If you peel away the congressional grandstanding, the SAVE Act is conceptually pretty simple. At its core, it demands that anyone registering to vote in a federal election provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship—think a passport, a birth certificate, or naturalization papers—rather than merely signing a form under penalty of perjury. It also instructs states to establish processes to cross-check voter rolls against federal databases and remove any non-citizens who might have slipped through the cracks.

If you ask me, requiring someone to show proof of citizenship to vote in a nation’s federal election sounds eminently reasonable. I need a valid photo ID to board a domestic flight, rent a car, and see a doctor. It is hard to get deeply offended by the notion that choosing the leader of the “free” world should require at least as much identification.

To see this clearly, let’s temporarily set aside the obsessive rhetoric of President Trump, the aggressive, anti-immigrant posture that often characterizes his administration, the fabricated Jim Crow parallels drawn by the opposition, and the concerns about the separation of powers between the federal government and the states. Strip away the political posturing and partisan grievances, and the basic mechanic itself—verifying that voters meet the legal eligibility requirements before handing them a ballot—is hardly a radical idea.

So why does a proposal like the SAVE Act cause such an explosive, catastrophic meltdown on Capitol Hill? Why does every debate over voter ID, mail-in ballots, or voter roll maintenance devolve into a high-stakes, existential knife fight where each side accuses the other of destroying the republic?

The answer, as I argued in a previous article How About Making Elections Less Important?, is that we are missing the forest for the trees. The issue isn’t really the administrative paperwork of registering to vote. The real problem is that political initiatives like the SAVE Act shouldn’t even need to be a national obsession in the first place.

We are trapped in permanent, exhausting campaign cycles because our government has expanded into virtually every corner of our daily lives. Come election day, we, the people, feel the urgency to get to the ballot box because we know that whoever wins will hold immense power over our paychecks, our healthcare, our retirement, and our children’s education. If we don’t vote—or if the opposing party games the system—we risk getting steamrolled by political factionalism and armies of special interest groups fighting over the tax, spending, and regulatory bounty.

In a truly free society—a system of genuine capitalism where government is strictly limited to protecting individual rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness—the right to vote would be a marginal issue. Why? Because we simply wouldn’t have that much to vote on.

Consider retirement. Millions of citizens march to the polls every other November driven by the anxious dread that the wrong party will cut, freeze, or alter their Social Security checks. But in a free society, government wouldn’t be running a bloated, close to bankrupt, federal pension system. You would be in complete charge of your own retirement from the day you entered the workforce. You wouldn’t pay the hefty 12.4% payroll tax (split between you and your employer), leaving you with a significantly higher paycheck to invest. Combined with zero capital gains taxes on your investments, another feature of a free society, the simple power of compound interest would make it nearly impossible not to retire comfortably. Without politicians holding the keys to your golden years, your retirement wouldn’t hinge on who wins a Senate seat in Pennsylvania. Voting on the matter would be entirely moot.

Or look at education. Parents currently wage ferocious political battles over local school boards, state curricula, and federal education departments just to ensure their kids get a decent schooling. In a truly free market, education wouldn’t be controlled by government bureaucracies. It would operate like any other service: competing free-market providers would drive costs down and quality up. We would see the educational equivalent of a “Walmart of schooling” and the online efficiency of an “Amazon of learning,” offering affordable, high-quality options tailored to every child, every value, and every wallet. Parents wouldn’t need to exercise political power at the ballot box to rescue their kids from failing district schools.

When government is strictly limited to its proper functions—national defense, the police, and the courts—the political stakes drop through the floor. Washington loses the power to hand out regulatory favors, grant industry subsidies, or redistribute wealth. Corrupt lobbying loses its return on investment, and the white-hot intensity of our national political theater instantly cools off.

Which brings us back to the SAVE Act. While I have no objection to asking voters to prove their citizenship before casting a federal ballot, my bigger hope isn’t primarily for tighter voter registration rolls. My hope is for a society where elections matter so little to our personal survival and prosperity that we stop treating every election cycle like Armageddon.

If we reduced government back to its constitutional guardrails, who occupies the White House or controls Congress wouldn’t drastically alter your wallet, your family’s future, or your personal freedom. Whether non-citizens vote, whether voters show a passport or a driver’s license, or how often voter rolls are scrubbed would become what it always should have been: a minor, low-stakes administrative detail rather than a national crisis.

Until we make elections less important, we will keep fighting over who gets to hold the whip. But if we can take away the whip itself, initiatives like the SAVE Act will just be plain old common sense.

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I don’t bring this up out of a desire to kick a retired bureaucrat while he’s down. But Fauci’s personal reflections serve as a textbook case of a much larger, systemic truth: government agencies are fundamentally unsuited to manage public health crises. In fact, government involvement in public health is not only wildly impractical—it is inherently immoral, as it relies on the massive, systematic violation of individual rights.

When a central planning apparatus is given sweeping authority to control human behavior in the name of “the collective good,” you don’t get swift, rational science. You get political cover-ups, arbitrary edicts, economic destruction, and state-sanctioned coercion. Forcing healthy individuals into house arrest, shuttering peaceful businesses under pain of fine or imprisonment, and mandating medical treatments are fundamental violations of our rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness.

So, who should we trust?

In Think Right or Wrong, Not Left or Right, chapter 5.15 Capitalism Reduces the Impact of Natural Disasters, Including Pandemics, I laid out the alternative: a free-market capitalist system where a government limited strictly to protecting individual rights stays out of the way, allowing private, marketplace actors to handle natural disasters and disease threats.

To statists, the idea of leaving pandemic preparedness to the market sounds utterly terrifying. “Without Dr. Fauci and the CDC, who will tell us when to wash our hands or close down our restaurants?” they cry. But this fear stems from a complete misunderstanding of how market incentives work—and a total disregard for individual liberty.

In a capitalist society, private enterprises operate out of self-interest, profit, and the vital necessity of preserving their reputation. An infectious disease outbreak is a catastrophic threat to a business’s bottom line. Think about a cruise line, an international airline, a hotel chain, a hospital system, or health insurance company. If an outbreak starts on their watch and decimates their customers or workforce, the financial losses are devastating, and the damage to their brand lethal.

Unlike government bureaucrats who collect their comfortable taxpayer-funded pensions regardless of whether their policies work, marketplace actors have actual “skin in the game” in the form of massive financial incentive to prevent disruptions before they start.

In a free market, private companies wouldn’t wait around for a government agency to draft a 500-page manual on a novel virus six months after it spreads. Instead, marketplace actors would maintain continuous, highly aggressive monitoring of global infectious disease threats. Insurance companies, medical providers, supply-chain logistics firms, and corporate risk managers would fund private epidemiological surveillance systems to catch outbreaks early.

When a threat is detected, private actors move with a speed no government agency could ever hope to match. Airlines would immediately implement voluntary testing protocols to keep passengers safe and protect their brand. Businesses would pivot to remote arrangements, offer protective measures, or deploy advanced air filtration technologies to keep their doors open safely. Hospital systems would activate carefully planned emergency management protocols. Pharmaceuticals would compete fiercely to develop therapeutics and vaccines without being stalled for months by regulatory red tape, FDA bottlenecks, or political posturing.

Crucially, all of this happens voluntarily. Individuals choose which risk levels they are comfortable with, and businesses adapt to serve those preferences without stepping on anyone’s individual rights.

Compare this to state control. In a government-run system, bureaucrats suffer no financial penalty for getting things wrong, but face immense political risk if they admit a mistake. The result? They double down on flawed, rights-violating policies, suppress alternative scientific viewpoints, and cover (or not) their tracks in private diaries. In a free market, a company that mismanages a crisis loses customers, market share, and investor capital to competitors who got it right. Not to mention the risk of facing legal action if they are deemed negligent.

Does this mean government has zero role to play when a deadly pathogen strikes? Not quite. Under true capitalism, the government does have a very limited, strictly defined role: protecting individual rights. In the context of an infectious disease outbreak, this means enforcing objective laws against individuals who knowingly or recklessly endanger others—such as someone knowingly spreading a deadly, highly contagious virus in public spaces, which constitutes a direct physical violation of others’ rights. Beyond enforcing basic laws against fraud, physical harm, and breach of contract, government officials have zero moral or practical authority to shut down peaceful businesses, mandate medical procedures, or dictate how free citizens conduct their daily lives.

