[The Right to Remember](/posts/the-right-to-remember) made the case that a public ledger converts what would otherwise be a standing positive right — continuous, fundable, defundable preservation work — into something closer to a structural guarantee: a record that doesn't need an […]
Most arguments reach for two categories first, because two categories are cheap. On or off, true or false, life or death, us or them — a dichotomy costs nothing to state and does real work the instant it's stated, because […]
We begin this article with the observation that what is said below invalidates everything else that was said in Article 1. The previous essay in this series took chapter 50 of the *Tao Te Ching* mostly at face value — […]
Before the parties, before the manifestos, before anyone was arrested for it, most modern revolutionary movements began the same way: a handful of people meeting to read something together. Russians called the form the *kruzhok* — literally "little circle" — […]
Take the abstraction out of the last two essays and put it somewhere concrete: a public park, on an ordinary afternoon. Not a private club and not somebody's back lawn — the public good, in its landed form, on behalf […]
Chapter 50 of the *Tao Te Ching* opens with an accounting that sounds almost bureaucratic for a book so given to paradox: […]
Henry George's proposal was simple enough to fit on a bumper sticker: tax the value of land itself, not what people build on it, because land's value comes mostly from the surrounding community — roads, schools, transit, the sheer fact […]
In September 2021, Gavin Newsom signed two bills that did something California zoning law had not done in the better part of a century: they told a single-family homeowner that the city could no longer stop them from adding a second unit, or a third, or a fourth, to their own lot […]
Palo Alto's Parks & Recreation Commission recently stood up a small ad hoc committee to strengthen biodiversity and pollinator connectivity across the park system. It's the kind of item that disappears from public attention within a week — it shouldn't. There's a real social liberty argument buried in it.
Every institution we deal with — our job, our lease, our culture, our education and training, our government -- has social implications and importance
Alongside the essays here, we keep a smaller side project: a set of self-contained slide decks that walk through three arguments in more depth than a blog post usually allows — game theory, political philosophy, and a critical look at libertarianism itself.
We recently sketched out three competing shapes a California libertarian platform could take: the current LPCA line, an idealized “maximal liberty” platform, and a geoist alternative built around Henry George’s economics.
Every dollar our city government spends comes from We the People. Our property taxes, our sales taxes, our labor. And yet for most people, finding out exactly where that money goes — how we understand and actualize priorities – which […]
Social Liberty