Somewhere in the American South, or on a chaparral hillside in California, there is very likely a live oak — one of a handful of evergreen *Quercus* species that share the name for their wide, low, spreading crowns — that […]
Two things happened to American cities in the same twenty-year stretch, using the same federal money, the same engineering confidence, and in more than one case the same construction crews. One got the streams. The other got the streets. Both […]
Political philosophy usually hands you two options for what the state actually is, and asks you to pick a side. The liberal tradition, running from Locke through the American founding to most modern minarchists, treats the state as a neutral […]
The West North Central division — North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, and Missouri — earns the regional treatment [The South Rises](/posts/the-south-rises), [Schisms Within](/posts/schisms-within), and [The River Decides What Seven States Couldn't](/posts/the-river-decides-what-seven-states-couldnt) already gave other Census divisions, and […]
[An Industrial Park from a Bloated Government](/posts/an-industrial-park-from-a-bloated-government) already traced what California's government has become in plain fiscal terms: a general fund that roughly doubled in a decade, a single-year surplus larger than most states' entire budgets, a swing into tens […]
California voters decide on November 3 whether to rewrite how the state's signature environmental law actually works in practice, and the honest answer to what it would do for social liberty is not a clean yes or no. Proposition 45 […]
[The Municipal Trilemma](/posts/the-municipal-trilemma) worked through pickleball as the cleanest small-stakes instance of the boundary problem this site keeps finding at every scale: a court's value to the players and its cost to the neighbors are both real, both large, and […]
A kid is still on the swings when the first truck backs in. Nobody closed the gate, nobody posted a notice on the bulletin board by the restrooms — the crew just arrives, cones off the strip of brush along […]
[Freedom Pathways](/posts/freedom-pathways) closed by naming the two harder cases still ahead of it in this series: land whose entire value lies in never being developed by anyone at all, which is refuge's problem, and land whose use by one party […]
[What Sacramento Is Deciding](/posts/what-sacramento-is-deciding), [Austin's Long Recess](/posts/austin-s-long-recess), [Beacon Hill's Interval Training](/posts/beacon-hill-s-interval-training), and [The View from Tallahassee](/posts/the-view-from-tallahassee) each read a single capital's session. [The South Rises](/posts/the-south-rises) and [The River Decides What Seven States Couldn't](/posts/the-river-decides-what-seven-states-couldnt) broke that pattern to read a region […]
Swap out the council, the mayor, the party in charge of a given town, and three problems stay exactly where they were. They aren't failures of any particular administration's competence or good faith. They're built into what a municipality *is* […]
This is the first piece in a series — pathways, access, and refuge — asking what a land ethic actually derived from social liberty's own premises looks like, rather than borrowed wholesale from a conservation movement this site hasn't otherwise […]
Thomas Paine opened Common Sense with that distinction in January of 1776, months before any congress had declared anything, and the distinction is the whole argument this piece is built on. Society — the actual fabric of people cooperating, trading, […]
Social Liberty