Nathan Goodman

YouTube video by David J. Bier Trump is ordering people executed

I have a YouTube channel where you can watch this short video about Trump's murder spree in the Caribbean alongside all my congressional testimony. We recorded the video shortly after the 2nd boat strike... but there have been more already. Like, comment, subscribe
www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RUJ...

So agents trespassed into a citizen’s home on a fishing expedition and murdered their dog kfoxtv.com/news/local/e...

It is impossible—even for those of us who spend a pathological amount of time every day working on CBP, ICE, and DHS—to fully track these agencies’ misdeeds.

Transparency trails years behind, if we are lucky and persistent. Someday, the accounting from this period will be terrible.

I feel like this photo of masked, armed men pepper spraying a pastor protecting his community is going to be a defining picture of this moment in America for a long, long time.

Rousseau, Adaptive Preferences, and Social Entrepeneurship Near the start of The Social Contract (1762), in his criticism of Aristotle, Rousseau (recall) diagnoses the phenomenon of adaptive preferences. What we desire is not just shaped by society, but what ...

Rousseau, Adaptive Preferences, and Social Entrepeneurship
open.substack.com/pub/digressi...
Shout outs to @erwindekker.bsky.social, @lastpositivist.bsky.social, @serenekhader.bsky.social

The following is REAL footage from Portland, 2025. Viewer discretion is advised.

From Native Son to Ethnomethodology On Richard Wright and Harold Garfinkel

This week's Substack post discusses the links between Richard Wright's classic Chicago novel, Native Son, and Harold Garfinkel's early (ethnomethodological) studies of the way juries work in Chicago.

Or simply, how institutional racism was understood in the 1940s.

Rutgers professor moving to Europe after threats over antifa accusations Mark Bray says threats intensified after a Turning Point USA petition accused him of promoting political violence

Solidarity with Mark Bray. Purging academia of scholars of antifascism is just the first step in establishing fascist ideological orthodoxy.

Jacob T. Levy discusses the health of American democracy on the Liberal Currents’ Half the Answer podcast September 5, 2025

The discussion @caitlinmoriah.bsky.social and I had with @jacobtlevy.bsky.social via @liberalcurrents.com was so marvelous and informative; @cato.org agrees as much.

The health of American Democracy was the prime focus, but we got all over - including Trump, authoritarianism, ice cream, and more!

Folks should head over to @fijanational.bsky.social and give them a follow. They should have way more than they currently do.

If you’re following me you’re probably exactly the type of person who should be on a jury. It’s important to know your rights when it comes to voting your conscience.

The Fight for Free Speech Around Jury Nullification From the US to the UK, activists with both the Fully Informed Jury Association and Defend Our Juries have routinely faced repression for clearly protected free speech

FIJA stands with the #jurynulification activists of Defend Our Juries who've faced repression in the UK for basic free speech

fija.substack.com/p/the-fight-...

Former USAID official here.

The current Administration has done zero impact analysis to estimate the effects of its obliteration of USAID on deaths around the world.

It just keeps saying "no one has died" as a mesmeric incantation.

The facts, below. 🧵

DEI for me, not for thee.

How ICE Hides Detainees From Their Lawyers ‘It seems like cruelty is the point,’ one attorney said.

ICE abducts people and then immediately moves them around to prevent access to lawyers and habeas corpus petitions. @emmarjanssen.bsky.social has the story on this consistent game being played to frustrate due process.
prospect.org/justice/2025...

Practically speaking, no government knows any limits to its power, except the endurance of the people.

Tyranny stops when people decide to stop it. #jurynullification

Virtual event Oct 15th 8pm ET

Hey everyone! I'm doing a virtual book talk with the lovely folks of @firestorm.coop

You can register here:
firestorm.coop/events/3479-...

The White House ordered military occupation of yet another opposition-party-controlled US city.

One of our federal judges blocked this flagrantly illegal perversion of our Constitution. The White House tried to evade the order, activating a different military force.

She has blocked them again.

Fighting Copaganda Under Authoritarianism — Interrupting Criminalization A discussion of how to advance narratives that undermine authoritarianism and increase solidarity, featuring Interrupting Criminalization's Andrea Ritchie, Abolition Journalism Fellow Lewis Raven Wall...

