These two pieces are especially important as the first critiques ever published (AFAIK) of the idea that the legitimate functions of government could and should be turned over to market mechanisms.

As Rothbard notes, this is an odd claim coming from “one of the great founders of the conquest theory of the State.” Dunoyer’s suggestion that democratic elections provide all the competition that’s needed in the market for security also sits oddly with his earlier interest-group analysis of electoral politics.

A summary of this meeting was published in a subsequent issue of the Society’s organ, the Journal des Économistes. I have now translated and posted this summary, which bears the title “Question of the Limits of State Action and Individual Action
 Discussed at the Society of Political Economy.”

I'm dissolving in the economic organism!

Newly translated and added to the Molinari Institute online library: an excerpt from chapter 10 of Gustave de Molinari’s 1888 Political Evolution and the Revolution. This extract includes the following passage, whose wording – despite its dismissive reference to “anarchists” – is clearly inspired by Proudhon’s call for the “absorption” and “dissolution” of the state “in the economic organism”:

Thus it is that, instead of absorbing the organism of society according to the revolutionary and communist conception, the municipality and the State are dissolved into this organism. … The future thus belongs neither to the absorption of society by the State, as the communists and collectivists suppose, nor to the suppression of the State, as the anarchists and nihilists dream, but to the diffusion of the State within society.

But if Molinari in 1888 was borrowing without acknowledgment from Proudhon’s 1851 General Idea of the Revolution, Proudhon’s provisions for private police and courts in that work may in turn be borrowing without acknowledgment from Molinari’s 1849 Soirées and “The Production of Security.” Once again, the so-called “capitalist” and “socialist” wings of individualist anarchism prove to be intertwined.

Co-Editor Charles Johnson and major contributor Roderick Long to the book Markets Not Capitalism (2011) will be at The Gnu’s Room for a discussion of the topics addressed in the book. The economic crisis needs fresh new responses, which emphasize the ways in which poverty and economic inequality have resulted from collusion between government and big business, which has enriched a few corporate giants at the expense of the rest of us. Rather than turning back to politics, the authors argue that working people must begin to free themselves of the mistakes of the past, and work together to take back control over their own lives and livelihoods through individual freedom, mutual exchange, and nonviolent grassroots social activism.

Charles has an official announcement of the release of the C4SS/ALL anthology Markets Not Capitalism, along with:

• a table of contents
• an excerpt from the book
• two different links to buy it
• a link to read it online
• and a link to download it.

So why are you still over here?

Incidentally, the official release date is – the Vth of November. Dismember, dismember.

Kevin Carson explains why free-marketers should be Occupiers.

Sheldon Richman explains why Occupiers should be free-marketers.

In other news, Ross Kenyon’s Occupational activities continue to make the local paper and frighten Republicans.

Our quest for world domination continues to continue ….

Our quest for world domination continues!