C4SS Feed 44 presents Chad Nelson‘s “Dissolving Borders” read by Mike Godzina and edited by Nick Ford. “When feuding parties are unnaturally forced apart by walls, be they real or metaphorical, you can count on their disputes escalating into outright aggression against one another. And the states who govern such borders would have it no other way….

In Free Market Fairness [1] John Tomasi lays out a way in which the gap between broadly libertarian (or classical liberal) and high liberal (or liberal egalitarian) political philosophies can be bridged. Since F. A. Hayek’s methodologically individualist rejection of the concept of social justice, and Robert Nozick’s liberty-based rejection of egalitarian distributive justice, there…

One of the best things about The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy is that David Graeber finally tackles issues directly relevant to anarchists. While his prior work has had value, it’s also largely been about rather obvious topics and punctuated with a need to apologize for or defend…

Back on May 19th, 2015, the Los Angeles City Council passed a resolution that would increase the minimum wage to $15 by the year 2020. Fast forward to May 27th, and we see labor “leaders” who intensely supported the increase pushing a last minute amendment to exempt companies from it if they let the unions…

“Behind every great fortune,” Balzac wrote, “there is a crime.” That’s certainly true of the largest concentrations of wealth in the world today. The fortune of every billionaire, it’s safe to say, was amassed through some sort of crime. You don’t make that kind of money on the free market. And the holdings of every…

It’s sad evidence of collective latent racism that no one cares about prison until a conventionally attractive, intelligent, well-educated, middle-class, urban white woman goes there. Hence, Orange is the New Black, a funny and moving hit original series based on a bestselling memoir. How is it that black and Latina women are relegated to supporting…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Roderick Long‘s “Secret Service Incident Highlights Double Standard” read by Christopher King and edited by Nick Ford. “Implicit in the idea of a governmental police force, from the Secret Service down to your local beat cop, is inequality of rights. Police by definition are supposed to have rights that other people don’t have:…

C4SS Feed 44 presents “Scratching By: How Government Creates Poverty as We Know It” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Charles Johnson, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. The daily experience of the urban poor is shaped by geographical concentration in socially and culturally isolated ghetto neighborhoods within the larger city, which have their…

Judge Katherine Forrest’s decision to lock up Ross Ulbricht for the rest of his life is a momentous tragedy. There were other tragic circumstances on display during Ulbricht’s trial, however. Submitted as evidence against the integrity of the Silk Road were stories of drug overdoses that were allegedly tied to products bought on the darknet…

Involuntary commitment is the ability of the State to institutionalize mentally ill people against their will. Perhaps the most well-known law providing for involuntary commitment is Florida’s “Baker Act” of 1971, which allows for the involuntary commitment of a person who (a) may possibly have a mental illness, and (b) may be harm to themselves,…

Ross Ulbricht has been sentenced to die inside a cage. We call this a “life sentence”, but it is a death sentence. His fate is quite literally to die in a cage in order to punish him for operating the online drug market known as the Silk Road. But truly, that is not his crime….

An article by George H. Smith from a few years ago makes a distinction about freedom that seems worth pursuing. In “Jack and Jill and Two Kinds of Freedom” (also a podcast), Smith distinguishes between (as the title indicates) two kinds of freedom, or between freedom and liberty. He tells the story of Jack, who…

The impending expiration of the USA Patriot Act is a matter of intense focus among civil libertarians; Rand Paul’s filibuster has been in the news, along with petition drives pressuring Congress not to vote for renewal. But it doesn’t really matter: Even if the legislation expires, the NSA will carry right on with domestic surveillance…

I should begin by affirming that I have no objection, in principle, to the use of or the appeal to statistical information, to assessing the empirical impacts of a given policy choice. [1] Such appeals are an important aspect of public policy research and of the advocacy of libertarian principles. Statistics, in and of themselves, are…

Every time I read a column by John Stossel, I think my estimation of him has fallen to its theoretical limit. And then I read the next one. For years, Stossel has tipped his hat to the idea that “pro-market” and “pro-business” are not the same thing. He occasionally gives an example of welfare for…

For as much as empire persists, it goes rather unmentioned by virtually anyone outside of Left opposition to it, which has (unfortunately) little weight in the US at all. Those who support US hegemony & keep it going have learned over time to use code words & feelgood lies to avoid having to actually discuss…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Will Moyer‘s “Genuine Ideology” read by Tony Dreher and edited by Nick Ford. “Genuine ideology is a fringe phenomenon. Genuine ideology exists, but is primarily found at the margins of mainstream discourse and political power. Put another way, the farther you move away from the mainstream, the more likely you are to find…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Chad Nelson‘s “Time to End the ‘Special Relationship’” read by Joey Clark and edited by Nick Ford. “So while more discussion and new information are normally welcomed before war is waged, Netanyahu’s antics gave us neither. His Congressional hosts will use his address to bolster their calls for the continued American war state,…

Here I will attempt to refine some remarks that I recently made on Twitter, arguing that libertarians ought to be wary of the general phenomenon of public policy “wonkishness” — which I’ll define very loosely as a concern with offering practical public policy reforms or proposals based on statistical and empirical evidence (the kind of…

Republican presidential aspirant and U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio gave a major foreign-policy speech recently, and the best that can be said is that he did not claim to favor small government and free markets. What he wants in a foreign policy couldn’t possibly be reconciled with any desire to limit government power. Rubio is for…