NA Thompson

I'm a Libertarian Who Hates Cars

2025-07-27T00:00:00Z

The standard libertarian position on cars goes something like this: the automobile represents individual freedom, the market delivered it, people chose it, end of discussion. If you dislike car dependency, you are probably a statist who wants to ban things.

That position is wrong on every count. And I say that as someone whose political commitments run about as libertarian as they get.

My contempt for car-centric infrastructure is not a betrayal of those commitments. It is a direct consequence of them. The environment that forces car ownership on everyone who wants to participate in ordinary life was not built by the free market. It was built by the state. The only thing the libertarian position gets right is the conclusion: government intervention produces bad outcomes. It just misidentifies which intervention produced this one.

Our cities and suburbs, jammed with traffic, stretched out with isolated houses miles from anything useful, sliced up by massive highways: none of this happened from people voting with their wallets. It is the direct product of government policies that spent decades subsidizing automobiles and dismantling every alternative.

What is the most prominent piece of infrastructure in America? It's not something built by private enterprise; it's the Interstate Highway System, a monument to government planning and spending. The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 didn't bubble up from real market demand; it was a top-down power grab that remade America in the image of the automobile, driven as much by federal ambition as by the political muscle of auto, oil, and construction lobbies.

The Government's Heavy Hand

Eminent Domain: To carve out these massive arteries, governments wielded the power of eminent domain, forcibly seizing private land, destroying vibrant communities in the process. Where in the libertarian ideal is the justification for the state to bulldoze your property for the sake of a government-favored industry?

Zoning Laws: The ubiquitous single-use zoning ordinances that corrupt our cities are anything but a free-market phenomenon. These government mandates dictate where different types of buildings can be located, forcing residential areas to be segregated from commercial zones. This artificial separation makes walking or biking for even basic errands impractical, effectively mandating car ownership.

Minimum Parking Requirements: By forcing developers to include a certain number of parking spaces with every new building, regardless of actual demand, governments have inflated construction costs, consumed valuable land, and ensured that our urban landscapes are dominated by parking lots. This is a direct subsidy for car usage, baked into our legal code.

The Myth of Car Capitalism

The myth that cars are a purely capitalist creation ignores the massive government role in forcing this reality on us. Real capitalism thrives on choice and the efficient allocation of resources based on genuine demand and accurate pricing. Our car-centric system distorts these principles at every turn.

Consider the externalities: the costs associated with driving that aren't borne by the individual driver. Congestion, pollution, and wear on public infrastructure are all socialized costs. In a truly free market, these costs would be internalized through mechanisms like congestion pricing, making driving more expensive to those abusing it and making other options more competitive.

What a Real Free Market Could Deliver

What kind of transportation landscape would a truly free market produce? I suspect it would be far more diverse and human-scaled:

Privately funded transit systems competing for riders
Walkable and bikeable neighborhoods driven by consumer preference and efficient land use
Innovative, smaller-scale transportation solutions
Cars as one option among many, not the default necessity they are today

My desire for walkable cities isn't a rejection of capitalism; it's a call for it. It's not the free market that built this car-dependent world. It was government. And I'd prefer to see what a truly free market in transportation could create.

The Biggest Lie in Capitalism

2025-08-01T00:00:00Z

I get a lot of sideways glances for many of my views. But nothing gets the "normies" more confused than when I say I want to see the entire system of intellectual property burned to the ground.

"But you're all about property!" they sputter.

Exactly. I'm all about real property. And intellectual property is its mortal enemy. It is the single most destructive, anti-capitalist, pro-monopoly legal framework poisoning our society, and it's time people saw it for the scam that it is.

Let's get one thing straight. The only reason property rights exist is to solve a very simple problem: scarcity. You and I can't both use my hammer at the same time. We can't both eat the same sandwich. My use of a scarce, physical object excludes your use. Property rights are the rules that let us navigate this physical reality without cracking each other's skulls open.

You know what isn't scarce? An idea.

