor. Sadly, it only reaffirms that stereotype. It’s exactly what left-wing critics of libertarianism…

Introduction The capitalist economy has gone through another shock, and the potential for another, larger one is on the horizon. While it’s seemingly in its death throes, capitalism continues to fuel growth. Under such a system we have seen a vast improvement in general living standards across the globe, despite rigged markets and the omnipresent…

It has been a century since “the man who never died” was put to death. Joe Hill, whose songs inspired labor organizing and introduced the phrase “pie in the sky,” went before a firing squad on November 19, 1915. The case putting him at the scene of a grocery store shootout was tenuous at best. But as Franklin Rosemont observes,…