Dylann Roof, who murdered nine black parishioners because they were black has been charged by the central government with committing hate crimes. Words cannot adequately express the evil of Roof’s actions at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and no decent person would want to say anything that be could possibly be construed…

In Free Market Fairness [1] John Tomasi lays out a way in which the gap between broadly libertarian (or classical liberal) and high liberal (or liberal egalitarian) political philosophies can be bridged. Since F. A. Hayek’s methodologically individualist rejection of the concept of social justice, and Robert Nozick’s liberty-based rejection of egalitarian distributive justice, there…

“You call yourself free? Your dominant thought I want to hear, and not that you have escaped from a yoke. Are you one of those who had the right to escape from a yoke? There are some who threw away their last value when they threw away their servitude. Free from what? As if that mattered to Zarathustra! But…

This election cycle’s crop of uninspiring presidential hopefuls, now including Texas Senator Ted Cruz, must be a relief to those favoring mass disillusionment with electoral politics. No candidate, Rand Paul included, represents a convincing alternative to the status quo. Contrast this with the current president, whose appeals to “hope” and “change” convinced many Americans of…

David Graeber. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (Brooklyn and London: Melville House, 2015). This book is, properly speaking, not a book at all, but a collection of essays loosely clustered around the common theme of bureaucracy. Of the material in the book, only the long introductory essay…

As a libertarian masochist who keeps up with the regular by-the-numbers attacks on libertarianism at Alternet and Salon, I almost dared to hope for something at least marginally better from Robert Kuttner at The American Prospect (“The Libertarian Delusion,” Winter 2015). I was disappointed. “The stubborn appeal of the libertarian idea persists,” Kuttner writes, “despite…

How to write an Alternet criticism of libertarianism: 1) Cite an unpleasant aspect of Ayn Rand’s philosophy; 2) use the news topic of the day as an exemplar of that unpleasantness; and 3) treat it as somehow symbolic of the fundamental nature of the entire libertarian movement. In this case, I’m not so much interested in…

The Molinari Institute is pleased to announce a new interdisciplinary, open-access libertarian academic journal, the MOLINARI REVIEW, edited by me. We’re looking for articles, sympathetic or critical, in and on the libertarian tradition, broadly understood as including classical liberalism, individualist anarchism, social anarchism, anarcho-capitalism, anarcho-communism, anarcho-syndicalism, anarcha-feminism, panarchism, voluntaryism, mutualism, agorism, distributism, Austrianism, Georgism, public…

Nel suo classico Quel che si Vede e quel che non si Vede, Frédéric Bastiat osserva: “Tra un cattivo economista e un buon economista c’è una sola differenza: Il cattivo economista considera unicamente gli effetti visibili; il buon economista prende in considerazione sia gli effetti visibili che quelli che andrebbero previsti.” Mark J. Perry, dell’American…

You may be familiar with Murray Rothbard’s article “Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature.” Hans-Hermann Hoppe, beloved eminence grise at LewRockwell.com, takes things a step further and makes belief in human inequality the defining characteristic of right-libertarianism (“A Realistic Libertarianism,” Sept. 30). This isn’t just a hill he’s willing to die on, but a hill…

C4SS has teamed up with the Distro of the Libertarian Left. The Distro produces and distribute zines and booklets on anarchism, market anarchist theory, counter-economics, and other movements for liberation. For every copy of Lysander Spooner‘s “Natural Law” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Lysander Spooner‘s “Natural Law“. $1.50 for the first copy. $0.75 for…

Parsing Political Divides in the Mainstream and in Anarchism CNBC describes the Corporate Perception Indicator as “a far-reaching survey of business executives and the general population from 25 markets,” “research firm Penn Schoen Berland survey[ing] 25,012 individuals and 1,816 business executives.” The results of the survey show quite unsurprisingly that the general public associates government…

On September 18, a military police officer at Lapa, east zone of Sao Paulo, Brazil, killed street vendor Carlos Augusto Muniz Braga. Footage of the tragedy surfaced and was viralized, showing the moment the police officer shoots point blank at the victim. Carlos moved away but fell down shortly afterwards. What was his crime? Witnesses…

About the only thing A. Barton Hinkle gets right about the Industrial Workers of the World in “Meet the Left-Wing Extremist Running for U.S. Senate” is not calling them the “International Workers of the World”. Although at least Reason likening the “Wobblies”, whose founding antedates the Russian Revolution by over a decade, to “warmed-over Lenin” is not the…

With the United States on the verge of another war in the Middle East — or is it merely the continuation of a decades-long war? — we libertarians need to reacquaint ourselves with our intellectual heritage of peace, antimilitarism, and anti-imperialism. This rich heritage is too often overlooked and frequently not appreciated at all. That…

I’d like to first thank Mr. Lock for his thoughtful, well-mannered observations on my little piece. Commenters such as Mr. Lock honor me with their courteous thoughts and, in my humble view, raise the bar for discussion and debate by refraining from ad hominem and from attempts to impute motives; dealing with my points and…

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 Collected Writings of Renzo Novatore (2012, Ardent Press), edited by Wolfi Landstriecher is split up chronologically and features most of Novatore’s known work at the time. It most notably features his longest and relatively best known work “Towards the Creative Nothing” which takes up a big portion of the book at thirty-five pages. In…

“Our leaders invent nothing but new taxes, and conquer nothing but the pockets of their subjects.” — Thomas Hodgskin Is government the source of our rights? I fear that today many people would say yes. Not infrequently it is said that the government or the Constitution grants us freedom of speech or press or the…

In recent weeks both Thoughts on Liberty and Reason have published articles on the Millennial generation’s social and political attitudes, as they relate to libertarianism. One is a good example of how libertarians should approach Millennials. The other most decidedly is not. Let’s start with how to. Rachel Burger, at Thoughts on Liberty (“Millennials And Left-Libertarianism…