At the excellent Freeebay blog, Brent Emerson provides four criteria of success for social anarchy (emphasis mine): [Participants] are free from economic oppression and coercion, exercising decisionmaking authority in proportion to the degree they are affected by outcomes [2]; survive and are healthy; have equal opportunity to participate in the production & consumption of goods…

Writing about the Aaron Swartz case in which, as I understand it, a boatload of journal articles were liberated from behind some kind of paywall, Carolyn Ann tells us: The thing is, information is the bedrock of all economic activity. If people wanted information to be free, they’d create a society where competitiveness couldn’t exist.…

Knowledge and know-how. Znanie and umetnost. Is it just my imagination, or does the world conspire against the possession of both by one individual? It’s as if embarking on one path forever closes the other, or at least makes it significantly more of a logistical challenge. Programs of instruction that can be described as professional,…

A post by Arnold Kling got me dredging up some thoughts from the back of my mind concerning the non-profit sector. For a long time I’ve had mixed feelings about this sector. On the one hand, I regard non-profit organizations as institutions (and I regard institutions as the enemy of thick individualism) which of course…

I love the Freeebay website for their commitment to the gift economy, although I find the writing there to be very academic and usually way over my head. Today, however, David Graeber’s On the Moral Grounds of Economic Relations is readable, humorous and really offers some believable explanations of things. Required reading for anagorists and…

Traditionally, entitlement referred to the condition of the aristocracy, the nobility, the landed gentry; someone with a title. The conservative public relations machine has been very successful at re-branding, in the public mind, safety net programs as “entitlement” programs, or “entitlements” for short. The liberal project started out as an attempt to make sure nobody…

Regular readers of this blog probably know that I consider business people to be an elite subset of the population, and that I include small business in this characterization. Even the low-income or insolvent among the self-employed I regard with what can only honestly be called a certain amount of envy. I envy their independence,…

Freedom vs. Safety David brin says: “Nobody makes me choose between freedom for my children and their safety!” That’s fighting spirit, and I love it! The idea that there’s a tradeoff between freedom and safety is the basis to all the post-9/11 hysteria and the resulting surveillance state. It’s also a proven strategy for pitting…

My fixation on the sacred/profane dichotomy is apparently shared with one Charles Eisenstein.