Essays
Long-form work on philosophy, political theory, and first principles. Slow reading.
Essays
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The Database of Ruin
Privacy was never mainly protected by law. It was protected by friction, by the sheer cost of watching everyone. We have driven that cost to zero, and what we are assembling in its place is a single …
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What Liberty Requires Beyond Slogans
Liberty as a slogan asks nothing of you. Liberty as a project asks for everything: institutional design, cultural maintenance, and the discipline to want it for people you disagree with.
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The Boycott and the Blacklist
Cancellation gets defended as just a boycott, free-market consequences for free speech. It is not. A boycott is the use of your own liberty. A cancellation is an attack on someone else’s, and …
From the Series
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The Long Crisis · Part 6
America's Immigration Dilemma
The Long Crisis, Part 6. America’s edge over Europe is real, but it has an immigration problem of its own, and it runs two ways at once. The melting pot can fail because people never join it, or …
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The Voluntary Settlement · Part 1
The Third Answer
Most of adult life is spent at work, which makes the firm one of the main places human beings actually live together. The two answers our age offers for how owners and workers should relate are both …
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The Long Crisis · Part 5
Europe's Structural Trap
The Long Crisis, Part 5. Europe is promising itself an autonomous future as an independent pole in a multipolar world. The arithmetic says otherwise. It cannot fund its social model, rearm, absorb …
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The Long Crisis · Part 4
The Operating System
The Long Crisis, Part 4. The split between America and Europe isn’t really about GDP or defense budgets. It runs on a deeper layer: a shared answer to what a person is and what we owe each …
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The Long Crisis · Part 3
The Transatlantic Divorce
The Long Crisis, Part 3. The Western alliance didn’t die in the war with Iran. It died years ago, and the war was simply the moment everyone had to stop pretending otherwise. What replaces it is …
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The Long Crisis · Part 2
Reading the Climax
The Long Crisis, Part 2. The war with Iran feels like the decisive moment. That instinct is what the theory warns against, and what Iran actually did was not break the old order but X-ray how much of …
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The Long Crisis · Part 1
Where We Are in the Cycle
The Long Crisis, Part 1. We’re somewhere inside a Crisis era, and the question that matters isn’t whether America stays powerful. It’s whether that power ends up resting on earned …
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The Unearned · Part 1
From Plunder to Justice: A New Foundation of Law and Liberty
Law has one just purpose, to defend natural rights, and never to plunder them. But the hardest case for any philosophy of liberty is land, which no one made and everyone needs. Working from …