I'll be with @interruptcrim.bsky.social for a conversation about how to advance narratives that undermine authoritarianism and increase solidarity. Join me, @dreanyc123.bsky.social and Lewis Wallen on October 15th, 3pm est! ❤️ ❤️

As the people who insist otherwise try to burn the country, it's important to affirm that immigrants, from everywhere, are awesome, and America is better the more immigrants we have. You have to be just empty and vapid and unimaginably small to reject that.

ICE Wants to Build Out a 24/7 Social Media Surveillance Team Documents show ICE plans to hire dozens of contractors to scan X, Facebook, TikTok, and other platforms to target people for deportation.

NEW: ICE is planning to hire a team of nearly 30 people to surveil social media 24/7, build dossiers on people, and flag them for arrest and deportation. @dell.bsky.social has the scoop: www.wired.com/story/ice-so...

You can also find an earlier draft of my chapter in this SSRN preprint: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Possibly of interest to @aaronrosspowell.com, one of the few open standard bearers of radical liberal ideas.

A Radical Liberal Approach to LGBTQ Emancipation Progress towards freedom for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ) people can largely be attributed to experimentation and entrepreneurship within markets and civil society. Liberal institutions of property, contract, consent, and free...

Read my chapter here: link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

Find the book here: link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

7. Conclusion Regardless of whether the terms I use in the previous section ever catch on within social movements (they likely will not), I hope that this chapter encourages researchers to continue exploring the synergies between mainline economics and radical LGBT politics. Analytical anarchism, as well as the related research program of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom regarding polycentric governance, can be quite fruitful for understanding social movements, mutual aid, and anarchist prefigurative politics. Public choice, particularly the analysis of political capitalism, can be fruitfully applied to understand the systems of state violence and economic privilege that radicals rightly critique. Ultimately, mainline economics offers a powerful lens for understanding our world. Through that understanding, radicals can better understand the feasible paths available for emancipatory social change.

Sometimes this means casting cold water on proposed paths towards emancipation. Attempts to remake the world through centralized economic planning will lead not to emancipation, but to calculational chaos and abuses by the wielders of centralized power. Some nominally democratic or decentralized forms of radical social change may be subject to similar pitfalls. Yet the most radical and anti-authoritarian elements of the movement, namely the anarchists and abolitionists, are prefiguring a better world each day. Rather than attempting to impose liberation from the top-down, they are forging new forms of associational life that enable marginalized people to survive, thrive, and govern themselves in the face of hostile power. The insights of mainline economics can help us understand what sets these distinct radical paths towards liberation apart from one another, as well as why imperfect but promising moves towards emancipation have occurred within liberal democracies. The partial liberalism we see around us enables experimentation, entrepreneurship, coordination, and community. Radical critics offer trenchant critiques of violence and inequity in existing institutions. Yet for a radical change to be truly emancipatory, it should preserve and expand this space for experimentation and entrepreneurship, not constrain or crush it.

I don't anticipate the terminology I use in the chapter to catch on.

But I hope the core insights do.

Because emancipation matters, and mainline political economy can help us understand current oppression & what proposals for overcoming it are feasible.

Many radical queer and trans movements emphasize direct action and mutual aid projects that leverage local knowledge to directly help the most vulnerable, rather than imposing top-down plans via efforts to seize control of a state that is hostile to queer and trans survival. These strategies are far less vulnerable to the pitfalls we identified in the previous section. Rather than imposing centralized economic planning, they empower individuals to use their local knowledge, cooperate from the bottom-up, and help their community. In this respect, the vibrant and positive sum practical anarchism of radical queer and trans liberation movements is already consistent with the radical liberal vision I outline here. They might never choose to speak of it in those terms, as they may associate “liberalism” with a stodgy status quo rather than an emancipatory project. But they already live their lives in a manner that is consistent with bottom-up discovery, endogenous rule formation, the pursuit of the positive sum, and efforts to live our lives as dignified equals. Ultimately, that is more important than labels. While social anarchists and other LGBTQ radicals may at times envision future arrangements that would likely have harmful unintended consequences, the day-to-day activities of their movements help to create productive and emancipatory forms of voluntary association. The anarchist emphasis on experimentation, direct action, and mutual aid leads to genuinely positive action, regardless of what totalizing visions any given radical may be motivated by.

I am under no illusion that anarchists, leftists, or radical queer & trans activists will adopt my "radical liberal" language.

