We already knew Joe Biden was a useful idiot for the “Green” (actually greenwashed) or “Progressive” wing of corporate capital, because of his indignation over the “theft” of “intellectual property.” He denounced “stealing” songs or movies as morally equivalent to a “smash-and-grab at Macy’s” — and in keeping with that belief has supervised FBI actions…

Twelve past Nobel Peace Prize winners are asking a 13th member of their club to ensure that the Central Intelligence Agency’s upcoming report includes information about harsh interrogation US government tactics following 9/11. While these 12 Nobel laureates seem to understand the moral imperative of transparency and simple human decency, even during the so-called “war on terror,” the 13th…

October 28 marks the 50th anniversary of one of the most classic and revered political speeches in American history. Ronald Reagan’s “A Time for Choosing” roused the American people and was a crucial moment in his ascendance to the conservative leader he became. That’s why it’s crucial that we forget it. A popular conservative news site writes,…

This weekend I had the pleasure of attending Students For Liberty’s New Orleans Regional Conference. It was a delightful event, featuring a talk by C4SS’s own Roderick Long along with many other radical, principled, and insightful speakers. One of the most interesting presentations was by Maggie McNeill, a retired sex worker who blogs at The…

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 Jason Lee Byas‘ “Toward an Anarchy of Production” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Jason Lee Byas‘ “Toward an Anarchy of…

At The Washington Post, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ Jared Bernstein argues that “the Federal Reserve can reduce inequality,” that by “using its interest-rate tools to keep the cost of borrowing down and signaling to the investor community that it is committed to keeping rates low, it can help to trigger job-creating activity.”…

I came late to the news of Twitpic‘s impending (and thankfully partial) closure and even later to an explanation for it. My initial assumption was that the service had failed to turn a profit and become financially insolvent. I couldn’t have been more wrong. This is, in the worst way, all about “intellectual property.” And it significantly and negatively impacts…

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 William Gillis‘ “15 Anti-Primitivist Theses” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with William Gillis’ “15 Anti-Primitivist Theses“. $2.00 for the first copy….

The election season is upon us, and we’re hearing the usual political promises about raising wages. Democrats pledge to raise the minimum wage and assure equal pay for equal work for men and women. Republicans usually oppose those things, but their explanations are typically lame. (“The burden on small business would be increased too much.”)…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “Hobby Lobby — A Question of Agency” read James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. To repeat, there were a lot of people whose agency was at stake here besides the Green family’s — in particular, the 70% majority of Hobby Lobby’s workers who are women. who may have been having…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Jason Lee Byas‘ “A Matter of Life and Death” from the Students for a Stateless Society‘s Volume 1, Issue 3 of THE NEW LEVELLER read by Trevor Hultner and edited by Nick Ford. Even more fundamentally, both aggression and domination beat back the thing that makes us distinct from the dead. In so far as we…

Paul Krugman, in denouncing the excessive market power of Amazon (“Amazon’s Monopsony is Not OK,” New York Times, October 19), proclaims that the Robber Baron Era ended when “we as a nation” put an end to it. There’s a powerful story in the book of 2 Samuel about the prophet Nathan confronting King David after…

C4SS Feed 44 presents “A Plea for Public Property” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Roderick T. Long, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. For many libertarians, the most important argument for private property is what Garret Hardin has labeled “the tragedy of the commons” (though the basic idea goes back to Aristotle). Most…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Thomas L. Knapp‘s “ISIS and Ukraine: They’ll Say Anything” read by Christopher King and edited by Nick Ford. We all remember how Vietnam ended. After two lost ground wars in Asia in the last 12 years, after recourse to the history book accounts of the post-WWII era, you might expect Obama to have…

American politicians’ attempts to create panic over a potential Ebola outbreak in the United States seem to have failed. Family and other contacts of US “patient zero” Thomas Eric Duncan completed a 21-day quarantine with no new cases appearing in that pool. Two nurses who treated Duncan are now symptomatic, but this seems to be…

C4SS Feed 44 presents “Socialist Ends, Market Means” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Gary Chartier, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. Left libertarianism represents a particularly radical development of generally acknowledged libertarian moral judgments and an elaboration of the implications of moral principles that can be seen to provide plausible grounds for rejecting…

Speaking at a $10,000-a-plate fundraiser hosted by Democratic billionaire Rich Richman, President Obama denounced the GOP as — wait for it — the “party of billionaires” (Douglas Barclay, “Obama blasts Republican billionaires at home of Democratic billionaire,” Rare, Oct. 9). “If Republicans win, we know who they’ll be fighting for. Once again, the interests of billionaires…

The second campaign round of Brazil’s presidential election between Worker’s Party (PT) candidate and president Dilma Rousseff and Brazilian Social Democratic Party candidate Aecio Neves has started and a large portion of the electorate and the politicians connected to leftist parties have decided to take a stance. The Liberty and Socialism Party (PSOL), for instance, drafted…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Joel Schlosberg‘s “Our Bodies, Their Subsidies” read Christopher King and edited by Nick Ford. Moreover, the Affordable Care Act is merely the latest in a century-long line of legislation ostensibly aimed at increasing the affordability of health care, but which by subsidy have locked in a status quo of needlessly high levels…

In his recent Rolling Stone cover story (“In Defense of Obama,” October 8), Nobel Prize-winning economist,  peak liberal and New York Times commentator Paul Krugman lays out what he believes is a qualified defense of Barack Obama’s presidency: A sycophantic love letter from a man who surely must know better, but either has chosen to ignore six years of…