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 […]
Six rallies in a row, the ball goes crosscourt to the backhand corner. Nothing about it is dramatic. It lands deep, a few feet inside the sideline, with enough height to push the opponent back and not enough pace to […]
At the north end of the Bassin de la Villette in Paris stands a round stone building with a ring of columns, built in the 1780s by the architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux. It looks like a small temple. It was a […]
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 […]
Around 1300 an English poet put Richard the Lionheart on crusade in rhyming couplets. In Richard Coer de Lyon the king’s army raises a siege tower, and the poem says of it: “A tour ful strong, That queyntyly engynours made.” […]
On October 16, 1834, a pair of workmen were told to get rid of two cartloads of old wooden sticks stored in the Palace of Westminster. The sticks were Exchequer tallies, notched hazel rods that had recorded payments to the […]
On almost any Saturday in the spring of 2021, an open house in Sunnyvale went something like this. The house was a three-bedroom ranch on a cul-de-sac, one of thousands put up in the late 1950s for the engineers and […]
A bricklayer in 1890 laying a course of common brick stooped to the pile at his feet, picked up a brick, turned it over to find the better face, tapped it to knock off loose mortar, and carried it up […]
Early, before work, a woman walks her dog to the field at the end of the street. The field is empty. Halfway across she unclips the leash and the dog runs, nose down, in long loops through the wet grass. […]
On high ground above tree line, trails are often marked by cairns: small stacks of stones, one in sight of next, trails leading across rock where no path wears into the ground. Nobody knows who are their builders. A hiker […]
In 1492 the abbot of Sponheim, Johannes Trithemius, wrote a treatise called In Praise of Scribes. Monks, he argued, should keep copying books by hand even though the new presses could produce them faster. Copying was devotion. A scribe meditated […]
From 1803 until 1890, a French worker who wanted to change jobs had to carry a small booklet, the livret d'ouvrier. Each employer wrote in it the date the worker was hired and the date they left, and a worker […]
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 1268 the Republic of Venice settled on a way to choose its doge that still looks like a puzzle invented to torment students. The Great Council drew thirty of its members by lot. The thirty were cut to nine […]
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 […]
Murray Bookchin died in 2006, believing his politics had mostly failed to find an audience. Twenty years later his idea, that free people should govern themselves in face-to-face assemblies and federate their towns instead of submitting to a state, has […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Every society keeps a list of its problems. In ours the list is made by whatever gets measured, argued about in public, and funded: housing, crime, inflation, the border, the budget. It's a useful list. It's also incomplete in a […]
No single post on this site was written to be read as a system. Each one starts from something narrower and more provoking — a ballot measure, a zoning fight, a dead anarchist's pamphlet, a tennis tournament's prize structure — and follows the […]
Every institution we deal with — our job, our lease, our culture, our education and training, our government -- has social implications and importance
Every dollar our city government spends comes from We the People. Our property taxes, our sales taxes, our labor. And yet for most people, finding out exactly where that money goes — how we understand and actualize priorities – which […]
Herbert Marcuse from: Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore, Jr., and Herbert Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), pp. 95-137. THIS essay examines the idea of tolerance in our advanced industrial society. The conclusion reached is that the realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, […]
The Libertarian Party (US): a political party in the United States that promotes civil liberties, non-interventionism, laissez-faire capitalism, and limiting the size and scope of government. The party was conceived in August 1971 at meetings in the home of David F. Nolan in Westminster, Colorado, and was officially formed on December 11, 1971, in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The organizers of the party drew inspiration from the works and […]
In grateful response to Hans-Hermann Hoppe 1 Cultivate a sense of Home Stop Mass Immigration 2 Mind your own business Stop attacking, killing and bombing people in foreign countries 3 Let funding return to natural distribution Defund the ruling elites and its intellectual bodyguards 4 Replace Fiat with Cryptocurrency End the FED and all central […]
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