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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
[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 […]
[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 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 […]
[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 […]
[What Sacramento Is Deciding](/posts/what-sacramento-is-deciding), [Austin's Long Recess](/posts/austin-s-long-recess), and [Beacon Hill's Interval Training](/posts/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](/posts/growing-a-movement-as-a-design-problem) argued that the […]
Three regions into this beat and no two legislatures have run on the same clock. [What Sacramento Is Deciding](/posts/what-sacramento-is-deciding) covered a state in continuous annual session against a hard floor deadline. [Austin's Long Recess](/posts/austin-s-long-recess) covered one that meets once every […]
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 […]
[What Sacramento Is Deciding](/posts/what-sacramento-is-deciding) and [Austin's Long Recess](/posts/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 […]
[What Sacramento Is Deciding](/posts/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 […]
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