C4SS Feed 44 presents David S. D’Amato‘s “The Black Hole of the American Injustice System” read by Christopher B. King and edited by Nick Ford. And while consumers pay top dollar for the prisoners’ expensive wares — and companies like Colorado Corrections Industries rake in millions — the prisoners themselves often make as little as 60 cents per…

Remember that stupid “We Are the 53%” campaign? Were you hoping you’d seen the last of it? Sorry to disappoint you, but it’s back. This time it’s being resurrected in an even more monstrous form by Stephan Kinsella — a libertarian attorney who, when not writing stuff like this, is actually one of the most…

The 2014 midterm election delivered both good news and bad. The good news is that the losers lost. The bad news is that the winners won. Journalist Mike Barnicle says he’s never seen an election in which the people feel so distant from the government. I wish his diagnosis were right, but I suspect it…

Science and innovation are chaotic, stochastic processes that cannot be governed and controlled by desk-bound planners and politicians, whatever their intentions.  Good scientists are by definition anarchists. –Theo Wallimann, ETH Zurich Abstract Although profitable, cancer therapy has failed to live up to the promises of the War on Cancer waged since 1971. Modern chemotherapy can…

Ask the average person on the street what kills more Americans – choking yourself to get off or evil terrorists? I haven’t done this myself but I suspect the results would be tilted quite far to the “evil terrorist” side. And why wouldn’t they be? After all, America is engaged in an epic struggle against…

We already knew Joe Biden was a useful idiot for the “Green” (actually greenwashed) or “Progressive” wing of corporate capital, because of his indignation over the “theft” of “intellectual property.” He denounced “stealing” songs or movies as morally equivalent to a “smash-and-grab at Macy’s” — and in keeping with that belief has supervised FBI actions…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “Hobby Lobby — A Question of Agency” read James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. To repeat, there were a lot of people whose agency was at stake here besides the Green family’s — in particular, the 70% majority of Hobby Lobby’s workers who are women. who may have been having…

Paul Krugman, in denouncing the excessive market power of Amazon (“Amazon’s Monopsony is Not OK,” New York Times, October 19), proclaims that the Robber Baron Era ended when “we as a nation” put an end to it. There’s a powerful story in the book of 2 Samuel about the prophet Nathan confronting King David after…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Joel Schlosberg‘s “Our Bodies, Their Subsidies” read Christopher King and edited by Nick Ford. Moreover, the Affordable Care Act is merely the latest in a century-long line of legislation ostensibly aimed at increasing the affordability of health care, but which by subsidy have locked in a status quo of needlessly high levels…

In his recent Rolling Stone cover story (“In Defense of Obama,” October 8), Nobel Prize-winning economist,  peak liberal and New York Times commentator Paul Krugman lays out what he believes is a qualified defense of Barack Obama’s presidency: A sycophantic love letter from a man who surely must know better, but either has chosen to ignore six years of…

At the Washington Post‘s Wonkblog, Jason Millman argues that expensive drugs are often worth the cost (“Why extremely expensive drugs are often worth the cost,” October 6). Although expensive specialty drugs like Sovaldi for Hepatitis C cost thousands of dollars a month, they may provide significantly greater benefits than traditional drugs — including “treatments for complex diseases…

My good friend Ciaran, who introduced me to the insights of free market libertarianism (Particularly the works of Frederic Bastiat and Ludwig von Mises), expressed his confusion at the notion of free market socialism. As the concepts are typically considered polar opposites, I figured I would offer some glimpses at various strains of free market…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “On Big Box Stores and the Abuse of Hayek” read Christopher King and edited by Nick Ford. Borders at least tips his hat to the possibility that there is some local government aid to Big Boxes. But he does so in the manner of Lincoln’s anecdotal Jesuit who, accused of…

It’s no secret that economists and libertarians have developed a bad habit of assuming things about history and other societies on first principle without actually checking archaeological or anthropological findings. On occasion the divide can be quite stark. David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years gets a lot of momentum by attacking a widely circulated…

A recent story in the Wall Street Journal highlights the “growing roster of countries” that now want a say in the world’s major corporate mergers. Given the interconnectedness of today’s global economy, it is no wonder that more than 100 international jurisdictions now claim antitrust authority to examine deals, all “embracing different approaches for evaluating…

È opinione comune che, secondo come vengono formulate le domande, i sondaggi possono produrre praticamente qualunque risposta desiderata. Emily Ekins, parlando dell’atteggiamento della generazione Y su questioni economiche e politiche (“Are Millennials Far Left on Economics? No,” Reason, 18 agosto), dimostra un’incoerenza concettuale quasi totale nell’inquadrare i risultati di un sondaggio Reason-Rupe sulla generazione Y…

What governs price? Does cost of production determine price or does price determine cost of production? In the world of economic caricatures, the classical economists (Smith, Ricardo, et al.) took the former position, the Austrians the latter. Specifically, the Austrian view supposedly is that that demand driven by marginal utility determines the price of consumer…

Crowd-sourcing is a novel way of organizing our society these days. Whether we’re trying to fund projects through Kickstarter or GoFundMe or editing the next big Wikipedia article, crowd-sourcing is a big part of what makes the internet great and a potential source of freedom for everyone. But just because something is largely peer-to-peer orientated doesn’t…

It’s a common observation that polls can produce virtually any response desired, depending on how the questions are worded. Emily Ekins, ostensibly reporting on the political and economic attitudes of millennials (“Are Millennials Far Left on Economics? No,” Reason, August 18), displays almost total conceptual incoherence in framing the results of a Reason-Rupe poll of “millennials” (young Americans age…

About the only thing A. Barton Hinkle gets right about the Industrial Workers of the World in “Meet the Left-Wing Extremist Running for U.S. Senate” is not calling them the “International Workers of the World”. Although at least Reason likening the “Wobblies”, whose founding antedates the Russian Revolution by over a decade, to “warmed-over Lenin” is not the…