The environmental agenda has been infected by extremism—it’s become an economic suicide pact. And we’re here to challenge it. On Earth Day, visit http://freemarketamerica.org/

If I Wanted America to Fail.

An Exclusive interview, Alex Jones speaks with Sen. Rand Paul on NDAA, TSA undercover on Houston busses, Obama’s overall neglect of the Constitution, his possible impeachment and much more. This is a must see video.

With the Senate poised to consider comprehensive “cybersecurity” legislation this month, a bevy of questions need answers. Although it is difficult to secure computers, networks, and data, are government spending and regulation the answer? Are the cybersecurity threats touted in Washington real or trumped up? Should legal protections for privacy and other values give way in the name of “information sharing” with the Department of Homeland Security?

Whole Foods will open its first location in Park Slope, Brooklyn next year, following an eight-year battle with community activists, preservationists, and some leaky subterranean oil tanks.

Opponents of the project are concerned the upscale grocer will destroy the bucolic landscape, chase away the thriving manufacturing industry, and forever conceal the historic backyard of one of Brooklyn’s most treasured landmarks. Seriously.

A few blocks away sits the legendary Park Slope Food Co-op, which routinely tackles issues of national—and international—importance, such as conflict in the Middle East, natural gas drilling, and our “post hyper-capitalist” future.

What do threatened co-op shoppers and neighborhood activists have to say about the new Whole Foods?

Reason.tv correspondent Kennedy investigates.

Written and produced by Jim Epstein.

Recorded 10 March 2012 at the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. Featuring Peter Klein, Joe Salerno, David Gordon, Shawn Ritenour, Guido Hulsmann, and Jeffrey Herbener. Includes a Question and Answer period.

1. Authoritarian Capitalism (Fascism) and Liberal Capitalism (the Free Market)

What is sometimes referred to as “authoritarian capitalism,” or fascism, is in fact a variety of statism, specifically socialism, the system of political economy in which the prerogatives of ownership over the means of production and distribution are vested in the state. Under the fascist economic system, private capitalists are nominally regarded as the owners of the means of production, meaning that they hold property titles to these assets and are referred to as “owners” of these assets. However, this so-called ownership is merely illusory. The actual prerogatives of ownership are vested, not in the private capitalist, but in the state and its bureaucracy.[1] It is the state that tells the private capitalist how he must use “his” property, under the threat of confiscation or even imprisonment. In the words of economist Ludwig von Mises, it is “socialism in the outward guise of capitalism.”[2]

This is a very different political-economic system from “liberal capitalism,” also known as “free-market capitalism.” Free-market capitalism is an authentically capitalist system, in which the prerogatives of ownership over the means of production are vested in private citizens, not in the state. Under this system, the means of production are genuinely privately owned, and the private-property owner holds, not just a property title, but, more importantly, the actual prerogatives of ownership and ultimate control. In the system of free-market capitalism, the private-property owner is regarded as having property rights (i.e., an enforceable moral claim to the prerogatives of ownership) that must be respected by all others, including the state and its functionaries.

In their purest forms, these two systems of political economy are fundamentally different in kind; in fact, they are polar opposites. However, this opposing nature stems from the degree to which the prerogatives of ownership of ostensibly private property are arrogated to the state — i.e., the degree of state intervention. On the one extreme we have the free market, in which there is no — or at least little — state interference with private-property ownership (which is therefore genuine); on the other extreme we have fascism, in which there is plentiful or total state interference with private-property ownership (which is therefore illusory).

Since fascism and the free market are distinguished by state intervention we can therefore see that the two systems are separated by a connecting bridge of interventionism through the system of the “mixed economy.” The fascist system can be viewed as a system of hyperinterventionism, accruing when state interference with private-property rights is so extensive that the alleged private ownership of property becomes a mere farce, and the state may properly be regarded as the de facto owner of the means of production and distribution — i.e., there is de facto socialism. For this reason, the analysis of fascism and its long-term viability is very similar to the analysis of interventionism in the mixed economy, and the same kinds of economic and political insights apply.

CONTINUED at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Written by Ben O’Neill.

Barack Obama and Rick Santorum probably couldn’t agree that August falls in summer, but on one important issue they are closer than the Winklevoss twins. Both regard manufacturing as precious beyond words, and both think the federal government should be making special efforts to promote it.

Obama favors an array of tax breaks to induce manufacturers to keep jobs in the United States, and Santorum wants to completely scrap the corporate income tax on companies in this particular sector.

“Everybody benefits when manufacturing is going strong,” said the president. Santorum recently lamented, “We have the manufacturing sector of the economy when I was growing up that was 21 percent of the workforce. It’s now nine.”

These are not exactly new sentiments. Walter Mondale, the 1984 Democratic presidential nominee, demanded, “What do we want our kids to do? Sweep up around the Japanese computers?”

In 1992, independent presidential candidate Ross Perot, railing against the North American Free Trade Agreement, forecast “a giant sucking sound” caused by jobs going to Mexico. Pundits galore have long warned that we are “losing our manufacturing base.”

But if nostalgia were a sound guide to economic policy, we should be building Studebakers and rotary telephones. Neither Santorum nor Obama seems to grasp the realities of manufacturing in 21st-century America.

The first is that it’s not declining in the ways that matter. Compared to1990, the total value of U.S. manufacturing output, adjusted for inflation, was up by 75 percent in 2010 — despite a drop caused by the Great Recession.

CONTINUED at Reason. Written by Steve Chapman.