This article won the 2011 Beth A. Hoffman Memorial Prize for Economic Writing. Although critics on the left are very astute in describing the evils of present-day society, they usually fail to understand either the root of those problems (government intervention) or their solution (the operation of a freed market). In Progressive commentary on energy,…

Frankly, I have a hard time understanding what goes on in the heads of “progressives.” On the one hand, they constantly complain — and rightfully so — about the power of big business and corporate domination of our society and economy. But on the other, their rhetoric is full of nostalgia for the government policies…

Back in the ’90s, the Financial Times referred to the G8 countries and the Washington Consensus they enforced as a “de facto world government.” As if we needed any reminder that such a global corporate regime exists in practice, consider the Trans-Pacific Partnership currently under negotiation. Although in theory the authority of all treaties signed…

In 399 BCE, for the crime of “corrupting the youth” and undermining belief in the customary gods of Athens, Socrates was sentenced to drink a cup of hemlock. If the goal was to silence Socrates’ voice, it’s safe to say that plan backfired in a big way. The story of Socrates stands second in the…

How many times have you heard a politician, addressing some issue of regulatory policy, speak of “all the stakeholders” being at “the table?” That phrase has become popular recently, in particular among sponsors of maximalist copyright law proposals like SOPA and ACTA. “All the stakeholders had seats at the table — the RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft…

As if the C4SS vs IP story wasn’t weird enough, it has taken a bizarre and unexpected turn in the past twenty four hours. The story so far: On September 13th, 2013, C4SS’s student activist network, Students for a Stateless Society (S4SS), published a letter dissociating from the S4SS UGent chapter for violating and activating…

“You wouldn’t steal a car, you wouldn’t steal a handbag, you wouldn’t steal a television, you wouldn’t steal a movie.” Sounds familiar doesn’t it? For years the copyright industry has been telling us that piracy is a crime. However, recently another supposedly heinous copyright crime has been added to the list: exposing racism. On September…

Libertarian Harry Browne famously wrote that government “knows how to break your legs, hand you a crutch, and say, ‘See, if it weren’t for the government, you wouldn’t be able to walk.’” But with deficits and recessions looming, governments have been getting stingier when it comes to handing out crutches. The U.S. House of Representatives recently…

The Obama administration has announced the formation of a panel of “outside experts” to review the NSA’s surveillance practices. And a wide-ranging, diverse collection of experts they are; when it comes to institutional backgrounds and viewpoints, they span the entire spectrum from A to B. They remind me a bit of the space shuttle crew…

If there’s one thing the libertarian establishment — that is, mainstream libertarian organizations whose main activity is lobbying the state for “free market reform” — loves, it’s so-called “privatization.” An article by Paul Buchheit at Truth-out.com (“Eight Ways Privatization has Failed America,” Aug. 5) treats the failure of privatization as a reflection on the limits…

There’s an occupational category called “futurist,” which involves attempting to guess the likely future based on extrapolations from current trends and their interactions. Now, many people can spot the major currents of change in our time. It’s when a number of those currents intersect, producing all kinds of whorls and eddies and butterfly effects, that…

O sistema de medicina dos Estados Unidos é corrupto, ineficaz e desnecessariamente caro. Esses resultados decorrem da violência do estado em favor da elite politicamente bem relacionada (especificamente seguradoras privadas, médicos, empresas farmacêuticas e de equipamento médico). Escassez artificial, superfaturamento, má alocação de financiamento de pesquisa e supressão de terapias alternativas (não patenteáveis) podem ser…

In the late 19th century, the decentralizing potential of the Second Industrial Revolution — the introduction of electrical power into industry — was a common theme in social analysis. The idea was that electrical power was destroying the technical rationale for large factories. The main reason for the Dark Satanic Mills of the First Industrial…

Since November, more than a thousand Bangladeshi garment workers have perished in two tragic factory calamities: a fire in Tazreen and a building collapse in Savar, outside the capital, Dhaka. Bangladesh is a major exporter of apparel to the West and “is set to become the world’s largest apparel exporter over the next few years,”…

Of all the self-styled libertarian commentaries attempting to put the Bangladesh garment factory tragedy in “perspective,” Benjamin Powell’s is probably the worst (“Sweatshops In Bangladesh Improve The Lives Of Their Workers, And Boost Growth,” Forbes, May 2). In Bangladesh, Powell writes, “some 4,500 garment factories employ approximately 4 million workers. In the grand scheme of…

The American medical system is corrupt, ineffective and unnecessarily costly. These outcomes are due to state violence on behalf of the politically connected elite (namely private insurers, physicians, pharmaceutical and medical device companies). Artificial scarcity, price-gouging, misallocation of research funding and the suppression of alternative (non-patentable) therapies can be ameliorated

There’s nothing quite so funny as the sight of the authoritarian functionaries of a dying order trying to suppress a revolution they don’t understand — and failing miserably. The State Department’s attempt to censor 3-D printable gun files from DEFCAD is the latest — and one of the most gut-bustingly hilarious — attempts by the…

In a speech last month about proposed gun control legislation, President Obama decried opponents’ attempts to encourage “suspicion about government.” “The government’s us,” he responded. “These officials are elected by you. They are constrained as I am constrained, by a system that our founders put in place.” But if government were “us,” why would we…

In every city and in most towns there still exist such bastions of communism so radical as to make even dastardly terrorist cells like the Pirate Bay pale by comparison. For in these crooked dens one might find not just the free sharing of information but non-consumable physical goods as well. Some even allow you…

Carson: Capitalism may have many varieties, types or flavors, but they all have one thing in common – they have nothing to do with a free market.