Tag
Culture
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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 only while almost everyone keeps a …
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The Tip Jar Is a Miracle
An unwatched jar of cash on a counter is a small miracle of generalized trust, and trust is built, not bred. It is also a fragile commons that dies fast once cheating spreads. That, and not any slur about peoples, is what immigration …
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Disagreement Is Not Aggression
Express a mild opinion in public now and the response often comes back sized for an assault. Somewhere we lost the ability to tell disagreement from aggression, and the confusion is corrosive. A free society is one that settles its …
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Should Is Not Must
I posted a mild opinion online and got a wildly out-of-proportion reply that captured a confusion I have run into my whole life: that a libertarian voicing a preference is somehow the same as a libertarian demanding a law. It is not. …
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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 because they join only their own. Both …
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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 other. Lose that answer and a society …