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 a pamphlet by the Foundation for Economic…

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…

De Roderick T. Long. Artículo original: Spooner on Rent, del 10 de agosto 2010. Traducido al español por: Juan Pirela Parra. Benjamin Tucker famosamente sostuvo que la propiedad de la tierra depende de la ocupación personal continua, así que cuando un propietario le alquila una parcela o un edificio a un arrendatario el “propietario” le…

Is anarcho-capitalism a form of anarchism? The resounding cry from anarchists of all stripes—including myself—is NO! The debate rages on, but two questions are raised by this claim: why isn’t it anarchism and if it isn’t anarchism then what is it? I believe the answers are: because it fails to meet the deeper commitments of…

Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze’s Walk Out Walk On: A Learning Journey into Communities Daring to Live the Future Now is a fantastic survey of decentralized anti-capitalist projects across the globe. In particular, they use the examples of Unitierra—“a new form of university”—and the Zapatistas in Mexico to identify the difference between “scaling up” and…

I cannot remember when I last saw a Von Dutch hat. I remember being offended twenty years ago, when for a time they were all over the place, on the heads of people imitating at third hand the ironic poses of other people who had never heard of Kenny Howard; who had no idea who…

[Hear an in-depth discussion on this article and its topics in this episode of The Enragés] Preface  This article was originally composed as a series of posts on Facebook; I prefaced my series with the warning: “I have no use for being in anyone’s fan club, whether the U.S. libertarian/classical liberal communities, the Democratic Party,…

 View or download a PDF copy of Joseph Parampathu’s C4SS Study here: Prison Labor: Capitalism Without Markets, Understanding the Economics of Totalitarian Institutions Abstract Prison labor remains a paradox in many ways. Simultaneously sparsely studied or recorded, and ubiquitous; derided by labor unions and free workers as unfair competition and lauded by businesses as…

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…

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…

It’s never been easy to know what to make of self-styled free-marketers who see global capitalism as a real-life instantiation of their values. Given the deep and decisive role of state violence in the creation of global capitalism, they’re either unaware of the basic facts, and so unqualified for their positions, or engaged in a…

One of the central claims of capitalism is that it is the best system to bring supply and demand together; when people need a good or service, the capitalist market will provide. However, the reality of the situation can be quite the opposite. An excellent example of this—from my perspective as a lay person whose…

To read Proudhon, to many non-mutualist thinkers beyond anarchist academia, is laughable. Anarchist communists will insist that Bakunin, Kropotkin and Bookchin expand on Proudhon, rendering the original mutualist promise as empty (ironic considering the massive amount Bakunin took directly from Proudhon.) Anarchist capitalists insist that his theories were flawed, socialist, and/or didn’t rely on the…