…along with a lot of other things. Back in November, at Future of Freedom, Jacob Hornberger wrote: “America’s welfare state way of life is based on the notion that the federal government is needed to force people to be good and caring to others.” To which I responded:  Um, no. America’s welfare state way of…

Okumak üzere olduğunuz makale, Alex Aragona tarafından kaleme alınmış. 21 Haziran 2021 tarihinde “Imagining State-Capitalism” başlığı altında yayınlanmıştır. Tüm ideolojik konumlardan insanlar, Batı’da gerçekten serbest piyasalarla ya da ona yakın herhangi bir şeyle yaşamadığımız konusunda hemfikir olacaklardır. “Kapitalist” toplumlar veya “piyasalar” tarafından yönlendirildiği düşünülen toplumlar, aslında, sanayi ve ekonomik faaliyet sektörlerinin ya açıkça planlandığı ve…

Di Eric Fleischmann. Originale: Is the Market to Blame for Current Supply Chain Problems? del primo gennaio 2021. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna. È dal picco della pandemia ad oggi (e forse oltre, data la comparsa improvvisa di Omicron) che noi, gli Stati Uniti in particolare, vediamo un imponente sconvolgimento delle catene logistiche. A chi chiede…

From the height of the COVID-19 pandemic to today (and likely to continue with the sudden rise of Omicron), we—speaking particularly of the U.S.—have seen a massive disruption in global supply chains. The obvious (and correct) answer to ‘why?’  is that labor is the basis of society, and when it—particularly that part involved in moving…

People from all ideological angles will agree that we don’t live with truly free markets in the West, or anything close to it. “Capitalist” societies, or ones regarded as driven by “markets” are actually mixed economies where sectors of industry and economic activity are either overtly planned and directed by the state, or at least…

If you frequent right-libertarian social media circles, you’ve probably run across — more than once — the popular “World Population Living in Extreme Poverty, 1820-2015” meme. It’s a graph that shows high levels of absolute poverty relative to the total world population through the mid-20th century, with a rapid increase starting about 1950 in the…

During one of the many civil wars between patricians and plebians that racked the early Roman Republic in Livy’s account, Menenius Agrippa — a spokesman for the oligarchy that had enclosed the common lands and reduced the Latin peasantry to tenant status and debt peonage — defended the privileges of the landed aristocracy with a…

A common assumption among many people, included many of those who describe themselves as libertarians, is that we live in a free market world. That the market is free and dominated by freely exchanging actors seems a given. Every “market failure” is commonly seen as a market flaw that needs be corrected by the action…

The following practices determine whether a state activity can be categorized as genocide according to the United Nation’s Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of…

Community Land Tax Negates True Ownership …and Indirectly Reinforces State Capitalism Fred begins by denying that occupancy and use is relevant to legitimate appropriation, so long as the “person has title to land, and pays its economic rent to the relevant community”; meeting such criteria amounts, “in effect, [to] occupying the land.” So in the…

Cass Sunstein is such an excellent, if unintentional, parody of liberal goo-gooism that it’s hard to tell him from a creation of The Onion. As proof that “our democratic system structures” are not rigged — whatever Gloomy Guses like Elizabeth Warren and Lawrence Lessig may think — Sunstein (“The American System Isn’t Rigged,” BloombergView, August…

In the farcical, technocratic future society of Vonnegut’s Player Piano, you have to have at least a bachelor’s degree to do even the most menial service jobs — of which there aren’t a lot left. The great majority of jobs have been automated out of existence, and the ranks of the still employed are dominated…

Every time I write a commentary on one of John Stossel’s godawful columns, I tell myself I’ll lay off him for a while. But good lord, this latest wretched little piece of pro-corporate apologetics (“Corporations Have Become Hollywood’s Go-To Villains,” Reason, July 1) is about the worst thing he’s ever done. The biggest challenge any…

In Why the Rich Tolerate Being Looted Jeffrey Tucker argues the rich today act differently than they used to. They wear common clothing, avoid luxurious houses and cars, and even call for higher taxes on themselves. Tucker explains this new phenomenon by drawing upon an essay by Peter Leeson and says, “Property rights are weak today… The…

Speaking at the United Nations in 2006, Hugo Chávez excoriated ex- US President George W. Bush as “the devil.” Chávez waved a copy of Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, catapulting the book onto Amazon’s best-seller list. For his part, Chomsky has repeatedly stated that Chávez ushered a revolutionary break with Venezuela’s political…

In a recent article, Allison Benedikt makes her case that, as the title says, “If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person” (Slate, August 29). She clarifies: “Not bad like murderer bad — but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation’s-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what’s-best-for-your-kid bad.” The proper course of action, she argues, is to take one for…

Kevin Carson: In their equation of progress and productivity with the sheer quantitative mass of capital invested, are stuck in the paleotechnic age.

El estado trabaja para los capitalistas. No trabaja para usted.

Kevin Carson: The state works for the capitalists, not for you.

A Critique of a Critique: An Examination of Kevin Carson’s Contract Feudalism was originally published in the 2006 issue of Economic Notes No. 108 by the Libertarian Alliance, written by Paul Marks.