Alongside the essays here, we keep a smaller side project: On Social Liberty, a set of self-contained slide decks that walk through three arguments in more depth than a blog post usually allows — game theory, political philosophy, and a critical look at libertarianism itself. As of today, the collection holds three decks:

• Critiques of Libertarianism & the Libertarian Party (Political Theory, 14 slides) — a multi-dimensional critique spanning philosophy, economics, electoral performance, self-sovereignty, externalities, and counterarguments.
• The Prisoner's Dilemma (Game Theory, 11 slides) — why individually rational choices produce collectively irrational outcomes, with the payoff matrix, Nash equilibrium, real-world examples, and strategies like Tit-for-Tat.
• Positive & Negative Liberty (Political Philosophy, 13 slides) — Isaiah Berlin's two concepts of freedom, where they conflict across policy, Berlin's warning about tyranny, and the capability approach of Sen & Nussbaum.

Each deck stands on its own, but they were built to be read together. The prisoner's dilemma supplies the mechanism, Berlin's two liberties supply the vocabulary, and the libertarianism critique is where the two collide. Below is each deck in full, with a short discussion of why it's here and what it's arguing.

1. Critiques of Libertarianism & the Libertarian Party

We publish plenty here that argues from inside a broadly libertarian frame — the geoist platform piece is a recent example. This deck is the counterweight: it's the strongest version of the case against, laid out on its own terms rather than as a strawman to knock down before getting to "but actually." It covers the standard philosophical objections (self-ownership doesn't obviously settle questions about children, animals, or future generations), the standard economic ones (externalities and public goods don't dissolve just because a transaction was voluntary), and the less comfortable ones libertarians tend to skip — the Libertarian Party's actual electoral track record, and what "sovereignty" over your own life is worth in practice if you have no resources to exercise it with.

The point of running this deck first isn't to undercut everything that follows. It's that the prisoner's dilemma and the liberty distinction are both tools libertarians reach for constantly — markets solve coordination problems, negative liberty is the liberty that matters — and neither tool does the work on its own unless you've already granted the premises this deck is contesting.

2. The Prisoner's Dilemma

This is the mechanism underneath half the arguments on this site, usually left implicit. Any time a libertarian argument leans on "if the arrangement isn't voluntary for both sides, it wouldn't happen" it is quietly assuming the game only gets played once, with full information, no externalities, and no incentive to defect. The prisoner's dilemma is what happens when any of those assumptions fail: two parties who would both be better off cooperating end up locked into a worse outcome because, taken individually, defecting still dominates.

The deck below walks through the classic setup, the payoff matrix, why Nash equilibrium and Pareto optimum come apart, and then the more useful part — what actually gets people out of the trap. Not moral appeals, but the shadow of the future (repeated interaction), reputation, small-group monitoring, and institutions that change the payoffs directly. That last category is worth sitting with, because it's also the honest description of what a tax, a regulation, or a treaty is: a mechanism-design fix for a coordination failure markets alone won't clear on their own.

3. Positive & Negative Liberty

Isaiah Berlin's distinction is the one piece of academic political philosophy that earns its keep in almost every argument about what a state should or shouldn't do. Negative liberty is freedom from interference — no one stopping you. Positive liberty is freedom to actually do something — having the means, capacity, or opportunity to act on your own behalf. Most libertarian arguments run entirely on the first concept and treat the second with suspicion, since Berlin himself warned that positive liberty, taken far enough, becomes an excuse for someone else to decide what your "true" freedom-realizing self actually wants.

That warning is worth taking seriously, and the deck doesn't soften it. But it also walks through where the two concepts conflict in ordinary policy — zoning, licensing, and land use are exactly the terrain where "no one is stopping you" and "you have no realistic way to do this" both feel true at once — and closes with the capability approach Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum built as a third option: judge freedom by what people are actually able to do and be, not by which column, negative or positive, the obstacle happens to sit in.

Why these three together

None of these decks resolves the others. The critique of libertarianism doesn't refute the prisoner's dilemma's account of why institutions matter; Berlin's two liberties don't tell you which coordination problems are worth solving by law versus by norm. What they do is make the same underlying question harder to dodge from three different directions: when does leaving people alone actually deliver the freedom it promises, and when is "leaving people alone" just another way of letting a solvable coordination failure sit there unsolved? That's the question this site keeps returning to, slide decks included.