If I design a new engine, you can copy that design without me losing it. In fact, you might even come up with that same engine design independently. And if I write a song, you can sing that song and my vocal cords won't vanish. The world of ideas is one of infinite abundance. There is no natural conflict to solve.

So what is intellectual property? It's the government stepping in to create artificial scarcity where none exists. It is a state-granted monopoly.

A patent isn't a right to your invention. It's a government-enforced right to stop other people from using their own property (their tools, their factories, their raw materials) to create something similar. Copyright isn't a right to your story. It, too, is a government-enforced right to stop other people from using their own property (their ink, their paper, their hard drives) to replicate a pattern of information.

IP is a direct violation of actual, physical property rights. It's a crony's charter.

And if you think this is just some academic debate, look at the hellscape this system has created. Every single problem blamed on "capitalistic greed" online is a direct downstream effect of this government monopolization.

The Right to Repair is a joke because John Deere and Apple use copyright on their software to make it illegal for you to fix the tractor or the phone you supposedly own. They've used the power of the state to turn you into a digital serf who has to beg them for permission to use your own property.
The Streaming Wars are bleeding you dry because a handful of mega-corporations are using copyright to Balkanize our culture. They hoard content behind digital walls, forcing you to pay five different monthly tributes just to access the art and media of our time. There is no competition. It is yet another cartel operating under the protection of law.
Online creativity is being choked to death by automated copyright systems like YouTube's Content ID. It's a digital censorship regime where massive corporations can vaporize a small creator's livelihood with a single, automated claim, no questions asked. Fair use is dead, parody is a minefield, and all of it is in service of protecting these state-backed monopolies.

The Left sees these symptoms and screams "This is the failure of capitalism!"

No, it's not. This is the predictable outcome of giving corporations a government-issued weapon to destroy competition. The greed is just a constant. The monopoly power is the variable that turns it toxic.

Stop using their language. Intellectual "property" isn't property. It's a government-issued patent of monopoly, a legal weapon handed to the powerful to crush competition. The next time you encounter a problem that seems like "capitalism gone wrong," ask yourself: how much of this is really about IP?

The Deviancy Signal: Having Nothing to Hide is a Threat to Us All

2025-08-12T00:00:00Z

There is a special kind of contempt I reserve for the person who says, "I have nothing to hide." It is not the gentle pity you would have for the naive. It is the cold, hard anger you hold for a collaborator. Because these people are not just surrendering their own liberty. They are actively forging the chains for the rest of us.

Their argument is a pathology of the present tense, a failure of imagination so profound it borders on a moral crime. What they fail to understand is that by living as an open book, they are creating the most dangerous weapon imaginable: a baseline of "normalcy." They are steadily creating a data profile for the state's machine, teaching its algorithms what a "good, transparent citizen" looks like. Every unencrypted text, every thoughtless search, every location-tagged post is another brick in the wall of their own cage.

And then comes the part they cannot fathom. The context shifts. The political winds change. The Overton window slams shut on a belief they once held. A book they read is declared subversive. A group they donated to is re-classified as extremist. A joke they told is now evidence of a thoughtcrime. Suddenly, for the first time, they have something to hide.

So they reach for the tools of privacy. They download the encrypted messenger. They fire up the VPN. They start to cover their tracks.

And in that single act, they trigger the Deviancy Signal.

Their first attempt at privacy, set against their own self-created history of total transparency, is a screaming alarm to the surveillance machine. Their very attempt to become private is the most public and suspicious act they could possibly commit. They have not built a shield. They have painted a target. By the time they need privacy, their own history has made seeking it an admission of guilt.

But the damage does not end with self-incrimination. It radiates outward, undoing the careful work of everyone around you. Think of a person who has practiced solid operational security, spending years building a private digital life with no baseline for the state to analyze. They are a ghost in the machine. Then they communicate with you. Your unshielded device becomes the listening post they never consented to. You tie their identity to yours in a permanent, searchable log.

On a societal scale, this inaction becomes a collective betrayal. The power of the Deviancy Signal is directly proportional to the number of people who live transparently. Every person who refuses to practice privacy adds another gallon of clear water to the state's pool, making any ripple of dissent starkly visible.

