A kid is still on the swings when the first truck backs in. Nobody closed the gate, nobody posted a notice on the bulletin board by the restrooms — the crew just arrives, cones off the strip of brush along […]
[The Park](/posts/the-park) walked three postures a public good can take — fenced and gated, worn and organic, natural and unmanaged — and asked, along the way, whether "public good" names anything real at all. Its answer set two conditions a […]
A libertarian visiting rural Nebraska and a libertarian visiting Manhattan tend to notice opposite things. In the country, the complaint is usually that government is too far away, too slow, too indifferent to conditions only a local actually understands. In […]
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 […]
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: […]
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 […]
Social Liberty