But fortunately, they largely embrace bottom-up, experimental, polycentric strategies consistent with the core point I'm making.

But even if a radical liberal anarchism of the sort that the 19th century individualists embraced seems possible, some radical queer and trans activists may worry that it winds up supporting existing unjust distributions of wealth and life chances. Yet consistent with Holcombe’s analysis of political capitalism, the 19th century individualist anarchists recognized that existing inequality and economic injustice rests upon state-granted monopoly privileges, especially “four of principal importance: the money monopoly, the land monopoly, the tariff monopoly, and the patent monopoly” (Tucker 1893). Tucker argued that ending such state granted monopoly privileges would empower ordinary people and erode precisely the exploitative and unequal relations that socialists wished to resist. Members of queer radical movements have likewise sought to end unjust state-secured monopolies. For instance, activists affiliated with AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) have opposed pharmaceutical patents and FDA restrictions that limit HIV patients’ access to medicine (Szijarto 2023). Radical transgender activists have often supported routing around the monopoly privileges that medical professionals have when it comes to prescribing gender affirming hormones and related treatments (Rotondi et al. 2013). These activists engage in mutual aid, routing around state-erected barriers to entry and ensuring that their fellows have access to the healthcare they need. This strategy directly challenges state secured monopoly privileges and moves us in the direction of a genuinely free market, rather than the captured political capitalist system we live under.

Even if the liberals' concerns about feasibility are addressed, the radicals may fear that having markets & property at all entails dangerous inequality.

I argue that abolishing state secured privileges & entry barriers helps alleviate this concern.

The radical queer and trans movement’s emphasis on prison and police abolition, as well as their efforts to organize individuals who face violence and criminalization by the state, means that they have direct experience engaging in this type of endogenous and bottom-up governance. To the extent that the most marginalized members of the queer and trans community see the police and the criminal justice system as a threat rather than a service provider, they will seek out alternative mechanisms to keep their communities safe. For instance, the Audre Lorde Project, an organization run by LGBT people of color, has operated a safe neighborhood campaign that works to deescalate and prevent hate violence without calling the police (Goh 2019). Similar projects in which marginalized people build alternatives to state administered governance have been documented by Mariame Kaba and other prison abolitionists through a project called “One Million Experiments.” This name resonates with the emphasis mainline economists place on bottom-up processes of experimentation and discovery, rather than top-down one-size-fits-all solutions.

I also argue that the prefigurative social experimentation carried out within anarchist, abolitionist, and radical queer & trans social movements gives us further reasons for hope.

However, some liberals may balk at the proposal. They may question its feasibility. After all, Mises, Hayek, and other similar liberal thinkers did not embrace Tucker’s anarchist conclusions. This is largely because they believed that a state equipped to enforce general rules, especially rules pertaining to the protection of property and contract, was necessary for sustaining the market order and the social cooperation it begets. Were they correct? Tucker and de Cleyre did not think so. More importantly, an emerging research program in mainline economics provides social scientific reasons to believe that social order, social cooperation, and the protection of rights are possible without a centralized state. This research program, which Peter Boettke (2005) has dubbed “analytical anarchism,” uses historical case studies, institutional analysis, and economic theory to analyze situations of endogenous rule formation. These situations occur when individuals or groups cannot rely upon a state’s formal legal system to protect their rights or solve their governance dilemmas, and therefore they instead endogenously devise governance arrangements that work for them. Boettke and Candela (2020) summarize a large portion of this literature, showing that both inclusive mechanisms that bring people together and exclusive mechanisms based around selective groups can be used to provide governance that sustains social cooperation from the bottom-up.

I argue that the economic literature that Peter Boettke has called "analytical anarchism" gives us good reasons to think that individualist anarchism is feasible.

Yet while mainline economics hereby imposes a set of constraints upon the ways we can escape the current morass of imperialism, coercively imposed gender conformity, political capitalist exploitation, and mass imprisonment, this does not mean that a radical break from the existing order is impossible. Instead, it means that this radical break, to achieve liberatory ends, must maintain opportunities for bottom-up, decentralized coordination of individuals’ diverse plans. In the next section, I discuss one possible way forward for this kind of bottom-up radicalism.

Anyway, just because economics places constraints on the kinds of alternative arrangements that are feasible doesn't mean we can't seek radical forms of alternative governance.