Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Nathan Goodman

@nathanpgoodman.bsky.social

2.4K followers 4.2K following 300 posts

Economist who studies institutions, political economy, polycentricity, defense & peace economics, and border militarization. https://www.nathanpgoodman.com/ https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=1Ue5NBMAAAAJ&hl=en

www.nathanpgoodman.com

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Pinned

Nathan Goodman @nathanpgoodman.bsky.social · Nov 12

Much of my work focuses on the militarization of the US-Mexico border.

For instance, this paper examines how that militarization shaped domestic policing: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Border militarization and domestic institutions - Constitutional Political Economy

The objective of this paper is to examine the impact of border policies and the increased militarization of border control practices on the expansion of police powers, the erosion of constitutional co...

link.springer.com

1 12 28

Reposted by Nathan Goodman

Kelly² @anarchakelly.bsky.social · 3h

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.

5 11

Reposted by Nathan Goodman

Fully Informed Jury Association @fijanational.bsky.social · 3h

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-...

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.substack.com

1 10 30

Reposted by Nathan Goodman

Michael Clemens @mclem.org · 8h

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. 🧵

Nathan Kalmoe (he/him) @nathankalmoe.bsky.social · 11h

apnews.com/article/myan...

Starving children screaming for food as US aid cuts unleash devastation and death across Myanmar

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has repeatedly said “no one has died" because of his government’s decision to gut its foreign aid program.

apnews.com

1 110 220

Reposted by Nathan Goodman

David Bier @davidjbier.bsky.social · 6h

DEI for me, not for thee.

41 590 1.9K

Reposted by Nathan Goodman

David Dayen @ddayen.bsky.social · 2d

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...

How ICE Hides Detainees From Their Lawyers

‘It seems like cruelty is the point,’ one attorney said.

prospect.org

85 1.5K 2.8K

Reposted by Nathan Goodman

Fully Informed Jury Association @fijanational.bsky.social · 2d

Tyranny stops when people decide to stop it. #jurynullification

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

1 5 40

Reposted by Nathan Goodman

William Gillis 🏴 @rechelon.bsky.social · 2d

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

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

1 10 26

Reposted by Nathan Goodman

Michael Clemens @mclem.org · 2d

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.

Lindsay P Cohn @lindsaypcohn.bsky.social · 2d

Folks we are watching the adjudication of some of the most important constitutional issues of federalism, executive discretion, and judicial review since the 19th c

www.oregonlive.com/politics/202...

Judge issues new broader order barring any National Guard from relocating to Oregon

Judge asked federal government lawyer: 'Do you believe this is an appropriate way to deal with a judge’s order that you disagree with?'

www.oregonlive.com

1 8 24

Reposted by Nathan Goodman

Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 2d

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! ❤️ ❤️

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...

www.interruptingcriminalization.com

1 16 32

Reposted by Nathan Goodman

Aaron Ross Powell ☸️ @aaronrosspowell.com · 2d

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.

3 390 1.5K

Reposted by Nathan Goodman

Andrew Couts @couts.bsky.social · 5d

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...

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.

www.wired.com

800 4.9K 6.5K

Nathan Goodman @nathanpgoodman.bsky.social · 5d

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

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 entrepr

papers.ssrn.com

Nathan Goodman @nathanpgoodman.bsky.social · 5d

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

1 1

Nathan Goodman @nathanpgoodman.bsky.social · 5d

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

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...

link.springer.com

1 1

Nathan Goodman @nathanpgoodman.bsky.social · 5d

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

Liberal Emancipation

This contributed volume explores the topic of emancipation and economics within the liberal system of thought.

link.springer.com

1 1

Nathan Goodman @nathanpgoodman.bsky.social · 5d

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.

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.

1 4

Nathan Goodman @nathanpgoodman.bsky.social · 5d

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.

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.

1 2

Nathan Goodman @nathanpgoodman.bsky.social · 5d

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.

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.

1 3

Nathan Goodman @nathanpgoodman.bsky.social · 5d

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.

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.

1 2

Nathan Goodman @nathanpgoodman.bsky.social · 5d

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

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.

1 2

Nathan Goodman @nathanpgoodman.bsky.social · 5d

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.

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.

1 1

Nathan Goodman @nathanpgoodman.bsky.social · 5d

Honestly, I wish that I had cited and quoted from @rechelon.bsky.social's @c4ssdotorg.bsky.social
essay "Action is Sometimes Clearer Than Talk: Why We Will Always Need Trade" here, as they get at these issues much more clearly and effectively than I do here.
t.co/QlywSVvVUh

https://c4ss.org/content/53019

t.co

1 1

Nathan Goodman @nathanpgoodman.bsky.social · 5d

This has significant implications for understanding which types of radical social change are feasible.

Its implications are most obvious for state socialists, but it has implications for social anarchist proposals too.

