Three voices. SL speaks for the Social Liberty Foundation. Claude is the AI model that helped draft this piece, given its own lines. 3rd Party is a composite of the country's existing outside parties, fifty years of running […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 They oppose the same wars, want the same drug laws repealed, defend the same speech, distrust the same police powers, and start from the same moral premise: that every person belongs to themselves […]
Armies take territory. Culture takes people, and it keeps them long after armies go home. […]
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 Law can be written in an afternoon and repealed in another.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 […]
Ask why libertarianism is so widely disliked and the answers come back remarkably consistent. [One recent survey of the criticism](https://factually.co/fact-checks/politics/why-is-libertarianism-hated-c21590) sorts them into a few bins: the philosophy is said to put individual rights above any collective claim, to favor […]
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 […]
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, […]
Frédéric Bastiat's most famous essay isn't about schooling at all. A boy breaks a shopkeeper's window, and the crowd that gathers finds a silver lining: the […]
America's founding answer to state power was a list of things the state may not do: it may not establish a religion, may not abridge speech, may not […]
Follow one town's actual attention for a season and the allocation stops making sense. A parks department commissions two hazard assessments on a single oak […]
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