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 […]
Current Libertarian Platform*: The Libertarian Party of California (LPCA) in 2025 bases its platform on core libertarian principles of individual liberty, limited government, and free markets, as outlined in various sources from the Libertarian Party and its California affiliate. Below is a description of a relevant Libertarian Party platform tailored to California, reflecting its current […]
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 […]
Traditional and Critical Theory Max Horkheimer Outline by Philip Turetzky, turetzky@colostate.edu Traditional Theory & Natural Science: 1) Theory is the sum of propositions linked in a system (basic and derived), where derived propositions are consonant with the facts. Theory consists of useful hypotheses – stores of knowledge (library analogy). 2) This view of theory descends […]
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 […]
Social Liberty