Let me begin by stating how happy I am that this exchange is happening. As information technology has come to saturate our lives over the last two decades we’ve seen the debate over non-market economies remerge. A recent essay published in The Economist1 both summarizes the discourse and speaks to its increasing prominence. In the…

Now it may surprise some, but unlike many fellow freed market anarchists at C4SS, I am not a market anarchist because of the economic calculation problem. While I do think the economic calculation problem rightly points out that top-down command economies cannot adequately produce and distribute goods to meet the needs of society, anarchist economic…

Is it possible for our enemies to discover actual insights? The impulse to deny this is universal. The third reich dismissed special relativity as “Jewish physics” and lost significant advantage. The USSR worried that accepting Darwin’s insights in evolution would open the floodgates to capitalist social darwinism and so they hurt themselves by sticking with…

It’s fun to reimagine the same damn fights among anarchists over “markets” with “network” substituted in its place. After all, “market” just stands for “trade network.” And while opposition to the act of trade is a distinct and important component of most rejections of markets — see my prior parable about the benefits of trade…

It will always remain astounding how the authoritarian left shares so much archaic morality with the right-wing when we talk about the idea of fucking for pay. The most deeply devoted members of the alt-right, the centrist core, and left-wing radicals all turn into pearl-clutching suburban soccer moms when the subject of sex-work is broached….

The state depends on its cops to enforce private property. Without them present, the owners would have to hire private security to protect their property from seizure, and that is (due to economies of scale of which the state takes advantage) massively more expensive on the whole. So, one of the most effective ways to…

In Ursula K Le Guin’s classic short “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” she considers a prosperous and happy society whose success is somehow purchased through a dark bargain — the torture and abject immiseration of a single child. Despite the positive good won for the many, a few starry-eyed children of Omelas refuse…

When it comes to economics, market anarchism has done a pretty good job at punching above its weight. While Austrians and Marxists tend to ignore us, when they do respond it’s with strawmen or lazy assertions of dogma that are easily dispatched. In serious debates in these realms, we hold our own, only falling short…

Yesterday C4SS’s own Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory, Kevin Carson, appeared on the popular libertarian podcast Liberty Chronicles, produced by Libertarianism.org. Together with podcast host Dr. Anthony Comegna, Kevin discusses the possibility of a post-capitalist world, the nature of capitalism as an economic system, and market alternatives to capitalist economics. Listen below, or at Libertarianism.com….

Di Gary Chartier. Originale pubblicato il 21 giugno 2018 con il titolo “Commercial Society” Is a Myth. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna. Chi si oppone alla libertà di movimento, che sia progressista o conservatore, liquida gli appelli a tale libertà dicendo che si basano su grette questioni economiche. I sostenitori della libertà ricordano che, nonostante quello…

Progressive and conservative critics of open migration frequently dismiss calls for freedom of movement as rooted in narrowly economic concerns. Proponents of freedom point out that, despite what you might hear on TV, immigration yields widespread benefits for both the societies to which immigrants go and those from which they come. And they emphasize the…

Di William Gillis. Originale pubblicato il 12 giugno 2018 con il titolo The Failure of Soviet Privatization. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna. Quando “Il Mercato” è Soltanto il Luogo dove si Riciclano i Soldi Insanguinati dello Statalismo Quando cadde l’Unione Sovietica, tra i programmi di “privatizzazione” c’era la distribuzione delle azioni delle aziende ai loro dipendenti….

When “The Market” Is Just Money Laundering the Bloodsoaked Riches of Statism When the USSR fell one of the “privatization” schemes was to just hand workers stock certificates in the companies they worked at. The problem of course was that the economy was seized up and everyone was starving. So gangsters and the children of…

Zine form can be found here! Markets are not my end goal. My end goal is anarchism which will always look like something just beyond the horizon of my knowledge. Markets unleash the creative complexity that make the dynamic testing of a wide range of liberatory strategies more meaningfully possible. This very same complexity makes…

This essay argues that markets are an ideational construct, constructed through a milieu of ideologies, power structures and authority relations. Rather than modern markets being spontaneously ordered mechanisms that have evolved naturally from the progressions of history, they are in instead constitutions of power and ideas, acting as a semiotic mechanism for underlying socio-economic realities….

Praxeology maintains its importance precisely because it implies fundamental principles as the guiding action in scientifically studying human action and understanding its dynamics and relations. From coming from these principles, human actions can be understood as having particular reasoning’s and laws which inform how further understandings of human action can be qualitatively determined and mapped….

The Lego corporation, popular producer of interlocking miniature toy bricks, has recently been making increased efforts to market its toys to girls. Some of these efforts have met with criticism from feminists, who worry about toys that are stereotypically “girly” in a way that reinforces traditional gender roles. In a recent piece titled “Un-PC Lego…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Derek Wall‘s “Corporate Capitalism, Not Simply a Product of the State” read and edited by Tony Dreher. I think there are number of arguments to suggest that if we replaced corporate control with market competition, we would, in a relatively short time, be back to concentrated markets. I am, incidentally, a…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “Will Free Markets Recreate Corporate Capitalism?” read and edited by Tony Dreher. And when I say “free markets,” I am not referring to a society in which the majority of economic functions are organized through money exchange (the “cash nexus”) or business firms. By “free market” I mean only…

Considerato che quel poco di libertà di cui ancora godiamo in occidente deriva in gran parte da istituzioni legali in concorrenza tra loro che operavano entro di giurisdizioni sovrapposte secoli fa, è curioso il fatto che tanti libertari pensino ancora che un tale ordine, caratteristica essenziale dell’anarchismo basato sul libero mercato o sul diritto naturale,…