Questo articolo è stato scritto da Sheldon Richman e pubblicato su The Future of Freedom Foundation il 5 settembre 2014. In un suo sorprendente articolo, Daniel McCarthy, il lodevole direttore di The American Conservative (TAC), scrive: “L’impero britannico prima, e quello americano poi,crearono e mantennero un ordine mondiale in cui il liberalismo [classico] poté fiorire.”…

As many in the libertarian community already know, Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne recently unveiled a plan to build a revolutionary new model of finance on the back of the old financial system. Namely, by creating a Bitcoin equivalent of the New York Stock Exchange in hopes of eventually replacing Wall Street entirely with a crypto-security trading system…

With another fall election season picking up steam, The New Yorker’s Sam Wang wonders whether the 2014 election will “be a wave or a ripple.” A wave, Wang says, occurs when “one party makes massive gains and overturns the existing power dynamic.” But notwithstanding Wang’s intended point, the “existing power dynamic” in the United States…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Roderick Long‘s “Poison as Food, Poison as Antidote” read and edited by Nick Ford. But it is an all-too-common mistake – and this tendency to underestimate the chasm between free markets and corporatism is enormously beneficial to the state, enabling a slick bait-and-switch. When free markets and government grants of privilege to…

Like many libertarians, I’ve learned a lot from Murray Rothbard on a wide variety of subjects. Of course, no one gets everything right, especially someone as intellectually ambitious, multidisciplinary, and prolific as Rothbard. Nevertheless, reading the work of the man who left such a mark on the modern libertarian movement is as profitable as it…

Though many Americans know that prisoners often work while behind bars, the conditions under which they toil may be less than clear. Fortune magazine made waves this summer when it reported that “[p]rison labor has gone artisanal,” revealing a multimillion dollar business that puts convicts to work making everything from specialty motorcycles to goat cheese sold at…

All’inizio di settembre, la Reuters ha reso nota una ricerca commissionata dalla Federal Reserve che dimostra che negli Stati Uniti cresce la disuguaglianza in termini di reddito e ricchezza. “Tutta la crescita del reddito,” dice la Reuters, “è concentrata nella parte alta… con il 30,5% nelle mani del 3% della popolazione.” La ricerca della Federal…

The war in Syria is here. It got held up in social media traffic. We thought the angry hashtags had permanently ceased death from above for the Syrian people. For a moment, the Internet rejoiced in its seemingly overwhelming power to harness the American people’s voice. We were sick of war, sick of decent people being…

L’amministrazione Obama ha recentemente annunciato una politica di intervento limitato in Iraq, con l’uso di droni per allontanare la possibilità che Isis conquisti i territori autonomi curdi. Il principale alleato americano è il governo regionale curdo di Massoud Barzani. Gli aiuti americani contro Isis si limitano alle regioni curde in Iraq. Il principale avversario di…

My Center for a Stateless Society colleague Roderick Long once described full anarchy as the golden mean, not a form of zealotry or extremism, but a middle way “between mandating what should be optional and prohibiting what should be optional.” Professor Long’s point is not mere framing or spin, attempting to pitch anarchism to an…

When I tuned in to US president Barack Obama’s televised speech on his plans for war against the so-called “Islamic State,” I expected exactly what we got — a bland sundae of pseudo-patriotic drivel topped off with some whipped cream of big bucks for the military-industrial complex and the cherry of regime change in Syria. What I didn’t expect was…

“Dio mio il livello di allerta a Londra è appena stato innalzato e mi è passata la voglia di uscire :(” Così diceva un sms di un mio amico. La recente notizia secondo cui il governo britannico ha innalzato il livello di allerta terroristico a “serio” riaccende il clima di paura, riflesso sui social media…

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…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Carlos Clemente‘s “Vulture Funds vs. Argentina” read by Christopher King and edited by Nick Ford. The most outrageous fallacy in this line of reasoning is the conflation of the political class of a country with its citizenry at large. Whenever vultures succeed in collecting the full value on defaulted government bonds, the…

On the liberal wing of American politics, US Senator Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) success in capturing the love of millions is astounding. Her image as savior of indebted workers and unheard voices in America strikes a note with those concerned about reduced class mobility, and rightly so. Consider Warren’s speech introducing emergency legislation to allow refinancing of student loans….

In a startling article, Daniel McCarthy, the admirable editor of The American Conservative magazine (TAC), writes, “Successive British and American empires created and upheld the world order in which [classical] liberalism could flourish.” In other words, as he writes in “Why Liberalism Means Empire,” “Liberalism and empire reinforced one another in manifold ways.” Therefore, if…

The political economy of Benjamin Tucker represents an alloy of its major influences, synthesizing the work of radical thinkers such as Josiah Warren, William B. Greene, Ezra Heywood, and Lysander Spooner to create a mature, comprehensive individualist anarchism. From Heywood came Tucker’s trademark analysis of the wrongs of rent, interest, and profit, “follow[ing] closely the…

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…