One of the first things I learned in my health care career is that pain is an inherently subjective experience. Different people experience different levels of pain in different situations, and everyone has their own idiosyncratic problem areas — one can’t bear dental pain while another finds back injuries unbearable. Because of this fact, backed…

Ostrom begins by noting the problem of natural resource depletion—what she calls “common pool resources”—and then goes on to survey three largely complementary (“closely related concepts”) major theories that attempt to explain “the many problems that individuals face when attempting to achieve collective benefits”: Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons,” the prisoner’s dilemma, and Olson’s “logic…

It’s been the thing lately, among certain establishment liberals, to dismiss libertarians as “Koch-funded shills.” We’ve heard a lot of it from Mark Ames and Yasha Levine at NSFWCorp, for example. This is stupid, first of all, because it’s historically illiterate. Free market libertarianism has its origins in the classical liberalism of two hundred years…

The strongest argument in favor of the fiction of “intellectual property” is consequential rather than moral: Creators of good things — novels, songs, drugs, what have you — we are told, will essentially go on strike if government doesn’t guarantee their profits by vesting them with monopoly “rights” to ideas. Instead of writing that next…

Tyler Cowen’s thesis is that economic growth is leveling off and rates of return decreasing because we’ve already picked the “low-hanging fruit” (meaning innovations and investments that have high returns). The stagnation in GDP and median income in recent decades means “the pace of technological development has slowed down,” and the general population is benefiting…

“Reformism” is one of those words that’s hard to pin down sometimes. It’s usually taken to mean advocating for “reform within the system” — in other words, the bad kind of reform. A bad reform operates from the unstated – often unconscious – starting assumptions of the system. It takes the existing institutional framework of…

This article won the 2011 Beth A. Hoffman Memorial Prize for Economic Writing. Although critics on the left are very astute in describing the evils of present-day society, they usually fail to understand either the root of those problems (government intervention) or their solution (the operation of a freed market). In Progressive commentary on energy,…

C4SS Trustee and Senior Fellow, Gary Chartier, discusses war, peace and the permanent danger of a standing state on C4SS Media’s youtube channel.

Of late I have been trying to balance my staunch support of the non-aggression principle (NAP) and self-ownership with my increasingly leftist values. For some anarchists the NAP and property rights are totally and wildly incompatible with anarchism, with the argument going so far to claim that stereotypical anarchism is rooted in a rejection of…

It’s impossible to make this stuff up, folks. Salon.com columnist Tom Watson, in an article on the upcoming “Stop Watching Us” rally in Washington, D.C., has excoriated all of his progressive friends for supporting something that libertarians — surprise! — also support. He writes, “Some of the biggest names in civil liberties and digital freedom…

C4SS Senior Fellow and Molinari Institute Director and President, Roderick T. Long, presenting before the 2013 Students for Liberty Dallas Regional Conference at the University of North Texas. Roderick T. Long particpated in a brief interview regarding his talk, Objections to Libertarianism, Transitioning to Free(d) Markets, and More.

In The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith famously wrote, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” It may seem strange that history’s best-known advocate of the free market would cast such aspersions on business…

Welcome to the third edition of my weekly review! Let’s get started on a fantastic series of articles. First off are the usual pieces on foreign policy and military affairs: 1. Barry Lando discusses how presidential intervention almost squashed a damning 60 minutes segment on American involvement in Iran. 2. Andre Vltcheck discusses the recent…

“Need I comment that these capitalists, both in Islam and in Christendom, were friends of the prince and helpers or exploiters of the state? […]” “Thus, the modern state, which did not create capitalism but only inherited it, sometimes acts in its favor and at other times acts against it; it sometimes allows capitalism to…

Em “Libertarianism: What’s Going Right”, eu mencionei o Rothbardianismo de Esquerda como uma base possível para buscar áreas de concordância entre libertários de mercado e a esquerda. Eu gostaria de entrar já nessa questão com mais profundidade. Em 2004, eu estava extremamente animado sobre a “Era of Good Feelings” entre os políticos Michael Badnarik do…

Welcome to the second edition of my libertarian leftist weekly review! There are many exciting new pieces to share. I will be sending 30 a week. Let’s get started. A hot topic of late has been the potential war with Syria. Here are some articles addressing it from an anti-war/anti-imperialist perspective: 1. Rob Urie talks…

In 2011 I sat on a panel discussion at King’s Books in Tacoma, Washington, on the subject of the effect of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on soldiers and their families. My prepared remarks were a discussion of the impact of repeated deployments on the families I saw on the labor and delivery floor…

Libertarianism has nothing to do with national interests. Libertarianism is about individual liberty. The liberty to live your own life, to pursue your own livelihood, and to come and go as you please to anywhere that’s open to you or anywhere you’re invited to go. The implications for immigration policy are obvious: Everyone – not…

Back in the ’90s, the Financial Times referred to the G8 countries and the Washington Consensus they enforced as a “de facto world government.” As if we needed any reminder that such a global corporate regime exists in practice, consider the Trans-Pacific Partnership currently under negotiation. Although in theory the authority of all treaties signed…

C4SS Senior Fellow and Trustee Chair, Sheldon Richman, speaks at the University of Oklahoma on Constitution Day. He posits that perhaps the Articles of Confederation were the altogether superior document. http://youtu.be/k9dM0l1ZxO8 Q and A with $5 worth of prognostication: http://youtu.be/XHruM7Vnsao