My phone buzzed four times on the evening of November 3, all of them texts from campaigns, all of them asking for money, and three of them using the same word. A progressive champion needed me before midnight. A progressive[…]
Two students sit at two pianos down the hall from each other, working on the same eight bars. The first has the metronome at 72 and has played the passage, by the tally marks penciled in the margin, forty-one times […]
Six rallies in a row, the ball goes crosscourt to the backhand corner. Nothing about it is dramatic. It lands deep, a few feet inside the sideline, with enough height to push the opponent back and not enough pace to […]
Around 1300 an English poet put Richard the Lionheart on crusade in rhyming couplets. In Richard Coer de Lyon the king’s army raises a siege tower, and the poem says of it: “A tour ful strong, That queyntyly engynours made.” […]
In 1492 the abbot of Sponheim, Johannes Trithemius, wrote a treatise called In Praise of Scribes. Monks, he argued, should keep copying books by hand even though the new presses could produce them faster. Copying was devotion. A scribe meditated […]
There is a painting in the Prado's collection, hung for years in Spain's Congress of Deputies, that shows three men about to die. Antonio Gisbert painted it in 1860. Juan de Padilla stands at the center, calm, his hand on […]
Every society keeps a list of its problems. In ours the list is made by whatever gets measured, argued about in public, and funded: housing, crime, inflation, the border, the budget. It's a useful list. It's also incomplete in a […]
Two groups of people call themselves libertarians. They oppose the same wars, want the same drug laws repealed, defend the same speech, distrust the same police powers, and start from the same moral premise: that every person belongs to themselves […]
Culture is what people do when no one is telling them what to do. Law can be written in an afternoon and repealed in another. Culture takes generations to grow and generations to lose, and it decides, long before any […]
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon gave the nineteenth century one of its most durable lines and then largely vanished from the century that kept quoting it. "Property is theft" outlived the book it came from, the movement it was meant to launch, and, […]
Why did a healthy oak, older than the town that killed it, actually have to die? Not the proximate answer — a hazard report, a rejected second opinion, a […]
Five Centuries Under One Crown laid out the mechanism in the abstract: once a municipality commissions a hazard report on a tree, the report itself becomes the […]
In August 2026, California's Governor's Office announced it had identified a psychological condition afflicting a large share of the state's population, and that it was standing up an apparatus to manage it. […]
There's a piece of received wisdom so common it rarely gets argued for anymore, only assumed: private owners degrade land, chasing this quarter's yield at the expense of next century's soil, and only a government — a park service, a […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
"Sacred cow" is a metaphor borrowed from an animal that was never actually being protected for the animal's own sake — reverence for cattle in the traditions the phrase comes from was never primarily a policy for the cow's welfare, […]
Imperial County, California, sits over a groundwater basin that took millennia to fill, in a region already contesting every acre-foot of Colorado River allocation it has left. In early 2026, a developer proposed a data center there just under a […]
We leave a little before half past seven, with maybe twenty minutes of real light left before the sun actually goes down at 7:39 — gold enough that the sidewalk cracks throw shadows, cool enough that Dog isn't panting before […]
Start with the part that isn't actually in dispute among the people who study it, however much it's disputed everywhere else. The planet's average surface temperature has risen a little over 1.1°C above the pre-industrial baseline, and it did that […]
Actual Modern Georgist Experiments went looking for what actually happens when a Georgist land value tax leaves the seminar room and meets a real city — Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, Estonia, Taiwan, the whole uneven record. The conclusion there was that plain […]
"Unsafe Safety" argued that "safety" earns the deference it currently gets for free only when a claim survives being checked — a stated mechanism, a measurable harm, a cost that's actually been weighed, and a review process that puts the […]
No one has ever stood up in a public meeting and argued for danger. That is precisely what makes "safety" the most useful word in politics — not because it describes something everyone wants, though it does, but because invoking […]
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" — […]
Building a Culture of Life — ChatGPT 2025 Government 1. Enact laws protecting life and rights 2. Provide safety nets (disability, housing, food aid) 3. Ensure law enforcement, diplomacy, anti-violence policies 4. Offer family leave, childcare support, education funding 5. Ensure access to ethical, affordable care 6. Uphold equal justice under the law 7. Enforce […]
Herbert Marcuse from: Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore, Jr., and Herbert Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), pp. 95-137. THIS essay examines the idea of tolerance in our advanced industrial society. The conclusion reached is that the realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, […]
preface to The Menace of Privilege Henry George Junior 1905 WHAT is the cause of the grave changes that are coming over the American Republic — the extraordinary inequality in the distribution of wealth manifested on every hand; the rise of class feeling; the growth of the aristocratic idea; the lapse from morals in business […]
Murray Rothbard, 1992 Well, they finally got David Duke. But he sure scared the bejesus out of them. It took a massive campaign of hysteria, of fear and hate, orchestrated by all wings of the Ruling Elite, from Official Right to Left, from President Bush and the official Republican Party through the New York-Washington-run national […]
Since 2014 solidarity activists, independent leftists, and others have been crossing the Tigris to study the developments in Rojava, the independent multi-ethnic enclave in northern Syria. Here the Kurdish people, whose aspirations have been stomped on for generations throughout the Middle East, are building a society structured institutionally around an assembly / council democracy and […]
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of […]
Libertarianism is the ethical proposition that all and only coercive harm is evil. Geoism (also called “Georgism” after Henry George) is the proposition that the rent of land should be either shared equally or used for public revenue. Geo-libertarianism combines these two philosophies into equal self-ownership and equal rights to the rent of natural resources. […]
