C4SS Feed 44 presents “We Are Market Forces” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Charles Johnson, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. It’s convenient to talk about “market forces,” but you need to remember that remember that those “market forces” are not supernatural entities that act on people from the outside. “Market forces” are…

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…

Georgetown philosophy professor Jason Brennan, by his own estimation the soul of reasonableness, has decided that now — when adjunct outrage has reached the boiling point over universities replacing 75% of their faculty with low-paid temporary workers while the numbers and salaries of administrators explode — is the perfect time to give adjuncts the Bronx…

The Civil War caused a huge schism in the American libertarian movement from which it wouldn’t recover for decades. Inner conflicts between abolitionists who favored the war and the invasion of the South, ones who saw the war as inevitable and required to end slavery, and those who thought the war was an egregious moral…

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…

Un articolo recente a proposito delle elezioni britanniche citava una lettera che ammoniva gli elettori sostenendo che un governo laburista avrebbe danneggiato la ripresa economica del paese. Avallata dai leader delle maggiori industrie britanniche e inviata al quotidiano The Telegraph, la lettera sosteneva che l’elezione di un governo conservatore avrebbe mandato questo segnale al resto…

“That government is best which governs not at all…” –Henry David Thoreau In this essay, I will contend that the role of the state is to prevent competition to its “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory”. In order to substantiate this argument, I will first compare Marx’s definition of…

A recent story on the British elections reports on a letter warning voters that a Labour government would prove harmful to the country’s economic recovery. Endorsed by leaders in Britain’s business community and submitted to The Telegraph, the letter argues that the election of a Tory government would signal to the rest of the world…

In the 1997 Simpsons episode “Homer’s Enemy” viewers meet Frank Grimes, a man who has never caught a break. He has had to work hard, if not outright struggle, for everything he has in life. Grimes is hired to work at the nuclear power plant alongside Homer Simpson, who is very much the opposite of…

Origin Story  Those who are not familiar with comic books and the history surrounding them may be confused about the recent kerfuffle over the Batgirl cover and it being pulled. Never fear! For I have in my Utility Belt of Knowledge, the proper gadgets to give some context and offer critique. Batgirl, or Barbara Gordon as she is better…

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…

As a libertarian masochist who keeps up with the regular by-the-numbers attacks on libertarianism at Alternet and Salon, I almost dared to hope for something at least marginally better from Robert Kuttner at The American Prospect (“The Libertarian Delusion,” Winter 2015). I was disappointed. “The stubborn appeal of the libertarian idea persists,” Kuttner writes, “despite…

Cody Wilson, a founder of Defense Distributed, is a name too often connected with the failures of corporate and government bureaucracy. For those not in the know Defense Distributed is a Texas non-profit that defends the so-called constitutional right to bear arms.  But once again this supposed “guarantee” will be abridged by another corporation. This…

C4SS Feed 44 presents “Free Trade is Fair Trade” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Joe Peacott, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. “Free” trade agreements and organizations like NAFTA and WTO may alter some of the details of this intervention, but do not challenge the principle that governments are entitled to tell their…

The future of energy in the United States is a testy topic these days. Politicians, industry officials and special interests are fighting over partisan policy proposals. All actors are fully engaged in the art of hyperbolic mouth breathing — depraved political theater at its finest. The Obama administration wants to build a legacy of environmental stewardship and energy…

Two weeks ago we all learned that Brad Spangler, a professed libertarian and anarchist once of some prominence, is a child molester. There have always been hidden monsters and no movement, community or culture is entirely immune. But while we’ve spent the last two weeks recoiling in horror and crushed under the sadness of these…

One of the biggest challenges to the complete decoupling of the provision of law from the state, with a free market of security and adjudication, is the possibility that these entities would collude against their customers. Economically, it is noted that consumers would lose some money while the collusion in the supply of goods and…

C4SS Feed 44 presents “Labor Struggle in a Free Market” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Kevin Carson, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. The problem is that, to date, bosses have fully capitalized on the potential of the incomplete contract, whereas workers have not. And the only thing preventing workers from doing so…

One of the most common questions raised about a hypothetical free market society concerns worker protection laws of various kinds. As Roderick Long puts it, In a free nation, will employees be at the mercy of employers?… Under current law, employers are often forbidden to pay wages lower than a certain amount; to demand that…