This is part two of a three part series on an article by Lynn Stuart Parramore of Alternet. The first part focused on a contention she made about libertarians and inequality. This post discusses her take on libertarians and public goods. Our focus is on her thoughts about national defense. As she puts it: Another…

Matthew Yglesias may be the most left-libertarian friendly liberal commentator out there. Not only is he unusually open to free market ideas, but he’s also repeatedly shown strong sympathies for open-source and post-scarcity approaches to economic organization. In fact, he’s practically built his brand around setting himself against the two defining features of American liberalism…

Lynn Stuart Parramore recently wrote an Alternet article titled “3 Things That Make Libertarian Heads Explode“. She identifies three areas where our heads will supposedly explode. They are inequality, public goods, and regulation. She evidences no awareness of the existence of left-wing market anarchists or any other type of libertarian leftist. In her world, the…

C4SS Media presents Natasha Petrova‘s “Good Piece In The Jacobin,” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. “The key word here is ‘most’. A left-libertarian market anarchist transformation would involve a free market anti-capitalist or laissez faire socialist democratization of the market through freed market means. This could conceivably involve expropriation of state corporatist or…

Num texto recente publicado no site da Foundation for Economic Education chamado “Contra o brutalismo libertário“, Jeffrey Tucker pede para que os libertários reflitam sobre os motivos que os fizeram adotar essa identificação e descreve dois perfis mais gerais de libertários. São elas: 1. O humanitário, que se identifica como libertário porque se preocupa com…

In a recent post for the Foundation for Economic Education, called “Against Libertarian Brutalism,” Jeffrey Tucker calls upon each libertarian to self-reflect on their reasons for adopting the label and in doing so, identifies and describes two broad categories of libertarianism. These are: 1.  The humanitarian, who identifies as libertarian because he’s concerned about the freedom…

Big changes are often terribly disruptive, even among those who favor the changes. For an example, one need look no further than the libertarian movement’s struggles to address itself to recent social, legal and political developments on what I’ll call, for brevity’s sake, “the same-sex marriage front.” Libertarian opinions on that issue run across a…

Very soon, S4SS will begin issuing its monthly newsletter, The New Leveller. It will be a running discussion devoted to radical libertarian and individualist anarchist thought, and, drawing off of nineteenth-century periodicals like Benjamin Tucker’s Liberty and Moses Harmon’s Lucifer, the Lightbearer, it will feature plenty of fire. The primary purpose of the New Leveller is to provide…

Wie opkomt voor vrijheid steunt vreedzame en vrijwillige uitwisseling tussen mensen en strijdt tegen gewelddadige beperking van deze uitwisseling. Het hoeft echter niet direct te betekenen dat een systeem van vreedzame, vrijwillige uitwisseling “kapitalisme” genoemd hoeft te worden. Er zijn uiteraard sommigen die vinden dat dit overduidelijk is wat “kapitalisme” betekent. Ik kan ook niet…

Left-libertarians need a psychological theory and practice to augment their philosophical framework. Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT) represents a good choice for left-libertarians, because it emphasizes individuality and social interest. It was formulated and begun by the psychologist, Albert Ellis. The central idea of it is that our beliefs about things that happen to us…

Será que o governo deveria punir coletivamente donos de empresas que, por aparentes razões religiosas, se recusassem a servir alguns grupos de consumidores? Embora esse comportamento seja repugnante, a recusa em prestar serviços por conta de raça, etnia ou orientação sexual é um exercício de auto-propriedade e da liberdade de não-associação. É um ato não-violento…

C4SS Media presents Thomas L. Knapp‘s “When Killer Cops Get a Pass, There are Consequences,” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. “The jury’s acquittal of Ramos and Cicinelli was a vote for the latter outcome. It was also a vote for continuing and escalating police lawlessness. The less the specifically guilty individuals pay for…

Should the government coercively sanction business owners who, out of apparent religious conviction, refuse to serve particular customers? While such behavior is repugnant, the refusal to serve someone because of his or her race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation is nevertheless an exercise of self-ownership and freedom of nonassociation. It is both nonviolent and nonviolative of…

C4SS Media presents Kevin Carson‘s “On The Worship Of Authority,” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. “Until most people abandon their state-inculcated respect for uniformed authority, and their willingness to treat officially defined outsiders as the “other,” the Rodney King and Kelly Thomas verdicts — and uncounted such verdicts yet unnamed — will continue.”

Several states have recently considered passing laws allowing legal discrimination against LGBT people. These laws are based on the notion of religious freedom. What is the proper left-libertarian response to these laws? The answer is advocacy of direct action. If the laws pass, we left-libertarians should engage in sit-ins analogous to what the Civil Rights…

The Libertarian Alliance blog posted my piece on why libertarians are not conservatives. It wasn’t received very well. The poster of the article argued thusly: Note: In my view, this is a silly article. The author does to conservatism just what the more brain dead conservatives do to libertarianism – that is, to pick out…

My blog post on the differences between conservatives and libertarians has caused some controversy. These criticisms and comments deserve to be answered. Let’s start with a comment made on this page by N8chz: Libertarian and conservative are practically opposites, but America is a special place. American libertarianism is a different breed of libertarianism and American…

The identification of libertarians with conservatives seems never ending. At the recent International Students for Liberty conference Justin Amash equated the two. Many leftists make similar equations with the intent of demonizing libertarians as right-wingers. What is the truth of the matter? We’re most definitely not conservatives. Liberty is a radical and revolutionary idea. One…

US Representative Justin Amash (R-MI) is far from the first, and is unlikely to be the last, politician to equate libertarianism and conservatism (“Rep. Justin Amash: Conservative and libertarian ‘basically the same philosophy,’” by Jack Hunter, Rare, February 16). But the comparison is not only just plain wrong: It benefits supporters of statism on both…

Max Borders discusses the rise of the libertarians. Sheldon Richman discusses the sacralization of voting. Ramzy Baroud discusses the implosion of Iraq. Pratap Chatterjee and Tom Engelhardt discuss the surveillance state. Marjorie Cohn discusses the NSA scandal. Wendy McElroy discusses the immorality of government education. Michael S. Rozeff discusses the nation-state. Carlos Clemente discusses Chomsky’s…