Mutual Exchange Radio

Today, Nathan Goodman is joining Mutual Exchange Radio to discuss the provision of public goods and welfare in a stateless society. Nathan is a PhD student in economics at George Mason University. Previously, he was the Lysander Spooner Research Scholar in Abolitionist Studies at the Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS). His research interests include defense and peace economics, Austrian economics, public choice, Bloomington school institutional analysis, self-governance, and analytical anarchism. Our discussion centers around his research on why national defense might not always be a public good and how the Mormon church has found ways around game theoretic problems that arise in mutual aid. He also gives a really helpful introduction to polycentricity and some key economic concepts.

Welcome to Mutual Exchange Radio, a project of the Center for a Stateless Society. Joining me today is Will Gillis. Will is the director of the Center and is a second generation anarchist who's worked as an activist in countless projects since getting involved in the lead-up to N30. He studies physics and writes regularly on the egalitarian potential of markets. His writing can be found on his website, humaniterations.net, as well as on C4SS.org. Today's discussion centers around a technical topic in political philosophy that has utmost importance for real-world political movements and many ideological debates: the distinction between positive and negative liberty. Will positions himself as defending a universalist conception of positive liberty as primary and against particularly neo-Lockean libertarian views that place negative liberty as fundamental, but in many ways he comes at it from a different, more highly consequentialist perspective than most theorists. He also has some interesting theories for how a heavy priority on negative liberty has lead many American libertarians towards alt-right and fascist perspectives. This was a fun, philosophically exciting conversation and I hope it is as thought-provoking for you as it was for me. Be warned though, it is a long one which is necessary since we covered a lot of ground and Will takes a lot of great philosophical sophistication and thoughtfulness into his views, which I hope comes across here.

Today we are joined by Kelly Wright. Kelly has written for the Center on topics ranging from the history of anarchist thought, transgender liberation, and police militarization. Kelly also served as Chelsea Manning's Campaign Manager for her run for U.S. Senate in the Democratic Primary in Maryland in 2018 and is a member of Chelsea's support committee providing material support for Chelsea as she defies a federal grand jury. Our topic today is on the legal tools the US Government has to target whistleblowers and dissenters and restrict the civil liberties of every day Americans. Today we cover the legal ground surrounding grand juries, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and other examples of legal overreach by the state. Kelly is able to draw from a wide variety of examples from the history of state overreach.

My guest today is Fabio Rojas, a professor of sociology at Indiana University. Dr. Rojas is an expert who works on the sociology of political movements and social theory. He is the author of several books, including Theory for the Working Sociologist, Party in the Street: The Antiwar Movement and the Democratic Party after 9/11 and From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline. He is also currently co-editing Contexts, the official magazine of the American Sociological Association. Today we discussed the economics, sociology, and ethics of immigration and the open borders movement. We are exploring what a world with little to no immigration restrictions might look like and Dr. Rojas' case for why it would be preferable, both on economic and on ethical grounds. Dr. Rojas addresses some of the most common objections to open borders from the left and the right. He is a very knowledgeable expert on the sociology of immigration as well as a passionate advocate for immigrant rights and that really comes through in our conversation.

Welcome to this episode of Mutual Exchange Radio, a project of the Center for a Stateless Society. Today's guest is Lyn Ulbricht, the mother of Ross Ulbricht. Ross Ulbricht was the founder of Silk Road, a website run as a market that valued the privacy and security of its patrons highly. Because of its emphasis on privacy, it quickly became famous for hosting exchanges of a clandestine nature, such as drugs. Ross was targeted and sentenced to life without parole on entirely non-violent charges for his involvement in Silk Road on very legally dubious grounds. His case has important and dangerous legal implications for the future of the drug war, internet privacy, and due process more generally in the United States. Since Ross' arrest Lyn has strived to direct awareness beyond the sensationalism of the case to issues at stake and how the case impacts freedom in the digital age, as well as a passionate defender of due process and her son. She has spoken at numerous events; appeared on many TV, radio and podcast shows, including Reason TV, CNN, HuffPost Live and Fox; and conducted interviews with major and alternative media, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes and The Guardian. She is also featured in the documentary Deep Web. Our conversation today focuses primarily on the details and facts of Ross's case, including the incredible story leading to his arrest and the dangerous legal precedent it sets. Without further ado, here is Lynn Ulbricht. You can get more information about Ross' case and the petition to free him at FreeRoss.org.

Welcome to Mutual Exchange radio, a project of the Center for a Stateless Society. Today's guest is Maggie McNeil, an author, journalist, and blogger who is an expert on sex work and a sex worker herself. Maggie has written a series of short stories on sex work, Ladies of the Night, runs her own blog, The Honest Courtesan, and has had her writings featured in outlets such as The Washington Post, Reason Magazine and Cato Unbound. Most recently, she was featured prominently in the documentary The War on Whores, which you can rent on Vimeo. Today we discussed the legal and moral issues surrounding sex work in which Maggie gave her strongest case for decriminalization and responded to some common objections, as well as the social and moral implications of its decriminalization and normalization. You can tell that Maggie really knows the empirical literature on this topic and that made this an especially informative conversation. I hope you learned as much as I did.

Welcome to Mutual Exchange Radio, a project of the Center for a Stateless Society. Today's guest is Kevin Carson, a senior fellow of the Center for a Stateless Society who holds the Center's Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory. He has written books such as Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available on C4SS' website. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation, and his own Mutualist Blog. Today, we discussed a study he published last year for the Center on New Libertarian Municipalism. Libertarian Municipalism is an idea that has its roots in one of the most famous social anarchist thinkers of the twentieth century, Murray Bookchin. However, Kevin is more interested in modern movements focusing on a more decentralized model of a market economy based on common ownership of certain resources, drawing from thinkers such as Elinor Ostrom. Its focus is on an openly democratically run city on a local level, transforming local governments into partners in the transition to a post-capitalist economy. In this discussion, we cover the history of the idea of libertarian municipalism, what the movement on the ground has looked like in recent years, the policy implications of it for local cities, economic indicators that society is progressing in that direction, and common objections to the idea. It was a fun conversation that allows leftist thinking to move on from focus on, from the center, electoral political outcomes on the national level and, from more radical circles, violent insurrections that are impractical in the near future.

We're excited to announce the launch of a new project from C4SS: Mutual Exchange Radio. Our inaugural guest for this show is Gary Chartier, a distinguished professor of law and business ethics at La Sierra University and a leading Anarchist philosopher. He's the author of such books as Anarchy and Legal Order: Law and Politics in a Stateless Society, The Consciousness of an Anarchist, and Radicalizing Rawls Global Justice and the Foundations of International Law. Intro/Outro Music by Dan Burns