“Govern a large country,” says the sixtieth verse of the Tao Te Ching, “as you would cook a small fish.” A small fish falls apart if it’s poked and turned too often. One way to read the line is as […]
Arden, Delaware, is a village of a few hundred houses under oak and tulip poplar, a few miles north of Wilmington. Nobody there owns the ground under a house. Since 1900 residents have leased their lots from trustees and paid […]
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 […]
On November 1, 1966, All Saints’ Day, the National Football League awarded its sixteenth franchise to New Orleans. The timing wasn’t a coincidence of the calendar. A few weeks earlier Congress had passed a law exempting the merger of the […]
Schisms Within ended on a question: whether a primary-season fracture costs a coalition the general election, or whether November simply reassembles what August split apart. The Great Lakes states, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, vote on November 3, and […]
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 […]
Every argument for freedom eventually runs into the same practical objection. If anyone can start a school, a land trust, a clinic, or a cooperative, how is anyone supposed to know which ones are any good? A parent choosing a […]
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 […]
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. […]
Three voices. SL speaks for the Social Liberty Foundation. Claude is the AI model that helped draft this piece, given its own lines. 3rd Party is a composite of the country's existing outside parties, fifty years of running […]
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 […]
Owning Essential made a narrow claim about a California ballot measure: once a government grants expedited process and exemption from rules to a defined list of project categories, the list itself becomes the site where a value system gets imposed, […]
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 […]
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 […]
Social Liberty