Government may also have a limited foreign policy related role “encouraging” countries who don’t want to admit scientists and other professionals who are working on pandemic preparedness to change their stance.

The bottom line is that when you strip government of its arbitrary power to manage our health, you eliminate the political theater that defined the COVID-19 era. We wouldn’t have to parse the diary entries of unelected officials to figure out why our basic liberties were trampled.

Natural disasters and viral outbreaks are an unfortunate reality of the human condition. But while nature provides the virus, statism provides the moral offense of tyranny and the lingering economic ruin of central planning. If we truly want to minimize the impact of the next pandemic while safeguarding our freedom, it’s time to stop relying on bureaucratic figureheads and start trusting the unmatched efficiency, adaptability, and moral foundation of a free market, of true capitalism.

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The fundamental premise of a free society is that each human being is an end in themselves, not a means to the ends of others. Each of us possesses inalienable individual rights to our own life, our own mind, and the product of our own effort. This right is not a gift from the state, nor is it a temporary privilege subject to the shifting whims of public policy. It is an absolute requirement of human nature, human survival and human flourishing, grounded in the fact that we must think, choose, and act voluntarily if we are to exist as rational and moral agents.

Compulsory national service, whether in the military or under the guise of civil infrastructure development, stands as a direct and absolute negation of this right. When the state asserts the power to seize a citizen’s labor and time, it is not merely asking for a contribution; it is declaring ownership of that citizen. To command individuals through the threat of criminal prosecution is to reduce them, for the duration of their service, to the status of a state subject. There is no moral distinction between seizing the entire lifetime of a person (slavery) and seizing a portion of their life under the euphemism of “national service.” Both rest on the same premise: that the individual’s life belongs to the collective.

The disruption of AI is the latest societal development raising calls for compulsory national service. I recently came across an article in Pirate Wires, AI Is Breaking the College-to-Work Pipeline. National Service Can Fix It, where Anduril Industries co-founder Trae Stephens argues that the disruptive pressure of artificial intelligence on entry-level white-collar employment justifies a nationwide program of mandatory service. Stephens presents a bleak picture of young, debt-ridden college graduates displaced by technology, and suggests that compulsory service can act as a stabilizing counterweight through rebuilding infrastructure, imparting practical skills, and moderating social polarization.

This argument rests on a profound moral and economic fallacy: the notion that a practical crisis can or should be resolved by violating individual rights. First, the displacement caused by artificial intelligence is a dynamic market challenge, not a permanent death sentence for human labor. When technology automates certain skills, it frees intellectual capital to engage in higher-value, more complex pursuits. By forcibly removing young people from the path of voluntary professional development and placing them into state-mandated make-work, the government does not “fix” a pipeline; it actively delays and disrupts the cognitive adaptation required to survive in a dynamic economy.

Second, Stephens’ appeal to “shared sacrifice” to build patriotism and moderate class stratification is nonsense. True patriotism cannot be coerced. Love of one’s country is a voluntary consequence of valuing the freedom, justice, and opportunity that country provides. Forced service does not cultivate genuine unity; it breeds deep, justified cynicism and resentment. It forces those who wish to build, create, and innovate to put their lives on hold, subordinating their rational self-interest to the forced bureaucratic directives of the state.

Proponents of compulsory service often paint a romantic picture of demographic intermixing, where young people from disparate backgrounds find common ground while paving roads or clearing forests. But forced integration is not the same as social harmony. Voluntary cooperation is the only basis for authentic human connection. When we trade with one another voluntarily—whether exchanging labor for wages, ideas for inspiration, or goods for money—we do so to mutual advantage. This voluntary association honors the mind and choice of each of us.

In contrast, compulsory service replaces the harmony of mutual trade with the hostility of mutual sacrifice. It pits the individual against the group, teaching young people that their personal ambitions, unique talents, and rational plans are secondary to the collective’s immediate physical demands. A young software engineer, an aspiring artist, or a brilliant biochemist is told that their highest moral duty is to abandon their specialized pursuits to perform low-skilled manual labor. This is not a “fix” for economic uncertainty; it is a deliberate destruction of human potential.

The argument that “national service” is necessary during times of uncertainty, radicalization, and cynicism misses the root cause of these very societal ills. Societal cynicism does not arise from a lack of state control; it arises from the state’s continuous overreach and its disregard for individual liberty. When the government treats citizens as chess pieces to be moved across the board of public utility, it erodes the moral fabric of trust and personal responsibility.

If a country’s infrastructure needs rebuilding, or if its defense requires strengthening, the only moral and practical path is through voluntary association—as the co-founder of the innovative and disruptive defense company Anduril Industries should know—with the government getting out of the way. If these causes are truly valuable, the citizens of a free nation can and will fund them, offering competitive compensation to those who choose to participate. If a cause cannot attract voluntary participation, the public does not value it sufficiently, or the terms are unacceptable. The state has no moral authority to bypass the judgment of its citizens by resorting to forced mandatory national service.

Conscription, under any name, is an act of government force against the individual. The disruptions of artificial intelligence and the shifting dynamics of the labor market require flexible, innovative, and above all, voluntary solutions. To suggest that we rescue a generation of young people by stripping them of their right to self-determination is a grotesque moral abomination. The ultimate measure of a society’s strength is not its ability to compel its youth into collective labor, but its commitment to respecting and protecting individual rights.

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I asked my trusted legal assistant, Gemini, for a draft that I subsequently revised. I realize no geographical option exists for separating ourselves from the welfare state; we’re stuck within the borders of the U. S. of A (my apologies to seasteaders and free cities promoters whom I wish success in their efforts, however, the proof is in the pudding). And I realize most Americans are welfare state “loyalists.” But why not have some fun with the idea—with serious undertones. Because, if not reversed, the statist trajectory we’re on will not bode well for the future of freedom, liberty and the respect for and protection of individual rights.

Settle in, review the draft, and submit your feedback in the comments. Should it be rewritten in more modern language suited to a younger audience? Should it be more explicit in discussing the immorality of the welfare state? This is your opportunity to partake in an imaginary, virtual Continental Congress—and then ask yourself if you would sign it, pledging your life, your fortune and your sacred honor for the cause.

+++

IN CONGRESS, [insert date], BY THE REPRESENTATIVES OF INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS RESPECTING AMERICANS, IN VIRTUAL CONGRESS ASSEMBLED

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for productive, rational individuals to dissolve the political bands which have bound them to an extractive system of collective dependency, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and the requirements of human survival and flourishing entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all individuals are created equal, that they possess unalienable individual rights, that among these are life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, minds must be free, and human action must remain uncoerced. That the only moral justification for government is the protection of individual rights from physical force and fraud. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their freedom and safety.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience has shown, that mankind is more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute statist despotism, it is their right to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future protection. Such has been the patient sufferance of independent, productive citizens; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government.

The present welfare state has a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having the ultimate objective the establishment of an absolute tyranny of the collective over the mind, the labor, and the property of the individual. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

The welfare state has:

• instituted a system of institutionalized extortion, seizing the earned rewards of the productive under the guise of altruism and the public interest, thereby treating the individual not as an end in himself, but as a sacrificial asset for the collective.

• penalized achievement, capability, and wealth creation, treating the virtues of industry and innovation as moral crimes to be taxed, while subsidizing stagnation and dependency.

• erected a multitude of new offices, sending swarms of unelected regulators to harass our businesses, dictate our peaceful contracts, and eat out our substance through endless mandates and compliance penalties.

• perverted the concept of rights from a protection against physical coercion into a corrupt claim on the labor and property of others, fabricating false entitlements to housing, healthcare, and income at the point of a legal gun.

• weaponized the currency through centralized manipulation, inflating away the savings of the thrifty to fund unbacked state liabilities, eroding the foundational property rights of every citizen.

• broken the natural link between effort and reward, eroding the moral fiber of society by punishing success and rewarding failure, fostering an artificial class conflict between those who produce and those who consume without producing.

• monopolized and degraded the vital functions of science, research, and healthcare through monolithic federal entities, substituting political consensus for objective truth, open inquiry, and free-market discovery.

