Overnight News: Humanity at the precipice: You can vote your way into slavery, but you have to fight your way out.

The headline is not quite true. The Hoplite Greeks who birthed our earliest ideas about human liberty won their freedom not in battle but in neglect: At the furthest fringes of a contracting empire, they were left without overlords – but a country boy can survive. The fathers banded together as equals and developed weapons and tactics that kept their land free of brigands and emperors for centuries – long enough for Ds ideas about family and civil society to grow deep roots.

Dc liberty is all we ever hear about: Bigger, faster, more, more, more. But Ds liberty is borne of the dignity of human autonomy: Not what it might do, but that this is what we are – self-responsible free moral agents. Humans thrive when they are free. Enslaved, they wither and die.

Yesterday on BloodhoundBlog:

Brian Brady: Listing and Selling A San Diego Home The Bloodhound Blog Way. If you list, read this: Brian delivers a brilliant idea for making appraisal contingencies vanish.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage applications decrease as rates move higher.

Mortgage News Daily: The Real Story Behind The Past 2 Weeks of Mortgage Rate Volatility.

Housing Wire: In defense of the individual real estate agent. I’m a treetop flyer. Born survivor. Usually work alone.

Housing Wire: Yellen vows economic shakeup if confirmed for Treasury.

Joy Pullman: Democrats Are Framing Americans As Domestic Terrorists So They Can Do To Us What They Did To Trump In Spygate.

David Marcus: Don’t Worry, It’s Just Corporate Fascism.

City Journal: Crime and Diminishment: Rising violence may undercut New York’s efforts to rebuild its economy.

Roger Kimball: A Party of Faction and Fantasy.