Here I will attempt to refine some remarks that I recently made on Twitter, arguing that libertarians ought to be wary of the general phenomenon of public policy “wonkishness” — which I’ll define very loosely as a concern with offering practical public policy reforms or proposals based on statistical and empirical evidence (the kind of…

Conservatism and libertarianism don’t belong together. Even in cases where conservatives are using the same rhetoric as libertarians, they too often don’t mean anything like what we mean; their “free market” is an apologetic for the economic status quo and global corporatism, their “equality before the law” is reserved only for traditionally privileged in-groups (think…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Ryan Calhoun‘s “Fresh Fruit for Rotting Idols” read by Thomas J. Webb and edited by Nick Ford. “These issues, among others, were not discussed because too many people were outraged with one of the few young voices breaking through the elder echo chamber with an important question. Unaware that this was actually an…

With criminal justice reform front and center in today’s news, it’s as good a time as ever to revisit some of the various anarchist approaches to issues of crime and punishment. One particular analysis written by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea, Anarchism and Crime, remains as relevant today as when it was written —…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “The End of Libertarians” read by Trevor Hultner and edited by Nick Ford. “Some people find it rhetorically useful to compare all the different forms to slavery by way of analogy; and in some cases it may actually be a useful analogy. But when you’re talking to a person whose ancestors experienced…

La Questione del Fallimento del Mercato Un bene pubblico, così come definito dagli economisti, è un qualunque bene dal cui godimento non possono essere esclusi i non contribuenti. La teoria dei beni pubblici interessa i libertari per due ragioni: primo, perché molte cose che reputiamo importanti (strade di comunicazione, istruzione, difesa personale, antincendio, difesa nazionale,…

How can you tell an American progressive from an American radical? A progressive laments the condition of working people and proposes to further empower the government. A radical laments the condition of working people and proposes to empower individuals by diminishing the power of government. Of course government power and individual power differ in kind:…

In 1970 country singer Lynn Anderson had a hit recording of a Joe South song that opened with the line: I beg your pardon. I never promised you a rose garden. I often think of that song in connection with the libertarian philosophy. You may be asking: for heaven’s sake, why? Because it’s what I…

Lottare per la libertà significa opporsi all’uso della forza per frenare lo scambio pacifico e volontario. Questo però non significa che dobbiamo chiamare “capitalismo” un sistema basato sullo scambio pacifico e volontario. Certo ci sono persone che pensano che “capitalismo” significhi proprio questo. E io non sono in grado di dimostrare che si sbagliano, perché…

Support C4SS with Kevin Carson’s “The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand” Audio version, read by Mike Gogulski • Introduction to the Portuguese Version of Iron Fist • • Versione in italiano • • Версия на русском • << Back to the Market Anarchism FAQ page Introduction Manorialism, commonly, is recognized to have been founded by…

The Fulcrum of the Present Crisis: Some Thoughts on Revolutionary Strategy Center for a Stateless Society Paper No. 19 (Winter 2015) [PDF] The Cult of Mass, Lionization of Protest Culture & Other Industrial Age Holdovers Protest Culture. The so-called “cargo cults” of New Guinea, Micronesia and Melanesia evolved in response to the influx of American manufactured…

Nel suo saggio classico, “The Use of Knowledge in Society” (L’Uso della Conoscenza nella Società, es), F. A. Hayek parla del concetto di conoscenza distribuita. Ogni individuo ha una conoscenza unica che deriva dalle sue esperienze e dalle sue preferenze, conoscenza a cui altri, per quanto informati, non possono accedere. Scrive Hayek: Dire che la…

Megan Erickson’s article on techo-fixes for education (“Edutopia“) in the March issue of Jacobin is an excellent critique of corporate-driven education “reform” efforts like those of the Gates Foundation and IDEO. As a critique of attempts to build an alternative educational model around decentralizing technology in general, it’s… not so excellent. The immediate object of…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Jeff Ricketson‘s “A Left-Libertarianism I Don’t Recognize” read by Tony Dreher and edited by Nick Ford. In fact, what left-libertarianism has as its central tenet is that every individual should have complete control over their life and no one else’s. Misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism and the myriad other bigotries that can haunt the…

“You call yourself free? Your dominant thought I want to hear, and not that you have escaped from a yoke. Are you one of those who had the right to escape from a yoke? There are some who threw away their last value when they threw away their servitude. Free from what? As if that mattered to Zarathustra! But…

Last week I set out Auburn University philosopher Roderick Long’s argument that libertarianism can’t be reasonably dismissed as strange. (A modest objective, to be sure.) After all, Long writes, mainstream libertarianism holds that each individual has a right not to be aggressed against, aggression being defined descriptively (not normatively) as the initiation of physical force….

In a book review of Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual (which I confess I haven’t read), Roger McKinney — evidently following Siedentop — trots out the hackneyed claim that individualism is a product solely of the West, and specifically of the post-pagan West. In response to the first claim, I’ll simply point to the many…

Call for Abstracts for the Molinari Society’s next Eastern Symposium, to be held in conjunction with the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division meeting, January 6-9, 2016, in Washington DC. (Note that this meeting is the week after New Year’s, rather than, as in past years, just before New Year’s. This later time is expected to…

According to the received version of “interest group pluralism” in J.K. Galbraith’s book American Capitalism, there’s supposed to be a sort of check-and-balance system (Galbraith called it “countervailing power”) between big business, government regulatory agencies and organized labor. But what usually happens in the real world, when the allegedly “opposing” centers of power are so…

So, libertarians, how many rights do people have? One (say, the right to life, albeit with countless applications)? Three (life, liberty, and property)? Or an unlimited number (the right to do this, that, and the other, ad infinitum)? Because part of any strategy to achieve a fully free society presumably includes persuading nonlibertarians to be…