• central-planned the economic choices of consenting adults, blocking energy production, stalling industrial growth, and strangling infrastructure under the banner of modern economic and ecological collectivism.

• monopolized and politicized the education of the young through state-run schooling, forcing parents to fund the systematic subversion of their own values and violating their fundamental right to direct the upbringing and education of their children.

• combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our foundational liberty and unacknowledged by our natural law; giving its assent to their acts of pretended legislation:

- for imposing arbitrary tariffs and taxes on us without our genuine consent;

- for depriving us in many cases, through regulatory tribunals, of the benefits of objective trial by jury;

- for taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable economic liberties, and altering fundamentally the forms of our civil society.

In every stage of these oppressions, we have petitioned for redress in the most principled terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A system whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant collective, is unfit to be the ruler of a free, rational people.

Nor have we been wanting in attentions to our collectivist brothers and sisters. We have warned them repeatedly of attempts through our legislatures to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our shared moral potential. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common humanity to disavow these immoral usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our productivity and peace. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of reason. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity of holding them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in coercion, in freedom friends.

We, therefore, the sovereign individuals of this emerging free society, appealing to the supremacy of reason for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by authority of the rational nature of mankind, solemnly publish and declare, that this society is, and of right ought to be, free and independent; that we are absolved from all allegiance to the welfare state, and that all political connection between us and the apparatus of collective dependency is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent individuals, we have full power to contract freely, produce unhindered, accumulate property securely, trade voluntarily, and to do all other acts and things which sovereign persons may of right do.

And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of objective reality and the power of the human mind, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

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Yet, as we look to the next century, this spectacular legacy is threatened by an intellectual counter-revolution gathering strength in Western academies and international policy forums: the degrowth movement. Championed by intellectuals like Thomas Piketty, Joseph Stiglitz and others, recently in the limelight for their article We economists have done the maths: ‘growth’ is a doomed strategy – there is a better way, this movement frames economic contraction and environmental asceticism not as an unfortunate necessity, but as a moral imperative. When stripped of its academic jargon, eco-humanitarian veneer, and shoddy “science,” degrowth reveals itself as fundamentally anti-human flourishing and, by extension, anti-American.

The essential flaw of the degrowth doctrine lies in its inversion of the relationship between man and nature. The American founding was built on the Enlightenment ideal that human reason can understand, harness, and improve the physical world to serve human life. Human created growth in all its forms is the material and immaterial manifestation of human intelligence translating freedom into flourishing. It is the mechanism that lifted billions out of destitution, cured diseases, and expanded human horizons. Degrowth, conversely, is built upon the immoral premise that the earth comes first, and that human beings are static resource-consumers whose ambitions must be actively suppressed to preserve a pristine, unchanging planet.

By placing a mystical eco-collectivism above the requirements of human life, the degrowth movement inevitably depends on a heavy-handed, statist foundation. Economic growth cannot be stopped or reversed voluntarily, because the desire to improve one’s life is innate to humans. To halt this, the state must expand its power to unprecedented, totalitarian dimensions. Piketty’s prescriptions for punitive, near-confiscatory taxation and global wealth registers are not merely tools to redistribute wealth; they are explicit mechanisms designed to cap human ambition. Stiglitz’s constant calls for pervasive state management of the economy similarly assume that a bureaucratic elite is better suited to dictate the limits of human enterprise than individual citizens operating in a free market. Both personify the evils of collectivism.

This statist structure directly violates the unalienable individual rights guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence. When the state shackles the economy to achieve an arbitrary zero-growth or negative-growth target, it is shackling the individuals who comprise that economy. It tells entrepreneurs that their vision is a social liability. It tells scientists that their energy-intensive breakthrough is an ecological crime. It tells ordinary workers that their dreams of a larger home, a better car, or a more prosperous future for their children must be sacrificed on the altar of CO2 emission reductions.

This is the collectivist premise in its purest, most immorally destructive form: the assertion that individuals have no right to their own ambitions, visions, and dreams if those conflict with a centrally planned ecological mandate. Under a degrowth regime, the pursuit of happiness is replaced by the enforcement of stagnation. Liberty is exchanged for a web of suffocating regulations designed to manage human rationing. Life itself is devalued, treated as an environmental burden rather than an end in itself.

It is tempting to brush off the degrowth movement as the latest in a long line of environmentalist assaults on individualism, individual rights, limited government, capitalism and human flourishing. After all, warnings of potential catastrophic effects of global cooling, global warming, and most recently climate change have all been rebuked. But we must remain vigilant and explicitly reject the false dichotomy that we must choose between a healthy planet and a prosperous humanity. The solution to actual environmental challenges has never been the retreat into poverty, but the advance into greater technological sophistication. Free individuals, motivated by the rewards of a free market, possess the creative capacity to develop clean energy, engineering marvels, and efficient systems that protect our surroundings without impoverishing our people.

As we celebrate the country’s 250^th anniversary, our responsibility to the future is clear. We must proudly champion the morality of individualism and protection of individual rights over the immorality of collectivism and statist rights violations. We must proudly champion a vision of abundance, innovation, and freedom, recognizing that human life and human flourishing is the ultimate standard of the good. The degrowth movement offers a future of managed decline and shared misery. America’s promise has always been, and must remain, a future of limitless potential, fueled by the uncompromised liberty of the human mind.

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This got me thinking. Would pushing for an amendment to once and for all respect and protect all individual rights help prime the culture for change? An amendment that protects only individual rights, not alleged rights—right to healthcare, right to work, right to housing, right to an education, etc.—that violate individual rights of others in the process of being enforced? In other words, would the cause of freedom benefit from an amendment that limits the U.S. Constitution to the intent put to paper in the Declaration of Independence?

Almost from its inception, the United States has drifted from its foundational ideal. We have moved from a nation founded on the idea of individual rights being unalienable (with significant groups such as African Americans and women initially being excluded) to one increasingly ruled by the view that those rights have to take a backseat to the alleged rights of collectives or groups. The Declaration of Independence identifies the purpose of government as securing individual rights—specifically life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Yet, our current welfare statist republic operates on the premise that government must increasingly violate individual rights using taxation, redistribution and regulation to “respect” collective rights.

To help reverse this trajectory, what about promoting a singular, clarifying, constitutional corrective: an “Amendment of All Amendments.” This act would not merely add another rule to the books; it would redefine the moral horizon of our government, tethering it irrevocably to the principles of 1776 and initiating the phased, systematic dismantling of the welfare state.

As I’m not a constitutional scholar, I asked my legal assistant—Gemini—for a draft. This is what it suggested (with some subsequent editing of mine):

Section 1. The government of the United States and all subordinate jurisdictions shall exist solely to protect the unalienable individual rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness of all U.S. residents. Individual rights is the moral principle defining and sanctioning an individual’s freedom of action in a social context free from physical, including government, coercion.

Section 2. All government actions, including but not limited to taxation, redistribution, and regulation that infringe upon these individual rights are hereby declared unconstitutional.

Section 3. To ensure a peaceful and orderly transition, all existing programs, subsidies, and administrative mandates inconsistent with the purpose defined in Section 1 shall be phased out. The transition shall be completed no later than 25 years after the ratification of this amendment. The legislative branch shall submit a binding, incremental schedule for this transition within 2 years of ratification.

Not a bad start; the devil’s of course in the details, but let’s keep it simple. The power of this amendment lies in its philosophical precision. By defining individual rights as “the moral principle defining and sanctioning an individual’s freedom of action in a social context free from physical, including government, coercion”, it draws a bright line between the state and its residents.

Under this definition, rights are not grants from the government; they are the preconditions of human life. To live, one must produce; to produce, one must own the fruits of one’s labor. When the government taxes the productive to subsidize the non-productive, it is not merely practicing “social policy” or promoting “the common good”—it is violating individual rights. It is treating the resident as a means to the ends of others.

This amendment would render the entire apparatus of the welfare state unconstitutional because the welfare state is, by definition, a system of coercive redistribution. Whether through income tax, social insurance mandates, wealth transfers, or regulations, the current system relies on the initiation of physical force against individuals.

