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Wealth inequality is much sharper in America than all other industrialized countries. The income of the richest 1% Americans has soared while the income of ordinary people either decreased or stagnated in recent decades. However, America used to be a rather middle-class society. It was not before the 1980s that the G.O.P.’s far-right branch grew more influential in challenging the oppression of “big government.” New Deal era policies were gradually abandoned and wealth inequality soared. Ronald Reagan claimed that “fascism was really the basis for the New Deal,” and his heirs followed suit in denouncing the federal government’s “tyranny.” Overall, the center of the U.S. political debate on economic issues is drastically more to the right than in Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The Democratic Party is far less devoted to the interests of the poor, the working-class, and the middle-class than other left-wing parties in the West. The G.O.P. tends to cater only to the richest of the rich, unlike virtually no other major conservative party in the modern Western world.

This article is a field report on PorcFest, a libertarian festival. The festival is part of the Free State Project, which seeks to build a libertarian voting bloc in New Hampshire. Porcfest is also a temporary proof-of-concept for a utopian libertarian society. At PorcFest, the preferred money forms are those that contain precious metals (such as bits of silver or pre-1964 US dimes) and cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which offer a kind of digital metallism. As a temporary site of economic alterity, PorcFest offers a reworked vision of shared value and trust in and between individuals.

This chapter previews this book (which examines the origin and development of the private property rights system to debunk three false claims: that inequality is inevitable; that capitalism is more consistent with negative freedom than any other system; and that there is something “natural” about the private property system). This chapter explains the importance of debunking these three claims, the usefulness of examining the intellectual history of how they became so important in political thought, and the value of reviewing the prehistory and early history of the private property system to debunk them.

This chapter shows that the belief in natural inequality survives in many guises in contemporary social science and political philosophy—most especially in social contract theory and in “freedom-based” arguments for unequal private property rights in natural resources and the things people make out of them. The parallels between contemporary and historical justifications for inequality are striking. They all use the belief that inequality is natural and inevitable to justify coercive rules to maintain inequality, but they all present conflicting explanations why inequality is inevitable. This observation itself raises doubt about this claim and provides reason for empirical historical analysis of whether the natural inequality hypothesis is true.

This chapter uses anthropological and historical evidence to debunk what the authors call the natural inequality hypothesis—i.e. the belief that inequality is natural and inevitable and/or that inequality is the inevitable result of respecting negative freedom. It examines land-tenure and property systems in a wide-variety of societies known to history and anthropology. It shows that many societies maintained very high levels of social, political, and economic equality for extremely long periods of time while protecting negative freedom at least as well, if not better than, contemporary property rights-based societies.

Roskies discusses an important method in neuroscience that is too often left out of free will debates: single-neuron recordings. Roskies explains classic experiments on perceptual decision making and asks whether brain processes are stochastic, but she ends up siding with compatibilism over libertarianism. In their comments, Kane defends his brand of libertarianism against Roskies's compatibilism, and Shadlen proposes further lessons from his work on perceptual decision making. In her reply, Roskies defends her compatibilism as well as her interpretation of the science.

Publicly regarded as right-wing, Eastman defends Dewey against conservative critics but also suspects his former teacher of mistaking the true method of arriving at the truth with the truth itself. Alienating his lover Florence Norton, he marries social worker Yvette Szekely in 1958. He chafes under the “slavery” imposed on him by Reader’s Digest but continues to work for the magazine and develops a new interest in animal studies. Now calling himself a “libertarian conservative,” Max withdraws from National Review, citing his atheism. The second volume of his autobiography, Love and Revolution (1965), completed with the help of critic Daniel Aaron, reminds readers of the puzzling arc of Max’s life. Seven Kinds of Goodness, his final book, with portraits of spiritual leaders from Buddha to Jesus, ends with the encouragement that we make a “jewel of the accident of [our] being.” Max dies on March 26, 1969, in Bridgetown, Barbados, his summer home. His son Daniel, alternately rejected and embraced by his distracted father, follows him a half year later.

This chapter investigates the grand strategy proposals by some of the leading think tanks operating in Washington DC, demonstrating how their nominally impartial, and independent research reveals a dominant, bipartisan neoconservative/liberal-internationalist consensus on hegemony that further underlines the intertextual and practical interconnection between research expertise, professional knowledge and policymaking. The think tanks examined in this chapter were selected to assess those formally independent research outputs with the greatest policy impact under the Obama presidency, while also reflecting the widest range of political views on American grand strategy. The chapter examines how organisations supporting deviant grand strategy discourses of libertarian restraint (Cato) and liberal-progressive cooperative security (CAP) have attempted to shift the public policy debate and how the stigma of isolationism underwrites a powerful status quo in Washington DC.

This chapter looks at the first of four memory communities that dominate the public discourse of collective memory about the civil war in El Salvador. This first group, comprised of civilian elites, is defined by a common narrative of the war that emerges from the elites’ life-story narrations, either self-written memoirs, or autobiographical interviews that have been published. Adhering to a rigid version of economic libertarianism, the members of the civilian-elite memory community see themselves as an aggrieved minority that has been subjected to the expropriating tendencies of left-wing insurgents and anti-communist reformists. The elites’ narrative explains their disproportionate wealth as having been rightfully earned in a free market place. Thus, they describe anyone who wants to undermine their earnings or structure society differently as being tantamount to a thief, including their own military governments and modernizing segments of the U.S. government.

This chapter examines when and how the constitutional challenge to the so-called individual mandate of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA), which requires almost everyone to purchase health insurance, arose. It first charts the beginnings of arguments that the ACA mandate was unconstitutional, including those put forward by David Rivkin and Lee Casey, Peter Urbanowicz and Dennis G. Smith, Rob Natelson, Jonathan Adler and Ilya Somin, and Randy Barnett. In particular, it analyzes the philosophical assumptions underlying Barnett's Tough Luck Libertarianism as well as his interpretation of the Constitution regarding the ACA mandate. The chapter then turns to lawsuits that were filed against the ACA hours after it was signed by President Barack Obama on March 23, 2010, leading to the elevation of the case to the Supreme Court. It also considers the argument that Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg termed the Broccoli Horrible before concluding with an assessment of various court decisions on the constitutionality of the mandate.

This chapter examines the consequences of the Supreme Court's decision on the constitutionality of the so-called individual mandate of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA), which requires almost everyone to purchase health insurance. It first discusses how the decision changed the ACA before turning to the Court's ruling regarding the Medicaid expansion. It then considers the implications of Tough Luck Libertarianism for health care.

Explicitly or otherwise, much of contemporary futurism stages the Singularity as a conflict between mutually exclusive visions of the future: one in which market-driven progress flourishes unimpeded, and another in which the forces of entropy and human complacency lead inexorably to extinction. In particular, extropian transhumanism – a movement rooted in libertarian politics – tends to view environmental and other regulatory interventions as adversarial to the kind of unfettered technological development needed to free human beings from the fatal limitations of presingular life-as-we-know-it. Such ideological commitments are deeply encoded in the transhumanist construction of self and identity, and in turn inform its treatment in sf. The chapter traces this impulse through the writings of roboticist Hans Moravec, extropian leader Max More, and libertarian sf writer Vernor Vinge. Fiction by Rudy Rucker and criticism by N. Katherine Hayles provide a counter-reading that aggressively challenges the extropian position.