Kyle Platt chats with Sheldon Richman about the recent standoff between the Bureau of Land Management and Nevada Rancher Cliven Bundy. Who has a claim to the land? Can a government own land?

Venerdì scorso (undici aprile), un terreno nei sobborghi di Rio de Janeiro è stato reso al gigante della telefonia fissa Oi. L’area, conosciuta come “favela da Jelerj” era stata occupata da 5.000 persone, provenienti soprattutto dalle favelas di Mandela, Manguinhos e Jacarezinho, che lì avevano costruito le loro case improvvisate. Ci sono stati scontri con…

Lynn Stuart Parramore just can’t stop attacking libertarianism. In a recent article titled How Piketty’s Bombshell Book Blows Up Libertarian Fantasies, she targets libertarians on equality and wealth. She also continues to evidence no awareness of the existence of left-wing forms of libertarianism like left-libertarian market anarchism. This is the ideology both I and the site…

In the latest example of a phenomenon as old as the state itself, Stan McCoy – formerly the US Trade Representative’s chief “intellectual property” negotiator, who wrote ACTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s IP chapter – was just given a cushy job at the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). He’s one of over a dozen…

C4SS Media presents Kevin Carson‘s “Charles Koch Clutches Pearls, Dies of Moral Rectitude” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. Over two hundred years ago free market economist Adam Smith pointed out that, when businesspeople get involved in government, it’s to protect themselves against competition and rob the public. That’s just as true of the Kochs…

C4SS Media presents Joel Schlosberg‘s “Did Somebody Say McThor’s?” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. Only in an industry with grotesquely overextended operating costs could a film like Hulk take significant creative risks, gross a quarter-billion dollars, and still be regarded as box office poison. Even in an economy stacked against their audience awareness, comics properties like Teenage Mutant…

The Bundy ranch saga has been the subject of heated good guy/bad guy framing by both mainstream liberals and mainstream conservatives, who differ only on which roles to assign to Bundy and the feds, respectively. But I can’t really see any good guys in this. The respective echo chambers for the two sides differ on…

Those in power regularly reveal themselves to be oblivious to conditions in the real world, and to material constraints on transforming their commands into reality. There’s good reason for this: Their power insulates them from direct experience of the material world, and from direct experience of the constraints offered by material reality. For example, earlier…

Part 1: Kolko at Home An earlier generation of libertarians was interested in Gabriel Kolko, a historian of the Left. Who was he? Born in 1932 in Paterson, NJ, historian Gabriel Kolko studied at Kent State, the University of Wisconsin, and Harvard University (PhD: 1962). From 1970 until his retirement he taught history at York…

C4SS Media presents Thomas L. Knapp‘s “Kontinued Keystone Konfusion” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. Over the years, I’ve been skeptical of lefty claims that prominent “libertarian” think tanks just shill for whatever corporations are willing to write checks for favorable “analysis.” But this kind of thing makes me wonder.

In 1997, New York state declared war on the Seneca Nation reservations located upstate near Tonawanda. The war was over a declared power of the state to impose taxes on goods sold on native reservations. As enforcement, New York saw fit to shut down native businesses, cutting off petroleum and cigarette supplies to the Senecas….

In Crimea, truppe prive di insegne hanno occupato l’aeroporto e preso il controllo della regione. A Mosca, il parlamento russo ha autorizzato senza obiezioni l’ex colonnello del Kgb Vladimir Putin all’impiego dei militari russi in Ucraina. A Kiev, capitale dell’Ucraina, un’insurrezione che forse è genuinamente spontanea e forse no, e che forse è composta da…

Last Friday (04/11), a piece of land property in Rio’s suburbia was reinstated to telecom giant Oi. The area was known as “favela da Telerj” and had been occupied by 5,000 people, mostly from Mandela, Manguinhos, and Jacarezinho favelas, who built improvised homes there. There were serious confrontations with the Military Police in the enforcement…

If you thought the standards of the Famous Artists’ School (“Can You Draw the Pirate?”) on old matchbook covers were lax, wait till you see Reason magazine’s criteria for recognition as a “free market think-tank.” The American Federation of Teachers blacklists asset managers who manage public sector employees’ defined benefit pension funds, but have contributed…

C4SS Media presents Kevin Carson‘s “How Not to Respond to Charges of Hypocrisy” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. “Idealistic” Kennedy liberalism, like the process for making sausage, doesn’t bear much looking into. In reality, behind all the talk of promoting the “ideals of the Enlightenment” and “global community” and “human rights,” the state does…

Nel 2010 Newt Gingrich spiegò che il presidente americano Barack Obama “non si capisce” se non si tiene conto del suo orientamento “anticoloniale keniano” come punto di riferimento interpretativo del suo comportamento bizzarro. Certo che Obama è riuscito a nascondere benissimo il suo odio profondo verso il colonialismo; tanto che ha elogiato l’Europa, in un…

Here we go again: The US Supreme Court has relaxed some political contribution limits. Cue the hype. Last year, 2013, was the first year of the 2014 campaign cycle. Question #1: How much did federal elected officials spend on their 2014 campaigns last year? Answer:  At least $3.45 trillion — a little over $6.4 billion…

Justin Raimondo discusses the pattern of disaster in U.S. foreign policy. Charles R. Pierce discusses the torture scandal and the Obama admin. Brian Cloughley discusses the warmongering of NATO. Alexander Reid Ross discusses Hollande’s trip to Nigeria. Brian Doherty discusses five gun rights cases to watch. Raphael Cohen and Gabriel Scheinmann discuss the Libyan war….

Charles Koch of Koch Industries, wounded to the core of his being by allegations from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and others that his championing of the “free market” conceals lobbying efforts to rig the system in his favor, sufficiently recovered his composure to respond in a Wall Street Journal op-ed (“I”m Fighting to Restore…

Più di un decennio fa, i blogger neoconservatori coniarono il termine “Fisking” per indicare uno strumento polemico (usato per la prima volta contro il giornalista di sinistra Robert Fisk) che consiste nel fare a pezzi un commento, frase per frase, tagliuzzandone analiticamente ogni parte fino a ridurla a coriandoli. Anche se la posizione dei neoconservatori…