Consequential Actions Podcast

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 12i

I Asked an AI Investor Whether a Machine Could Set Every Rent in New York. He Said It Absolutely Could.

David Evans is the founder and managing partner of Sentiero Ventures, an early-stage venture fund outside Dallas that invests in business software where artificial intelligence is the core of the product. He has been writing software since the early 1990s, built and sold a national digital signage network, and founded EasySeat, an online ticket resale business that reached the Inc. 500 and sold in 2015, and teaches graduate courses on innovation and entrepreneurship at the University of Texas at Dallas. He and Jeff met as seventeen-year-olds sharing a dorm room in Baltimore in August 1995.

The question was direct: could a system read every rent-stabilized building file in New York and produce a number the board could not produce? He said it absolutely could — and then he scoped it, and the scope turned out to be the whole answer. It could read every unit, tenant, price and alternative in the city at once, at a fixed point. It cannot carry that forward, because every decision compounds against every other one until the thing diverges past recovery. He has a name for that horizon, borrowed from mathematics rather than economics, and he ran into it twenty years ago building ticket prices, where he spent years assuming it was a data problem before concluding there was no data to find, because the events had not happened yet. We also cover why large language models are not on the road to general intelligence, what a dog and a bell reveal about the difference between having the words and having the world, data poisoning as an attack on the record itself, the arithmetic of federal equity stakes, and the moment an aggregator becomes a market maker and the number on the screen stops being a price.

Recorded 6 September 2026; the Rent Guidelines Board litigation (argued 2 September, decision reserved) and the Senate FY2027 defense authorization may have moved since.

Did this leave us more free, or more governed?

⏱️ CHAPTERS

0:00:00 — Introduction to the Episode

0:01:15 — Guest Introduction

0:05:11 — Interview Commences

0:05:47 — Machine Learning in Ticketing

0:09:09 — The Business Value of AI

0:13:10 — AI and the Job Market

0:17:27 — The Scottish Enlightenment and LLMs

0:23:43 — Data Poisoning and Future Content

0:29:08 — Technocracy and Government Intervention

0:32:19 — Can AI Replace Human Planners?

0:40:11 — The Scale Problem of Government Investing

0:44:31 — The Solow Paradox and Productivity

0:47:59 — Market Disruption and Autonomous Trucking

0:53:35 — Innovation vs. Regulation

0:57:03 — Post-Interview Reflection

1:02:44 — More Free or More Governed?

📚 Companion article, “The Scottish Alternative — The Scottish Enlightenment, Part I: Foundations”: https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/the-scottish-alternative-the-scottish-enlightenment-part-i-foundations

🔗 Sentiero Ventures: https://sentiero.vc

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 12B

A City Promised Groceries 30% Below Retail. Somebody Still Has to Decide 30% Below What.

In July, New York City published a request for proposals for five publicly funded, privately operated grocery stores. A core basket sells at thirty percent below retail, reset once a month. The information session was August 5. Proposals are due at four o’clock on October 16. The document names market data as possible inputs without fixing a benchmark or a formula — so somebody eventually has to decide what a typical retail price is in a city of more than a thousand grocery stores, and decide it again a month later.

The Rent Guidelines Board voted seven to one on June 25 to set zero percent adjustments for roughly a million rent-stabilized apartments, though one of its own seven research documents produced figures from 3.4 to 8.5 percent. One number has to cover a building in Brooklyn where every unit is stabilized and the boiler is forty years old, and the building two blocks away with four stabilized units and a new roof. St. Paul, Kansas, has kept a city-owned supermarket running since 2013 at a small profit; Erie, fifteen miles away, did everything a careful town is supposed to do: it surveyed residents, sent its clerk to St. Paul in 2019, ran the store for about three and a half years, leased it to a professional operator, and the doors closed anyway. And the most complete public accounting of federal equity ownership — $27.7 billion across thirty-nine deals — is maintained by a think tank, with no marked-to-market ledger and no exit framework. Cloture on the Senate defense bill’s motion to proceed failed fifty to forty-six on July 14.

The libertarian side does not get off either. Certainty about outcomes is one of the things the knowledge argument denies to everybody, and the national security objection wins its own domain outright. But ending a practice and directing an economy require different knowledge. Abolition is not central planning.

