Friday Roundup

Dialogue With a Young Communist: A good overview of market anarchism and its relationship with other forms of libertarian thought and praxis.

Budd on the Fourth Amendment, The Home, and the Poor: The welfare-warfare State never acts with mere benevolence. Welfare is as much a device of control as anything else; in this case through acts of supervision and invasion of privacy.

Hayek in Tuscaloosa: Market anarchy at work: not individualistic scrambling for gain and advantage over one’s neighbors, but voluntaristic and mutualistic working together for common good- without a central entity with coercive force directing and compelling everyone. Examples like this are one of the most potent counter-arguments to statists who argue for the necessity of a strong and omnipresent State, or any State at all for that matter. This is not an isolated example, either: read stories from the tornado outbreak in the Midwest, or go back to stories from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina a few years ago. Order did not in fact break down (there was no epidemic of rape and murder and such in the Superdome, for instance, despite fevered media reports); if anything, order and social cohesion increase in these situations.

Mom-and-Pop Stores vs. Big-Box Stores in the Food Desert: ‘Unfortunately, we will get what we measure. The $400 million that the Obama administration has set aside to create greater food access in these so-called food deserts will likely go to attracting full-service grocery franchises that heap upon our children megatons of empty calories like those in high-fructose corn syrup and corn oil — yes, the very products that emerge from Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack’s own great state of Iowa. But the profits made in those big-box stores will drain away from our neighborhoods and communities, bound for distant corporate headquarters, further impoverishing most food producers and consumers.’

Practical Rules, Strategies, and Tactics For Building a Civilization of Life and Love: Older but good. ‘How to build a just and sustainable society within the shell of the collapsing ruins of the old unjust and unsustainable culture of death and its associated structures of sin and violence. This is a non violent little way of justice and peace.’

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