Scenes from Delaney Hall (6)
Here’s a first: I was at Delaney Hall last night for The Peoples’ Vigil, a quasi-religious event held each Monday at 7:30 pm. During the vigil, Shane Claiborne, a self-described Anabaptist and founder of the New Monastic Movement, made admiring reference to the Cato Institute, of all things. “Even the Cato Institute,” he said, “is against this building…” He was alluding to the research of David J. Bier, Cato’s Director of Immigration Studies and Selz Foundation Chair in Immigration Policy, and in particular, to Bier’s paper, “Immigrants Cut Victimization Rates, Boost Crime Reporting” (Policy Analysis 1003, August 2025), which argues that contrary to popular belief, comparatively few immigrants are violent criminals. You’re more likely to be killed by a falling vending machine or hit by lightning than killed by an “illegal immigrant.”
Category Archives: liberty and the left
Ian Austin, Outside Agitator
Scenes from Delaney Hall (4)
Just a postscript to my June 3 post, “Nowhere to Hide,” featuring Ian Austin. I heard last night through the activist grapevine that Austin had been arrested. The arrest is obviously a case of targeting one of the most charismatic ground-level leaders of the migrant defense movement. He’s repeatedly been arrested in just this way across the country, most often to have the charges dropped. The point is not to sustain the charges in court but to intimidate and harass him with the intention of undermining the migrant defense movement.
Stirring the POT (5)
Politics and the Problematics of Fun
I started my “Stirring the POT” series earlier this year as a vehicle for announcements, but it gradually morphed into a series of ruminations on conferences I attended. The latter turned out to be the more interesting enterprise, so I’ll close out the year with a belated conference rumination. This past April, I went to San Francisco, at the invitation of Roderick Long and the Molinari Society, to be on an Author-Meets-Critics panel on Gary Chartier’s Christianity and the Nation State. It promised to be a good time, and it was. Continue reading
Anarchy in Baltimore!
EDITED to change the order of presenters:
EDITED AGAIN to change a couple of references to “December” to “January.”
EDITED YET AGAIN to update location: We’re in Laurel B at 2:00, and Laurel C at 4:00. So, different rooms, but the least bad case of different rooms. On the 3rd floor (escalators will take ya; 2nd floor is registration btw), tucked away past the Harborside rooms.
The Molinari Society will be holding its mostly-annual Eastern Symposium in conjunction with the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in Baltimore, 7-10 January 2026.
Our symposium comprises two back-to-back sessions on Wednesday afternoon (both in the same room, we hope!). Here’s the schedule info:
Molinari Society symposium: Topics in Radical Liberalism
Session 1:
G2D. Wednesday, 7 January, 2:00-3:50 p.m., Baltimore Marriott Waterfront, 700 Aliceanna St., Baltimore MD 21202.
chair: Roderick T. Long (Auburn University)
speakers:
Irfan Khawaja (Independent Scholar), “Academia’s Complicit Executioners: A Critique of the Kalven Committee Report”
Zachary Woodman (Western Michigan University), “Extended Cognition as Property Acquisition”
Session 2:
G3D. Wednesday, 7 January, 4:00-5:50 p.m., Baltimore Marriott Waterfront, 700 Aliceanna St., Baltimore MD 21202.
chair: Roderick T. Long (Auburn University)
speakers:
Cory Massimino (Center for a Stateless Society), “A Liberal Socialism Must Also Be Left Market Anarchist”
Jason Lee Byas (Georgetown Institute for the Study of Markets and Ethics) “Distributed Justice: Can We Make Sense of Justice Outside the State?”
La Migra and the Lessons of History
I wake up. First thing I do: I look at my phone, and click on Radio Jornalera, the online workers’ radio station of Resistencia en Accion. Que pasa? What’s going on? ICE is once again in Trenton, masked and armed, as they’ve been every other day recently. But Resistencia’s Rapid Response team is there, too, demanding that ICE identify themselves, filming them, and taking down their license plates and badge numbers.
Continue readingResistance in Action
I’ve previously mentioned my work with Resistencia en Acción, a migrant defense group based in Princeton and Trenton, New Jersey. Much of what Resistencia does is to face down ICE whenever the need arises. And to put it bluntly: ICE has to be faced down. It’s less a law enforcement agency than a glorified group of thugs–an American Gestapo–intent on solving, by brute force, problems that they themselves have confabulated. Continue reading
Complicity, Neutrality, Atrocity (5/5)
Controllers, Stakeholders, and the Claims of Justice
This is part 5 of a five-part series. For part 1, go here. For part 2, go here. For part 3, go here. For part 4, go here.
I began this series by distinguishing between an Institution and its Stakeholders, and have made two basic assumptions throughout: (a) that “stakeholder” is a legitimate concept, and (b) that stakeholders can legitimately make moral claims on corporate institutions. Though widely regarded as conventional wisdom, the assumption is in some quarters deeply controversial: a minority of dedicated critics have argued against both (a) and (b). Against (a), it’s argued that “stakeholder” is a vague and rationally unusable concept. Against (b), it’s argued that to the extent that “stakeholder” means anything, it fails to identify anyone who has a legitimate moral claim to make against, say, a corporation.(1) Continue reading
Epistolary Sprouts in Brussels
The glorious ongoing Institut Coppet online collection of Gustave de Molinari’s Complete Works has brought to light some correspondence between Molinari and Proudhon from their years of Brussels exile during Napoléon III’s regime in France. The letters are few in number and are not ideologically substantive, but they are nonetheless interesting. So I’ve translated them. Enjoy!
Engels on Social Murder
“Social murder” is a form of homicide that takes place through relatively invisible social processes involving collective rather than individual responsibility. The concept is controversial because it attributes murder to “society” while relying on an unconventional conception of murder: society intends murder, and society kills, where society is identified with a ruling class that controls the political system. What’s controversial here is that social murder kills mostly by omission rather than commission, and is perpetrated by a class rather than by individuals. Both assumptions flout the conventional understanding of the intentionality and causality of murder. Continue reading
“False Alternatives in the Politics of Knowledge”
Just a reminder to anyone attending the APA Eastern in New York this January: the Molinari Society is hosting a session on “False Alternatives in the Politics of Knowledge,” Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2025, 4-5:50 pm, room TBA. Cory Massimino and I will be giving papers, with Roderick Long moderating and commenting. Cory’s paper is “Between Convergency and Conspiracy.” Mine is “Between Indoctrination and False Neutrality,” a defense of an advocacy-based conception of pedagogy, using the teaching I did under the Israeli occupation as a case study. For more details, click here.
Policy of Truth 