The question this program keeps asking: did this leave us more free, or more governed?

Facts on the litigation, the federal portfolio, and the pending defense authorization are stated as of the recording date and may have moved since.

⏱️ CHAPTERS

0:00 — NYC’s Request for Proposals for Publicly Funded Groceries

3:19 — Welcome to Episode 12B: Self-Evident

4:45 — David Hume’s Argument on Undesigned Institutions

5:57 — The NYC Rent Guidelines Board and Price Fixing

12:36 — Analyzing the NYC Groceries Program

15:33 — The Mixed History of Municipal Grocery Stores

25:49 — The Federal Government’s Growing Equity Portfolio

29:56 — The Dilemma of Exiting Federal Ownership Stakes

33:25 — Sovereign Wealth Funds and Durable Machinery

39:04 — Local Experiments vs. Unbounded Federal Programs

41:26 — Addressing Three Objections to the Knowledge Argument

47:53 — The Liberty Test: Are We More Free or More Governed?

55:21 — Looking Ahead: Artificial Intelligence and Adam Smith

📚 Companion article, “The Scottish Alternative — The Scottish Enlightenment, Part I: Foundations”: https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/the-scottish-alternative-the-scottish-enlightenment-part-i-foundations

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 12

The Country That Made David Hume Refused to Hire Him

In the spring of 1745 a man of thirty-four sat down in Edinburgh to defend himself anonymously against charges of atheism and skepticism, because a chair had come open at the university in his own city and he wanted it. It did not work. The clergy organized, the town council gave the post to William Cleghorn, and six years later Glasgow refused him too. David Hume never held a teaching post in his life — and the university system that turned him away was the single most important reason his country was able to produce him.

Scotland lost Darien and argued itself into a union. Its Kirk, because Presbyterian doctrine required ordinary people to read Scripture themselves, put a schoolmaster in nearly every lowland parish, and in the same generation Thomas Aikenhead, twenty, was hanged for blasphemy in January 1697, a short walk from where Hume would be born. Scotland had five universities against England’s two, and an old town on a single ridge where a judge and a printer and a professor drank in the same tavern. Francis Hutcheson, lecturing in English from 1730, held that every human being is born free and that oppressed colonial subjects may justly overthrow their rulers — an argument Francis Alison carried to a Pennsylvania schoolroom whose pupils included three signers of the Declaration. Then Hume denied that reason founds moral judgment, took the original contract apart, wrote that consent is the best and most sacred foundation of government where it has place, and replaced it with convention: two men rowing a boat, languages, gold and silver — each more intricate than anything a committee built, and not one of them designed.

The reckoning dates Hume’s footnote on race and its revision history, and puts the conservative objection at full strength. The knowledge argument can warn about the limits of what a planner knows; it cannot by itself tell you to end an inherited injustice.

The question this program keeps asking: did this leave us more free, or more governed?

⏱️ CHAPTERS

0:00:00 — The Strange Case of David Hume

0:03:29 — Episode 12 Introduction

0:05:16 — Condition One: Scotland’s History and the Union of 1707

0:12:52 — Condition Two: The Kirk of Scotland

0:16:35 — Condition Three: Scottish Universities and Club Culture

0:19:28 — Francis Hutcheson and the Moral Sense

0:31:27 — David Hume’s Treatise and Academic Exile

0:37:30 — Hume’s Critique of the Original Contract

0:42:54 — Artificial Virtues and Undesigned Order

0:53:09 — The Epistemic Claim: Scottish vs. French Enlightenment

0:59:02 — The Reckoning: Hume’s Racism and Glasgow’s Slave Economy

1:07:04 — Objection One: Hume as a Problem for Natural Rights

1:11:00 — Objection Two: The Conservative Objection

1:14:44 — Objection Three: Universal Language vs. Particular Freedom

1:17:25 — The Liberty Test

1:22:51 — Conclusion and Episode 13 Preview

📚 Companion article, “The Scottish Alternative — The Scottish Enlightenment, Part I: Foundations”: https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/the-scottish-alternative-the-scottish-enlightenment-part-i-foundations

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 11i

I Asked a Forty-Year Appellate Lawyer What a Court Is For. He Said It Is a Bureaucracy.

