Posts tagged “policy”

Three Blind Assessors

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. […]

That Which Is Not Learned

Frédéric Bastiat's most famous essay isn't about schooling at all. A boy breaks a shopkeeper's window, and the crowd that gathers finds a silver lining: the […]

Bill of Separations

America's founding answer to state power was a list of things the state may not do: it may not establish a religion, may not abridge speech, may not […]

Government: Wait... I'm Supposed to Be Doing Something About Pickleball

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 […]

Government Schooling Is Unacceptable

Ask someone why the state runs the schools and the answer arrives instantly, before the question has even finished: of course it does, who else would? That instant, unreflective quality is itself worth noticing. Almost nothing else this large — […]

Fourteen Propositions -- California 2026

Before getting to what's actually on it, the ballot itself deserves a harder look than it usually gets. California's initiative process was built in 1911 as a check on a legislature the Progressive movement considered captured by the railroads — […]

Universality: Redistribution Without Categories

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, […]

Owning Essential

Ask most Californians to name the law that actually decides what gets built in their state — a subdivision, a transmission line, a warehouse, a corner grocery's expansion — and the California Environmental Quality Act is unlikely to come up. […]

What the Plains Decided Not to Change

The West North Central division — North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, and Missouri — earns the regional treatment The South Rises, Schisms Within, and The River Decides What Seven States Couldn't already gave other Census divisions, and […]

Proposition 45 and the Two Kinds of Delay

California voters decide on November 3 whether to rewrite how the state's signature environmental law actually works in practice, and the honest answer to what it would do for social liberty is not a clean yes or no. Proposition 45 […]

The Region That Already Ran the Experiment

What Sacramento Is Deciding, Austin's Long Recess, Beacon Hill's Interval Training, and The View from Tallahassee each read a single capital's session. The South Rises and The River Decides What Seven States Couldn't broke that pattern to read a region […]

The River Decides What Seven States Couldn't

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 […]

Schisms Within

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 […]

Transitioning to LVT

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 […]

The South Rises

What Sacramento Is Deciding, Austin's Long Recess, and 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 argued that the […]

Beacon Hill's Interval Training

Three regions into this beat and no two legislatures have run on the same clock. What Sacramento Is Deciding covered a state in continuous annual session against a hard floor deadline. Austin's Long Recess covered one that meets once every […]

What Sacramento Is Deciding

This is the first entry in a beat this site is starting: reading a state legislature's session, bill by bill, for what it actually means for social liberty, rather than waiting for the national platform fights that get all the […]

The View from Tallahassee

What Sacramento Is Deciding and 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 […]

Austin's Long Recess

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 […]