The Majesty of the Law When I was seven years old, playing in front of our house on the outskirts of Brooklyn one morning, a policeman stopped and chatted with me for a few moments. He was a kindly man, of a Scandinavian blonde type with pleasant blue eyes, and I took to him at […]
— edited from lew rockwell We have been all too familiar in recent years with the phenomenon of Big Government Conservatives, of people who have betrayed and seemingly forgotten their principles and their heritage in a quest for power and pelf, for respectability and for access to the corridors of power, people who have moved […]
Cass R. Sunstein, More is Less, in The New Republic, at 37 (May 18, 1998) A German psychologist named Dietrich Dorner has done some fascinating experiments designed to see whether people can engage in successful social engineering. The experiments are run by a computer. Participants are asked to solve problems faced by the inhabitants of […]
Chapter I The Inquiry Narrowed to the Laws of Distribution—Necessary Relation of These Laws The preceding examination has, I think, conclusively shown that the explanation currently given, in the name of political economy, of the problem we are attempting to solve, is no explanation at all. That with material progress wages fail to increase, but […]
In every psychic experience, even in the production of a work of art, there exists a nucleus that is impossible to transform. It resists any and every action against itself. We are used to dealing with these irreducible and radical othernesses by adapting them to our own way of knowing and our experience. In reality, […]
from General Idea of the Revolution I beg that the reader will pardon me, if in the course of this study an expression should escape me which might betray any feeling of self-esteem. I have the double regret, in this great question of authority, of being, on the one hand, as yet alone in asserting […]
John Muir The moon is looking down into the canyon, and how marvelously the great rocks kindle to her light! Every dome, and brow, and swelling boss touched by her white rays, glows as if lighted with snow. I am now only a mile from last night’s camp; and have been climbing and sketching all […]
The subject of this Essay is not the so-called Liberty of the Will, so unfortunately opposed to the misnamed doctrine of Philosophical Necessity; but Civil, or Social Liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual. A question seldom stated, and hardly ever discussed, in general terms, […]
the social revolution was the establishment of a libertarian socialist economy based on coordination through decentralized and horizontal federations of participatory industrial collectives and agrarian communes The economic changes that followed the military insurrection were no less dramatic than the political. In those provinces where the revolt had failed the workers of the two trade […]
George Woodcock (1969) I was asked to write on decentralism in history, and I find myself looking into shadows where small lights shine as fireflies do, endure a little, vanish, and then reappear like Auden’s messages of the just. The history of decentralism has to be written largely in negative, in winters and twilights as […]
THE ECOLOGICAL USE OF TECHNOLOGY I have tried, thus far, to deal with a number of tangible, clearly objective issues: the possibility of eliminating toil, material insecurity, and centralized economic control. In the present section, I would like to deal with a problem that may seem somewhat subjective, but one which is nonetheless of compelling […]
Usufruct, in Roman-based legal systems, the temporary right to the use and enjoyment of the property of another, without changing the character of the property. This legal concept developed in Roman law and found significant application in the determination of the property interests between a slave held under a usus fructus (Latin: “use and enjoyment”) […]
Few arguments have been used more effectively to challenge the case for face-to-face participatory democracy than the claim that we live in a complex society. Modern population centers, we are told, are too large and too concentrated to allow for direct decision-making at a grassroots level…our economy is too global to unravel the intricacies of […]
The theologians answer: All justice comes from God That is true; but we know no more than before. The philosophers ought to be better informed: they have argued so much about justice and injustice! Unhappily, an examination proves that their knowledge amounts to nothing, and that with them — as with the savages whose every […]
The question whether this act is valid as a labor law, pure and simple, may be dismissed in a few words. There is no reasonable ground for interfering with the liberty of person or the right of free contract by determining the hours of labor in the occupation of a baker. There is a contention that bakers as […]
Of what consequence to you, reader, is my obscure individuality? I live, like you, in a century in which reason submits only to fact and to evidence. My name, like yours, is truth-seeker. My mission is written in these words of the law: Speak without hatred and without fear; tell that which thou knowest! The […]
Proudhon 1840 Chapter I. The Idea of a Revolution If I were asked to answer the following question: What is slavery? and I should answer in one word, It is murder, my meaning would be understood at once. No extended argument would be required to show that the power to take from a man his […]
Propositions 51 School Bonds. Funding for K-12 School and Community College Facilities. Initiative Statute. 52 Medi-Cal Hospital Fee Program. Initiative Constitutional Amendment and Statute. 53 Revenue Bonds. Statewide Voter Approval. Initiative Constitutional Amendment. 54 Legislature. Legislation and Proceedings. Initiative Constitutional Amendment and Statute. 55 Tax Extension to Fund Education and Healthcare. Initiative Constitutional Amendment. 56 […]
adapted from Murray Bookchin, Municipal Libertarianism Any agenda that tries to restore and amplify the classical meaning of politics and citizenship must clearly indicate what they are not, if only because of the confusion that surrounds the two words. Politics is not statecraft…Citizens are not constituents or taxpayers. Statecraft consists of operations that engage the […]
Effect of the Great Principles Proclaimed by the French Revolution. From the time when the Revolution brought down to the masses its Gospel – not the mystic but the rational, not the heavenly but the earthly, not the divine but the human Gospel, the Gospel of the Rights of Man – ever since it proclaimed […]
Brian Hodgkinson — A New Model of the Economy Systematically recognizes land as a critical factor of production—separate from labor and capital—and thereby properly sets the stage for an in-depth analysis of what causes various social ailments such as wealth inequality, poverty, or the destruction of the environment. Martin Adams — Land, A New Paradigm […]
THE LANDLORD’S GAME The Landlord’s Game may be played by two or more. Each player selects one piece, and, if there are two players, each provides himself with $6oo; if three players, each $500; if four players, each $400. All money and implements not in use by the players should be put upon the […]
Social Liberty