James Ostrowski is a trial and appellate lawyer in Buffalo, New York, in his forty-second year of practice. He took degrees from SUNY Buffalo and Brooklyn Law School, sat in Murray Rothbard’s private seminar, wrote the Cato study “Thinking about Drug Legalization” in May 1989, and is the author of thirteen books. In May 2026 he stood for chair of the Libertarian Party, led the first ballot, and lost on the third. In April 2019 he won the reversal of the first conviction ever prosecuted under the New York SAFE Act: Benjamin Wassell had sold two of his own rifles to an undercover investigator, and Jim won unanimously on a jurisdictional point — the Attorney General had no authority to bring the case.

I asked him what the purpose of a court is. Courts are a bureaucracy, he said. They act in their own interest and they are deeply ideological. Judges are politicians, and appointed judges are frequently more political than elected ones and less transparent about it, because when a handful of people put a judge on a bench nobody outside that handful can see the constituency being served. That is a cold thing to hear at the end of a week spent admiring a constitutional settlement, and it is the most useful thing anyone said on this show all week.

Then I handed him the arms clause of 1689 and asked which of his clients’ liberties survive only because Albany has not gotten around to them yet. He reached for compulsory government schooling and the drug war, both almost entirely state and local, where the money and the enforcement and the prisons actually are. A state can oppress and a town can oppress, and the only real advantage of the town is that you can leave it. We close on his new book, Government Takes 80%, which compares the cost of government in 1900 against 2026.

Every episode of this show asks the same question of whatever it examines: did this leave us more free, or more governed?

⏱️ CHAPTERS

0:00:00 — Introduction to the English Bill of Rights

0:00:38 — Episode Overview

0:03:08 — Guest Background

0:05:59 — Origins of a Legal Career

0:12:20 — Early Drug Policy Advocacy

0:20:19 — The Reality of the Courts

0:24:23 — Defeating the NY SAFE Act

0:30:38 — Challenging Gun Licensing

0:33:58 — Analyzing the 1689 Arms Clause

0:44:23 — Liberty at the State Level

0:49:54 — The Ratchet Effect of Government Growth

0:58:43 — Libertarianism’s Historical Contributions

1:04:26 — Government Takes 80%

1:12:17 — Closing Reflections

1:19:08 — Preview of Next Week

📚 Companion article — Week 11, on the Glorious Revolution: https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/1688-triumph-and-warning-the-glorious-revolution-and-its-limits

⚖️ Jim’s work and books:

LibertyMovement.org — https://libertymovement.org

Books page — https://libertymovement.org/books/

Amazon author page — https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B00OE8JKQO

X / Twitter — @JimOstrowski

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 11B

Learning Resources v. Trump, Section 122, and the 1689 Bill of Rights: How the Taxing Power Left Congress

At one minute past midnight on July 24, 2026, a tax on most of what Americans buy from abroad stopped existing. No bill passed either chamber. No president signed anything. In the same minute a different tax took its place, at roughly the same rate, on roughly the same goods. The old tax had a deadline that put the question back to Congress; the new one has a deadline that puts the question to a federal agency and to the industries that benefit from it.

Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump came down six to three on February 20, 2026, resting on Article I and on Gibbons v. Ogden. The President obeyed — a government that gives money back when a court tells it to is doing something most governments in most centuries would not have done — and Customs and Border Protection has reported roughly $128.6 billion in refunds accepted for processing. Within hours came Proclamation 11012 under Section 122, a ten percent surcharge with a hard ceiling of fifteen percent and a 150-day limit, and then a Section 301 action covering sixty economies, with no rate ceiling, continued not by Congress but at the written request of a benefiting domestic industry. Congress took no recorded vote.

We read the whole money clause of 1689 and follow it through a forty trillion dollar national debt, a permanent appropriation for interest that no Congress votes on, a central bank Congress insulated on purpose, and an operation in the long end of the bond market. The claim is not that the Constitution failed. February proved the improvement on 1689 is real. July proved it is not sufficient.

One question governs everything we do on this program. Did this leave Americans more free, or more governed?

