Durante tutta la durata della “chiusura” del governo americano, i politici democratici hanno paragonato i loro rivali repubblicani ad “anarchici”, dicendo che la “chiusura” dimostra la necessità di un governo. Un esempio è un recente intervento al senato della senatrice Elizabeth Warren, democratica. I fraintendimenti del suo intervento sono rampanti. Confonde cooperazione e governo dicendo: “Nella nostra…

Recently Mike Konczal (“‘Corporatism’ is the Latest Hysterical Right-Wing Accusation,” The New Republic, December 15) attacked “corporatism” as a pernicious right-wing meme, ostensibly aimed at exposing Obama’s policies for “enriching the well-off” but in reality a “reactionary” agenda freeing big business from accountability. I think he underestimates the extent to which the “corporatism” and “crony…

The Canadian Supreme Court recently struck down the anti-prostitution laws of the country. This sound legal decision provides an occasion for a deeper discussion of the dynamics of sex worker politics. In particular, it allows for a dialectical or contextual left-libertaian analysis. Chris Matthew Sciabarra ably describes dialectics as: “Dialectics is the art of context-keeping….

So last Sunday in the midst of a second wave of blockades of tech company buses in San Francisco and Oakland, a bus window was broken by some anarchist activists and the action immediately sailed to the top of countless news sites. Activists had been trying to draw attention to how the buses (collectively termed…

Nel 2011 partecipai ad una discussione pubblica presso King’s Books a Tacoma, nello stato di Washington. Si parlava dell’effetto che hanno le guerre sui soldati e le loro famiglie. Mi ero preparato a rispondere parlando dell’impatto che le guerre continue hanno sulle famiglie che incontravo nella sala parto dove lavoro. Durante questa discussione, però, fui…

“At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,” said the gentleman, taking up a pen, “it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want…

Christmas is now a commercial frenzy, a profusion of overplayed songs and overwrought sentiment, mixed with pleading to remember “the reason for the season” and to “keep Christ in Christmas.” But there’s something else that’s being lost and perhaps was never emphasized enough to begin with, something I think we need now more than ever-…

From Boing Boing: The ACLU has spent years in court trying to get a look at a top-secret FBI interrogation manual that referred to the CIA’s notorious KUBARK torture manual. The FBI released a heavily redacted version at one point — so redacted as to be useless for determining whether its recommendations were constitutional. However,…

Today is the 99th anniversary of the Christmas Truce of 1914, a spontaneous soldiers’ truce that broke out on Christmas Eve all along the Western Front in France, lasting in places until the day after Christmas. French, British and German soldiers, intrigued by the sound of Christmas carols from the enemy trenches, first tentatively refrained…

Quando si parla di droni, l’atteggiamento della maggior parte dei futuristi libertari è il pessimismo. I droni sono generalmente visti in un più ampio scenario tecno-fascista, come l’egemonia USA (fatta di laser orbitanti e robot soldato telecomandati dall’ONU) immaginata dallo scrittore Ken Macleod nella sua serie Rivoluzione d’Autunno. La tentazione è comprensibile. Dopotutto i droni (combinati con operazioni…

The annual digests continue. Let’s get moving on number 9! Stephen Masty has a quiz to decide whether you’re an imaginative conservative or not. Matthew Feeney discusses 5 hot foreign policy subjects of 2013. Gene Healy discusses the myth of isolationism surrounding a foreign policy of non-intervention. Laura Carlsen discusses the setbacks for women’s rights…

In einer Ansprache, die die Luftangriffe auf Libyen durch die USA und ihrer Verbündeten zum Thema hat, sagte Präsident Obama, dass das Scheitern zu handeln „ein Verrat an uns selbst wäre“, dass ein Massaker in dem Land „das Gewissen der Welt beflecken“ würde. Jedes mal wenn die Elite der Außenpolitik des Imperiums anfängt davon zu…

Pope Francis wrote in his recent apostolic exhortation, “Just as the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say ‘thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality.” He’s right — but not in the way he intends. Before…

I write a lot about artificial scarcity as a source of rents for the propertied classes, and the role of the state in enforcing it. But the other side of the coin is the role of the state in rendering naturally scarce things artificially abundant to the privileged classes. We can see this in recent…

“To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated at, regulated, docketed, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, weighed, censored, ordered about, by men who have neither the right, nor the knowledge, nor the virtue. … To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed,…

In passato, ho dibattuto contro l’autorità sia in termini di principi che di conseguenze. Istituzioni come lo stato non hanno autorità legittima su di te perché nessuno possiede nessun altro, e tu non puoi delegare ad un’istituzione un’autorità che non hai, affinché la eserciti in tuo nome. A livello pratico, l’autorità conduce a irrazionalità e…

There were two radical, anti-authoritarian movements of the 1960s which developed in very different ways yet compliment each other in ways which remain unappreciated. One is the newly formed Libertarian movement headed by people like Murray Rothbard and Leonard Read, both experts in economics who spent much of their time at the blackboard or the…

The late, great HL Mencken defined puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere is having a good time.” I haven’t visited Michael Bloomberg’s New York City in more than a decade, but if I landed at LaGuardia tomorrow, I’d half expect to be greeted by officials right out of Tompkins Harrison Matteson’s painting “Trial…

The main plotline of the Star Wars prequel trilogy concerns an apparent conflict between the central government (the Senate) on the one hand and a coalition of mercantile interests (the Trade Federation, the Commerce Guild, etc.) on the other. As events unfold, however, it quickly becomes obvious to the audience (though much less quickly to the protagonists)…

For a very long time, Miley Cyrus embodied everything I hated about contemporary pop music. Meticulously groomed as a picture-perfect Disney sponsored pop starlet she seemed indistinguishable from the legions of similar cookie-cutter manufactured singers who came before her except for being the daughter of one-hit wonder Billy Rae Cyrus, which added bizarreness and nepotism…