C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “‘Intellectual Property’ Kills’” read by Mike Godzina and edited by Nick Ford. The key agenda at the center of all the so-called “free trade agreements” is the imposition, at the behest of the giant corporations that depend on “intellectual property” monopolies for their profits, of a form of protectionism…

C4SS Feed 44 presents “Platonic Productivity” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Roderick Long, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. “Nothing I’ve said shows that men and women are equally productive; it’s only meant to show that, given prevailing cultural norms and power relations, we might well expect to see a gap between men’s…

…Left-libertarians share with other leftists the recognition that big businesses enjoy substantial privileges that benefit them while harming the public. But they stress that the proper response to corporate privilege is to eliminate subsidies, bailouts, cartelizing regulations, and other state-driven features of the legal, political, and economic environments that prop up corporate power rather than…

, … We on the Libertarian Left consider it utterly perverse that free market libertarianism, a doctrine which had its origins as an attack on the economic privilege of landlords and merchants, should ever have been coopted in defense of the entrenched power of the plutocracy and big business. The use of the “free market”…

… So we see, even assuming an “anarcho-capitalist” property regime, anything recognizable as “capitalism” to anyone else could not exist. In fact the society would look a lot like what “anarcho-socialists” think of as “socialism”. Not exactly like it, but much closer than anything they’d imagine as capitalism. However, under anarchism, even such a strict…

Alfred Marshall, the founder of the so-called neoclassical school, was also the first prominent economist to attempt a reconciliation of Ricardo with the marginalists. Following the Senior-Longfield school, as interpreted by Mill, Marshall treated the “abstinence” of capital (or “waiting”) as another form of disutility alongside labor. He thus fused them into a unified subjective…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “Rio Tinto: A Real-Life “Billy Jack” Villain” read by Dylan Delikta and edited by Nick Ford. Rio Tinto is, without qualification, one of the most evil corporations in the world. It has colluded with repressive regimes going back to Franco’s use of troops to suppress strikes in Rio Tinto’s…

C4SS Feed 44 presents David S. D’Amato‘s “The Free Market as Class Warfare” read by Mike Godzina and edited by Nick Ford. That is, if a “free market” just means a system in which free individuals are able to associate and contract with one another without outside interference, protected in their legitimate private property rights, then the…

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…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Roderick Long‘s “Chomsky’s Augustinian Anarchism” read by Jeff Riggenbach and edited by Nick Ford. “Chomsky might object that my defense of market accountability ignores the fact that such ‘accountability’ involves voting with dollars, so that the wealthy have more votes than the poor – whereas in a democratic state everyone has an equal…

C4SS Feed 44 presents “Regulation Red Herring” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Sheldon Richman, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. What’s overlooked—intentionally or not—is that the alternative to a government-regulated economy is not an unregulated one. As a matter of fact, “unregulated economy,” like square circle, is a contradiction in terms. If it’s…

In Free Market Fairness [1] John Tomasi lays out a way in which the gap between broadly libertarian (or classical liberal) and high liberal (or liberal egalitarian) political philosophies can be bridged. Since F. A. Hayek’s methodologically individualist rejection of the concept of social justice, and Robert Nozick’s liberty-based rejection of egalitarian distributive justice, there…

“Behind every great fortune,” Balzac wrote, “there is a crime.” That’s certainly true of the largest concentrations of wealth in the world today. The fortune of every billionaire, it’s safe to say, was amassed through some sort of crime. You don’t make that kind of money on the free market. And the holdings of every…

C4SS Feed 44 presents “Healthcare and Radical Monopoly” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Kevin Carson, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. In New York City, John Muney recently introduced an updated version of lodge practice: the AMG Medical Group, which for a monthly premium of $79 and a flat office fee of $10…

C4SS Feed 44 presents “English Enclosures and Soviet Collectivization” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Joseph R. Stromberg, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. The English enclosures, standing as they do as a centerpiece in the ongoing Optimist/Pessimist debate over the industrial revolution, will be the first instance of agrarian “collectivization” or consolidation discussed…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “At Alternet, Every Day is Liberal Self-Parody Day” read by Mike Godzina and edited by Nick Ford. “But I want to focus instead on the internal inconsistency of Eskow’s statements on the sharing economy, and his incredibly naive understanding of how regulations work. Eskow’s argument about the sharing economy is: 1)…

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,…

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…

C4SS Feed 44 presents “The American Land Question” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Joseph R. Stromberg, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. One key (but not the only one) to this much-sought-after independence was access to land, a theme taken up by Catholic writers Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton in early twentieth-century…

C4SS Feed 44 presents “How “Intellectual Property” Impedes Competition” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Kevin Carson, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. Since intellectual property is not necessary to encourage innovation, this means that its main practical effect is to cause economic inefficiency by levying a monopoly charge on the use of existing…