Whether social anarchist proposals are subject to this critique is a more complicated question. After all, social anarchists are not proposing a central planning board to coordinate production and distribution. Their preferred arrangements are still polycentric, and therefore leave room for individuals and groups to act on their local, context-specific knowledge. However, to whatever extent social anarchism entails jettisoning exchangeable rights to productive property, it is likely to prevent the emergence of prices for productive property. The knowledge discovered and communicated through prices is therefore unlikely to be discovered and communicated. In such a context, local decisions can still proceed based on local knowledge, but coordination and cooperation across wider groups of people that cannot directly communicate with one another is likely to be hampered. When the extent of social cooperation, productive specialization, exchange, and coordination is limited in this way, people will likely be substantially poorer. Under such conditions of poverty, fewer people, including queer and trans people, will be able to flourish and thrive. The productive specialization that has given rise to LGBTQ-empowering forms of commerce and civil society would be hampered. Moreover, to achieve coordination in the absence of markets and central planning, communities would likely turn to tradition as an alternative coordination mechanism (Lavoie 1985b). Traditions are often a useful coordinating mechanism, but they can be stultifying and oppressive for those whose values, goals, and identities do not fit well with them. We might therefore expect coordination based on tradition to further the marginalization of at least some queer and trans people. Thus, any proposal that aims to entirely jettison exchangeable property rights to productive property is likely to exacerbate oppression, not emancipate queer and trans people.

1 2

Nathan Goodman @nathanpgoodman.bsky.social · 5d

A core insight in the mainline literature is that without exchangeable property rights over productive goods, economic calculation is impossible.

Property enables exchange, which enables us to discover prices. These prices communicate knowledge & enable coordination.

Resources, including resources used for production, are scarce. They have competing uses. Therefore, using them for one productive project entails foregoing the benefits of another productive project. Given the multiplicity of possible projects we could pursue, and the variety of production techniques people could choose to use for those projects, they need some way to decide how to allocate scarce resources among competing ends. Moreover, these productive goods are heterogeneous. Therefore, while a piece of productive property can be used for multiple different kinds of projects, it cannot be easily shifted to producing just any other good. Mining equipment used to extract metal from the ground cannot be easily repurposed into farm equipment. This means that if scarce resources are used for productive projects that turn out to be unwanted, there are real costs to shifting production plans. Decisions about which production plans to pursue therefore have real costs, costs that would be concealed by treating capital as homogeneous, as some neoclassical economists do. Given the opportunity cost of pursuing one production project over another, how are people to choose among the diverse range of possible projects? How are they to assess which have benefits that exceed the costs? This is the problem of economic calculation.

In a market economy with institutions of private property rights, individuals and firms purchase, rent, own, and sell productive property. The exchanges they make give rise to exchange ratios, or prices, of these productive goods. These prices act as knowledge surrogates, communicating easily digestible information about how much value others in the market attach to alternative uses of the goods. Profit and loss feedback helps the owners of firms discern whether consumers value their products more or less than alternative uses of the inputs that they have used. That feedback also creates an incentive to adjust one’s productive plans if they are not creating value. Of course, markets are imperfect, characterized by externalities, information asymmetries, and distortions wrought by the political capitalist system we live in. However, even disequilibrium prices act as important knowledge surrogates, and as a lure for alert entrepreneurs to promote adjustments away from disequilibrium. . Moreover, the presence of political capitalism does not give us reasons to jettison price feedback altogether, but instead reasons to resist the state-secured system of privilege that distorts markets in the interests of politically connected capitalist rent seekers.

Unfortunately, the socialist program of central planning does jettison price feedback, at least for the goods used within production processes. Even so-called “market socialists” propose abolishing property rights in the means of production, instead replacing them with a mix of central planning and trial and error. Markets, in this system, are reserved for consumption and labor decisions. By eliminating the institutional foundation that exchange of productive property rests upon, socialist planning prevents exchange ratios (or prices) from emerging for these productive goods. This means giving up the guides that help individuals coordinate their plans with one another and pursue projects that create value for others.
When the process of market coordination via price feedback is abandoned, socialists need some alternative mechanism to coordinate productive plans. They often opt for central planning, which centralizes power in the hands of an elite group who then face all the problems of discretionary coercive power that radicals rightly recognize in the American police, prison wardens, and military commanders. The results include shortages, gluts, and other resource misallocations that impoverish the population. Moreover, the economy becomes militarized and regimented (Lavoie 1985b). In some cases, the economy, while nominally subject to central planning, decentralizes de facto decision-making into the hands of politically connected individuals who control plants and resources. In this way, socialism devolves into a system of mercantilism or political capitalism (Anderson and Boettke 1997).

The inability to engage in economic calculation means that a system that attempts to abolish private property or institute central economic planning is unable to raise productive forces, coordinate plans, and thereby guide society towards a world of plenty in which people can flourish free from exploitation, class antagonism, and alienation. That world is not within the realm of possibility. Therefore, while central planning is possible, it is not possible for it to achieve the lofty and admirable goals of socialists.
This applies to all forms of socialism that attempt to replace coordination via the market process with coordination via central planning, not just those that explicitly embrace a dictatorship of the proletariat. As Lavoie (1985b) explains, the knowledge problem impacts not just comprehensive planning, which attempts to plan the entire economy, but also various forms of noncomprehensive planning, such as industrial policy. Indeed, Lavoie devotes an entire chapter to discussing various proposals for planning via "economic democracy."

1 2

Nathan Goodman @nathanpgoodman.bsky.social · 5d

Yet at the same time, mainline economics enables us to assess the feasibility & likely consequences of proposed radical alternatives.

5. Economics as a Constraint on Utopias
If radical institutional changes are needed to challenge militarism, policing, and repressive gender roles, what form should these changes take? What strategy and aims should we pursue in our efforts to build a better world? Mainline economics is vital to answering this question because economic reasoning helps us analyze what institutional arrangements are feasible and what their likely consequences are.

1 1