⏱️ CHAPTERS

0:00:00 — The Midnight Tariff Expiration and Replacement

0:01:06 — The Supreme Court Ruling on Presidential Tariff Authority

0:02:37 — Episode Introduction: Self-Evident, Week 11, Part B

0:04:44 — The English Bill of Rights of 1689 and the Money Clause

0:07:44 — The Mutiny Act of 1689 and Parliament's Renewal Clock

0:11:11 — Analysis of Learning Resources Inc. v. Trump and IEEPA

0:15:03 — Proclamation 11012 and Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974

0:17:46 — Section 301 Investigations and the Beneficiary-Driven Renewal Clock

0:21:50 — Section 232 and the Lack of Congressional Votes

0:24:46 — The Congressional Trade Powers Reform Act and Trade Review Act of 2025

0:28:12 — Crossing the $40 Trillion National Debt Threshold

0:31:18 — Inflation as a Wealth Transfer and the Federal Reserve's Statutory Authority

0:36:27 — Treasury Buyback Operations and Liquidity Support

0:41:18 — Article I, Section 8: The Two-Year Limitation on Army Appropriations

0:46:16 — Evaluating the Non-Delegation Doctrine and Judicial Remedies

0:50:30 — Defending the Necessity of Speed in Statutory Delegation

0:55:13 — The Liberty Test: Are Americans More Free or More Governed?

1:00:17 — Preview for Thursday: Jim Ostrowski on the Arms Clause

1:00:53 — Outro and Consequential Actions Subscription Details

📚 Read the companion article: https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/1688-triumph-and-warning-the-glorious-revolution-and-its-limits

Victor Davis Hanson is one of my favorite historians and commentators. I have read and listened to his words for years. He is also wrong about third parties when he said they do harm. In this episode, I will explain in detail why that is.

On August 11, 2026, Victor Davis Hanson sat down with Jack Fowler and made two arguments about the ten-point platform that came out of the gathering at Tucker Carlson’s home in Maine: that third parties never win and only harm the party closest to them, and that the people behind this one are acting out of personal injury rather than principle. He is an advocate of liberty and a better writer than almost anyone working in this line, which is why I stepped out of my comfort zone to record a very rare reaction episode. Minor parties matter, and the math of what it really means to “waste your vote” is not what you think.

We also go through the record the rule promised: the debt at forty trillion dollars, crossed on August 18. A tariff program the Supreme Court held in Learning Resources v. Trump that the statute did not authorize, rebuilt the same afternoon on a different delegation. A war powers resolution that advanced 52 to 47 and was then kept off the floor on a point of order broken by the vice president. A transparency statute whose thirty-day deadline the Department of Justice missed. Two companion articles carry seventy-seven endnotes between them, and every figure spoken here is sourced in one or the other.

The question underneath all of it: did this leave Americans more free, or more governed?

⏱️ CHAPTERS

0:00:05 — A Special Reaction Episode

0:03:42 — The Libertarian Defection

0:06:13 — The Value of Third Parties

0:11:05 — Structural Barriers and the Spoiler Charge

0:25:28 — The 1912 Myth

0:29:40 — The Arithmetic of 1992 and 1996

0:33:35 — The Nader Concession and Vote Aggregation

0:41:04 — Electoral Disconnect46:26 - 1860 and Coalition Dissolution

0:50:59 — The Motive Argument

0:57:13 — Counting the Planks

1:02:00 — The $40 Trillion Reality

1:10:33 — Trade Doctrine and Executive Authority

1:19:25 — State Equity and Corporatism

1:24:56 — War Powers and Executive Overreach

1:38:38 — The Transparency Statutory Failure

1:42:20 — The Shifting Overton Window

1:50:40 — Anticipating Objections

2:02:31 — The Unobtained Vote

📚 The Arithmetic of the Wasted Vote — https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/the-arithmetic-of-the-wasted-vote-what-the-spoiler-argument-proves-and-what-it-cannot-survive

📚 Eight of Ten: What the Count Shows, and Why Motive Cannot Settle It — https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/eight-of-ten-what-the-count-shows-and-why-motive-cannot-settle-it

🎧 Source segment: The Victor Davis Hanson Show with Jack Fowler, August 11, 2026. https://youtu.be/KSNhi8tXgxc?si=Ir5lSd_8LA7mihGd

The passage discussed runs from 1:05:01 to 1:18:13. Two portions are read aloud rather than played, and the reason is given on tape in each case. Listen to the whole segment rather than to my selection of it.

