In 1771 Oliver Goldsmith sent a friend a short report on a sitting member of Parliament: “Burke is a farmer – en attendant a better place, but visiting about too.” The report was accurate. That autumn the member wrote to […]
For fourteen years, from 1920 to 1934, Ludwig von Mises held a seminar in his office at the Vienna Chamber of Commerce. He wasn’t a salaried professor. The University of Vienna let him lecture without pay, and his living came […]
In 1569 the Duke of Alba, governing the Netherlands for Philip II, asked the States General for three new taxes. The first, the Hundredth Penny, was a one-time levy of one percent on all property. The second, the Twentieth Penny, […]
In 1976 a double-hulled canoe named Hōkūleʻa sailed from Maui to Tahiti, about 2,500 miles, without a compass, a chart, or a sextant. Its navigator was Mau Piailug, from Satawal, a coral island in Micronesia about a mile long with […]
There is a painting in the Prado's collection, hung for years in Spain's Congress of Deputies, that shows three men about to die. Antonio Gisbert painted it in 1860. Juan de Padilla stands at the center, calm, his hand on […]
Most arguments about land start from the same assumption, even when they end in opposite places. If land is important enough, the government should hold it. Parks, forests, wetlands, watersheds, and lately housing, are all treated this way: once something […]
In California's housing arguments, two words get used as if they were interchangeable. A politician who wants more homes calls themselves pro-housing, and one who wants to permit more projects of every kind calls themselves the same thing. Opponents of […]
Before it was Silicon Valley, the Santa Clara Valley had another name. Promoters in the early twentieth century called it the Valley of Heart's Delight: miles of prune, apricot, peach, and cherry orchards between the bay and the hills, among […]
Historic events usually don't arrive on a date. The numerals Europe counts with didn't have a launch day. Leonardo of Pisa, the mathematician later called Fibonacci, brought the Hindu-Arabic system to Italian merchants in his Liber Abaci in 1202, and […]
Every tax on property rests on a number nobody paid. A house sells, and there's a price. But most houses don't sell in any given year, and a tax on property still has to be charged on all of them. […]
Two identical houses sit side by side on a street in the Bay Area. Same lot size, same 1950s floor plan, same view of the same hills. One owner pays about $2,000 a year in property tax. The other pays […]
Two groups of people call themselves libertarians. They oppose the same wars, want the same drug laws repealed, defend the same speech, distrust the same police powers, and start from the same moral premise: that every person belongs to themselves […]
Armies take territory. Culture takes people, and it keeps them long after armies go home. […]
Ask why libertarianism is so widely disliked and the answers come back remarkably consistent. One recent survey of the criticism sorts them into a few bins: the philosophy is said to put individual rights above any collective claim, to favor […]
Try three claims together and they look like a contradiction. Property is the origin of liberty — the thing that lets a person refuse, walk away, and build a life no one else can veto. Property is theft — Proudhon's […]
Follow one town's actual attention for a season and the allocation stops making sense. A parks department commissions two hazard assessments on a single oak […]
Why did a healthy oak, older than the town that killed it, actually have to die? Not the proximate answer — a hazard report, a rejected second opinion, a […]
Five Centuries Under One Crown laid out the mechanism in the abstract: once a municipality commissions a hazard report on a tree, the report itself becomes the […]
There's a piece of received wisdom so common it rarely gets argued for anymore, only assumed: private owners degrade land, chasing this quarter's yield at the expense of next century's soil, and only a government — a park service, a […]
Somewhere in the American South, or on a chaparral hillside in California, there is very likely a live oak — one of a handful of evergreen Quercus species that share the name for their wide, low, spreading crowns — that […]
Two things happened to American cities in the same twenty-year stretch, using the same federal money, the same engineering confidence, and in more than one case the same construction crews. One got the streams. The other got the streets. Both […]
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 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, Austin's Long Recess, Beacon Hill's Interval Training, and 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 broke that pattern once […]
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 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 […]
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