C4SS Senior Fellow and Lysander Spooner Research Scholar, Nathan Goodman, took part in and represented C4SS on the Salt Lake City, Utah, Trans-Pacific Partnership Welcoming Committee coalition and protest. Salt Lake Residents Resist the Trans-Pacific Partnership! Salt Lake City, UT November 19, 2013 Delegations from twelve national governments are meeting this week at Grand America…

For years now the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has been trying its best, unsuccessfully, to enforce its “intellectual property” claims upon those who would dare share and distribute media. They are of course not the only ones trying to get IP enforced; we have seen the same trends in music and gaming. Since…

Last time I was in my native Caracas, a couple of years ago, I was shocked by how ubiquitous cosmetic surgery had become among women. Since then, I have given some thought to the plausible origin of the trend and was surprised to find myself in agreement with what William Neuman’s recent piece for the…

Anarchists who intend to act as though we didn’t live in a dystopic world must find themselves perplexed at every moment. With the ecosystems of civil society so atrophied and virtually every surviving institution of value captured and beaten into participating in the bloody circus of statism, who do you call? What do you do…

Nothing like starting out your day with a laugh — and today I have Matthew Lynch (“12 Reasons Why Obama is One of the Greatest Presidents Ever,” Huffington Post, November 15) to thank for it. About half of Lynch’s points boil down to, “Obama is for x, because he makes speeches talking about x all…

Naomi Klein, to a casual reader, might seem to hate the free market. Or at least she hates what most people think of as the free market, based on the conventional use of that term by mainstream politicians and journalists. And the usual vulgar libertarian suspects (see here and here and here) have reacted with exactly the kind of by-the-numbers polemics you’d…

Sweden is often depicted in the international media as a bastion of pluralism, tolerance and progress. This image stands in stark contrast to the lived realities of marginalized people in Sweden who face an increasingly violent and desperate state. Reports of inner border controls in the Stockholm public transportation system have caused anger, fear and…

On November 13 Wikileaks published the leaked “intellectual property” chapter of the draft Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty. The IP section is a bundle of draconian provisions curtailing Internet freedom in the interest of protecting proprietary content industries like movies and music and imposing new restrictions on commerce to enforce corporations’ patent monopolies on genetically modified organisms…

This week I had the great pleasure of talking with Ben Stone, the Bad Quaker, about a wide range of important topics. We discussed left-libertarianism, the IP attacks against C4SS from earlier this fall, the symbiotic relationship between corporations and government, the dangers of bigotry, and much more. The podcast can be found here.

Recentemente assisti a uma apresentação por Mark Hendrickson da Faculdade da Cidade do Pomar acerca do livre mercado e da Walmart. Na apresentação Hendrickson cobre em sucinto, mas informativo detalhe, como funcionam os mecanismos do livre mercado. Firmas que oferecem melhores preços no mercado subtraem clientes de outras firmas, e o resultado final é que novas empresas…

Amia Srinivasan has four questions for free-market moralists, specifically those who accept something like a Nozickian account of individual rights. My own take is more Rothbardian than Nozickian, but that still seems close enough to give her four answers, and to ask four questions in return about the assumptions that underlie her essay. Amia begins by asking: 1….

Welcome to the fourth review! Let’s get started. First up are the usual pieces on foreign policy and militarism: Daniel R. Mahanty discusses how realists can also champion human rights. David Swanson discusses the visit to the White House of a Taliban victim and drone strikes. Patrick Cockburn discusses the victims of war in Iraq….

Today we can celebrate the recent relaunch of the Silk Road drug market, named for a predecessor taken down over a month ago by federal agents for its connection with an alleged assassination conspiracy involving alleged founder Ross Ulbricht. The FBI is attempting to tie Ulbricht to the online identity of the Dread Pirate Roberts (DPR), an entrepreneur…

Today I am a somewhat overweight, bearded suburban dad entering a comfortable middle age, but it was not always thus. Seven short years ago I was a lean, clean-shaven, heavily armored combat medic in Iraq, and today, November 11th, everyone is apparently required by law to remind me of the things I did in my…

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth (Belknap, 2009). This third installment in Hardt and Negri’s trilogy, which began with Empire and continued with Multitude, is concerned mainly with the forms taken by the successor society emerging from the decaying corpse of corporate capitalism. This quote is as good a statement of the general theme as…

An October 20-22, 2013, Fox News national poll revealed that the implementation of ObamaCare (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) by the American state has been so chaotic that 60% of registered voters characterize the process as “a joke.” The economic reasons for the incompetence are well known by libertarians familiar with the Austrian tradition…

I recently watched a short presentation by Mark Hendrickson from Grove City College about the free market and Walmart. In the presentation Hendrickson covers in short, but informative detail, how free market mechanisms work. Firms that offer better prices in the market draw away customers from other firms, and the end result is that new…

After watching a couple of people I know argue about whether “economic freedom” or “social freedom” was more important, I had the typical libertarian reaction: That’s a meaningless question, they’re the same thing. All transactions are “economic” in an important sense, and all relationships between people are “social.” To violently repress any non-invasive action is…

Easily the most persistent question that arises when we endure another shooting such as the recent one at LAX in which a TSA agent was killed and others injured is “Why?” It appears that the shooter, 23-year-old Paul Anthony Ciancia, had one thing in mind: Killing TSA agents. He did not appear to want to…

It’s been suggested that market anarchists should feel “grateful” to accused LAX shooter Paul Ciancia for killing TSA agent Gerardo Hernandez and wounding several others. After all, by market anarchist standards, the TSA is a criminal organization, subjecting travelers to intrusive and humiliating rights-violations. The fact that the TSA is a government agency constitutes no…