The 25-year timeline is not a delay; it is a mechanism for reconstruction. It acknowledges the complexity of our current entanglement while establishing a firm, non-negotiable exit date. A gradual, predictable phase-out allows for the adaptation of private markets, charities, and individual financial and other planning.

Here are some implementation examples:

• Retirement independence/Social Security phase-out

• Healthcare and Health Insurance independence

• Medicare and Medicaid phase-out

• Education independence

This amendment would not result in chaos; it would unleash the most potent force in human history: the individual mind in action. Economic growth would take off as we’ve never seen it, allowing for paying off the trillions of government debt and meet the trillions of unfunded entitlement obligations while gradually reducing taxes over the 25-year transition period. Government spending would be reduced to a trickle, limited to financing the military, law enforcement and the courts. Government money printing would end, and with it, inflation.

Admittedly, the “Amendment of All Amendments” is a moonshot. It most likely won’t get much traction by itself in the current moral/political climate. But perhaps it could be part of the toolbox championing the respect for and protection of individual rights and limited government? It took more than 70 years for women to get the right to vote. We’re probably at least as far away from celebrating the victory of individual rights over collective oppression. But we have to start somewhere, and the time is long overdue to finish the project our founders started.

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The intention behind the phrase is understandable. It recognizes courage, loss, and devotion. Yet the expression carries a deeper philosophical implication that deserves examination. Calling death in the defense of a free country “the ultimate sacrifice” suggests that the individual gave up something supremely valuable for something less valuable. But for a person who understands the value of liberty and individual rights, dying in defense of a society that protects those rights is in most cases not a sacrifice at all. It can instead be understood as a rationally selfish act.

Individual rights are moral principles defining and protecting a person’s freedom to follow his own mind and act according to his own judgment. The rights to life and liberty means the freedom to pursue one’s own pursuit of happiness. Property rights protect the material means necessary to sustain one’s life. A proper, limited government exists not to command citizens into collective service, but to secure those rights equally for every individual.

A nation like the United States, despite its flaws and contradictions, was founded on the revolutionary idea that individuals possess rights independent of kings, tribes, or ruling classes. That principle distinguishes a relatively free society from authoritarian regimes in which rights are ignored, rationed, or denied altogether. The difference is not abstract. It affects whether individuals may speak freely, worship freely, own property, defend themselves, innovate, build businesses, raise families according to their values, and pursue happiness without being restricted by laws and regulations violating individual rights. If a person deeply values living in such a society, then defending it is not the renunciation of his self-interest. It is an expression of it.

Sacrifice properly understood means surrendering a greater value for a lesser one or for no value at all. Giving up your career to care temporarily for a sick child is not a sacrifice if your child’s well-being matters more to you than short-term professional advancement. Likewise, risking one’s life to preserve a social system that makes human flourishing possible is not irrational self-destruction if the alternative is life under tyranny or subjugation.

A soldier who fights to preserve a free society may conclude that living under a regime hostile to liberty, rights, and self-determination would represent a profound diminishment of his own life. Such a person may rationally decide that defending freedom—even at mortal risk—is preferable to surviving in chains. In that sense, the willingness to die is not rooted in selfless surrender, but in the recognition that some conditions make life unworthy of a free human being. This perspective does not diminish heroism. If anything, it clarifies it. Courage is not the absence of self-interest. It is the willingness to act in defense of one’s highest values despite danger.

Consider the soldiers who stormed Normandy on D-Day in 1944. Memorial Day commemorations frequently describe those men as having sacrificed everything for future generations. Yet many of them understood precisely what was at stake. Nazi Germany represented conquest, dictatorship, censorship, racial collectivism, and industrialized murder. A world dominated by such powers would have been immeasurably darker and less free. The men who fought against it were not merely “giving themselves up” for strangers. They were defending the kind of civilization in which they themselves wanted to live.

The same can be said of many Americans who volunteered after Pearl Harbor. Most did not act from blind nationalism or mystical duty to the state. They recognized a direct threat to their own freedom, safety, and future. Fighting was dangerous, but submission to aggressive totalitarian powers was worse.

Of course, not everyone who joins the armed services arrives with a fully developed political philosophy. Some enlist primarily because they need financial stability, job training, or educational opportunities. A teenager signing enlistment papers may focus more on college tuition than geopolitical principles. Others may be motivated by family tradition, adventure, or vague patriotism without fully grasping the potential costs. That reality should be acknowledged honestly. Avoid romanticizing military service while obscuring its brutal realities. Young recruits are sometimes encouraged by emotionally charged rhetoric rather than sober reflection about war, injury, trauma, or death.

Still, one may hope that the majority of those who voluntarily serve ultimately recognize a deeper reason behind their commitment: the defense of a social system that protects their ability to live as free individuals. Even if that understanding emerges gradually through experience, it provides a morally coherent explanation for military service that avoids portraying soldiers as mere instruments of collective sacrifice.

The language of sacrifice also risks unintentionally reinforcing the idea that the individual exists primarily for the collective. But a free country is valuable precisely because it serves the lives of individuals—not the other way around. The state is not an end in itself. A nation matters because of the freedom and opportunity it secures for the people who live within it.

If I’m supporting a valued friend in need without sacrificing any higher values, it is not an act of selfless annihilation; it is simply about helping someone that is central to my own happiness and values. Similarly, citizens may fight for their country because they value the conditions that make their own lives meaningful and worth living.

This understanding preserves both individual dignity and the moral importance of freedom. As human beings, we do not become virtuous by abandoning our own interests. We become virtuous by identifying our genuine long-term interests and acting consistently to pursue and protect them.

Next Memorial Day, absolutely honor those who died defending the country. But please do so with language that better reflects the relationship between freedom and individual life. Most of the fallen did not die because they believed they were cogs in a sacrificial wheel. They died because they believed liberty was indispensable to living fully as human beings. That is not “the ultimate sacrifice.” It is the ultimate expression of how much a free life is worth.

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I’m not one to slap a “Coexist” sticker on my car, but my answer is yes. Not because I have abandoned my convictions, but because I take them seriously.

I think reason is man’s proper guide to life. I think the individual exists for his own sake, not as a sacrificial animal for collectivist ends. I think human beings flourish most fully when free to think, create, trade, love, build, and pursue happiness according to their own judgment. I think respect for and protection of individual rights is critical, that freedom of speech is not a government favor, and that the state should be strictly limited to protecting people from force and fraud through the military, law enforcement and the courts.

Conversely, I think religious and altruistic moral systems are profoundly mistaken; self-sacrifice is not the essence of virtue. I don’t think morality requires the renunciation of personal happiness. And I certainly do not think truth is established by revelation, feelings, tradition, or authority.

Yet I have no desire whatsoever to use political power to suppress those beliefs. In fact, I regard the desire to do so as evidence of philosophical insecurity. If your worldview cannot survive freedom, are you really standing on solid ground?

This has become difficult for many people to understand because politics has absorbed nearly every aspect of moral and cultural life. It’s been a long time since we merely disagreed about interpretations of the U.S. constitution. No, we disagree on conflicting visions of the role of government in minute detail. And because the welfare state has grown so immense, impacting every aspect of our lives, every disagreement feels existential.

The result is a society in which everyone is tempted to treat political opponents not as fellow citizens but as enemies of civilization. The progressive regards the religious conservative as a latent theocrat. The religious conservative regards the secular progressive as a cultural nihilist. The socialist regards the entrepreneur as morally suspect. The individualist regards the collectivist as a sanctimonious authoritarian. And, to be fair, sometimes all of them are correct.

But free societies do not require us to admire one another’s moral premises. They require something far more important: restraint. Specifically, restraint in the use of force, government and otherwise.

I have several deeply religious acquaintances who believe charity and self-sacrifice are central moral obligations. We disagree on fundamentals. They see humility before God as the beginning of wisdom. I see independent reasoning as the cornerstone of civilization.

Yet, we agree on almost everything political. Neither of us wants bureaucrats policing speech. Neither of us wants the government deciding which opinions are permissible. Neither of us wants citizens punished for peaceful exchange or voluntary association. Neither of us wants the state acting as national therapist, moral supervisor, or ideological referee.

