Tag
First-Principles
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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 a blend. Pretending otherwise is how …
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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 speculator. It is the family that bought last …
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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 tax with no ceiling. The second draft …
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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 chambers over to the same electorate. The …
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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, and the power to walk is the only thing …
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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 than citizens, filled by careerists. The …
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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 was built for. Government is not exempt. …
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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 something you already own. The money can be the …
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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 only question left is whether we write an …
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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 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 has to be defended on other ground.
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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 wrong, both halves of them. Copying was …
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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 generosity. They are what you owe once you see …
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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 examining, because the multiple is …
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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 states, choosing together, so that a …
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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 to theft, and the serious one, that no …
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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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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 above the majority and places certain …
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Sometimes You Have Bread
There is a joke going around: with capitalism, sometimes you have bread lines; with socialism, sometimes you have bread. It is funny because it is true. The market’s worst day is a line. The planned economy’s worst day is an …
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Love It or Leave It
A patriotic meme says America is so great even its haters won’t leave. It lands a real punch, and it is right that the nation has genuine enemies. But it spots them backwards. The test of a hater is not whether he criticizes the …
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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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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 forms of war. There is a third, and it …
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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 create. Open models are the better path …
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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 machine that holds something ruinous …
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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 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 charges everyone who passes. What the …
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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 the difference is structural, not a matter …