This was written back in 2012 during the Tuareg rebellion. I believe some of the predictions have been vindicated. The French intervention hasn’t quelled Islamist sentiments but simply radicalised them further and allowed them to move into other areas of North Africa. The MNLA’s and Tuareg peoples have also been repressed, with their wishes of autonomy being outright ignored. This is the effect of Western imperialism, allowing tensions to fester until violence is seen as the only path: Continue reading →

An institutional approach in monetary political economy means understanding that money and its antecedents are shaped by institutional arrangements. Looking back, we see the Fei of Yapp and Sumerian credit systems, where money was not known, and instead claims were made via credit. Social relations were a significant element of these monetary systems, making institutional characteristics the lynchpin of credit and money. Continue reading →

Rockwell’s recent piece Open Borders: A Libertarian Reappraisal provoked an angry response by Carson in How Low Can Lew Rockwell Go?. However they both go wrong. The former assumes a nonsense, fascistic idea that all American and European whites despise immigration and would prefer communities governed by restrictions on movement that have never been seen and takes a simplistic view of immigration and its forms and effects. However the latter also takes a simplistic view, asserting implicitly that because America was founded on robbery and imperialism, the people who live here now have no right to protect their culture and ideas in the way they would like. Continue reading →

Many may see anarchism and the general idea of statelessness as a pipe dream of abstract intellectualism and childish radicalism. Anyone who says this must have a stunted imagination and they simply serve as the useful idiots of the state and it’s plutocratic class. The Westphalian experiment is very young and in many respects ahistorical. The concept of governance in historical tribal or feudal structures was seen as much more decentralised and even voluntary. There were many different forms of governance, both economic and political. There was decentralised planning and economic control, as seen with kin groups in some tribes in Oceania and the Americas. There were also community credit-clearing systems, as well as local markets with forms of monetary exchange. Continue reading →

Introduction

The capitalist economy has gone through another shock, and the potential for another, larger one is on the horizon. While it’s seemingly in its death throes, capitalism continues to fuel growth. Under such a system we have seen a vast improvement in general living standards across the globe, despite rigged markets and the omnipresent power of the state. However, who is this growth for? While absolute poverty has been rolled back, and in many Western nations completely eliminated, we still see a large, indebted underclass, a Global South regularly sold out to the interests of capital and a system of vast wealth that only seems accessible to a privileged few. Continue reading →

In this paper I look at the effects of the UK’s national minimum wage on non-university educated 18-21 year olds. I find that the effects are generally negative, with a significant disemployment effect amongst the young and unskilled, whereby general levels of youth unemployment have consistently increased since the minimum wage has been increased above particular productivity levels. There are also major underemployment and training-deficit effects, where hours are usually cut irrelevant of the wider economic picture and there are forms of labour-labour substitution which favour trained, older workers over those entering the labour market. Fundamentally, the minimum wage does not help non-university educated 18-21 year olds in gaining skills, entering the labour market or finding long-term employment. Further, it entangles labour markets, negating their functioning as mechanisms that create employment dynamics. In this respect, I recommend reforms which decentralise the minimum wage toward smaller politico-economic units, allowing for disaggregated knowledge to inform decisions on the minimum wage’s effects. Continue reading →

Within the free banking literature, there is a large contingent that suggests fiat money is completely illegitimate, and that only commodity money is seen as genuinely freeing the banking system from the will of government. However, nearly every historical banking system has relied on a commodity standard, with government backing maintaining bullion reserves through resource extraction from colonial interests. If we look to the conquests of the Conquistadors in the Inca Empire, we see the desire for wealth in the form of gold as a major impetus for expanding and exploring. Continue reading →

Within global society, we see a large entrenchment of identity crises as globalisation and the neoliberal discourse that backs it creates new forms of exploitation both in Western society and in much of what is termed the Global South. The typical recesses of community and the socio-cultural as well as economic identities it created have been regressed through time, whether it be with the end of labour subsidiarity under Thatcher in Britain, the neocolonial practices of modern corporations backed up by US trade power or the pillage of tribally owned knowledge and resources through increasingly stringent intellectual property processes. Continue reading →

Like many “libertarians”, I regularly spouted the idea of NHS privatisation. I assumed that it was a bygone statist organisation that should’ve been privatised like the rest of them were under Thatcher. I instantaneously assumed that the inefficiencies present in the current system would be cured by privatisation, like the wave of a magic wand. Now, I’m not so sure. The dichotomy I perceived, of private versus government ownership, is a completely false one that is usually taken up by what Carson calls vulgar libertarians. Unfortunately I was guilty of the same vulgarity. Continue reading →