18 essays
In March 2025 a travel writer, Simon Buckby, published a guide called “The Arabian Peninsula is waking up and opening up.” The whole peninsula was opening, it said, except Yemen, “still stuck in civil war.” A single tourist visa for […]
In 1771 Oliver Goldsmith sent a friend a short report on a sitting member of Parliament: “Burke is a farmer – en attendant a better place, but visiting about too.” The report was accurate. That autumn the member wrote to […]
On November 1, 1966, All Saints’ Day, the National Football League awarded its sixteenth franchise to New Orleans. The timing wasn’t a coincidence of the calendar. A few weeks earlier Congress had passed a law exempting the merger of the […]
Early, before work, a woman walks her dog to the field at the end of the street. The field is empty. Halfway across she unclips the leash and the dog runs, nose down, in long loops through the wet grass. […]
On high ground above tree line, trails are often marked by cairns: small stacks of stones, one in sight of next, trails leading across rock where no path wears into the ground. Nobody knows who are their builders. A hiker […]
There is a habit of treating liberty and democracy as one thing with two names. Hold elections and freedom follows; where freedom is missing, elections are the cure. The last thirty-five years have been hard on that habit. […]
On Saturday a Houthi missile hit Riyadh's international airport for the third time in a week. Saudi Arabia says at least twelve people were killed and about three hundred wounded, the deadliest attack on the kingdom in more than a […]
Murray Bookchin died in 2006, believing his politics had mostly failed to find an audience. Twenty years later his idea, that free people should govern themselves in face-to-face assemblies and federate their towns instead of submitting to a state, has […]
Most arguments about land start from the same assumption, even when they end in opposite places. If land is important enough, the government should hold it. Parks, forests, wetlands, watersheds, and lately housing, are all treated this way: once something […]
Every argument for freedom eventually runs into the same practical objection. If anyone can start a school, a land trust, a clinic, or a cooperative, how is anyone supposed to know which ones are any good? A parent choosing a […]
Before it was Silicon Valley, the Santa Clara Valley had another name. Promoters in the early twentieth century called it the Valley of Heart's Delight: miles of prune, apricot, peach, and cherry orchards between the bay and the hills, among […]
Every tax on property rests on a number nobody paid. A house sells, and there's a price. But most houses don't sell in any given year, and a tax on property still has to be charged on all of them. […]
Two identical houses sit side by side on a street in the Bay Area. Same lot size, same 1950s floor plan, same view of the same hills. One owner pays about $2,000 a year in property tax. The other pays […]
Bab al-Mandab at night. On the Arabian shore, oil works burn in tall ragged sheets of flame, storage tanks and a pipeline standing black against the glow, a smaller fire further down the coast where a pumping station has been […]
Try three claims together and they look like a contradiction. Property is the origin of liberty — the thing that lets a person refuse, walk away, and build a life no one else can veto. Property is theft — Proudhon's […]
Frederick Bastiat In the department of economy, an act, a habit, an institution, a law, gives birth not only to an effect, but to a series of effects. Of these effects, the first only is immediate; it manifests itself simultaneously with its cause — it is seen. The others unfold in succession — they are not seen: […]
Machinery of Freedom, David Friedman A Saint once said: “Let the perfect city rise. Here needs no long debate on subtleties, Means, end, Let us intend That all be clothed and fed; while one remains Hungry our quarreling but mocks his pains. So all will labor to the good In one phalanx of brotherhood.” A […]
The central idea of libertarianism is that people should be permitted to run their own lives as they wish. We totally reject the idea that people must be forcibly protected from themselves. A libertarian society would have no laws against drugs, gambling, pornography — and no compulsory seat belts in cars. We also reject the […]
Social Liberty