All Landlords Are Terrible Landlords As an object lesson in support of his thesis that “government is a terrible landlord,” Steven Greenhut (Reason, Dec. 1) recounts his experience trying to get action from his county government over complaints of a poorly maintained, overgrown vacant lot owned by the fire department.  I started making calls to…

    The Undeclared Condominium The USSR As Partner in a Conservative World Order   Introduction Although the Right has typically framed the Soviet Union and “International Communism” as an aggressive and subversive revolutionary force, the reality is — at the very least — considerably more nuanced. In fact, it would be more accurate to…

I recently stumbled across a screenshot of this classic old tweet from Arthur Chu: Whenever such an observation appears on social media, it inevitably provokes a storm of responses along the lines of “workers wouldn’t be able to make anything if they had to make their own parts and tools.” For example, as part of…

“Moral Equivalency” is the Only Alternative to Nihilism. Israeli President Isaac Herzog said, in the aftermath of the October 7 terror attack, that  as far as the military is concerned, there is little difference between Gaza’s civilian population and Hamas, which has governed the besieged territory since 2007. “It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians…

At Reason (“Did NYC Just Kneecap Airbnb?”), Liz Wolfe seems to be diversifying beyond her normal focus on tech platform apologetics and crowding onto the turf of resident landlord whisperer Christian Britschgi. I confess my first reading of the title brought a smile to my face — probably not the effect Wolfe intended — as…

  Traduzione italiana: Io, la matita: Una Rilettura. Introduction There is probably no libertarian polemic more widely distributed and more familiar, or held in higher esteem, than “I, Pencil: My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read.” It originally appeared in the December 1958 issue of The Freeman. It has since been circulated as…

At Pluralistic, Cory Doctorow comments on libertarian elitists like Bryan Caplan and Jason Brennan, who argue for restricting the franchise because most people “Just Don’t Understand Economics”:  When you compare the views of the average person to the views of the average PhD economist, you find that the public sharply disagrees with such obvious truths…

Recently on Facebook, left-libertarian activist Brianna Coyle posted: Radical idea: The amount of freedom someone has in their life shouldn’t be dependent on how much money they have, or whether or not they own property. “Freedom of association” in the context of property rights is a privilege afforded only to those who own property. Freedom…

The Woke Nightmare That Doesn’t End! It’s in commercials! It’s on storefronts! It’s on social media, on television shows and streaming platforms! We may not be able to define what “woke” is, but, dammit! Like any obscenity, we know it when we see it! They’re ramming it down our throats and shoving it up our…

At the Hampton Institute, Shi Sanyazi argues that “Housing is Determined By Class Power and Profit, Not ‘Supply and Demand’”:  “The truth is that… our conditions as tenants are determined by the balance of class power, not the balance of supply and demand.  I know what they mean, of course. In the economic discourse between…

Steven Greenhut, apparently filling in for Christian Britschgi as Reason’s resident landlord whisperer, recently voiced his concern that “The COVID-19 Pandemic Permanently Damaged Property Rights.”  I know proppity is a word to conjure with among right-libertarians. From my anarchist perspective, the term — as opposed to possession — carries far less weight. But I regard…

Infantile Radicalism A mature person is one who has outgrown childish emotional impulses. He has learnt about himself and his environment thru personal experience, and has become able to control his emotional feelings in a rational manner. He has emerged from the sheltered dream world of childhood and been weaned to face reality. His reactions…

Di Kevin Carson. Articolo originale pubblicato il 26 aprile 2016 con il titolo Capitalism Comes in Many Flavors? Traduzione di Enrico Sanna. In un recente commento pubblicato sul Washington Post dal titolo La crisi d’identità del capitalismo americano (26 maggio 2016), Steven Pearlstein fa una tassonomia del  capitalismo che, a suo dire, “esiste in tante…

David Harvey. A Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse (London and New York: Verso, 2023). David Harvey may be familiar to some from his background as a Marxist geographer focusing on neoliberalism and uneven development, or for his development of Henri Lefebvre’s “Right to the City” concept. The Grundrisse itself amounts, more or less, to a voluminous…

Psychological Motives Behind Collectivism Collectivism is a doctrine of the “crowd mind”, a philosophy of incompetency. To those who have ever been the losers in the unequal, privileged, and despotic struggle for existence, who have not felt the glory and satisfaction of conquering obstacles and the achievement of aims, the thought of peace and security…

Karl Widerquist’s “A Dilemma for Libertarianism” deserves to be better known. It exposes a contradiction in natural rights libertarianism, a set of principles held by those who seek to build a capitalist political philosophy on the basis of property rights.  These principles typically include: That individuals can legitimately own property if the property was justly…

Throughout the world, the word “anarchism” has a variety of meanings. When most people think of “anarchism,” the first things that come to their mind are fire-setting bomb throwers and masked rioters smashing Starbucks and McDonald’s windows. In the popular imagination, anarchism is synonymous with chaos. Armed with this image of anarchism as a nihilistic,…

I just finished reading The Conquest of Bread by the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921). The book inspired Catalonia syndicalists in the Spanish Civil War, Magonism in Mexico, and the Occupy movement but still… I wasn’t expecting anything, I thought I’d be very bored because the book was written in 1892, I was sure it…

Ensayo escrito por Kevin Carson. Título original: Hayek’s Fatal Conceit Versión en español realizada por Kathiana Thomas • Versión pdf A4 • • Versión pdf compaginado • Oskar Lange es recordado por haber dicho, durante los debates acerca del argumento del cálculo económico de Ludwing von Mises, que se debería erigir una estatua de Mises…

La Tragedia della Proprietà Privata e la Farsa della sua Difesa Saggio di Kevin Carson. Pubblicato originariamente il 19 agosto 2020. Titolo originale: Capitalist Nursery Fables: The Tragedy of Private Property, and the Farce of Its Defense. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna. Scarica qui la versione pdf Introduzione Da quando è comparsa la società di classe,…