—For the full written series of Parties, Ideologies, and Systems click here: https://www.consequentialactions.com/politicalsystems

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 11

The Invasion England Decided to Call a Revolution

On the afternoon of 5 November 1688, the people of a Devon fishing village looked out at Tor Bay and could not see the water for ships — something like four hundred and sixty of them, carrying fifteen thousand professional soldiers, their horses, their siege guns, and a printing press. It was the largest fleet to reach English shores since 1066 and belonged to a foreign head of state. Fourteen months later that same kingdom produced a document an American can read today and recognize in his bones.

James II did not lose his throne because he was Catholic. He lost it because he claimed a power to suspend acts of Parliament, made a test case of it in Godden v. Hales by dismissing six of the twelve judges of England, and then, in June 1688, produced a Catholic son. In January 1689 the Convention resolved that a king who had fled a foreign army at night had abdicated.

The limits were real: the crown could no longer suspend a statute, tax without a grant, keep an army in peacetime without consent, or dismiss a judge for a verdict. But by 1694 a permanent funded national debt, a bank chartered to service it, and an excise run by professional bureaucracy were extracting on a scale James II could only have dreamed about. The chains on the crown were the collateral. And bloodless describes one kingdom out of three: at Aughrim on 12 July 1691 something near seven thousand men died in a single afternoon.

The question underneath all of it: did this leave people more free, or more governed?

⏱️ CHAPTERS

0:00:00 — Introduction: The Invasion of Tor Bay in 1688

0:02:22 — Episode Welcome & Housekeeping Notes

0:04:10 — James II: The Cold Arithmetic of a Catholic Monarchy

0:06:39 — Royal Overreach: The Suspending and Dispensing Powers

0:09:11 — The Declaration of Indulgence & The Threat of Absolutism

0:12:23 — Crisis Arrives: A Catholic Heir & The Trial of the Seven Bishops

0:15:18 — The Immortal Seven Invite William of Orange

0:17:34 — William’s Continental Strategy & The Declaration of Reasons

0:21:35 — Defection, Desertion, and the Flight of James II

0:24:37 — The Convention at Westminster & The Fiction of Abdication

0:31:05 — The Declaration of Right: Offering the Crown at Whitehall

0:33:03 — The Cost of Conscience: The Non-Juring Clergy

0:35:10 — The English Bill of Rights: Ancient Liberties Declared

0:39:51 — The Act of Toleration & The Strict Boundaries of Religious Freedom

0:41:45 — The Fiscal-Military State: A Bound Crown & A Standing Army

0:47:41 — The “Bloodless” Myth: Conquest in Scotland and Ireland

0:53:44 — The Reckoning: Exclusion, Oligarchy, and Permanent Limits on Power

0:57:13 — Three Objections: Foreign Coup, Aristocracy, and the American Claim

1:06:38 — The Liberty Test: Are You More Free or More Governed?

1:11:59 — Conclusion, Substack Details, & Episode 12 Preview

📚 Companion article — “1688: Triumph and Warning”: https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/1688-triumph-and-warning-the-glorious-revolution-and-its-limits

🎓 Whiteboard primer on the Stuart monarchs: https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/english-monarchs-explained-henry-viii-to-george-iii-self-evident-companion-reference

🎙️ Next Saturday: Episode 12, The Scottish Alternative.

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 10i

A Prosecutor Would Give Up Every Institution but One

Dr. Thomas Laehn taught constitutional law and political philosophy to undergraduates before he ever charged anyone with a crime. He is now the County Attorney for Greene County, Iowa, the first Libertarian ever elected to partisan office in that state, and a candidate for the United States Senate seat Joni Ernst is leaving open. He is also, by his own description paradoxically, a proponent of jury nullification.

