Sheldon Richman’s outstanding “Capitalism Versus the Free Market” lecture can be viewed online courtesy of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

The talk very effectively explains crucial economic and political history and theory. It will positively contribute to any viewer’s understanding and advocacy of liberty.

My weekly commentary for Center For a Stateless Society examines working within the state versus working around the state. It is a response to recent articles by Bret Stephens and Naomi Klein concerning Milton Friedman and that which he embodies.

Check it out at Center For a Stateless Society.

My latest commentary is up at Center For a Stateless Society. It describes a program to train inner-city youths to work at suburban Walmarts as one manifestation of state and corporate power intersecting to dominate life, and it takes a look at some ways to counter the authoritarians.

The archive for this week’s Thinking Liberty is now available for download. Jim Lesczynski, libertarian activist, entrepreneur, and author, joined us for the evening. Topics included zoning laws, regulatory barriers to forming new businesses, libertarian activism, and libertarian fiction.

I recently read Antony Beevor’s The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939. It’s a worthwhile read for anyone interested in this period of history. It brings together the political, military, and social history of the war and places it in context with the era’s European politics. This is a complex task, and Beevor succeeds. Helpful maps and pictures are included.

The Battle For Spain includes the roles of the Durruti Column and the CNT-FAI, but since they are woven into the rest of narrative, this might not be the best book for a specifically anarchist study. It certainly will provide a solid basis for understanding the war. The only objection to the work I can think of at the moment is that people new to the history might have trouble keeping up with the acronyms and names, but it shouldn’t be too difficult to remember their context.

I just posted my February Center For a Stateless Society feature: Holding Onto Ideology As We Move Past Dogma. The teaser I originally wrote for the c4ss.org homepage link was: “Darian Worden tries to avoid sounding pretentious as he tells anarchists how to think.” But it seemed like placing this bit of self-referencing humor there would be confusing, so I changed the summary to my favorite sentence in the essay: “If your only plastic soldier is the Bazooka Guy, then your army is going to suck.”

I had originally written in my notes for the article that Rand Paul only got so much support because he “originated in the nutsack of the messiah” but that’s sexist, superfluous, and cruder than the situation called for.

My latest commentary is up at Center For a Stateless Society. It’s a point-by-point discussion of a protest invitation. Check it out: Marching Orders.

A number of excellent commentaries have come out of C4SS lately. And if you want to see more of them, why not throw a few bucks into our fundraiser? Just go to c4ss.org and click the ChipIn button on the right of the page.

My latest commentary can be viewed at Center For a Stateless Society.

When people focus too much on icons of the past – like a famous Tea Party – the lessons that history contains become obscured. People who believe they are against government power can be led into supporting more power if they don’t look for alternatives to rulers…(read more)