About

I am a libertarian who got tired of libertarians.

Not of the ideas. The ideas are mostly right, the old ones anyway, Locke and Bastiat and Paine and the strain of thought that says a person owns himself and the state is a servant. I still believe that. What I got tired of was the movement, or whatever it has become: memes instead of arguments, purity tests instead of politics, reflexive opposition to anything government touches without any serious interest in what should replace it. The Libertarian Party nominates unserious people. The online right-libertarian world is a sloganeering contest. And the left-libertarians, to the extent they still exist, have made their peace with a state that grows by the session and never shrinks back.

So I stopped arguing on the internet and started writing for the kind of reader I actually wanted to talk to. Someone who takes liberty seriously as a project and not just a bumper sticker. Someone willing to follow the argument past the comfortable parts, including the parts where standard libertarian orthodoxy falls apart, because it does fall apart in places, and pretending otherwise is how the movement stays small and marginal.

This site is rooted in classical liberalism. Natural rights, decentralized power, free markets, property rights, individual responsibility, skepticism of concentrated authority whether it wears a government badge or a corporate logo. But I will challenge the orthodox libertarian position when it is historically blind or philosophically incomplete, and I will do it without apology, because a tradition that cannot survive an honest audit does not deserve to survive at all.

The foundation is written down in From Plunder to Justice. A person owns himself, his labor, and what his labor produces. He does not fully own the bare earth, because he did not make it and his exclusive claim to it costs everyone he shuts out. Law exists to defend those rights, not to plunder them, and the only tax that does not plunder is the one that falls on unearned rent rather than the fruits of labor. Everything else on this site runs on that line.

“Reclusive” is the distance. From partisan tribalism, from performative politics, from the pressure to fit inside a label someone else defined. Including the libertarian label, when it stops being useful.

The essays here deal with what liberty actually requires beyond slogans. Where property, land, power, and justice interact in ways the standard catechism does not cover. Whether free societies can survive the cultural and institutional decay they are currently running, and what the answer demands of the people living through it.

No party loyalty. No ideological safe space. Just the work.