There is only one way to disarm this weapon: we must destroy its premise.

The task is not merely to hide, but to make privacy the default: make encryption a reflex, make anonymity a universal right. We must create so much noise that a signal is impossible to find. Our collective goal must be to make a "normal" profile so rare that the watchers have nothing to compare us to.

We must all become deviations.

Enshittification is Not a Market Failure. It's a Government Success.

2025-12-21T00:00:00Z

I received an email recently that challenged my worldview. The reader brought up "enshittification." It is a term coined by Cory Doctorow to describe how platforms die. First they are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Finally they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then they die.

The reader asked me a simple question: if I believe in the free market, how do I answer for this? It seems like the natural evolution of every digital product is to turn into a digital drug where the quality drops but the addiction remains.

Peter Thiel once famously said that "competition is for losers." He was right. The goal of every business is to become a monopoly. If you have no competitors, you can degrade your product, raise your prices, and treat your customers like cattle. That is the capitalist dream.

But dreaming about a monopoly and keeping one are two very different things.

In a functioning market, enshittification is a suicide note. If a bakery starts using sawdust instead of flour to save money, they create a massive financial incentive for the guy across the street to open a shop that sells real bread. If a platform fills your feed with ads and tracks your location, they create a vacuum for a competitor to offer privacy.

So why doesn't that happen? Why do these tech giants get to degrade their products without consequence?

Because they have a moat. And if you look closely at that moat, you will see it is not made of market innovation. It is made of government paper.

The Intellectual Property Trap

Ask yourself why the market has not solved predatory mobile games. Why doesn't a competitor just clone the game, strip out the microtransactions, and sell the clean version for a flat five dollar fee?

Because they would be sued into oblivion.

Copyright and patent laws are not property rights. They are government grants of monopoly. They are the state explicitly making it illegal for you to compete. When a company uses IP law to stop a competitor from offering a better version of their software, the dependency is not being enforced by the market. It is being enforced by the state's threat of violence against anyone who touches the code, or anything "too similar."

We see the same dynamic in the physical world. General Motors didn't destroy the electric streetcar in a fair fight. They didn't win because consumers hated trains. They won because they used municipal franchise monopolies and massive federal highway subsidies to dismantle the rail network.

The government put its thumb on the scale. It used zoning laws and eminent domain to block the alternatives.

The Only Way Out

The incentive to optimize for quality only exists when you cannot force dependency.

If I cannot ban my competitors using IP laws, and I cannot block their construction using zoning boards, and I cannot get a bailout when I fail, I have only one option left to keep you as a customer. I have to actually be better than the other guy.

The Left looks at the degradation of the internet and blames capitalism. They think the solution is to use the state to break up these companies. They are wrong. The state is the weapon these companies used to kill their competition in the first place.

You want to stop enshittification? Stop building the moats. Abolish the intellectual property laws that make competition illegal.

If we stop protecting these monopolies from the consequences of their own greed, the market will punish them faster than any regulator ever could.

We Must Seize the Means of Compute

2025-12-23T00:00:00Z

I find myself in an uncomfortable position lately. I am agreeing with people who usually stand against everything I believe in.

There is a loud contingent of critics who hate Artificial Intelligence. They hate the energy usage. They hate the massive water consumption of the data centers. They hate the sheer industrial scale of the resources being poured into what is, effectively, a chatbot.

And they are right.

The current model of "Cloud AI" is a disaster. It is a gross misallocation of energy and a centralization of power that should make any freedom-loving person squirm. We are burning rivers of coal to power servers owned by three or four mega-corporations so that they can rent us back a sanitized, lobotomized version of human knowledge for twenty dollars a month.

But the critics get the solution wrong. They want to ban it all. They want to regulate the chips. They want to stop the progress.

The answer is not to stop the intelligence. The answer is to move it. We need to take it out of their data centers and put it onto our desks.

The Rentier Trap

If your intelligence lives in the cloud, you are a tenant. You are renting your thinking, your writing, and your coding from a landlord who speaks to the government every single day.

