Professional fools are an ingrained aspect of our image of the medieval royal court system. Fools, more commonly known as jesters, were permitted to be asses for the amusement of heads of governments. While professional and respectful conduct was expected of most members of the court, the Fool existed to give an image of laxness….

Political satire has a long and honorable history: Aristophanes, William Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift; W.S. Gilbert; George Orwell; Tom Lehrer, David Frost, and That Was the Week That Was; George Carlin; Spitting Image, Yes, Minister; the Smothers Brothers; the early Saturday Night Live, Dave Barry, The Onion, South Park, Family Guy, and so many more. Unfortunately,…

C4SS has teamed up with the Distro of the Libertarian Left. The Distro produces and distribute zines and booklets on anarchism, market anarchist theory, counter-economics, and other movements for liberation. For every copy of Voltairine de Cleyre‘s “The Dominant Idea” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Voltairine de Cleyre‘s “The Dominant Idea“. $1.50 for the…

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…

On the morning of November 6 the US Federal Bureau of Investigation trumpeted its takedown of the Silk Road 2.0 website and the arrest of  alleged operator Blake Benthall. In so doing the FBI demonstrated, once again, that the War on Drugs has nothing to do with anything its propagandists claim it’s about. If drug criminalization is a…

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…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Joel Schlosberg‘s “The Conquest of the United Kingdom by Scotland” read by Christopher B. King and edited by Nick Ford. “Yes” netting 44.7% of the tally undermines a 300-year consensus and the devolution of substantial political power to Scotland is already conceded. Such a near-tie is far more problematic for an existing political system…

C4SS has teamed up with the Distro of the Libertarian Left. The Distro produces and distribute zines and booklets on anarchism, market anarchist theory, counter-economics, and other movements for liberation. For every copy of Kevin Carson‘s “Millennial Liberty” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Kevin Carson‘s “Millennial Liberty“. $1.00 for the first copy. $0.60 for…

A recent Pew Research study surveys 44 countries, revealing that the Chinese are even friendlier to free markets than Americans. Katie Simmons, a senior researcher at Pew, “notes that China has enacted numerous reforms to open up the country’s economy since the 1970s.” It probably shouldn’t surprise us that people living under the Communist Party of China’s rule…

It’s election day in the USA. The mass incarceration nation is deciding which political opportunists will rule. On the state and local level, citizens are casting their votes on ballot initiatives that will determine the structure, specifics, or application of state coercion. Some of these ballot initiatives probably deserve support from prison abolitionists, specifically initiatives…

There’s a certain kind of economic technocrat who tosses around the term “economies of scale” like a Young Earth creationist tosses around the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This is true of legacy liberalism, obviously, which is still defined by the mid-20th century mass-production paradigm of Joseph Schumpeter, John Kenneth Galbraith and Alfred Chandler. It’s also…

Discussing Prime Minister Narendra Modi in The Economic Times, businessman Gurcharan Das worries that “[t]oo many Indians still believe that the market makes ‘the rich richer and the poor poorer.’” Modi, Das argues, has an opportunity to “transform the master narrative around” free market reform, convincing Indians that a free market system helps ordinary Indians, not…

C4SS has teamed up with the Distro of the Libertarian Left. The Distro produces and distribute zines and booklets on anarchism, market anarchist theory, counter-economics, and other movements for liberation. For every copy of Roy Childs‘ “No Government” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Roy Childs‘ “No Government“. $1.00 for the first copy. $0.60 for…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “You Had One Job, UN” read by Paola Delfino and edited by Nick Ford. To paraphrase Lysander Spooner’s quip about the Constitution, either the UN was created to enable these crimes by the world’s largest and worst aggressor (in which case it is pernicious), or it has been unable to stop…

For nearly two weeks in August, the US Federal Aviation Administration imposed a “no-fly zone” over the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, where protests raged over the police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown. The stated reason for the “no-fly zone” was that shots had been fired at a police helicopter. Now, thanks to an Associated Press investigation, we…

C4SS has teamed up with the Distro of the Libertarian Left. The Distro produces and distribute zines and booklets on anarchism, market anarchist theory, counter-economics, and other movements for liberation. For every copy of Sheldon Richman‘s “Class Struggle Rightly Conceived” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Sheldon Richman‘s “Class Struggle Rightly Conceived“. $1.00 for the…

The publication of “Iron Fist” in late 2001 was a milestone for me. Larry Gambone’s decision to publish it as a Red Lion Press pamphlet was an honor, and was the main thing that kicked off my career as a published writer (as opposed to the kind who writes angry letters to the editor and…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Ryan Calhoun‘s “Open Carry or Open Submission?” read by Christopher King and edited by Nick Ford. This is the story across America: If you are black and armed, you are a threat. And to get to the ugly bottom of it, that’s true, and it’s why blacks re-introduced politically conscious open carry. Feed…

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…

So here we go again. Another biennial US election season draws to a close and here come the solemn multi-partisan invocations of civic duty: Exercise that franchise. Pull that lever, push that button, mark that box. The future of western civilization depends on you. And if you don’t vote, don’t complain. Question: If I don’t drive around…