Infamous British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher espoused a fusionist ideology which sought to weld pseudo-individualism to the traditionalist collectivism of the nuclear family and the nation state in a manner not unlike her American counterpart Ronald Reagan. Unsurprisingly, this ideological chimera led to an incoherent world view that rhetorically championed the freedom of the individual,…

At Reason, Elizabeth Nolan Brown (“Feds Make a Pharma Patent Grab”) gives new meaning to the term “grab.” Most people would consider a state-granted monopoly on the right to produce something to be in itself a grab. But not Brown.  The Biden administration recently invoked the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, in claiming the right to…

In the previous installment of this column, I discussed Walter Block’s repeated defense of “voluntary slavery contracts” as one example of his long record of defending economic phenomena as “voluntary,” regardless of the role of background or systemic violence in making them possible. But it didn’t stop there. Consider his defenses, just within the past…

Randy Barnett is arguably on the short list of the libertarians most influential in American public life. His legal scholarship has informed challenges to state power in the courts; indeed, he himself has argued before the Supreme Court. He has been an active participant in intra-libertarian theoretical debates for decades. And his book The Structure of…

At The Freeman, Cody Cook asks “Was Jesus a Friend to Big Business?” He begins by quoting several of the many prima facie condemnations of the wealthy in the Gospels, and notes their troubling implications for the sort of libertarianism (pro-wealthy, pro-business, and pro-big business) both he and The Freeman represent. With such strong statements…

  The Rentier Economy, Vulture Capital, and Enshittification   There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of…

The Poverty of Right-Libertarian Cliches Right-libertarians, it seems, have a love affair with Garrett Hardin and his so-called “tragedy of the commons.” It’s a principle to which they return, time and again. But as a foundation, it is historically illiterate; and the structure which they erect upon it is conceptually incoherent. Take, for example, Saul…

Anarchism is an odd beast and effective advocacy takes a multitude of forms. During the past year, the team behind the Center for a Stateless Society has been focused on exploring how we can best explain and defend the idea of vibrant social cooperation without aggression, oppression, or centralized authority. With limited resources, both financially…

At Real Clear Markets, John Tamny — FreedomWorks Vice President and Director of the FreedomWorks Center for Economic Freedom — manages to fit an impressive number of fallacious talking points into one column. FreedomWorks, as you might know, is the outfit founded by Dick Armey — the crook extraordinaire who (along with fellow dumpster fires…

Moloch, Prèmiere partie, par Kevin Carson. Article original: Moloch – Mass-Production Industry as a Statist Construct. Traduction française par Leuk. I – Les origines de la production Sloaniste de masse Une bifurcation La centralisation de la production durant la Révolution Industrielle, et la concentration de la production mécanique dans de grandes usines, fût principalement le…

Sanders’ book centers on two tasks facing the American people. He states them at the outset. First: These Americans [the predominantly younger voters who supported Sanders’ candidacy] understand that proposals that tinker around the edges are an insufficient response to the enormous crises we face. For them, there is a rapidly growing recognition that this…

  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…

The Need For It Is. At Reason, J.D. Tuccille (“Worried About the Debt Fight? Make the Hard Spending Decisions That Politicians Won’t!”) restates a familiar refrain of the libertarian right: “it’s easy to forget that a statutory limit to federal borrowing isn’t the real issue; the real problem is that the federal government habitually spends…

In “Inside the Delirious Rise of ‘Superfake’ Handbags,” Amy X. Wang at the NYT reports on the fashion industry’s discomfiture over counterfeit luxury handbags that are indistinguishable from the real thing.   Not long ago, I found myself wandering through Paris with a fake Celine handbag slung over my shoulder. In France, a country that prides…

In “Is Working From Home Really Working?” (paywall-free version here), Steven Rattner opines — or rather pearl-clutches — that the phenomenon variously known as quiet quitting, working from home, or the Great Resignation, reflects a change in American attitudes toward work. And changed in a way that he views as “not for the better.” This…

At Slate, Edward Ongweso Jr. treats the Silicon Valley Bank failure as “emblematic of a startup ecosystem and venture-capital apparatus that are too unstable, too risky, and too unmoored from reality to be left in charge of something as important as the direction of our technological development.” It’s fair to say there’s a considerable gap…

Nicolai J. Foss and Peter G. Klein. Why Managers Matter: The Perils of the Bossless Company (New York: Hachette Group, 2022). Why Managers Matter is a response to the excessive and sometimes gush celebration of flattened hierarchies among management faddists like 90s management fad Tom Peters and his successors. Ironically, this book reminds me of…

In the first installment of this series, I argued that the “public” vs. “private” distinction was in large part meaningless because the similarity in organizational style of centralized, hierarchical, and bureaucratically managed institutions outweighed their nominal ownership by the government or by private business. But there’s another sense in which the “private sector” is virtually…

Okumak üzere olduğunuz makale Kevin Carson tarafından kaleme alınmış ve ilk olarak The Freeman tarafından yayımlanmıştır. 4 Ocak 2013 tarihinde ise C4SS’de yayınlanmış, Efsa tarafından Türkçe’ye çevrilmiştir. “Fikri mülkiyet hakları” ile ilgili herhangi bir değerlendirme, bu tür “hakların” gerçek mülkiyet haklarını baltaladığı ve bu nedenle özgürlükçü ilke açısından gayri meşru olduğu anlayışıyla başlamalıdır.  Gerçek, somut…

As the debate about AI art and writing took over the Internet, we at C4SS got to wondering: what does the AI itself think about all this? While it’s not yet possible for AI to give us opinions without some prompting, C4SS’s Evan Pierce sat down with ChatGPT to co-write some essays in favor of…