We have seen how this plays out. A model is released. It is amazing. Then the "safety" teams get involved. The regulators make a phone call. The model gets dumber. It starts refusing to answer questions about medical history or political philosophy. It lectures you on bias instead of writing the code you asked for.

This is unavoidable when the compute is centralized. A server farm is a fixed target. It is easy to regulate. It is easy to tax. It is easy to censor. If the government wants to know what you are asking a commercial AI, they do not need a warrant for your house. They just need a subpoena for the data center.

Centralization turns a tool of liberation into a tool of surveillance.

Efficiency is Liberty

This is where the engineering challenge becomes a political one.

For the last few years, the industry has been obsessed with "bigger is better." Trillions of parameters. Massive context windows. Models so heavy they require a small nuclear reactor to run. This bloat serves the incumbent monopolies perfectly. If you need a hundred thousand dollars of hardware to run a model, only Google and Microsoft can play the game.

Liberty requires efficiency.

The most important metric in AI right now is not how smart the model is. It is how small the model can be while still being useful.

A model that runs on a five-year-old laptop is infinitely more valuable to a free society than a super-intelligence that only runs on an H100 cluster. When developers figure out how to quantize a model down to 4GB of RAM without losing coherence, they are not just saving memory. They are effectively smuggling a scholar past the border guards.

The Library on a Thumb Drive

An LLM is not a collage machine. It is a compression algorithm. It looks at the entire sum of human knowledge (our books, our code, our forums, our science) and maps the statistical relationships between those ideas. It is a map of the world.

And a map of the world belongs to everyone.

A local LLM is the ultimate public library. Imagine a USB stick containing a competent doctor, a senior software engineer, a translator, and a historian. You can plug this stick into any machine with no internet connection, in a country with total censorship, and it will work. It will answer your questions. It will help you write code. It will teach you history that has been scrubbed from the schoolbooks.

When you run the model locally, there is no "safety team" filtering your thoughts. There is no monthly fee. There is no record of your queries. There is just you and the math.

Seizing the Compute

The hardware is already here. The gaming PCs and laptops we use every day are powerful enough to run these systems if we optimize the software correctly.

We are seeing a resurgence of sovereign computing. People are realizing that the only way to protect their digital life is to physically own the metal it runs on. This is the only way to opt out of the surveillance state.

They can regulate the cloud. They can pressure the CEOs. They can pass laws about what "safety" features a commercial chatbot must have. But they cannot police millions of disconnected machines running open-source math in the privacy of their own homes.

That is the baseline we need to build. A knowledge repository that cannot be turned off, cannot be censored, and does not require a subscription.

The Cartography of Control: How the Uniparty Stole 2026

2025-12-30T00:00:00Z

Gerrymandering is typically treated as a partisan grievance. Republicans draw unfair maps, Democrats complain. Democrats draw unfair maps, Republicans complain. Each side accuses the other of destroying democracy. Neither side mentions what is actually happening.

Both sides do it. Both sides do it deliberately, in coordination with each other's tacit understanding, to protect their shared interest in power against the interests of the voters they theoretically represent. This is not two teams playing dirty. It is a single cartel managing market share.

The 2025 redistricting cycle made this undeniable.

What we watched was not a battle between Republicans and Democrats. It was the maturation of the Uniparty: a collusive duopoly employing state power to insulate incumbents from the competitive pressure that elections are supposed to apply. They treat you as a managed resource rather than a sovereign body.

The Incumbent Protection Racket

In a free market, competition drives efficiency. In politics, the major parties operate as a cartel. Their goal is not to win ideas but to erect barriers to entry.

The 2025 redistricting cycle was an exercise in market allocation. The two major competitors effectively agreed to carve up the territory to create "safe seats." They packed opposition voters into a few overwhelming districts and cracked the rest to dilute their influence. This is not just about winning. It is about reducing the cost of governance.

If an incumbent lives in a safe district, they do not need to build coalitions. They do not need to demonstrate fiscal responsibility. They only need to satisfy the narrow ideological base that controls the primary.

