Ask most Californians to name the law that actually decides what gets built in their state — a subdivision, a transmission line, a warehouse, a corner grocery's expansion — and the California Environmental Quality Act is unlikely to come up. […]
In August 2026, California's Governor's Office announced it had identified a psychological condition afflicting a large share of the state's population, and that it was standing up an apparatus to manage it. […]
Ask most people why government issues the currency and you'll get a shrug — of course it does, who else would? The monopoly feels less like a policy choice than a fact of nature, the same way a national anthem […]
There's a piece of received wisdom so common it rarely gets argued for anymore, only assumed: private owners degrade land, chasing this quarter's yield at the expense of next century's soil, and only a government — a park service, a […]
Somewhere in the American South, or on a chaparral hillside in California, there is very likely a live oak — one of a handful of evergreen *Quercus* species that share the name for their wide, low, spreading crowns — that […]
Two things happened to American cities in the same twenty-year stretch, using the same federal money, the same engineering confidence, and in more than one case the same construction crews. One got the streams. The other got the streets. Both […]
Political philosophy usually hands you two options for what the state actually is, and asks you to pick a side. The liberal tradition, running from Locke through the American founding to most modern minarchists, treats the state as a neutral […]
The West North Central division — North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, and Missouri — earns the regional treatment [The South Rises](/posts/the-south-rises), [Schisms Within](/posts/schisms-within), and [The River Decides What Seven States Couldn't](/posts/the-river-decides-what-seven-states-couldnt) already gave other Census divisions, and […]
[An Industrial Park from a Bloated Government](/posts/an-industrial-park-from-a-bloated-government) already traced what California's government has become in plain fiscal terms: a general fund that roughly doubled in a decade, a single-year surplus larger than most states' entire budgets, a swing into tens […]
California voters decide on November 3 whether to rewrite how the state's signature environmental law actually works in practice, and the honest answer to what it would do for social liberty is not a clean yes or no. Proposition 45 […]
[The Municipal Trilemma](/posts/the-municipal-trilemma) worked through pickleball as the cleanest small-stakes instance of the boundary problem this site keeps finding at every scale: a court's value to the players and its cost to the neighbors are both real, both large, and […]
A kid is still on the swings when the first truck backs in. Nobody closed the gate, nobody posted a notice on the bulletin board by the restrooms — the crew just arrives, cones off the strip of brush along […]
[Freedom Pathways](/posts/freedom-pathways) closed by naming the two harder cases still ahead of it in this series: land whose entire value lies in never being developed by anyone at all, which is refuge's problem, and land whose use by one party […]
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