The good news about the presidential election season is that so many voters seem disgusted with career politicians. The bad news is that these voters are naively opting for “outsiders” who in reality are just politicians in another form. They are anti-politician politicians. This, I submit, is not progress. It is certainly a hopeful sign…

Jerry Taylor of the Niskanen Center dropped a truth bomb on the beltway in his recent piece for Fox News about the decline of Rand Paul. Taylor notes that the alleged growth of the libertarian movement in the wake of the Ron Paul campaign was largely illusory. The alienated populists and conspiracy theorists that filled…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Chad Nelson‘s “Lessig Would Use a Scalpel Where a Machete is Necessary” read by Mike Godzina and edited by Nick Ford. Lessig isn’t wrong to detest the baldly corrupt American political system. In the 2016 presidential race, less than 400 of the country’s wealthiest families will contribute nearly half of the overall…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Ryan Calhoun‘s “Hate Crimes: Bernie Sanders’s Political Theater” read by Katrina Haffner and edited by Nick Ford. Somehow Sanders has managed to escape criticism for a similarly bad piece of legislation he supported — the Local Law Enforcement Against Hate Crimes Act — another virtual gift bag for police departments. Hate…

Somehow left-libertarianism (or at least my article “What Is Left-Libertarianism?” Center for a Stateless Society, June 15, 2014) has come to the attention of Heather Johnson, a Libertarian candidate for Senate in Minnesota. And not in a good way. “Left-libertarianism,” she says on her Facebook page, “is as much bull***t as right-libertarianism,” because it “violates……

Introduction by Chad Nelson Involvement in the anarchist movement sometimes feels like a futile enterprise. How to get from here to there in a “real” world dominated by statists and authoritarians is a dilemma that confounds even the most sure-footed of anarchists. And when attaching oneself to an anarchist organization, it’s easy to be pessimistic…

While the election of Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the Labour Party has injected some novelty into the utterly stale state of affairs that is British party-politics, he leaves much to be desired for those seeking radical change. My fellow traveller, Pete James put it rather well: It took me most of the week…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Cory Massimino‘s “Sanders’s Immigration Comments Prove We Need a Radical Left” read by Tony Dreher and edited by Nick Ford. When individuals are free to move and travel without asking permission from government bureaucrats, they are capable of crafting meaningful lives and communities that enable everyone to advance their well-being on…

C4SS Feed 44 presents T.J. Scholl‘s “Border Authoritarianism is Not Only an Institution of the Outwardly Racist” read by Thomas J. Webb and edited by Nick Ford. Anti-immigrant sentiment has found a home in political platforms across the nation and on both sides of the aisle. One such politician is Wisconsin Governor and 2016 Republican…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Nathan Goodman‘s “The New Deal’s Legacy of Corporate Welfare” read by Tony Dreher and edited by Nick Ford. Mainstream progressives tell us that the New Deal was a victory for the working class and the public interest. But New Deal corporate welfare programs like the Ex-Im Bank and the Raisin Administrative…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “So-Called ‘Criminals’ Rights’ Protect the Rest of Us” read by Mike Godzina and edited by Nick Ford. It’s a standard trope among right-wing “law and order” types to equate procedural protections against cops with protection of the alleged criminals they’re in pursuit of, or to equate due process rights…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Chad Nelson‘s “The Boston Marathon Two Years Later – A Policeman’s Delight” read by Joey Clark and edited by Nick Ford. For Constitution-worshippers it is one more tear in the Fourth Amendment, which purportedly guarantees Americans protection from random and baseless searches by the state. But the Fourth Amendment is regularly…

It was 1975 when the first same-sex Americans were “permitted” to marry one another. It was Clela Rorex who processed these licenses illegally. This act of sabotage against the state’s marriage monopoly was eventually discovered, and Rorex quit — many calling for her to face legal punishment. She’s said of her activism, “I didn’t want…

Harvard law professor and political activist Lawrence Lessig is mounting an intriguing run for President. Lessig’s symbolic campaign will be entirely funded by crowdsourced donations since he has a one-issue platform: campaign finance reform. If elected president, Lessig would attempt to pass a single law through Congress which would scrap existing private campaign financing in…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “Just When I Managed to Stop Laughing…” read by Joey Clark and edited by Nick Ford. Most of the top 1% today are senior corporate management, high-paid attorneys and other professionals, reflecting the growing managerialization of American society and the incorporation of a white collar New Class into the…

On August 26th, C4SS’s Sheldon Richman appeared on The Scott Horton Show to discuss libertarian class analysis, its roots, and the contemporary class divide. The interview is about 28 minutes.  

C4SS Feed 44 presents James C. Wilson‘s “Debt Forgiveness: End the Student Loan Industrial Complex” read by Mike Godzina and edited by Nick Ford. The student debt crisis is not limited to students in for-profit schools, but state institutions as well. Federal Student loans have the problem of being one size fits all. In a…

As you may know, I’ve got some opinions about capitalism, and about the idea of “anarcho-capitalism.” I think that anarcho-capitalism is an incoherent goal, and in some ways destructive in practice. Not because I’ve got a problem with property, money, competition or market exchange, but because I think the conflation of these market forms with…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Sheldon Richman‘s “What the Hell are we Doing in Yemen?” read by Joey Clark and edited by Nick Ford. Iran today serves the same purpose the Soviet Union, or the International Communist Conspiracy, served from the end of World War II until 1989-91, when the Soviet empire collapsed. Iran is the…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” read by Tony Dreher and edited by Nick Ford. In 2008, we heard a lot of stuff from Obama about the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping and Gitmo; and then in January 2009 Obama turned on a dime and enacted George Bush’s third term on such issues….