Don Boudreaux, an inspired George Mason University Econ professor, takes issue in a recent blog with a radio reporter. The commentator confuses the alleged ill-effects of marijuana with the perils of the consumer-supplier transaction. That’s like saying venison can kill you because in your pursuit of the deer you might accidentally blow your head off. Or an astigmatic fellow hunter might do it for you. Products are one thing - transactions, another. Dr. Boudreaux understands this - the media does not.

As noted on the notorious Liberty and Power blog (well, notorious for having banned me once, anyway, and for letting me back in; usually only Objectivists, Catonians, or other types of neocons ban me, cough-cough-PALMER-cough, cough-NOODLEFOOD-cough),

[Editor’s note: this article is excerpted from part IV of The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality. In the nineteenth and twentieth century, socialists often argued that socialism was superior to capitalism because it would deliver a higher standard of living and more consumer goods.

Should you be able to wear orange lederhosen at a World Cup match? Or be forced to enjoy the event in your undergarments?

Or specifically, should you be able to wear orange “leeuwenhose” with a Bavaria logo, Holland’s second biggest brewery, even though they are not an official World Cup sponsor? Does not being a sponsor of the event enable Fifa to strip ticket holders of their pants and put them in the trash in order to protect the interests of their sponsors?

[This article is excerpted from chapter 21 of Money, Method, and the Market Process, a collection of essays selected and edited by Margit von Mises and with an introduction by Richard M. Ebeling.]

I

The history of civilization is the record of a ceaseless struggle for liberty.

I wrote an Objectivist friend the other day, “No matter what your stance on IP, surely you must wince to read Rand write: “patents are the heart and core of property rights.” I mean... COME ON!”

Her reply: “Rand’s view is a variation of the Communist view that a worker owns what he worked on for having had some kind of productive contact with it.”

The collapse of socialism-communism has not only given rise to the remarkable growth of environmentalism, as a replacement outlet for hostility to capitalism, but also to some growth, vastly less considerable of course, in the remnants of the old anarchist movement, which now sometimes calls itself “libertarian” or “left-libertarian.” A leading strand of this remnant goes under the name “Mutualism.” And its philosophy has recently been set forth in a book by one Kevin Carson, called Studies in Mutualist Political Economy (Fayettville, Arkansas: S