[An Industrial Park from a Bloated Government](/posts/an-industrial-park-from-a-bloated-government) already traced what California's government has become in plain fiscal terms: a general fund that roughly doubled in a decade, a single-year surplus larger than most states' entire budgets, a swing into tens […]
Swap out the council, the mayor, the party in charge of a given town, and three problems stay exactly where they were. They aren't failures of any particular administration's competence or good faith. They're built into what a municipality *is* […]
[What Sacramento Is Deciding](/posts/what-sacramento-is-deciding), [Austin's Long Recess](/posts/austin-s-long-recess), [Beacon Hill's Interval Training](/posts/beacon-hill-s-interval-training), and [The View from Tallahassee](/posts/the-view-from-tallahassee) each read one state capital's session for what it actually decides about social liberty, bill by bill. [The South Rises](/posts/the-south-rises) broke that pattern once […]
[The South Rises](/posts/the-south-rises) took the East South Central states as a single unit because all four were governed, this year, by the same coalition with enough margin that the ordinary checks on that coalition had mostly stopped checking. The Great […]
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 […]
Nothing on this site sorts cleanly onto a ballot line, and that's worth addressing directly rather than treating as an accident of subject matter. [Personal Sovereignty](/posts/personal-sovereignty) argued that a Millian respect for individual judgment is the irreducible unit underneath the […]
[What Sacramento Is Deciding](/posts/what-sacramento-is-deciding), [Austin's Long Recess](/posts/austin-s-long-recess), and [Beacon Hill's Interval Training](/posts/beacon-hill-s-interval-training) each took a single state capital as the unit worth watching. This entry breaks that pattern on purpose. [Growing a Movement as a Design Problem](/posts/growing-a-movement-as-a-design-problem) argued that the […]
Our federalism pieces have spent months on a single recurring question: at what altitude should a given decision actually be made. [Splitting the Atom of Sovereignty](/posts/splitting-the-atom-of-sovereignty) described a constitutional design that keeps that question open and arguable rather than settling […]
Most of what a government is, historically, is one thing: a single will at the top, however that will gets chosen or replaced. A king, a parliament, a politburo — the label changes, but sovereignty itself stays whole, a single […]
Three regions into this beat and no two legislatures have run on the same clock. [What Sacramento Is Deciding](/posts/what-sacramento-is-deciding) covered a state in continuous annual session against a hard floor deadline. [Austin's Long Recess](/posts/austin-s-long-recess) covered one that meets once every […]
[What Sacramento Is Deciding](/posts/what-sacramento-is-deciding) and [Austin's Long Recess](/posts/austin-s-long-recess) gave this beat two structural patterns already: a legislature in continuous annual session against a hard floor deadline, and a legislature that meets once every two years and spends the other nineteen […]
Ask someone how a political movement grows and they'll usually answer in terms of message, money, or charisma — the right slogan, enough donors, a leader people will follow. Those things matter, but they're not what actually determines whether a […]
[What Sacramento Is Deciding](/posts/what-sacramento-is-deciding) opened this site's legislature beat with California, mid-session, bills moving through committee on a clock. Texas is the second region on that beat, and it immediately breaks the format that piece assumed: there is no Texas […]
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