Reclusive Libertarian
Land · Liberty · Markets · Individual Freedom
Essays
Long-form work on philosophy, political theory, and first principles.
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The Unearned Series · 5 parts
The earth and its natural opportunities are a common inheritance no one made, so the unearned rent of land and resources belongs to all. Capturing it is justice, not plunder. The …
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The Second Draft Series · 4 parts
A constitution is not scripture, and ours has already been rewritten, by drift and convenience, into something far less bound than the original. This series asks what an honest …
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The Citizens Dividend Series · 2 parts
Universal basic income reframed as what it actually is. Not welfare, but a dividend: the rent on your equal share of a commons that was enclosed without your consent, paid back to …
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The Enshittification of Government
A word coined for social media platforms turns out to describe something much older than social media: what happens to any organization once the people who run it stop needing to …
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The Honor System
A jar of cash left unwatched on a counter is one of the most valuable things a society owns and one of the strangest. It runs on generalized trust, an achievement built slowly by …
Blog
Current events read through the lens of the essays.
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You Never Had That Right
The last Flock dodge is two claims glued together: you never had a right not to have your plate read on a public road, and the future-despot file is a fantasy because we have not …
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What the Courts Actually Said
The Flock scoreboard in court is currently their side, and pretending otherwise is a gift to the other side. It is also not the Fourth Amendment. A panel can be wrong about the …
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Leave You Alone
The new pitch for Flock is that a camera on every road is a civil-libertarian tool, because it means fewer traffic stops. Precision at the stop is real. It is purchased by …
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Sold as Privacy
Age checks are moving into the operating system and being sold as the private option: one yes-or-no instead of a passport copy on every site. The private option is a gate. On a …
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The City's Real Shareholders
A resident stood up at his city council meeting and used a word usually reserved for tech platforms to describe what had happened to his local government: enshittification. The …