In practice, we can coexist perfectly well. Why? Because neither of us is trying to rule the other’s conscience. This is the central principle upon which civilized life depends: moral and spiritual conflict must be conducted through persuasion rather than coercion. Once that line of coercion is crossed, politics becomes indistinguishable from religious warfare.

What troubles me most is that increasingly few people seem willing to defend freedom for those whose moral premises they reject. It seems a large majority supports liberty for allies only. That’s unprincipled and shows a lack of independent thinking. The real test is whether you defend the freedom of people who annoy you, offend you, or strike you as fundamentally mistaken.

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Misattributed to Voltaire, this quote nevertheless perfectly captures my view. Truth cannot require force. If a religious doctrine is argued to be true, let it compete openly in the marketplace of ideas. If a secular moral philosophy is sound, let it persuade rational minds through argument and example. If a political system is just, let it defend itself without censorship or intimidation.

Human beings are not laboratory specimens to be arranged by enlightened planners. We are individuals with different temperaments, values, ambitions, talents, and spiritual needs. Some will pursue happiness through religion. Others through science, art, business, philosophy, family, or achievement. A mature political order leaves room for this diversity. What it may not do is grant any faction the power to impose its worldview using government force, violating the individual rights of others. That is the line I refuse to compromise on.

But within that framework there is room for cooperation. I can live peacefully beside the religious believer. I can fight for freedom alongside someone whose morality praises self-sacrifice. I can work with conservatives, leftists, atheists, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and people whose metaphysical assumptions differ radically from mine. Provided they accept one fundamental rule: No one gets to use government force as a weapon for moral conquest. That rule, ultimately, is what makes freedom possible in a diverse society. Not philosophical agreement, but the recognition that civilized human beings settle moral disputes with words rather than force.

No, it is not a perfect arrangement, and overtime I hope more will come to see the world as I do. But in the meantime, we can make progress by making common cause championing the respect for and protection of individual rights.

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Consider the current landscape. In California, proposals have surfaced for a one-time wealth tax aimed at billionaires, targeting accumulated assets rather than just income. In New York, lawmakers continue pushing similar redistributive policies focused on high earners. Here, in my home state of Colorado, the battle is more subtle and potentially more consequential, not only for Colorado but for the entire country: multiple initiatives seek to weaken or bypass the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR).

What is TABOR, you ask? It is not just any fiscal rule. Enshrined in the state constitution in 1992, it limits how much revenue governments can retain, and requires that any tax increase be approved directly by voters. If revenue exceeds its formula—based on inflation and population growth—the surplus must be refunded. In a modern political environment where taxation is often treated as a given, TABOR does something unusual: it asserts that citizens must consent before the state can take more of their income.

TABOR is not perfect. It still allows majorities to approve tax increases, which violates the individual rights of those in the minority—hence the never-ending parade of ballot measures trying to undo it. But it stands as one of the few institutional expressions of a principle largely absent from contemporary debates—that individuals are not subjects of the state.

That principle is precisely why TABOR is under pressure. Recent proposals aim to introduce a graduated income tax, override revenue caps, or redefine what qualifies as voter-approved revenue. Supporters frame these efforts in terms of funding public services or addressing budget gaps. What is missing is any serious engagement with the moral premise of taxation itself. The debate is framed almost entirely around outcomes—how much money is needed, who can afford to pay, and what programs will benefit.

This framing is not neutral. It assumes that individuals do not have an inherent right to what they earn—that their income is available for redistribution so long as a majority approves. Proponents implicitly take for granted a collectivist morality advocating that individual rights must play second fiddle to the alleged “rights” of a group in need or society in general.

If a person earns income through voluntary exchange—through work, innovation, or investment—on what grounds can others claim it? The common answer appeals to need: society requires funding for roads, schools, healthcare, welfare, etc. But need does not establish a moral claim on another person’s property. Without a limiting principle, there is no clear boundary to state power. Once that boundary erodes, policies like wealth taxes or TABOR rollbacks become easier to justify.

Colorado’s fight over TABOR is therefore not just local. It is a test case. If a constitutional safeguard requiring voter consent can be hollowed out through incremental changes, similar protections elsewhere become more vulnerable. What is at stake is not just fiscal policy, but a fundamental principle: that the only role of government is to protect individual rights, including property rights.

Policy arguments alone will not stop this trend. Advocates of expanded taxation speak in moral terms—fairness, equity, shared responsibility. Opponents often respond with technical details, projections, or procedural concerns. That mismatch is decisive. Make no mistake: Moral arguments always outweigh economic ones in shaping public opinion.

What is needed is a counter movement: a positive moral groundswell recapturing the moral high ground. The message must be fundamental: don’t step on my individual rights; what I earn belongs to me. In Colorado, instead of defensively arguing against weakening TABOR, play offense and argue for its strengthening. For example:

• Business owners must speak assertively and confidently about profits they have a right to keep as the result of value they created, not as resources awaiting redistribution. And reject the premise that success creates obligation—that the more productive someone is, the less claim they have to what they produce

• Workers must connect their paychecks to their time and effort, and express outrage that it is partially confiscated without their direct consent.

• Community leaders, intellectuals, writers and activists should tell inspiring stories and cautionary tales that illustrate a simple truth: income is earned, and your property is yours by right, not a societal piggy bank to be raided at will.

Politically, pair this activism with ballot initiatives that increase the protection of our rights to keep the fruits of our labor; initiatives that make it harder or—even better—impossible for majorities to violate those rights through the ballot box.

This doesn’t call for the absence of government, but for a limited state focused on protecting individual rights. Recognizing legitimate government functions such as national defense, law enforcement, and courts does not justify taking individual property for its financing by force. Because then it becomes a rights violating mechanism for subordinating individuals to collective demands.

Reversing the assault on individual rights at the ballot box—in Colorado, California, New York, and elsewhere—requires more than technical objections. It requires moral confidence in championing the respect for and protection of individual rights. Because as long as we accept the idea that our earnings are not truly ours—that they exist at the discretion of political majorities—there is no principled stopping point. TABOR, for all its imperfections, remains one of the last institutional barriers to that idea. If it is weakened or unraveled, the consequences will extend far beyond Colorado.

To learn more about creating a moral groundswell, check out this article.

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But something does feel different today. Conspiracy theories are no longer fringe curiosities whispered in dimly lit basements; they’ve become mainstream cultural artifacts, shared, memed, monetized, and occasionally acted upon—with alarming consequences. From QAnon to 5G towers causing pandemics, vaccines causing autism, and the oddly persistent belief that the U.S. never put a man on the moon, the modern conspiracy ecosystem is thriving.

It’s tempting—and partially correct—to blame social media. Platforms have undeniably accelerated the spread of falsehoods. A majority of Americans now get at least some of their news from social media, creating fertile ground for misinformation to flourish. Among teenagers, the situation is even more striking: about 80% report encountering conspiracy theories on social media weekly, and one survey found 81% believe at least one conspiracy theory. If true, that’s not a fringe problem—it’s a cultural phenomenon. And yet, blaming social media alone is like blaming the printing press for bad novels. It explains the distribution, not the demand.

To understand the demand, we have to dig deeper: why are so many people unable to reliably distinguish fact from fiction in the first place? At its core, believing in a conspiracy theory often involves a specific kind of cognitive error: starting with a conclusion and then selecting or inventing evidence to support it while ignoring or explaining away contradictory facts. It has been described as using the scientific method in reverse, where conflicting data is discarded and only confirming details are kept. This isn’t just a quirky mistake. It’s the opposite of disciplined thinking.

And here’s where the more fundamental issue emerges: generations of Americans have passed through an education system that often emphasizes what to think over how to think. Students memorize facts (at best), prepare for standardized tests, and learn to repeat accepted answers—but are far less frequently trained to evaluate evidence, identify contradictions, or trace ideas back to observable reality. The result? A population that may know many disparate things—but struggles to connect and validate them in a wider context.

Research on misinformation supports this concern. Young people, for example, often express high confidence in their ability to detect false information—while simultaneously struggling to do so in practice. In other words, they don’t just get fooled—they don’t realize they’re getting fooled. That’s not a social media problem. It’s an epistemological problem.

