Latest essay

Left: one massive gray stepped building feeds a row of identical clinics through thick pipes, above a queue of identical figures. Right: many small clinics of different shapes and colors joined by thin lines, with people walking between them.

The Starfish and the Mussel Bed

Alan Forester-Kaiser · November 13, 2026

Robert Paine pried the starfish off a stretch of Washington shore, and mussels took the rock. A market kept steady by its government ends the same way, and American medicine, steadied since 1942, is a close case.

Read the essay All essays

More recent essays

View all →

A vast parking lot under gray dust, the sun hidden. Screaming workers with leaf blowers throw dust into the air, a few small trees stand in tiny patches of soil, and a confused child holding a tennis racket and ball looks on.

We Asked for a Park

Margaret Johannsen · November 12, 2026

The lot on 24th Street in San Francisco’s Noe Valley had been an auto repair shop, then a parking lot belonging to Noe Valley Ministry, the Presbyterian church next door, and from 2004 a farmers market set up there on […]

#public choice #proposition hhh #los angeles #stewardship

+14

#parks #social liberty #indirection #public-sector unions #san francisco #accountability #california #public works #project labor agreements #prevailing wage #noe valley #bureaucracy #government #homelessness

A domed capitol stands on a block marked PUBLIC RECORD, chained to ledger blocks of deeds, statutes, budgets and votes; beneath, a row of meshed nodes each holds a full copy of the chain.

The Right to Remember

Social Liberty Foundation · November 8, 2026

Rights talk gets used loosely enough that it’s worth being exact about what a right is before applying the word to information. The distinction that matters here is Isaiah Berlin’s: negative liberty is freedom from interference — a space others […]

#history #transparency #philosophy #government

+3

#rights #technology #blockchain

Cartoon collage: an eagle soars over Heise, Massie, McArdle, Weinstein, Birney, Lindbergh, Rothbard and Nolan; the Libertarian porcupine lies dead on its back; a ballot strikes LIBERTARIAN for American Liberty.

Rebranding a Borrowed Line

Social Liberty Foundation · November 8, 2026

In 1840 a handful of abolitionists meeting in Albany nominated James G. Birney for president under the name Liberty Party. They had no ballot lines, no money and almost no votes, under seven thousand that fall. They built the party […]

#dispatch #america first committee #ross perot #james g birney

+39