The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand

The voice you will hear for the next 88 minutes or so belongs to me, Mike Gogulski.

I am a stateless ex-American. I renounced my American citizenship in 2008 and I have been a voluntary exile since 2004, presently living in Bratislava, Slovakia. As of this recording in June 2009, I maintain a website at www.nostate.com, which you are invited to visit.

The words you will hear belong to all of humanity, but they were written by Kevin Carson, a leading contemporary thinker in mutualism and individualist anarchism, and Research Associate for the Center for a Stateless Society, c4ss.org. The essay, The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand: Corporate Capitalism as a State-Guaranteed System of Privilege, was published in 2001, and is available online at Carson’s Mutualist Blog, mutualist.org, from flag.blackened.net, and from Red Lion Press in print form (http://www.geocities.com/vcmtalk/redlionpress.html).

For the recording, I have broken the essay into ten parts:

Introduction
The Subsidy of History
Ideological Hegemony
The Money Monopoly
Patents
Infrastructure
Military Keynesianism
Other Subsidies
Political Repression
Conclusion

I have attempted to read the text of Iron Fist as I have it in hand. Any deviations from the written text are my own.

It is worth noting for more mainstream libertarians and others not familiar with Carson’s work that one need not adopt Carson’s mutualism or his predictions regarding profit, rent and interest in a truly free market in order to find the analysis and historiography contained here of great value.