If you follow the news, you regularly hear of various treaties — GATT’s Uruguay Round, NAFTA, CAFTA, TPP — described as “Free Trade Agreements” whose purposes are to “reduce trade barriers.” This is a lie. Without exception, such agreements actually strengthen the one form of protectionism most vital to safeguarding corporate interests against competition in…

Qualche giorno fa mi è capitato di leggere l’articolo di Christopher Dickey “What the D-Day Veteran Told Obama at the 70th Anniversary Commemoration” (The Daily Beast, 6 giugno). Tra i presenti alla giornata dei veterani, assieme ad Obama, c’era il presidente francese Hollande e quello russo Putin. Per lo più, l’articolo parlava dei discorsi dei…

Eric Blattberg, writing for VenturBeat, reports (“Tesla Motors: Please infringe on our patents for the greater good,” June 12) that electric car manufacturer Tesla will henceforth permit all comers to exploit its innovations. “Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology,” says Tesla CEO Elon Musk. I…

America’s criminal code is massive, criminalizing a litany of seemingly harmless and ethical actions. In an excellent 2013 article in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Paul Larkin explores this overcriminalization through the lens of public choice theory. Public choice theory uses the assumptions and methods of economics to study the behavior of…

Max Borders (“The Big Box Effect,” The Freeman, May 14), in one of the most perverse exercises in framing ever, portrays Big Box stores and sprawl as examples of spontaneous order, and the older style of mixed-use development as the domain of statist control freaks. He even misappropriates phraseology from James Scott — of all people —…

C4SS Senior Fellow and Chair, Sheldon Richman, interviewed on the Rare show “Swapped Taliban detainees: Terrorists or prisoners of war?” hosted by contributor Kurt Wallace. https://soundcloud.com/rare-us/interview-with-sheldon-richman

“Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.” This blithe, sunny-sounding phrase, attributed to former Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank, is frequently called up in the service of the advancing march of the American state. It sounds very nice. Certainly government is one of the things people do together….

Al Jazeera recently covered Chattanooga, Tennessee’s high-speed Internet service (“As Internet behemoths rise, Chattanooga highlights a different path,” June 6). The “Gig,” as it’s affectionately known, operates at one gigabyte per second — about fifty times the U.S. average — charging each customer about $70 a month. It uses a preexisting fiber-optic infrastructure originally built…

A few days ago I read Christopher Dickey’s “What the D-Day Veteran Told Obama at the 70th Anniversary Commemoration” (The Daily Beast, June 6). In attendance along with Obama were French president Hollande and Russian president Putin. Most of the article discusses the leaders’ speeches of the day and the awkwardness of having both Obama and…

[Hear an in-depth discussion on this article and its topics in this episode of The Enragés] Three stories illustrate my own political ignorance. First, I’m walking down what I think are secret hallways in the Capitol building, at least where normal tours aren’t allowed to go. I’m with a Republican aide, who’s leading me to…

A couple of recent news items demonstrate once again — if such a demonstration is necessary — that “consent of the governed” as a source of legitimacy for representative democracy is absurd and impossible. In North Carolina, governor Pat McRory signed the Energy Modernization Act, which includes a provision criminalizing (reduced in the final version,…

Roman Catholic leaders from Cardinal Maradiaga to Pope Francis himself have made news this year in their criticisms of supposed free market economies, likening them to a form of idolatry that exploits and denies access to the poor. Because Catholic social teachings emphasize stewardship and aid to the less fortunate, clergymen such as Maradiaga have…

The “fog of war” is a reference to the moral chaos on the battlefield as well as the rampant confusion. Individuals kill others for no other reason than that they are ordered to. Things deemed unambiguously bad in civilian life are authorized and even lauded in war. The killing and maiming of acknowledged innocents —…

The release and return of American POW Bowe Bergdahl started off as simply cause for relief and celebration for his family and friends. Thanks to politics, it keeps taking on additional layers of interpretation for others. The revelation that Bergdahl questioned the continuing mission in Afghanistan prior to his capture has many of the same people who usually…

Few reading this will find it in anyway a novel insight that the Drug War has always been about control. The elimination of drugs was a useful narrative, but it’s one which has fallen into disfavor. As we learn what little threat these banned chemicals pose, all that is left is the gripping fist of…

So, two 12-year-olds allegedly stab another 12-year old multiple times in an effort to call forth creepy fictional character “Slender Man.” Two things about that should be immediately obvious to sane adults: The two kids are kids, and the two kids are, in a word, crazy. But an allegedly sane adult has chosen to charge…

Discussions of technological change in the media are generally coupled with discussions of technological unemployment and the increasing polarization of wealth. A good example is a piece by Eduardo Porter in the New York Times (“Tech Leaps, Job Losses and Rising Inequality,” April 15). Amid talk of all the technological wonders issuing from Silicon Valley,…

This week, the chemist Alexander Shulgin died. Hailed/demonized by the press as the “Godfather of ecstasy”, Shulgin was a pioneer in the science of mind altering substances and an outspoken drug advocate. From a distant enough perspective, Alexander Shulgin was just a chemist often under the employ of the federal government and chemical companies. His…

In recent weeks, I’ve seen multiple stories about deaths in prisons. These deaths were all preventable and easily attributable to prison conditions. Let’s examine a few of these incidents. According to the Miami Herald, “Florida’s Department of Corrections is facing a third potential criminal probe in the wake of another inmate death at a state…

If I had to describe “The Conscience of an Anarchist” in one word, it would be beautiful. Gary Chartier’s 100 page anarchist manifesto concisely and elegantly explains the way anarchists analyze public policy discussions, such as foreign policy, the drug war, regulation, subsidies, education, the two party system, infrastructure, the criminal justice system, police violence,…