The West North Central division — North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, and Missouri — earns the regional treatment [The South Rises](/posts/the-south-rises), [Schisms Within](/posts/schisms-within), and [The River Decides What Seven States Couldn't](/posts/the-river-decides-what-seven-states-couldnt) already gave other Census divisions, and […]
[Freedom Pathways](/posts/freedom-pathways) closed by naming the two harder cases still ahead of it in this series: land whose entire value lies in never being developed by anyone at all, which is refuge's problem, and land whose use by one party […]
[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 a single capital's session. [The South Rises](/posts/the-south-rises) and [The River Decides What Seven States Couldn't](/posts/the-river-decides-what-seven-states-couldnt) broke that pattern to read a region […]
This is the first piece in a series — pathways, access, and refuge — asking what a land ethic actually derived from social liberty's own premises looks like, rather than borrowed wholesale from a conservation movement this site hasn't otherwise […]
[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 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 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 […]
Imperial County, California, sits over a groundwater basin that took millennia to fill, in a region already contesting every acre-foot of Colorado River allocation it has left. In early 2026, a developer proposed a data center there just under a […]
[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 […]
[Actual Modern Georgist Experiments](/posts/actual-modern-georgist-experiments) went looking at what happens once a land value tax is up and running, and found a real, if uneven, track record: the mechanism reliably discourages sitting on empty land and encourages building wherever it's tried […]
Henry George's proposal was simple enough to fit on a bumper sticker: tax the value of land itself, not what people build on it, because land's value comes mostly from the surrounding community — roads, schools, transit, the sheer fact […]
In September 2021, Gavin Newsom signed two bills that did something California zoning law had not done in the better part of a century: they told a single-family homeowner that the city could no longer stop them from adding a second unit, or a third, or a fourth, to their own lot […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
The social cost of the tax that pays for the subsidy is greater than the gain to the buyers, because the extra buyers are able to to buy it at less than the market price. A subsidy lets people buy stuff below the price that would be set in a market. In a free market, […]
It is encouraging to see there is a growing awareness of the commons. This is partly through good historical research and partly through the pressing question of global warming. Research has shown how the commons have been eroded through land enclosure driving populations off the land into towns and cities, usually creating slums. Here the […]
Libertarianism is the ethical proposition that all and only coercive harm is evil. Geoism (also called “Georgism” after Henry George) is the proposition that the rent of land should be either shared equally or used for public revenue. Geo-libertarianism combines these two philosophies into equal self-ownership and equal rights to the rent of natural resources. […]
https://www.reddit.com/r/georgism/comments/qaf39r/how_would_geomutualism_work_in_practice_is_it/ I feel like this poster doesn’t understand what capitalism or socialism are. If by capitalism and socialism, it means neo-liberal capitalism and state socialism, then yes, mutualism and Georgism are two ideologies outside this paradigm. Capitalism is the control of capital by single people, who pay their workers wages, while keeping the […]
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.
Fred Folvary Introduction Conventional macroeconomics lacks a warranted explanation of the major business cycle, while the Austrian and geo-economic (Georgist) schools have incomplete theories. A geo-Austrian synthesis, in contrast, provides a potent theory consistent with historical cycles and with explanations about the root causes. The geo-economic and Austrian schools have had little interaction in the […]
Land value taxation is impeded by the same national sentiment that has reacted so strongly to the Supreme Court’s Kelo decision. That decision has sparked an intense national debate over the private property versus land use regulation and, ultimately, over the ability government to define a “public purpose.” State legislatures across the country are in […]
from John Ikerd, July 2008 In 1879, Henry George, a journalist and philosopher, proposed to abolish all taxation save that upon land values in his classic book, Progress and Poverty. He suggested that people were not poor because of any lack of productivity of either natural or human resources, but instead because of distribution of […]
Chapter I The Inquiry Narrowed to the Laws of Distribution—Necessary Relation of These Laws The preceding examination has, I think, conclusively shown that the explanation currently given, in the name of political economy, of the problem we are attempting to solve, is no explanation at all. That with material progress wages fail to increase, but […]
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