Links-libertarisme krijgt de laatste tijd veel aandacht in de bredere Amerikaanse libertarische gemeenschap. De term links-libertarisme is op vele manieren gebruikt binnen de Amerikaanse politiek, en er lijkt enige verwarring te zijn binnen de libertarische gemeenschap over wie die links-libertariërs nou werkelijk zijn. De basisideeën van links-libertarisme, zoals wij ze bij Alliance of the Libertarian…

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…

In a new article for Rolling Stone, “Inside the Koch Brothers’ Toxic Empire,” Tim Dickinson attempts to present the frequently demonized brothers Koch as essentially hardline libertarians, whose radical free market ideology is thoroughly mixed into their business philosophy and practices. We’ve all seen this article before. Liberal media outlets have made a whole industry…

If you accept your enemy’s conceptual categories, you’re apt to wind up with a badly framed debate in which both sides are unsatisfactory. Jeff Madrick’s article “Our Misplaced Faith in Free Trade” (New York Times, October 3) clearly demonstrates this. The corporate state and its stooges in both major political parties and the commentariat are heavily…

I often hear people make casual remarks like, “Well, the State has a right to collect taxes,” “the State has a right to punish criminals,” or “the State has a right to controls its borders.” Inside, I am always somewhat horrified at how very easily these kinds of assumptions are made, at how obvious the…

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…

In recent weeks the Ebola virus has dominated media headlines. Fueling global interest, the AP reports a nurse in Spain is the first person known to catch Ebola outside the outbreak zone in West Africa. The nurse treated two missionaries who traveled to the plagued region and contracted the virus. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), as of October…

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…

Di recente, il dipartimento penitenziario della Florida ha licenziato 32 secondini, misura presa dopo anni di presunte corruzioni all’interno del sistema carcerario, corruzioni alle quali è legata la morte di almeno quattro carcerati. I rappresentanti sindacali hanno definito il licenziamento di massa il “massacro del venerdì sera”. Un massacro che io approvo. Scavando tra i…

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…

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…

Florida’s Department of Corrections recently fired 32 guards after years of alleged corruption in the prison system with at least four related inmate deaths. Union officials call the mass layoff a “Friday night massacre.” Now that’s one massacre I can get behind. Reporters digging deeper into the prison records found multiple incidents of abuse and so-called…

Heather Cox Richardson’s call to “Bring Back the Party of Lincoln” (New York Times, September 3), based on her forthcoming book To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party, demands a package deal that not only never was, but could never be. In Richardson’s fantasy the Republican Party before the ascendance of Reagan “opposed the control of government by…

The Keystone XL pipeline is something no libertarian can support if consistency with free market principles matters. But that doesn’t stop a lot of right-leaning self-proclaimed libertarians from instinctively defending it — after all, anything that promotes fossil fuel use and gets environmentalists bent out of shape has to be “libertarian,” right? Thus A. Barton Hinkle’s “Get…

As many in the libertarian community already know, Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne recently unveiled a plan to build a revolutionary new model of finance on the back of the old financial system. Namely, by creating a Bitcoin equivalent of the New York Stock Exchange in hopes of eventually replacing Wall Street entirely with a crypto-security trading system…

Though many Americans know that prisoners often work while behind bars, the conditions under which they toil may be less than clear. Fortune magazine made waves this summer when it reported that “[p]rison labor has gone artisanal,” revealing a multimillion dollar business that puts convicts to work making everything from specialty motorcycles to goat cheese sold at…

All’inizio di settembre, la Reuters ha reso nota una ricerca commissionata dalla Federal Reserve che dimostra che negli Stati Uniti cresce la disuguaglianza in termini di reddito e ricchezza. “Tutta la crescita del reddito,” dice la Reuters, “è concentrata nella parte alta… con il 30,5% nelle mani del 3% della popolazione.” La ricerca della Federal…

C4SS Feed 44 presents “What Laissez Faire?” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Sheldon Richman, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. What, then, is this system called “capitalism”? It can’t be the free market because we have no free market. Today the hand of government is all over the economy — from money…