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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
Palo Alto's Parks & Recreation Commission recently stood up a small ad hoc committee to strengthen biodiversity and pollinator connectivity across the park system. It's the kind of item that disappears from public attention within a week — it shouldn't. There's a real social liberty argument buried in it.
The social cost of the tax that pays for the subsidy is greater than the gain to the buyers, because the extra buyers are able to to buy it at less than the market price. A subsidy lets people buy stuff below the price that would be set in a market. In a free market, […]
Social Liberty