I have a saying that goes something like: ‘I don’t trust anybody who thinks taxation is theft but profit isn’t.’ The former is a common sentiment among libertarians left and right, who argue, like Michael Huemer, that “[w]hen the government ‘taxes’ citizens, what this means is that the government demands money from each citizen, under…

[Hear an in-depth discussion on this article and its topics in this episode of The Enragés] Emma Goldman is someone who is frequently associated with anarchism as a historical phenomenon. Her mix of anti-state activism, radical support for feminism and free love movements in the early 20th century, and her radiant life of praxis for…

If one’s goal is to have productive exchanges when the word capitalism is thrown into play, they must stop doing two things: naively assuming people are more or less on the same page when the term is used; and suggesting that one or another meaning of the word is completely wrong. Some use the term…

[Hear an in-depth discussion on this article and its topics in this episode of The Enragés] The philosophy of Max Stirner (1806-1856 C.E.), or Egoism as it is sometimes crudely called, essentially addresses the relationship between the individual and alienation; to use Stirner’s language, the alienation between the individual and their property. Property can be…

Money and Your Freedom Dear Ron and Laura: Don has been East for a while and dropped in last night. Among other things he brought me up to date on your thinking and plants. I knew that my blast, when I was out to see you, would upset you. But I thought [it] worth while…

An Abolitionist Approach to Reactionary Violence: Lessons from the Kyle Rittenhouse Case On August 25th, 2020, Kyle Rittenhouse shot two people dead and injured one at a protest against the police shooting of Jacob Blake. Though this event (and the trial proceedings that follow) will be the main focus of this article, my analysis and…

Reflections on Socio-Economic Evolution Aside from various forms of robbery, legal and illegal, there are three methods by which humans get sustenance in their relations with others—parasitism, benevolence, and reciprocity. Parasitism is the inescapable relation between mother and child which is absolutely essential for the prolongation of life. It is characterized by consuming what one…

[Hear an in-depth discussion on this article and its topics in this episode of The Enragés] There is an odd side to the American Dream. One deemed worthless long ago, by the Soviets, by the Maoists, by the BPP. There exists a culture of greed. Though most people lack an in-depth understanding of economic terms…

It’s best to start this piece off by admitting that I am not particularly tech-savvy. I am a cheerleader for open-source, peer-to-peer, decentralized, appropriate, etc. technology, but, otherwise, I am only about as knowledgeable about this stuff as your average zoomer [1]. However, some things in the technological and digital world appear quite obvious to…

Anarchism Applied to Economics Value is the exchange equivalency of something measured in terms of another thing. The fundamental quality upon which value depends is utility in satisfying desire. In economics, utility doesn’t mean the ‘real’ or ‘actual’ ability of a thing to accomplish or assist in accomplishing a result, but means the human estimate…

Right-libertarian apologists for capitalism seem to have a thing about using holidays as vehicles for their talking points. Every Thanksgiving, Reason trots out John Stossel’s ahistorical buncombe about how communism almost killed the Pilgrims before private property saved them from starvation (despite my debunking it every year). On Christmas, we get apologetics for Ebenezer Scrooge,…

Eric Laursen. The Operating System: An Anarchist Theory of the Modern State. Foreword by Maia Ramnath (AK Press, 2021). Much of the ground Laursen covers in this book is already familiar to most anarchists. He does an adequate job, or better, at all of it. His treatment of the ideological hegemony of the state is…

In a recent interview, economist Bryan Caplan gave his usual right-libertarian spiel about the wonders of the free labor market (something that definitely exists under capitalism), complete with a bizarre praise of entrepreneurial schemes like Uber mixed with his own particular enthusiasm for open borders. At one point he’s asked to comment on Hans-Hermann Hoppe…

Unless you’ve been under a rock the past month or so or are a total social media abstainer, you’ve seen some of the worst people on earth whining about how “nobody wants to work any more!” Indeed, so great is the outrage of many that only putting angry signs in the window of their business…

In this episode of Mutual Exchange Radio, host Zachary Woodman interviews Jesse Spafford. Jesse is a Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin working on the project REAL – Rights and Egalitarianism. His research is focused on social and political philosophy with particular attention paid to debates between libertarians, socialists, and anarchists over the moral status…

View or download a PDF copy of Kevin Carson’s C4SS Study: The Methodenstreit Revisited: Marginalism and the Lost Power Context The Methodenstreit was a long-running and fairly acrimonious debate over the methodology of economic science, between Carl Menger (posthumously regarded as the founder of Austrian economics) and Gustav Schmoller of the German Historical School, which eventually…

​An Interview With Kevin Carson Today, as you can see from the title, we bring you the first of two parts of an interview with Kevin Carson, a senior fellow at C4SS who holds the Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory. Recently there has been a translation of both his first book into Spanish, Studies…

[Hear an in-depth discussion on this article and its topics in this and this episode of The Enragés] Mastering most things humans do requires lifetimes of practice. Woodworking, gardening, and painting are just a few crafts whose histories stretch back thousands of years. But modern telecommunication, the act of communicating nearly instantaneously with someone from afar,…

The original Constitution, as designed by the framers in Philadelphia, has often been seen as guaranteeing individual freedom from government repression. Many of Donald Trump’s critics see him as undermining our nation’s foundational constitutional principles, and people and groups from Joe Biden to Black Lives Matter are often seen as trying to restore them. But…

Traducción al español: La fatal arrogancia de Hayek View or download a PDF copy of Kevin Carson’s C4SS Study: Hayek’s Fatal Conceit Oskar Lange famously said, against the background of the debates over Ludwig von Mises’ economic calculation argument, that a statue of Mises should be erected in the planning ministry of a future socialist…