[The Park](/posts/the-park) walked three postures a public good can take — fenced and gated, worn and organic, natural and unmanaged — and asked, along the way, whether "public good" names anything real at all. Its answer set two conditions a […]
Almost no profession scores its practitioners the way tennis scores its own. A surgeon's skill is filtered through hospital politics, referral networks, and malpractice exposure before it becomes a reputation. A software engineer's output is filtered through a manager's judgment, […]
[A Meadow of Sacred Cows](/posts/a-meadow-of-sacred-cows) named the tell: a sacred cow is an arrangement defended, when it's defended at all, in the language of necessity or tradition, while the actual reason it survives is that a concentrated beneficiary never has […]
"Sacred cow" is a metaphor borrowed from an animal that was never actually being protected for the animal's own sake — reverence for cattle in the traditions the phrase comes from was never primarily a policy for the cow's welfare, […]
Imperial County, California, sits over a groundwater basin that took millennia to fill, in a region already contesting every acre-foot of Colorado River allocation it has left. In early 2026, a developer proposed a data center there just under a […]
[The South Rises](/posts/the-south-rises) took the East South Central states as a single unit because all four were governed, this year, by the same coalition with enough margin that the ordinary checks on that coalition had mostly stopped checking. The Great […]
A libertarian visiting rural Nebraska and a libertarian visiting Manhattan tend to notice opposite things. In the country, the complaint is usually that government is too far away, too slow, too indifferent to conditions only a local actually understands. In […]
Every institution accumulates arrangements nobody currently alive actually chose. "Nobody questions this" turns out to be a description that covers several genuinely different situations, and it's worth sorting them before going after any one of them, because most of what […]
Nothing on this site sorts cleanly onto a ballot line, and that's worth addressing directly rather than treating as an accident of subject matter. [Personal Sovereignty](/posts/personal-sovereignty) argued that a Millian respect for individual judgment is the irreducible unit underneath the […]
Three words carry the entire weight of the American constitutional order, and none of the three does any defining. "We the People" names a sovereign without ever saying who belongs to it — not a list, not a franchise requirement, […]
[Actual Modern Georgist Experiments](/posts/actual-modern-georgist-experiments) went looking at what happens once a land value tax is up and running, and found a real, if uneven, track record: the mechanism reliably discourages sitting on empty land and encourages building wherever it's tried […]
[What Sacramento Is Deciding](/posts/what-sacramento-is-deciding), [Austin's Long Recess](/posts/austin-s-long-recess), and [Beacon Hill's Interval Training](/posts/beacon-hill-s-interval-training) each took a single state capital as the unit worth watching. This entry breaks that pattern on purpose. [Growing a Movement as a Design Problem](/posts/growing-a-movement-as-a-design-problem) argued that the […]
Our federalism pieces have spent months on a single recurring question: at what altitude should a given decision actually be made. [Splitting the Atom of Sovereignty](/posts/splitting-the-atom-of-sovereignty) described a constitutional design that keeps that question open and arguable rather than settling […]
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