​De Kevin Carson. Artigo original: “Intellectual Property” Keeps Right On Killing. Traduzido para o português por Gabriel Serpa. Os habituais apologistas das grandes empresas do agronegócio, como o colaborador da revista Reason, Ron Bailey, citam estudos que demonstram a improbabilidade de o glifosato, ingrediente ativo do herbicidaRoundup, causar câncer nas concentrações que aparecem em produtos de supermercado….

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…

First, most producers are employees of firms, not owners. Viewed from the vantage point of classical theory, they have no reason to maximize the profits of firms, except to the extent that they can be controlled by owners. Moreover, profit-making firms, nonprofit organizations, and bureaucratic organizations all have exactly the same problem of inducing their…

An Interview With Kevin Carson Here we bring the second part of the interview with Kevin Carson, made by Diego Avila and Luis R. Vera. To access the first part click here. In this part, we finish with the questions related to the counter-economy and Venezuela as other parts of Latin America, as well as…

[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,…

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…

(Originally published at Cato Unbound on November 10, 2008) Defenders of the free market are often accused of being apologists for big business and shills for the corporate elite. Is this a fair charge? No and yes. Emphatically no—because corporate power and the free market are actually antithetical; genuine competition is big business’s worst nightmare….

(Originally published by Rad Geek People’s Daily on May 29, 2008) Here’s a great post from a bit more than a year ago at Anomalous Presumptions (2007-02-26), which I just got around to reading: I was responding to this key point: [P]eer production isn’t an assault on the principles of a free society, but an extension of…

A little over 100 years since anarchists, socialists, communists, libertarians, and radical unionists in the so-called united states successfully won the long, difficult, and bloody battle for the eight hour workday, we are still overworked and underpaid despite technological advancements necessitating less and less labor to maintain the same quality of life. To quote Bertrand…

Monopolies are pretty much universally bad. This is perhaps one of the most uncontroversial position amongst anarchists, who principally define themselves in opposition to the state, which Max Weber, in “Politics as Vocation,” defines as the monopoly on force and the approval of the use of force in a geographic area. Benjamin Tucker, the great…

What is C4SS? Politically, C4SS was founded to help promote the diverse perspectives found in left market anarchist circles. Our target audiences have long run the gamut from complete mainstream normies, to anarchist insurrectionaries, to libertarian academics. We are anarchists because we oppose every form of domination, but we are also rooted in one of…

Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged is a work whose reputation precedes it. Some may love and some may hate it, but most readers of this site, including ones who have not read this book, will likely have some knowledge of its major plot points and the ideological views of its author. Therefore this review…

It’s common for right-libertarians to attack — with some justification — the stupidity of those who equate opposing a law or government agency with opposing some value or goal in its name. Wanting to abolish the Department of Education, for example, doesn’t mean you’re against education. But right libertarians are guilty of a somewhat related…

In “The Problem of Scale in Anarchism and the Case for Cybernetic Communism,” Aurora Apolito writes: I don’t believe that markets can be “liberated” from capitalism, nor that they can do anything good anyway, regardless of their liberated status. In essence, this is because I view the market mechanism as running on a steepest descent…

[Hear an in-depth discussion on this article and its topics in this episode of The Enragés] In a previous column, I examined the way in which those who praise Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and their ilk for their “creative genius” or “value creation” are misplacing the credit. All the components of Tesla designs, and of…

I want to begin by praising Apolito’s piece. It both tackles the strongest argument against anarchism, the problem of achieving coordination at scale, and models the problem using insights from the cluster of fields that lie at the base of complex systems. Whatever my disagreements with them over markets, this is a welcome addition to…

Bourgeois Dignity‘s line of inquiry — at least as stated — is into the causes of what Deirdre McCloskey calls “the Fact” — the tenfold or more increase in the average person’s standard of living in a couple centuries’ time. Her thesis that “the Fact” owed its origins to a culture of innovation, of openness…

I’m a big fan of Aurora and hope that her contribution to this symposium helps encourage more anarchists to engage fearlessly with the mathematical dynamics of an anarchist society. But I must admit my disappointment, I was hoping her contribution would seriously engage with the arguments for markets and either present a novel alternative or…

The calculation problem, as stated by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, has been central to most libertarian arguments against non-market or non-price forms of economic coordination. The Misesian variant, argued in Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth and Socialism, is based on the role of factor input pricing in allocating inputs among competing uses….

When massive Western corporations provide relief and assistance during a pandemic, these stories are easily framed by corporate communications teams, the government, and mass media as some sort of angelic benevolence. This is, at most, half the story.  Many have hailed these companies for “stepping up” as they turn their productive capacities to producing things…