[The Municipal Trilemma](/posts/the-municipal-trilemma) worked through pickleball as the cleanest small-stakes instance of the boundary problem this site keeps finding at every scale: a court's value to the players and its cost to the neighbors are both real, both large, and […]
Almost no profession scores its practitioners the way tennis scores its own. A surgeon's skill is filtered through hospital politics, referral networks, and malpractice exposure before it becomes a reputation. A software engineer's output is filtered through a manager's judgment, […]
[A Meadow of Sacred Cows](/posts/a-meadow-of-sacred-cows) named the tell: a sacred cow is an arrangement defended, when it's defended at all, in the language of necessity or tradition, while the actual reason it survives is that a concentrated beneficiary never has […]
Every institution accumulates arrangements nobody currently alive actually chose. "Nobody questions this" turns out to be a description that covers several genuinely different situations, and it's worth sorting them before going after any one of them, because most of what […]
The previous essay in this series stopped at a deliberately uncomfortable place. It granted the harder case — that the hurt in front of us is not a curated instance doing rhetorical work for someone else's platform, but simply, unmistakably […]
"People are hurting" is not usually offered as the first line of an argument. It's offered as the last one — the point in a debate where further questions start to look indecent. Ask what the proposed program actually costs, […]
[The Right to Remember](/posts/the-right-to-remember) made the case that a public ledger converts what would otherwise be a standing positive right — continuous, fundable, defundable preservation work — into something closer to a structural guarantee: a record that doesn't need an […]
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.
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 […]
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: […]
Implement the universal ethic into the constitution, so that there be no restriction or imposed cost on acts which do not coercively harm others. Replace existing taxes with public revenue from user fees, pollution charges, and land value. Replace mass democracy with cellular democracy: small-group voting with bottom-up multi-level governance.
Social Liberty