[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 […]
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 […]
[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 […]
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* […]
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 […]
"Sacred cow" is a metaphor borrowed from an animal that was never actually being protected for the animal's own sake — reverence for cattle in the traditions the phrase comes from was never primarily a policy for the cow's welfare, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.
Machinery of Freedom, David Friedman A Saint once said: “Let the perfect city rise. Here needs no long debate on subtleties, Means, end, Let us intend That all be clothed and fed; while one remains Hungry our quarreling but mocks his pains. So all will labor to the good In one phalanx of brotherhood.” A […]
Usufruct, in Roman-based legal systems, the temporary right to the use and enjoyment of the property of another, without changing the character of the property. This legal concept developed in Roman law and found significant application in the determination of the property interests between a slave held under a usus fructus (Latin: “use and enjoyment”) […]
Brian Hodgkinson — A New Model of the Economy Systematically recognizes land as a critical factor of production—separate from labor and capital—and thereby properly sets the stage for an in-depth analysis of what causes various social ailments such as wealth inequality, poverty, or the destruction of the environment. Martin Adams — Land, A New Paradigm […]
Land Use and Public Property We recognize the right of property owners to control, use, transfer or dispose of their property in any manner that does not violate the rights of others. We believe that rights to land and any related water, oil or mineral rights are entitled to the same respect and protection. We […]
Social Liberty