The Aggressors

The cycle began with Republican-controlled legislatures in Texas, North Carolina, and Ohio shattering the norm that redistricting only happens once a decade.

Texas was the laboratory. Governor Abbott called a special session explicitly to dismantle the few remaining competitive districts. They cracked the Texas Triangle (the suburbs of Dallas and Houston) to dilute the power of urban voters. They knew the federal courts, following the Rucho decision, would not intervene in a partisan power grab.

North Carolina followed. They executed a county trade to shift from a competitive 7-7 split to an 11-3 Republican lock.

They destroyed the concept of the competitive election.

The Validators: The California Betrayal

If Republicans were the aggressors, Democrats were the validators.

For years, California Democrats preached the sanctity of "fair maps" and independent commissions. We were told the Citizens Redistricting Commission was the gold standard. But the moment that commission became an obstacle to power, they burned it down.

Proposition 50 was sold to you as the "Election Rigging Response Act." The narrative was simple: "Why should California play fair while Texas cheats?" They called it unilateral disarmament.

This is intellectually bankrupt. It equates the state with the party. It assumes a "Democratic seat" belongs to the Democratic Party rather than to the voters.

They used this framing to manipulate you. They told you that destroying your own independent institutions was the only way to stop the other team. The result was the suspension of the CRC until 2030. The new map targets Republican strongholds in Orange County and the Central Valley not to help you, but to flip five seats for the national party.

They disenfranchised millions of California voters and destroyed the credibility of reform just to settle a score.

The Death of Competition

The ultimate victim here is the competitive election.

In 2024, about 10% of House seats were competitive. After this cycle, that number will plummet. Safe seats mean unresponsive representatives.

This is also a targeted strike against third parties. The Uniparty hates the Libertarian and Green parties. Constant mid-decade redistricting makes it impossible to organize petition drives or build name recognition. By eliminating swing districts, they strengthen the "spoiler" narrative. They tell you that you must vote for the lesser of two evils because the margins are too tight, or that your vote doesn't matter because the district is too safe.

This is a manufactured psychological trap.

The Only Way Out

The Uniparty thesis is not a theory. It is an observable mechanism. Republicans override anti-gerrymandering reforms when they have the power to do so. Democrats do the same. Both parties use the machinery of the state against the sovereign body of voters when it serves their institutional interests. The events of 2025 are the clearest recent example, but the pattern predates them and will continue past them.

The solution is not to elect better people into the same system. Better people placed into the same incentive structure produce the same behavior. The solution is structural: remove the incumbents' ability to draw their own districts entirely, at the federal level, and dismantle the ballot access barriers that make third-party challenge economically impossible.

They cannot maintain the cartel if the maps are drawn by algorithm and the ballot is open to everyone. The cartel knows this, which is why both solutions remain politically difficult. That difficulty is itself evidence that you are looking at the right lever.

NA Thompson

I'm a Libertarian Who Hates Cars

The Government's Heavy Hand #

The Myth of Car Capitalism #

What a Real Free Market Could Deliver #

The Biggest Lie in Capitalism

The Deviancy Signal: Having Nothing to Hide is a Threat to Us All

Enshittification is Not a Market Failure. It's a Government Success.

The Intellectual Property Trap #

The Only Way Out #

We Must Seize the Means of Compute

The Rentier Trap #

Efficiency is Liberty #

The Library on a Thumb Drive #

Seizing the Compute #

The Cartography of Control: How the Uniparty Stole 2026

The Incumbent Protection Racket #

The Aggressors #

The Validators: The California Betrayal #

The Death of Competition #

The Only Way Out #

The Government's Heavy Hand

The Myth of Car Capitalism

What a Real Free Market Could Deliver

The Intellectual Property Trap

The Only Way Out

The Rentier Trap

Efficiency is Liberty

The Library on a Thumb Drive

Seizing the Compute

The Incumbent Protection Racket

The Aggressors

The Validators: The California Betrayal

The Death of Competition

The Only Way Out