The Trouble With Socialist Anarchism

Written by Per Bylund. The new movie “V for Vendetta” has provoked public discussion of the meaning of anarchism. Murray Rothbard was an advocate of the stateless society, but he was never accepted by the anarchist movement and is still considered more a “capitalist lackey” than anarchist thinker. Indeed, anarcho-capitalism has always been considered an…

Compulsory Education

Everyone loves learning. The thing is that not everyone likes studying and what’s even more frustrating is to be told how we should study, why we should study etc. Making education available to everyone is benevolent but making education compulsory for everyone is something that we are so used to that we do not see the blatant problem with it – the deprivation of freedom that prevents the flourishing of precisely those who have the most potential in society; children.

Teaching vs. Indoctrinating Your Children

What is the difference between teaching and indoctrinating? It’s a question that we don’t often think too deeply about, because the answer feels pretty obvious. It’s something bad that other people do to teach children falsehood before they know any better. Teaching is concerned with truth, and indoctrination is concerned with ridiculous dogma. But from an objective perspective, it’s hard to tell who is doing the indoctrinating and who isn’t.

New Logo for EVC

The EVC – Everything-Voluntary.com logo has been updated to reflect my growing desire to be more inclusive of all people who, while gathering under the umbrella of voluntaryism, bring with them ideologies outside of the classical liberal, austro-libertarian, and anarcho-capitalist traditions (the right). I am referring to ideologies such as historical anarchism, left or socialist anarchism, anarcho-communism, anarcho-syndicalism, anarcho-[you name it], mutualism, market anarchism, et cetera (the left).

Why We Need Less Politics and More Private Governance

We’ve lived through another election season, and this year, as with every years, the candidates competed to tell us about all the ways they were going to use the power of government to make our lives better. Unfortunately, many voters appeared quite sympathetic to the idea that government action can improve living standards and generally make markets work better. That’s the bad news. But, there are also trends at work right now that are bigger than any single election cycle, and while the candidates this year provided little reason for optimism, the voters themselves may be growing skeptical of just how much the government can solve all their problems. Nevertheless, one of the most important things we can do is really explain and understand how markets, and not government intervention, are our best hope for an orderly and prosperous society.

Ideology, Identity Politics, and Politico-Cultural Conflict

The past year’s political events, especially the campaign for the presidency as it converged on a contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, have illuminated the way in which ideology, with the identity politics that springs from it, drives a dialectical process: political domination creates resentment, which feeds reaction and, on occasion, revolution against a previously entrenched ruling class and its belief system.

Disaster By Design

Much research of human beings tends to focus on aggregates and averages. But humans come in various shapes and sizes; they have various skills and weaknesses; they do not all travel the same road at the same pace at the same age. One would not issue the same size of clothing to every first-grader; it could come up short on some, and sag on others. Why, then, must they read from the same page of the same primers? Why do the same single-digit addition, from the same page of the same textbook?