As human beings, we are capable of remarkable reasoning—but only when we actually use it. When we don’t, other forces take over: emotion, social pressure, and the desire for simple explanations in a complex world. Conspiracy theories thrive in that environment. They offer clarity (“it’s all connected”), agency (“someone is responsible”), and belonging (“you’re one of the few who see the truth”). Historically, they surge during times of uncertainty or social change, which helps explain their explosion during events like the COVID-19 pandemic. And once embedded, they can have real consequences. Conspiracy thinking has contributed to vaccine hesitancy, political violence, and widespread distrust of institutions. But here’s the crucial point: none of this requires social media to begin. Social media merely amplifies what is already there—a failure to ground beliefs in evidence and logic.

Perhaps the most ironic feature of the current moment is that we live in the most information-rich era in human history—and yet confusion seems to be winning. Why? Because access to information is not the same as the ability to evaluate it. Without a disciplined method of thinking—one that begins with observation, proceeds through logic, and demands consistency—information becomes a buffet where we tend to pick whatever confirms our prior beliefs. Misinformation spreads effectively because it exploits cognitive biases and emotional reactions, often outperforming factual content. In that sense, conspiracy theories are not an information failure. They are a thinking failure.

At this point, the standard response is predictable: reform education. Add media literacy. Teach critical thinking. Update curricula. But this assumes the system’s goals are aligned with independent thinking in the first place. Government (public) education, by its nature, is centralized, standardized, and politically influenced. It must serve diverse and often conflicting interests, which makes it poorly suited to fostering genuine intellectual independence. After all, teaching students how to think means equipping them to question authority, challenge consensus, and reject unsupported claims—even when those claims are institutionally endorsed. That’s a risky proposition for any system tied to political oversight.

More fundamentally, a one-size-fits-all education model cannot respect the individuality of students, the values of parents, or the professional autonomy of educators. It treats minds as units to be processed rather than individuals to be developed.

If the root problem is a failure to cultivate independent thinking, then the solution must begin with respecting the individual rights of everybody involved—the rights of educators to teach, of parents to choose, and of students to learn in environments that prioritize reason over rote compliance. That points toward the only solution that consistently respects individual rights: abolishing government (public) education.

Not to eliminate education, mind you—far from it—but to liberate it. A market driven, voluntary system that allows diverse approaches to flourish, including those that place genuine emphasis on logic, evidence, and intellectual independence. A system that aligns incentives toward providing real value for money and empowers families to select environments that actually develop thinking skills. A system where parents vote with their values and wallets, where individualized learning thrives, and young adults emerge who know how to think.

Conspiracy theories will never disappear. As long as humans can imagine hidden plots, some will. But the scale of the current problem is not inevitable. It reflects a cultural failure to prioritize thinking as a skill—something that must be taught, practiced, and valued. Social media didn’t create that failure. It revealed it. And until we address the root cause—our individual rights violating government (public) education monopoly—we’ll continue living in a world where millions of people, armed with infinite information, are still unable to tell facts from fiction.

Check out this excerpt if you’re curious about how to abolish government (public) education in practice. Or even better, buy the book.

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Islamism is an explicit threat to our individual rights as its goal is a world dominated by fundamentalist, totalitarian Islamic theocracy. What does this mean with respect to Iran? Escalation. The U.S. should say enough is enough and with immediate effect take out all Iranian military installations, and the country’s oil and gas production, refining and shipping capacity (oil and gas export is its main source of foreign currency). This would be an engagement without troops on the ground. Yes, there will be some loss of American life and material, but overall Iran’s armed forces won’t stand a chance against U.S. military might. The objective is not to invade, not to make Iran “safe for democracy,” but to cripple, demoralize, and send a message to the Iranian regime that America means business; that when we perceive a direct or indirect threat to the individual rights of Americans, we will act decisively.

Well, it looks like we’re doing it—kind of. Together with the Israelis, we’ve decimated the Iranian military and leadership. But as of writing this, we’ve yet to seriously damage Iran’s oil and gas production, refining and shipping capacity. And as unbelievable as it may seem, we don’t appear to have a strategy for securing the Strait of Hormuz, something you’d think would have been at the very top of the list from day one (and if we do have a strategy, the administration has done a very good job of obfuscating it).

This is a justified and righteous war (yes, it’s a war whether declared or not) that should have been fought at least 25, if not 45, years ago instead of wasting American lives and resources in Iraq and Afghanistan. But there is a clear and present danger that past performance is an indication of future returns; that we’ll fight this war halfway and pull out prematurely like so many others—only to find that in due time the underlying threat returns, emboldened and more dangerous than before.

When I wrote the article quoted from above a little over two years ago, I didn’t fully spell out my—and what should be the U.S.’s—position on Iran and the condition for peace: Regime change; stopping short of it is negligence and a betrayal of Americans who are paying with their tax dollars and higher prices. And if it means limited boots on the ground, so be it.

At its core, the purpose of any legitimate government is the protection of individual rights—the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That obligation does not stop at water’s edge. When a foreign regime is explicitly hostile to those rights and backs that hostility with violence, terrorism, and ideological expansionism, it becomes not just a distant problem, but a direct threat. The current Iranian regime fits the bill to a tee.

This is not merely a matter of geopolitical rivalry or competing national interests. As I’ve argued repeatedly, the ruling system in Iran is fundamentally ideological, rooted in a theocratic vision that violates individual rights in favor of submission to religious authority. Its leaders do not simply disagree with American values; they regard them as illegitimate and seek their destruction; we’re “The Great Satan.” That matters, because ideas drive actions—and Iran has spent decades translating those ideas into bloodshed.

Consider its role as the central hub of Islamist militancy. Iran is not just another state actor funding proxies for convenience; it is the primary engine behind a global network of armed groups that destabilize entire regions. Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, and various Shia militias in Iraq are not isolated actors with local grievances. They are extensions of a broader strategy: project power, spread ideological influence, and wage asymmetric warfare against perceived enemies—chief among them the United States and its allies.

It is often argued that Sunni jihadist movements operate independently of Iran’s Shia leadership, and therefore the regime cannot be considered the “source” of Islamist extremism writ large. This misses the bigger picture. While doctrinal differences exist, the operational reality is that Iran has normalized, financed, and legitimized the use of religiously justified violence as a tool of political power. Until Oct 7, it demonstrated successfully that militant ideology paired with state sponsorship can reshape entire regions. In doing so, it has provided both a model and a catalyst for other extremist movements, regardless of sectarian divides. In short, Iran is not just one threat among many; it is the amplifier of threats.

And yet, despite this, there remains a persistent call for “limited engagement” or “containment.” The idea is seductive: apply pressure, degrade capabilities, avoid escalation, negotiate, negotiate, negotiate. But this approach has been tried—and failed. Containment assumes a rational actor interested primarily in survival and stability. The Iranian regime, by contrast, has repeatedly shown that it prioritizes ideological expansion over economic well-being, and confrontation over coexistence. At its core it’s nihilist, and the only language it understands is force—overwhelming, destructive, lethal force.

Stopping a war against such a regime without fundamentally changing its nature is not a solution; it is a pause. And pauses, in this context, are opportunities—for rearmament, for regrouping, and for renewed aggression.

Moreover, the stakes extend far beyond Iran itself. The outcome of this conflict will be read carefully in Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang. If the United States once again demonstrates that it lacks the resolve to finish what it starts—that it is willing to tolerate hostile regimes so long as the immediate costs of confrontation seem high—then it sends a clear and dangerous signal: aggression pays, persistence wins, and American deterrence has limits that can be tested.

Conversely, a decisive outcome—one that results in the downfall of the current Iranian regime and its replacement with a government that abandons ideological militancy—would send the opposite message. It would demonstrate that there are consequences for sustained aggression, that sponsorship of terrorism is not a survivable strategy, and that the United States is capable of defending not just its territory, but the principles upon which it was founded.

Critics will argue that regime change is unrealistic, or that it risks chaos. But the status quo is not stable; it is a slow-burning crisis punctuated by periodic explosions of violence. The question is not whether there will be risk—it is whether we choose a path that addresses the root cause of that risk, or one that merely manages its symptoms.

Of course, regime change is not a slogan; it is a strategy, and it must be approached with clarity and seriousness. It requires not only military pressure, but political planning, regional coordination, and a clear vision for what comes next—something that unfortunately appears to be in somewhat short supply in the administration. But difficulty is not an argument against necessity. If anything, it underscores the cost of having avoided this challenge for so long.