Laehn defends Locke’s state of nature not as history but as a model, built the way a scientist builds one, and he gives Sir Robert Filmer his due along the way. Asked who decides, before force decides it, when a government exceeds the power its people could have handed it, he answers: the amendment process, the ballot, and twelve people in a jury box. He says he would surrender every other institution of government before he surrendered the jury.

Then the argument comes home. Iowa’s Utilities Commission vested a private company with the power of eminent domain along the route of a proposed carbon dioxide pipeline, and families along that route have refused to sell. Laehn walks through Kelo v. City of New London, the 2005 decision that read public use to mean public purpose, and the bill he drafted to stop the taking in Iowa, which passed both chambers with added language and was vetoed by the governor.

The question underneath all of it: did this leave Americans more free, or more governed?

Recorded August 17, 2026.

⏱️ CHAPTERS

0:00:00 — Introduction: The Execution of Algernon Sidney

0:00:46 — Welcome to Week 10: The Martyr and the Philosopher

0:02:22 — Setting the Stage: Introducing Dr. Thomas Laehn

0:03:37 — Interview Begins: Dr. Laehn’s Background and Campaign

0:06:03 — From Political Philosophy Professor to Rural Prosecutor

0:10:54 — Perspectives on an Article V Convention

0:13:11 — Dr. Laehn’s Forthcoming Book on Western Constitutionalism

0:14:26 — John Locke, Human Dignity, and the State of Nature

0:22:28 — Rebutting the Historical Criticisms of Locke

0:26:22 — Modern Property Rights: The Iowa Carbon Pipeline Controversy

0:34:18 — Eminent Domain, Kelo v. New London, and the Supreme Court

0:40:50 — When Government Overreaches: The Right to Revolution

0:44:21 — The Power of the Jury and Jury Nullification

0:47:56 — Challenging the Duopoly: Running for U.S. Senate as a Libertarian

0:53:30 — The Case for Congressional Term Limits

0:58:16 — Where to Follow Dr. Laehn’s Campaign

0:59:20 — Post-Interview Analysis: Locke’s Models and Filmer’s Reality

1:00:48 — The Verdict: More Free or More Governed?

1:03:20 — The Umpire of the Constitution and the Jury Box

1:05:53 — Next Week’s Preview: The Glorious Revolution of 1688

📚 Companion article — “The Martyr and the Philosopher”: https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/the-martyr-and-the-philosopher-algernon-sidney-and-john-locke

🗳️ Dr. Laehn’s campaign:

https://laehn4iowa.org

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 10B

Six Officers Searched His Home Over a Tweet 26 People Saw

In November of 2023, six police officers arrived at the door of a seventy-one-year-old retired special constable in Gillingham, Kent, and handcuffed him in his own home. Body-worn camera footage records them remarking on his bookcase — Douglas Murray, The Spectator, very Brexity things — and examining a shopping list for bleach, tin foil, and gloves written by his wife, a hairdresser. They held Julian Foulkes in a cell for eight hours. He had replied to a stranger on X. The reply had been seen twenty-six times.

Three hundred and forty years earlier, officers carried away Algernon Sidney’s papers under the rule scribere est agere: to write is to act. The framers knew that case, and Article III answers it with two witnesses to the same overt act — but that rule covers exactly one crime. The same standard applies here to a British government, a Chinese government, and an American administration: two parents arrested in front of their crying three-year-old, a man in Taiyuan confronted with screenshots that never came from his phone, a July 2026 Fourth Circuit ruling that a manual border search of your phone requires no warrant and no suspicion, and a Tufts doctoral student detained and moved a thousand miles over an op-ed.

The reform is real: Britain’s Court of Appeal found the non-crime hate incident regime unlawful in 2021, and its statutory basis was repealed by an Act that received Royal Assent this April. And the Honest Reckoning starts with the host, who has felt satisfaction watching people he dislikes lose their platforms, and says so.

Did this leave people more free, or more governed? Fancy hats and larger mobs: take the thing being done, put it in your own hands, and ask whether you could do it — and if not, whether a thousand of you could.

