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…

In early September, Reuters reported on a new Federal Reserve survey showing widening wealth and income gaps in the United States. “All of the income growth,” Reuters reports, “was concentrated among the top earners …  with the top 3 percent accounting for 30.5 percent of all income.” The Fed survey will no doubt disconcert those…

The book I will discuss below develops and defends the idea of law without a state. The book’s blurb tells us the following: This book elaborates and defends the idea of law without the state. Animated by a vision of peaceful, voluntary cooperation as a social ideal and building on a careful account of non-aggression,…

Why am I an Anarchist? That is the question which the editor of The Twentieth Century has requested me to answer for his readers. I comply; but, to be frank, I find it a difficult task. If the editor or one of his contributors had only suggested a reason why I should be anything other…

I love to backpack, surf, hike and climb. When I’m not able to engage in these pursuits, I sometimes find myself watching video of others adventuring in beautiful, remote locales. It helps me to hold on to some of those joyous and motivating travel feelings. I enjoy footage from decades past, when things were wilder,…

Pope Francis’s remarks on poverty, inequality and capitalism — most recently at his open air mass in Seoul — don’t sit well with many conservatives and right-leaning libertarians. The Pope’s remarks include criticism of growing economic inequality and a call to “hear the voice of the poor.” Among those who take issue with the Pope’s statement is…

Last week, Radley Balko published an interesting piece on the question “After Ferguson, how should police respond to protests?”  He contrasted the militarized approach seen in Ferguson and in the Battle of Seattle with less reactionary and more cooperative forms of policing. One police chief Balko praised was Chris Burbank of Salt Lake City, my hometown….

At Slate, Will Oremus raises the question “What if technological innovation is a job-killer after all?” (“The New Luddites,” August 6). Rather than being “the cure for economic doldrums,” he writes, automation “may destroy more jobs than it creates”: Tomorrow’s software will diagnose your diseases, write your news stories, and even drive your car. When…

In an article that will no doubt make “progressive” hearts go pitty-pat (“The 1% May Be Richer Than You Think, Research Shows,” Bloomberg, August 7), Jeanna Smialek suggests that top 1%’s wealth is far greater even than official statistics indicate — and that because so much of that wealth is hidden in offshore tax havens government efforts to…

Pare che gli ultra-trentacinquenni non amino altro che sentirsi dire che internet, e il rapido sviluppo culturale sviluppatosi in parallelo, è stato un terribile sbaglio le cui ripercussioni ci perseguiteranno. E poi c’è il mare di scribacchini opportunisti, tutti allineati nel descrivere questo loro spasmo generazionale reazionario come la voce contraria della ragione. Dicono che…

Zygmunt Bauman, in Postmodernity and Its Discontents, writes that religion, in its traditional form, used to celebrate human insufficiency. With a path more or less outlined for her entire life, the individual found herself powerless to change the conditions she was inserted in. In contrast to what he considers the “postmodern” condition, of uncertainty, premodern…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “The ‘Makers’ and ‘Takers’ — Not Who You Think” read and edited by Nick Ford. But you don’t get to be super-rich — to the tune of hundreds of millions or billions of dollars — by making stuff. You get that filthy rich only through crime of one sort or another…

Critics of libertarianism on the Center-Left sometimes depict it as a radical ideology that would turn upside down everything we know — a doctrine of such thorough-going change that the critics are compelled to ask “what society in human history was ever organized along libertarian lines?” Not so! Nick Gillespie (“Why an 1852 Novel by…

C4SS Feed 44 presents David S. D’Amato‘s “Open the Borders Now and Forever” read and edited by Nick Ford. Free and open movement is the natural, unconditional right of every single individual, a prerogative that precedes governments and their arbitrary borders and policies. Confronted with this fact, even some self-styled libertarians will cavil and complain, puling that…

A man, an American citizen, sits in his car as a U.S. Border Patrol agent insists that he roll down his window. He refuses. Agents use battering rams to smash the windows. Still, the driver refuses to leave his car, so he is hit with a Taser from two sides. He screams. It would be…

Anyone living today only knows the term isolationist as a pejorative. It gained prominence during WWII as a way to slander Americans who opposed U.S. entry into that war. Then, as now, it was said that those who opposed war against (insert foreign enemy) wanted to bury their heads in the sand and ignore the…

Over-35s seem to love nothing more than being told that the Internet — and the rapid cultural developments that have paralleled it — have been a terrible mistake with huge downsides that will surely doom us. And there’s no end to the opportunistic hacks lining up to dress this generational reactionary spasm as the contrarian…

Just about every week another story comes to my attention confirming the complete and total government-dependency of fracking — beloved of so many self-proclaimed “free market” advocates on the libertarian right. Something about eminent domain to build the pipelines, or liability caps for spills, or regulatory approval of unsafe pipelines superseding tort liability for negligence, and…

What is necessary for the use of land is not its private ownership, but the security of improvements. It is not necessary to say to a man, ‘this land is yours,’ in order to induce him to cultivate or improve it. It is only necessary to say to him, ‘whatever your labor, or capital produces…

Market anarchism is grounded in the sovereignty of each individual and the simple idea that all relationships between adults ought to be voluntary and consensual, permitting everyone the freedom to do anything she wishes, as long as she respects the identical right of all others. The “market” in market anarchism refers to the fact that…