The alternative—ending the conflict while leaving the regime intact—is easier in the short term and far more dangerous in the long term. It guarantees that the underlying drivers of aggression remain in place, that proxy networks continue to operate, and that future conflicts become not just likely, but inevitable.

A foreign policy grounded in the protection of individual rights cannot afford such half-measures. It must recognize that some regimes are not merely adversaries to be managed, but threats to be eliminated—not out of vengeance or ambition, but out of a sober assessment of what is required to secure a world in which Americans are free to live their lives without fear of ideologically motivated aggression.

If that principle means anything, it must mean this: when confronted with a regime that systematically exports aggression and denies the very concept of individual rights, the objective cannot be coexistence. It must be regime change. This time, let‘s finish the job.

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On paper, the bill promises relief for would-be homeowners and renters alike. In practice, it offers the illusion that government can fix a market by violating property rights.

Let’s take a short tour down this newly paved legislative road. One of the bill’s most attention-grabbing provisions limits large institutional investors from purchasing additional single-family homes once they control more than roughly 350 properties, and in some cases requires resale of certain purchases within several years.

Supporters frame the policy as protecting families from large investment firms. The slogan often heard is: Homes should belong to people, not corporations. A noble sentiment, you may think, but remember that corporations are, in fact, collections of people who voluntarily pool resources to buy things with the same individual rights, including property rights, as you and I.

The bill essentially declares that if you and 349 friends buy houses together, you’re fine. But if you and 350 friends do the same thing, you’ve apparently crossed into the moral territory of villainy and must now be handcuffed like a rogue criminal. It basically says that property ownership is fine, as long as you abide by the arbitrary limits set by the government. The immoral hubris of our elected representatives—both on the political right and left—and the ease by which they throw property rights under the bus, is illuminating.

Of course, the ROAD Act didn’t invent government involvement in housing. It merely joins a proud decades-long tradition of violating property rights. Consider zoning laws, which often dictate everything from how tall a building may be to how many families can live on a piece of land. In many cities, the most valuable land is legally restricted to single-family homes—meaning a property owner who wants to build apartments for dozens of families may be politely (or not) informed that the law prefers a lawn instead.

The result is a housing system that resembles a Rube Goldberg machine:

1. Regulations make construction harder and more expensive.

2. Housing becomes scarce and costly.

3. Government introduces programs to make housing “affordable.”

4. Those programs introduce new regulations that further complicate construction.

5. Housing becomes even more scarce and costly.

6. Rinse and repeat.

Housing shortages don’t appear out of thin air. They arise when demand grows faster than supply. In a free market, rising prices normally signal builders to construct more homes. But in heavily regulated markets, builders face layers of approval processes, environmental reviews, zoning restrictions, building codes, financing mandates, and compliance checklists long enough to qualify as doorstops.

The ROAD to Housing Act attempts to fix some of this by trimming certain regulations and encouraging development in places that build more homes. But it also introduces new federal restrictions—like the investor limits—that treat market participants less as voluntary actors and more as pieces in a statist game of chess. It’s a bit like removing traffic cones from a highway while installing speed bumps every 20 feet.

At the heart of the debate is a deceptively simple question: Who has the right to decide how a property is used—the owner, or the government?

If the owner decides, then a person should be free to build apartments, rent houses, or invest in housing projects as long as they respect the individual rights, including property rights, of others. No caps, no limits, no regulations, just a voluntary contract between individuals who recognize the mutual benefit of the transaction. If the government decides, then housing policy becomes an endless individual rights violating balancing act of mandates, quotas, and politically determined limits. The answer should be obvious.

The assumption behind the ROAD Act implies that housing markets cannot be trusted to coordinate supply, investment, and development without constant supervision. Investors are suspect, builders require incentives, and property ownership must occasionally be rationed for the “public good,” protection of property rights be damned.

The housing shortage is caused by too many rules rather than too few. The path forward must be paved with fewer new federal programs and more gradual retreat from decades of accumulated intervention at every level of government—federal, state and local. Here’s but a couple of suggestions that would move us towards separating government and housing by enforcing the protection of individual rights, including property rights:

1. Challenge Zoning in Court

When local zoning prevents owners from using their land as they see fit, and from building according to standards they choose—such as banning apartments on land suitable for them—such restrictions should be challenged in court as property rights violations. Over time, judicial scrutiny would dismantle the most restrictive local regulations, replacing bureaucratic planning with legal protections for ownership.

2. Simplify Building Regulations

Replace thousands of pages of compliance requirements with market driven, voluntary safety standards. And, of course, don’t pass the parts of the ROAD act that add insult to injury, such as the ownership cap. This would free the entire housing supply chain to innovate the use of both building materials, techniques, and processes over time increasing quality, reducing building times, expanding consumer choice and lowering prices.

The result wouldn’t be chaos. It would be something surprisingly ordinary: a housing market where builders build, investors invest, market-based watch dogs watch, and buyers buy—without needing permission slips from half a dozen federal, state and local government entities.

The irony of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is that it recognizes one crucial truth: America needs more homes. Where it falls short is in assuming that the same regulatory mindset that helped create the shortage is also the best tool for solving it. This only adds fuel to the fire. Markets are sometimes messy and unpredictable. But they have one advantage that central planners lack: they rely on millions of individual decisions rather than a single legislative blueprint.

If the goal is abundant affordable housing, the only reform needed is to trust the people who actually build and buy homes. After all, when individuals are free to create, invest, and trade property voluntarily, the housing market tends to produce something remarkable: Homes. Lots of them. For every wallet. And most importantly, the government can focus on its one legitimate role: protecting individual rights—including property rights.

Do you want to learn more about housing under welfare statism and capitalism? Check out this excerpt from the book.

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Imagine a world where vaccines are treated like smartphones, running shoes, or power tools: invented by ambitious minds, tested by competing certifiers and consumer advocate organizations, sold in voluntary exchange, and chosen—or declined—by adults acting on their own judgment.

Championing individual rights as they relate to the rights to produce, sell, certify, and consume vaccines demands something that may seem radical: removing the government from everything vaccine-related, except for its proper job of stopping force and fraud. Police the liars. Jail the con artists. Let everyone else get on with their life.

A free society rests on a simple moral premise: your life belongs to you; your body is not a public utility. You have the individual right to think, to produce, to trade, and to decide what medical offers you will or will not accept—so long as you do not initiate force against others.

This applies just as much to vaccines as any other product. Researchers have the right to experiment and innovate. Manufacturers have the right to produce and sell. Independent organizations have the right to test and certify. Doctors have the right to recommend. Consumers have the right to accept or refuse. All of this is moral because it is voluntary and respects individual rights.

What is not moral is coercion—whether wrapped in scientific authority or populist outrage. Let’s start with the “respectable” side: government vaccine recommendations. Typically framed as helpful guidance, they’re just advice, just science, we’re told.

But when the state speaks, it is not as a mere participant in debate. No, it speaks backed by taxing power, regulatory leverage, and the authority to punish noncompliance. “Recommendations” quickly intertwine with mandates, school requirements, procurement contracts, licensing rules, and liability shields.

Even when technically optional, recommendations shape the entire market structure. Producers design products to satisfy regulators. Hospitals align policy with bureaucratic checklists. Insurance companies adjust coverage accordingly. The result is not a free marketplace of ideas and products—it is a managed ecosystem orbiting a central statist authority. This violates individual rights because it replaces voluntary judgment with bureaucratic paternalistic coercion.

Now consider the anti-vaccine side that call for banning, defunding, or strangling vaccine producers in the name of protecting “the people.” In reality, it is the mirror image of the bureaucratic paternalism side. To say, “The government must make you take this,” and to say, “The government must forbid you from taking this,” are morally identical. Both subordinate the individual to the collective. Both treat peaceful producers and consumers as pieces on a statist chessboard. Swapping one set of rulers using government force for another does not make it moral.

Of course, if a company commits fraud—falsifies data, conceals risks—prosecute it. If it harms someone through negligence, let the courts award damages. That is justice. But to preemptively ban products because a group distrusts them is to apply government force against peaceful exchange.