⏱️ CHAPTERS

0:00 — The Arrest of Julian Foulkes Over a Tweet

3:13 — Introduction: Episode 10, Part B — To Write is to Act

6:25 — The Trial of Algernon Sidney and the Two-Witness Rule

9:55 — How Sidney's Case Shaped the U.S. Treason Clause

11:19 — Supreme Court Interpretations: Cramer and Haupt

13:53 — The Arrest of Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine

17:15 — Non-Crime Hate Incidents and the Police Bookshelf Search

20:13 — Britain Scraps the Non-Crime Hate Incident Framework

23:02 — Speech Policing and "Picking Quarrels" in China

26:25 — U.S. Border Searches of Electronic Devices

29:20 — Stanley v. Georgia vs. Records in the Cloud

30:14 — The Twitter Files, Murphy v. Missouri, and NRA v. Vullo

33:07 — The Truth About the Missouri Consent Decree

35:23 — Rumesa Ozturk: Visa Revocation for an Op-Ed

38:53 — The Reckoning: Schadenfreude and Asymmetrical Outrage

41:22 — Objection 1: The Hard Cases and Incitement (Lucy Connolly)

44:03 — Objection 2: Judging Britain by the First Amendment

45:16 — Objection 3: Writings as Evidence and Visa Discretion

47:25 — The Liberty Test: Can Lawful Opinion Be Treated as an Act?

52:17 — Preview of Thursday's Interview with Dr. Thomas Laehn

53:46 — Conclusion and Outro

📚 Read the companion article, “The Martyr and the Philosopher — Algernon Sidney and John Locke”: https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/the-martyr-and-the-philosopher-algernon-sidney-and-john-locke

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 10

They Executed Him for a Book Nobody Had Read

On the twenty-first of November, 1683, a sixty-year-old man stood at the bar of the Court of King’s Bench charged with high treason, without counsel, because English law did not permit a man accused of treason to have any. The crown had one witness, and the law required two. So the prosecution reached for an unpublished manuscript its officers had carried out of his study, and Lord Chief Justice George Jeffreys instructed the jury in three words of Latin. Scribere est agere. To write is to act. Two weeks later they cut off Algernon Sidney’s head on Tower Hill.

That same autumn, John Locke was living in Amsterdam under the assumed name of Doctor van der Linden. Both men were writing against Sir Robert Filmer, whose Patriarcha, published in 1680, made a dead man’s book into a live weapon — and whose hard question has never entirely gone away. When, exactly, did you consent? Produce it.

Each man is owed a reckoning. Sidney took secret money from the French ambassador while writing against arbitrary power. Locke held shares in the Royal African Company and was involved with versions of a colonial constitution declaring that every freeman of Carolina should have absolute power over his slaves. Historians genuinely disagree about how much of that scheme is his; the offense comes first, and only then the question of what it means that his principles proved larger than the man who stated them.

Did that leave people more free, or more governed? Take a law or policy in your own country today. Does it rest on powers the governed could actually have delegated, protecting rights they already held?

⏱️ CHAPTERS

0:00 — Introduction: The Treason Trial of Algernon Sidney

3:25 — Episode Overview: The Martyr and the Philosopher

4:28 — The Exclusion Crisis and the Popish Plot

8:08 — Sir Robert Filmer and the Divine Right of Kings

11:21 — Algernon Sidney’s “Discourses Concerning Government”

16:37 — The Trial, “To Write is to Act,” and Sidney’s Execution

20:30 — John Locke and the “Two Treatises of Government”

24:06 — The State of Nature, Natural Rights, and Property

27:26 — Government by Consent and the Right of Revolution

30:00 — The Reckoning: Sidney’s French Subsidies

31:29 — The Reckoning: Locke, Slavery, and Colonialism

37:23 — Objection 1: The Intellectual Roots of the American Founding

39:28 — Objection 2: Algernon Sidney as a Factional Martyr

41:11 — Objection 3: Locke’s Liberty as a Property Holder’s Facade

43:20 — Transmission to America: Influence on Franklin and Jefferson

46:42 — The Liberty Test: Delegated Powers and the Umpire of Revolution

50:45 — Conclusion and Preview of Next Episode

📚 Companion article, “The Martyr and the Philosopher — Algernon Sidney and John Locke”: https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/the-martyr-and-the-philosopher-algernon-sidney-and-john-locke