Essays
Long-form work on philosophy, political theory, and first principles. Slow reading.
Essays
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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 please the people it …
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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 institutions and held …
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It Was Never Property
When Sony deleted movies people had ‘bought,’ the internet answered with a slogan: if buying isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t theft. The grievance is real and the words are …
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Papers and Effects, Restored
The Database of Ruin diagnosed the machine assembling itself out of cameras, phones, and purchase records. This is the other half: a proposal to flip the legal default so that a fact describing a …
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The States Choose the President
The Electoral College is not a defect in an otherwise democratic system. It is the presidency built to the same plan as the Senate and the amendment rule and the whole compound structure: a union of …
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Beyond the Reach of the Vote
Democracy and republic are not two words for the same thing, and the difference is the whole argument. A democracy makes the will of the majority the highest authority. A republic puts a written law …
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The Soil Does Not Own You
In Trump v. Barbara the Court held that a child born to a tourist here for the weekend, or to a parent here illegally, is a citizen at birth, because the words ‘subject to the …
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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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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 …
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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 Unearned · Part 4
Not Only Land
Land is the clear case, not the only one. The same line reaches the ore, the aquifer, and the airwaves: charge the gift nobody made, leave the shaft and the transmitter untouched. Most real assets are …
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The Unearned · Part 3
Tax What You Didn't Make
The rent is unearned and the booth is real. This part names the levy that takes the toll and leaves the town: a tax on the site, never on the house, never on the wage. The hard case is not the …
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The Second Draft · Part 4
Purse and Sword
Congress holds the two powers that are most of what a government is: the purse and the sword, the power to tax and spend and the power to make war. It has handed both away, to the executive and to a …
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The Second Draft · Part 3
The States' House
The Senate was never meant to be a second House. It was the chamber of the states, the states’ structural check on the federal government, until a 1913 amendment cut that wire and turned both …
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The Citizen's Dividend · Part 2
The Floor and the Exit
The last essay settled what the dividend is. This one is about what it does, and the most important thing it does is not feed you. It frees you. A floor no employer can take away is the power to walk, …
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The Second Draft · Part 2
The People's House
The House was built to be the chamber closest to the people, and it has drifted furthest from them: frozen at 435, districts swollen to three-quarters of a million, apportioned by residents rather …
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The Citizen's Dividend · Part 1
Not Welfare, a Dividend
Almost every argument about a basic income is lost in the first word. Welfare is charity, a transfer from the people who earned the money to the people who did not. A dividend is the return on …
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The Second Draft · Part 1
Why Rewrite It
Proposing to rewrite the Constitution sounds like sacrilege. But we have already rewritten it, by drift and convenience rather than by amendment, into something far less bound than the original. The …
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The Voluntary Settlement · Part 4
The Cap
The hardest piece of the settlement, and the most attacked. A ceiling on what the people at the top can take, set as a multiple of the floor. It does almost nothing as redistribution, which is why it …
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The Voluntary Settlement · Part 3
The Floor and the Share
Strip the settlement down to the two commitments that do the real work, a published floor of dignity and a real share of the surplus, and you have the part that needs no apology. They are not …
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The Voluntary Settlement · Part 2
What We Refuse to Count
Almost everyone, left and right, agrees that pay should track value and that some people are worth many times what others are. They argue about the multiple. The premise underneath is the thing worth …
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The Unearned · Part 1
Enough and As Good
The whole case rests on five words Locke let slip and then seemed to take back. This part defends them against the three attacks that matter: that Locke abandoned the proviso, that it is an open door …
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The Long Crisis · Part 7
The Next Twenty Years
The Long Crisis, Part 7. The series ends where it began, at the fork between two exits. Europe’s choice is mostly made. America’s is not. The real danger is mistaking a strongman’s …
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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 Unearned · Part 5
The Last Enclosure
A large language model is the knowledge of the species, enclosed by a corporation and rented back to the people who made it. The value it sells is mostly unearned, captured from a commons it did not …
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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 2
The Tollbooth
The foundation essay and the first part of this series argued that the rent of bare land is unearned. This one looks at the thing itself: the landowner as a man who gates a road he did not build and …