Tag
Liberty
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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 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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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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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 person belongs to that person from the …
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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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The Button Marked Buy
Sony deleted movies people had bought, and the internet fired back: if buying isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t theft. I get the anger. But the slogan is wrong twice, and the wrongness is exactly why the people saying it keep …
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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 imposed order for renewal, when the only …
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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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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 jurisdiction’ mean nothing more than being reachable …
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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 Forgotten Amendment on Representation
The first amendment proposed by the First Congress addressed the size of the House of Representatives and how closely it should track population growth. It never became part of the Constitution. A modern statutory alternative called the …
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The Country That Was an Argument
Two hundred and fifty years ago a handful of men grounded a country not in a king or a bloodline but in an idea about the individual: that you own yourself, that your rights come before any government, and that a government is legitimate …
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The Court Sided With the Soil
The Supreme Court just held that a child born to a tourist here for the weekend is an American at birth. To get there the majority revived a feudal rule that a free people threw off in 1776: that the ground you are born on owns you. Thomas …
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An Open Letter to Dario Amodei
You told Congress that open models are too dangerous to be free. It is the same thing the priesthood said about scripture and the state said about encryption, and it has always meant one thing. Keep the power. Call it protection.
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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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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 self-ownership and Locke’s own forgotten …
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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 …