If right-libertarians have a “comparative advantage,” it’s in writing by-the-numbers puff pieces on “free trade” that borrow the language of Ricardo and Cobden to defend what amounts to a totalitarian corporate lockdown on the world economy. This time it’s Richard Ebeling of the Future of Freedom Foundation (“Free Trade Versus Political Fallacies,” June 15) doing…

Michael Gibson tries to demonstrate the infeasibility of a universal basic income by showing that people actually like to work, as evidenced by the increase of hours relative to increased prosperity witnessed during the 20th and 21st centuries. According to him, a UBI would not work as major disincentives are created, which Gibson shows by…

[Di Kevin Carson. Originale pubblicato su Center for a Stateless Society il 24 maggio 2016 con il titolo “Intellectual Property” Keeps Right on Killing. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna] Gli apologeti abituali dell’agroindustria, come Ron Bailey di Reason, citano continuamente studi che dimostrano come il glifosato, la “componente attiva” di Roundup, abbia un ruolo improbabile nell’insorgenza…

Complaints about “entitled Millennials” are practically an entire literary genre in their own right these days, but their younger siblings are coming in for their share of criticism too. At the Washington Post, Laura Hanby Hudgens (“Do teachers care more about schoolwork than your kids do? Here’s how to fix the apathy problem,” May 26)…

Right-libertarians are routinely awful on economic issues, acting as though big business were — in Ayn Rand’s famous phrase — “a persecuted minority.” But leave it to someone at the Cato Institute to write a column attacking corporate welfare on the grounds that it victimizes the recipients! That’s literally the title: “Corporate Welfare Harms Corporations”…

Throughout American history centralized, federally subsidized infrastructure projects have been a recurring theme for plutocratic interests. Under the Whigs (“internal improvements”) and the Gilded Age GOP (railroad land grants) it was promoted by parties that unabashedly identified themselves as advocates for national commercial interests. But with the rise of the Progressive movement at the turn…

Advertising and big data act as two elements with the capacity to end corporate dominance if the necessary steps can be taken. They act as the quasi-independent creations of the government scourge of mass production, born of the system of the factory, emplaced in the wider social factory of commercial neoliberalism that surrounds the modern…

The more means by which people can act the easier attack becomes and the harder defense becomes. It’s a simple matter of complexity. The attacker only needs to choose one line of attack, the defender needs to secure against all of them. This isn’t just true of small thermal exhaust ports, it’s true in our…

There’s an old saying that when you see a turtle on top of a fencepost, you know it didn’t get up there on its own. In the official capitalist ideology — especially the version that prevails in neoliberal America — great wealth is seen as the reward for superior entrepreneurship, foresight and personal drive. As…

To attribute to money a concept of bestowing freedom upon an individual owner may well exist as a theoretical possibility. Yet ownership is itself a contested concept. As is freedom. By bestowing freedom on the owner, it effectively prompts the dominance of certain types of power to come to the fore of monetary and economic…

At Reason, Brian Doherty tears into Bernie Sanders for opposing what the latter calls “unfettered free trade” (“Bernie Sanders Hates The World’s Poor, and Wants to Hurt Them,” April 5). “This wicked man deliberately wants to make it impossible for Americans to do the thing that historically most guarantees helping the truly poor in the…

You’ve probably had one of Those People say (usually after sidling up to you, looking around to see if anybody’s listening, and prefacing it with an “I’m not racist, but…” disclaimer) “Slavery was 150 years ago — they need to get over it!” Or maybe it’s ethnic cleansing episodes like Tulsa (“90 years ago”), or…

The release of the Panama Papers last weekend — a paper trail of eleven million leaked documents from the Mossack Fonseca global law firm — shows how major global banks move assets of billionaire capitalists and major political figures offshore to protect them from taxation. The revelation has stirred up a political hornets’ nest all…

In an interview with Cenk Uygur March 23, Bernie Sanders noted, “The media is an arm of the ruling class of this country,” going on to point out its concentrated corporate ownership (for example, Disney’s ownership of ABC, Comcast’s of NBC, etc). This corporate media have a vested interest in not covering real news in…

In a Washington Post article (“What rich countries get wrong about poverty,” March 28), Ana Swanson summarizes an argument by Caroline Freund, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, as follows: “Blaming the super-rich for global poverty would be a mistake.” In fact it might reflect an erroneous “First World mindset.” (Note: I…

Download a PDF copy of Kevin Carson’s full C4SS Study: Center for a Stateless Society Paper No. 20 (Spring 2016) Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real (With Special Regard to Paul Mason’s Post-Capitalism) I. Capitalist Techno-Utopianism from Daniel Bell On II. Categories of Leftist Techno-Utopianism III. Other Non-Capitalist Techno-Utopianisms John Holloway Michel Bauwens Accelerationism IV. Analysis: Comparison of the…

Download a PDF copy of Kevin Carson’s full C4SS Study: Center for a Stateless Society Paper No. 20 (Spring 2016) Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real (With Special Regard to Paul Mason’s Post-Capitalism) I. Capitalist Techno-Utopianism from Daniel Bell On II. Categories of Leftist Techno-Utopianism III. Other Non-Capitalist Techno-Utopianisms John Holloway Michel Bauwens Accelerationism IV. Analysis: Comparison of the…

At Reason, Steve Chapman (“Bernie Sanders’ Free Trade Mythology,” March 19) faults Bernie Sanders for saying: “Do you know that in 1960, Detroit, Michigan, was one of the wealthiest cities in America? Flint, Michigan, was a prosperous city. But then what happened is corporate America said, ‘Why do I want to pay somebody in Michigan…

Neither Bernie Sanders, the self-described democratic socialist, nor Donald Trump, the self-described terrific businessman, knows squat about economics. If their polices were enacted, regular working people would be harmed. This is most clear with trade. Sanders and Trump are flaming protectionists, which means they peddle perhaps the oldest, most-thoroughly discredited economics doctrine ever spoken. (An…

Download a PDF copy of Kevin Carson’s full C4SS Study: Center for a Stateless Society Paper No. 20 (Spring 2016) Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real (With Special Regard to Paul Mason’sPost-Capitalism) I. Capitalist Techno-Utopianism from Daniel Bell On II. Categories of Leftist Techno-Utopianism III. Other Non-Capitalist Techno-Utopianisms John Holloway Michel Bauwens Accelerationism IV. Analysis: Comparison of the Two…