On his blog, libertarian bestselling author and Ron Paul homeschooling curriculum writer Tom Woods has written some thoughts about thin and thick libertarianism and how they apply to the Duck Dynasty controversy. If you’ve been living in a cave, the star of reality television show Duck Dynasty said some unfortunate things about gay people and…

There were two radical, anti-authoritarian movements of the 1960s which developed in very different ways yet compliment each other in ways which remain unappreciated. One is the newly formed Libertarian movement headed by people like Murray Rothbard and Leonard Read, both experts in economics who spent much of their time at the blackboard or the…

The main plotline of the Star Wars prequel trilogy concerns an apparent conflict between the central government (the Senate) on the one hand and a coalition of mercantile interests (the Trade Federation, the Commerce Guild, etc.) on the other. As events unfold, however, it quickly becomes obvious to the audience (though much less quickly to the protagonists)…

United States Secretary of State John Kerry has been politicking through Southeast Asia the past few days. Kerry visited the Vietnam Mekong Delta, a place he knows well from his wartime adventures. US military interventionism in the region nominally passe, but there is another aspect of state violence still making headlines in the east: Environmental degradation. Kerry traveled…

Review 8 time is here! Let’s get started. James Bovard discusses the glut of police shootings. Sheldon Richman explains why government is the problem. Pepe Escobar discusses Erik Prince’s new book. Binoy Kampark discusses the creeping fascism in Europe. Uri Avnery discusses land theft in the Jordan Valley. Patrick Cockburn discusses the complicity of Saudi…

Glenn Broadnax of Brooklyn, New York, suffers from anxiety and depression. According to recently released court documents, on the evening of September 14th he was “talking to dead relatives in his head,” which led him to try “throwing himself in front of cars to kill himself.” As he disrupted traffic, police arrived. Broadnax reached his hand into…

Stephen Moss discusses Jeremy Scahil’s, Dirty Wars. Karam Filfian reviews Dirty Wars. Anthony Papa asks for a pardon of both drug war prisoners and the turkey. Deepak Tripathi discusses Obama’s Middle Eastern policy. David Macray discusses the plight of ex-convicts. Ahmad Barqawi discusses Bandar’s reign of terror. David Rosen discusses the private security threat to…

Alliance of Austin Agorists first networking party: An interview/Q&A with Charles W. Johnson. Due to some technical difficulties we were only able to capture three out of the ten questions that were actually conducted that night.

Montaigne famously held that one person’s profit always involves another person’s loss, and this apothegm has won him some hostility from libertarians; see Mises, for example, here, here, and here. But I think Montaigne’s meaning has been misunderstood. When the claim is taken out of context, it is easy to assume, first, that Montaigne is attacking profit, and…

In Commonwealth, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri observe that, because of network communications and radically cheapening production technology, capital accumulation is becoming “increasingly external to the production process.” But rather than working with this trend and exploiting the opportunities it offers, they argue, the Social Democratic approach is “to reintegrate the working class within capital.”…

I declare myself to be a capitalist and anti-capitalist, a socialist and anti-socialist, all at once. No, this is not my resignation of all use of politically descriptive terminology, and I am not declaring myself a moderate between two polar opposite camps. So how may I hold to each of these positions simultaneously? It is…

On the popular anarchist facebook page Anarchist Memes, an admin decided to exercise his private property rights in vocalizing his opinion that in a stateless society, unpopular opinions will not be dealt with peacefully. Status: “You think anarchism means we should all have some sort of right to say whatever you feel like? So let…

On the November 10 episode of the Stossel Show, libertarian commentator John Stossel had an exchange with anarcho-capitalist writer David Friedman on the possibility of “privatizing everything” (i.e. all government functions). When they got to military functions, their discussion shed considerable light on what “privatization” means to a lot of the libertarian Right. “Much of…

Welcome to my 6th review! Time to begin. Graham Peebles discusses the oppression of Ethiopian migrants in Saudi Arabia. Alexander Cockburn discusses the parallels between JFK and Obama. Ivan Eland examines JFK’s actual record. Jonathan Carp proposes a revolutionary alternative to raising the minimum wage. Jacob Hornberger discusses the post-911 dilution of civil liberties. Sarah…

Sean Gabb, successor to the late Chris Tame as Director of the Libertarian Alliance, is very much a man of the Right: a composite of Burkean and Little Englander, roughly equivalent to the Old Right or paleolibertarians on this side of the Atlantic. In his critique of managerialism and the corporate state, however, he has much…

C4SS Fellow, Jason Lee Byas, joins the podcast team of Rachel, Eamon, and Mark of the The El Paso Liberty Hour. They discuss Market Anarchy, the Center for a Stateless Society and the Anarchist movement within Libertarianism. Check Out Politics Conservative Podcasts at Blog Talk Radio with Be First In Media on BlogTalkRadio  

Destroying the Master’s House With the Master’s Tools: Some Notes on the Libertarian Theory of Ideology [PDF] We commonly look at ideology from the perspective of the ruling class, as a legitimizing tool. But ideology serves the purposes of the ruled, as well—as a guide to action in their class interest. The respective ideologies of rulers and…

Last week’s TGIF, “One Moral Standard for All,” drew a curious response from Matt Bruenig, a contributor to the Demos blog, Policy Shop. In reading his article, “Libertarians Are Huge Fans of Initiating Force,” one should bear in mind that the aim of my article was not to defend the libertarian philosophy, but to show that most people live…

Libertarians make a self-defeating mistake in assuming that their fundamental principles differ radically from most other people’s principles. Think how much easier it would be to bring others to the libertarian position if we realized that they already agree with us in substantial ways. What am I talking about? It’s quite simple. Libertarians believe that…

Advocating liberty means opposing the use of force to restrain peaceful, voluntary exchange. But it doesn’t have to mean calling a system of peaceful, voluntary exchange “capitalism.” Some people, of course, think this is obviously what “capitalism” means. And I can’t prove they’re wrong, because the word means different things to different people. I’m confident, though, that…