This weekend the Liberty Forum happens in New Hampshire. It’s a big conference of liberty-oriented folks featuring a broad array of speakers and exhibitors – a great opportunity to meet cool people and exchange ideas. The Alternatives Expo is a related event at the same hotel which includes speakers, workshops, and low-cost crash space. It aims to be an incubator of alternatives to the modern lifestyle of state and corporate control.

I’ll be speaking at AltExpo about libertarianism’s historic and current relation to the left. I’ll also have books for sale and literature for free at the main Liberty Forum exhibitor area.

I’m looking forward to it.

My weekly Center For a Stateless Society commentary is up at the C4SS site:
When State Capitalism Fails, We Have Each Other. The title is ripped off from an ad for a Really Free Market I once saw. It said: “When the banks fail we still have each other.” So I included Really Free Markets in the essay.

Free economies built from the ground up can enable more choice and accountability than the state-controlled economy. And they will enable people to be less vulnerable to the failures of state capitalism. Connecting with people via the internet and face-to-face communication can make this a viable option. Some opportunities include barter networks (including those that involve commodities like DelValley Silver), Really Free Markets where people give and take items as they want, local gardens, and the numerous examples of free exchange found in Kevin Carson’s Center for a Stateless Society paper “Society After State Capitalism.”

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.