C4SS Feed 44 presents “What Laissez Faire?” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Sheldon Richman, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. What, then, is this system called “capitalism”? It can’t be the free market because we have no free market. Today the hand of government is all over the economy — from money…

In early September, Reuters reported on a new Federal Reserve survey showing widening wealth and income gaps in the United States. “All of the income growth,” Reuters reports, “was concentrated among the top earners …  with the top 3 percent accounting for 30.5 percent of all income.” The Fed survey will no doubt disconcert those…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Carlos Clemente‘s “Vulture Funds vs. Argentina” read by Christopher King and edited by Nick Ford. The most outrageous fallacy in this line of reasoning is the conflation of the political class of a country with its citizenry at large. Whenever vultures succeed in collecting the full value on defaulted government bonds, the…

On the liberal wing of American politics, US Senator Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) success in capturing the love of millions is astounding. Her image as savior of indebted workers and unheard voices in America strikes a note with those concerned about reduced class mobility, and rightly so. Consider Warren’s speech introducing emergency legislation to allow refinancing of student loans….

In a startling article, Daniel McCarthy, the admirable editor of The American Conservative magazine (TAC), writes, “Successive British and American empires created and upheld the world order in which [classical] liberalism could flourish.” In other words, as he writes in “Why Liberalism Means Empire,” “Liberalism and empire reinforced one another in manifold ways.” Therefore, if…

The political economy of Benjamin Tucker represents an alloy of its major influences, synthesizing the work of radical thinkers such as Josiah Warren, William B. Greene, Ezra Heywood, and Lysander Spooner to create a mature, comprehensive individualist anarchism. From Heywood came Tucker’s trademark analysis of the wrongs of rent, interest, and profit, “follow[ing] closely the…

The book I will discuss below develops and defends the idea of law without a state. The book’s blurb tells us the following: This book elaborates and defends the idea of law without the state. Animated by a vision of peaceful, voluntary cooperation as a social ideal and building on a careful account of non-aggression,…

Why am I an Anarchist? That is the question which the editor of The Twentieth Century has requested me to answer for his readers. I comply; but, to be frank, I find it a difficult task. If the editor or one of his contributors had only suggested a reason why I should be anything other…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Dawie Coetzee‘s “There is More to Industrial Enclosure than Patents” read and edited by Nick Ford. I wonder about the motivation in forgoing these patents, given that many are relatively toothless. Tesla obviously wishes to play the heroic underdog, to imply solidarity with the open-source movement despite operating in an industry legally…

C4SS Feed 44 presents David S. D’Amato‘s “Avowals of Selfhood: Review of Egoism” read and edited by Nick Ford. For the egoist, individualism must precede anarchism, for the affirmation of self is the source of the denial of all authority — individualism being the more general thing, anarchism a specific implication. Any anarchism that sets itself…

“Man the terror alert for London has just been upped I don’t wanna go out now :(”, the text from my friend read. The recent news that Britain’s government has raised its terrorism alert level to “severe” unsurprisingly prompted a renewed climate of fear, reflected on social media and in major news outlets. Yet even…

Antiwar.com is having its annual fundraising drive. Antiwar.com is definitely a site worth donating to and visiting daily. Its been an indispensable source of information and opinion for me. There are always interesting editorials worth reading and plenty of news to inform you. Not to mention that it’s a single issue site that offers perspectives…

Amnesty International declared that the sentence passed by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, on a case in which the Guatemalan government did not investigate the tragic murder of a teenager, tells the whole world that violence against women will not be tolerated. Maria Isabel Veliz Franco was 15 when she was sexually abused, tortured and…

Anarchism and hierarchy have a tricky and messy relationship. Some anarchists proclaim to be against all hierarchy (sometimes even defining anarchism as such) and others proclaim they are simply against the state and don’t care about hierarchy itself. I believe individualist anarchism, rightly understood falls somewhere in between these extremes. Individualist anarchism, in short, is…

The Obama administration recently announced a policy of limited intervention in Iraq, using drone strikes to stave off conquest of Kurdish autonomous areas by ISIS. The main US ally on the ground is Massoud Barzani’s Kurdistan Regional Government, and US support against ISIS is limited to Kurdish areas inside Iraq. Barzani’s main competitor for the…

In Ferguson, Missouri, USA Michael Brown was gunned down by a local police officer and a wave of protests rightfully took over the town, demanding justice and an end to police abuse and militarization But what about the Brazilian Fergusons? In Brazil, police are routinely abusive, especially against poor young people from cities’s peripheries. Their use of…

I love to backpack, surf, hike and climb. When I’m not able to engage in these pursuits, I sometimes find myself watching video of others adventuring in beautiful, remote locales. It helps me to hold on to some of those joyous and motivating travel feelings. I enjoy footage from decades past, when things were wilder,…

C4SS Feed 44 presents “Anarchism Without Hyphens” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Karl Hess, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. But anarchism is not an ideological movement. It is an ideological statement. It says that all people have the capacity for liberty. It says that all anarchists want liberty. And then it is…

People are drawn to a commotion. In the marketplace of ideas, winners are often simply the loudest and as anarchists we hold ideas inherently more combative and attention grabbing than those regularly seen on a college campus. This is precisely what makes the campus perfect for radical activism, and was the philosophy which guided the…

The protests, police violence, and repression in Ferguson have sparked nationwide conversations about police militarization and misconduct. There’s some incredibly promising potential here, as more and more people become aware of the brutality of the modern criminal justice system. However, there are also some potential pitfalls that deserve cautious examination. First, the good. Popular commentators…