But without government mandates and central planning, how would we achieve herd immunity, you may ask? The same way we achieve technological standards and widespread adoption of smartphones—through voluntary incentives, information, cooperation and self-interest.

Herd immunity is not a mystical government program. It is a statistical threshold reached when enough individuals choose immunity—through vaccination or prior exposure—to reduce transmission within a population. In a free society, it is achieved through decentralized decisions rather than centralized decrees: vaccine producers compete to demonstrate safety and effectiveness; independent certification bodies build reputations for rigorous testing; insurers price risk and incentivize behaviors that reduce large-scale outbreaks; employers, schools, and private organizations set voluntary entry requirements as conditions of contract; doctors advise patients based on evidence; individuals weigh risks and benefits and act accordingly.

When a disease poses a serious risk, rational individuals have strong incentives to protect themselves. Businesses have incentives to maintain healthy workforces. Insurers have incentives to reduce costly outbreaks. If immunity confers personal benefit (which it typically does), most people will seek it voluntarily. As uptake rises, transmission drops, and herd immunity is reached.

Notice what makes this possible: respect for individual rights and freedom of association. A private school can require vaccination as a condition of enrollment. A cruise line can set its own policies. An employer can negotiate terms with employees. Health insurers can differentiate rates based on whether you’re vaccinated or not. Individuals can choose environments aligned with their preferences. No one is forced. Everyone acts voluntarily.

This decentralized approach also corrects errors faster. If one vaccine proves ineffective, consumers pivot. If one certifier becomes lax, its reputation collapses. Competition disciplines mistakes in a way government force never can.

One of the strangest features of the current system is liability distortion. Governments often shield vaccine manufacturers or assume financial risk. That weakens the alignment between responsibility and consequence. In a rights-based framework, there are no special immunities. If you produce a product, you stand behind it. If you deceive, you pay. If you injure through negligence, you face damages. Law enforcement investigates fraud. Courts resolve disputes. That is the full extent of legitimate government involvement. Everything else—funding research, endorsing products, mandating consumption, banning alternatives—is beyond its scope.

A consistent respect for individual rights demands trust in our capacity to make informed decisions, whether medical or related to any other product or service. While you may doubt the capacity of some of our fellow Americans, let me just say this: anybody who can learn to drive a car and operate a smartphone—which is the vast majority of us—is eminently capable of making all the daily decisions asked of us, including whether to get vaccinated or not. Sure, we may need advice and recommendations as when upgrading our smartphones. But just as with smartphones, vaccine advice and recommendations are abundantly available in a free society.

Vaccines are not a special exemption from liberty. They are a test of it. Adults will disagree. Some will take the jab enthusiastically. Some will decline. Some pharmaceutical companies will succeed brilliantly. Others will fail spectacularly. That is what freedom looks like: decentralized, and governed by responsibility rather than decree. The alternative may look cleaner in appearance but is corrosive in principle: government coercion over individual choice.

Government exists to protect individuals from force and fraud—not to run laboratories, issue moral directives, or referee voluntary exchange. Let’s champion the respect for and protection of individual rights. Keep the police. Keep the courts. But separate government from vaccines.

For more on how pandemics would be handled in a capitalist society, check out this article.

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None of these episodes are trivial. Abuse of power, corruption, criminal behavior, and moral hypocrisy matter. They should be investigated, punished when warranted, and remembered. But modern media does not merely inform us about scandal—it saturates our attention with it, in the form of sensationalist headlines and click-bait. The result is not vigilance, but distraction from what really matters. Scandals are bread and circuses for a modern republic.

The Roman emperors understood that public outrage can be managed by feeding it spectacle. The formula is simple: give the people something dramatic to fixate on, something emotionally charged and endlessly debatable, and they will neglect the quieter, more consequential decisions being made in their name. Today’s political class does not need gladiators; it has leaked emails, salacious testimony, partisan hearings, cable news talking heads and online influencers.

Consider how scandal operates. It is personal, moralistic, and theatrical. It divides into heroes and villains. It invites tribal loyalty and righteous anger. Most importantly, it demands no sustained thinking about systems, tradeoffs, or long-term consequences. We can be outraged without understanding a budget, a balance sheet, a statutory obligation, or constitutional checks and balances.

For the political class that’s a feature, not a bug. While we argue endlessly about who knew what, who lied, and who should be humiliated or jailed, the real threats to individual liberty and national solvency advance with almost no public scrutiny: The welfare state—the ever-expanding immoral web of individual rights violating entitlements, subsidies, mandates, regulations and promises—quietly accumulates debt and unfunded liabilities on a scale that dwarfs any personal scandal in modern history.

The national debt now exceeds $38 trillion (yes, with a “t”) and is growing faster than the economy that has to support it; interest payments alone are on pace to rival major categories of federal spending, crowding out everything else.

Social Security and Medicare represent $110 trillion (again with a “t”) and counting in promises that cannot be honored as written without massive tax increases, benefit cuts, inflation, or some combination of all three. These are not hypothetical future problems; they are baked into law. Every year reform is delayed, the choices become harsher and the burden heavier on younger generations who had no vote in creating them.

Yet how often does this dominate headlines? How often do politicians campaign honestly on what reform would require, or what inaction guarantees? Almost never. Structural insolvency is boring. It lacks villains with faces. It does not lend itself to viral clips. So it is displaced by scandal theater.

The welfare state’s rot is not merely fiscal. It is a massive violation of individual rights that normalizes dependency, erodes personal responsibility, and concentrates extraordinary power in administrative agencies that operate far from public accountability. It conditions us to see government not as a limited protector of rights, but as a perpetual provider—entitled to intrude, regulate, surveil, and coerce in exchange for benefits funded by debt.

Those individual rights violations rarely make front-page news: The slow erosion of property rights through taxation and inflation; the expansion of bureaucratic discretion over healthcare, employment, education, and family life; the normalization of emergency powers and rule-by-executive-order. These developments reshape the relationship between citizen and state far more profoundly than any impeachment saga. And yet, they happen offstage.

Scandals are politically useful because they allow the political class to profess outrage without threatening its own power. Republicans and Democrats alike eagerly weaponize them, not to restore constitutional limits, but to bludgeon opponents while preserving the underlying immoral machinery of the welfare state that benefits incumbents of both parties. The message is always the same: focus on this personality, this document, this hearing—never on the system itself.

Media institutions, for their part, are complicit. Outrage sells. Complexity doesn’t. A lurid scandal can be milked indefinitely, while entitlement reform requires numeracy, honesty, and the moral courage to admit that decades of bipartisan promises were unsustainable. So the cameras stay fixed on the circus, and the bread of unsustainable promises keeps coming—funded by borrowing against a future the audience is discouraged from thinking about.

To say this is not to excuse misconduct or argue for silence in the face of wrongdoing. Accountability matters. Law matters. Character matters. But proportionality matters too. A society that cannot distinguish between spectacle and substance will lose both its liberty and its solvency while cheering itself hoarse.

The greatest scandals of our time are not affairs, laptops, or tawdry connections. They are the deliberate avoidance of hard truths, the infantilization of the public, and the quiet mortgaging of our freedom through debt and dependency. They are the promises no politician intends to keep and the bills everybody wants to evade.

If we want real accountability, we must look past the circus and ask the questions no one in the political class or media want to answer: Who pays? Who decides? Who loses their freedom when the bills come due?

Until then, the show will go on. The circus is loud. It entertains. But beneath the surface lurks the real danger that eventually will make the political class run out of bread to feed us. Use the recent Epstein scandal as a teaching moment. And when the next one breaks (which it inevitably will), ask yourself what real scandal your elective representatives are trying to divert your attention from this time. Chances are it is—again—the national debt and unfunded entitlement liabilities.

The time is long overdue for holding your elected representatives to the fire. Do your part in creating the moral groundswell required for real change. And one day, the circus will leave town for lack of an audience.

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Do you wonder what you can do? As I outlined in Think Right or Wrong, Not Left or Right: A 21st Century Citizen Guide and mentioned above, creating the moral groundswell is a prerequisite for affecting political change.

For example, if you’re dependent on Social Security for your livelihood and Medicare for your healthcare, you may be trapped in the system for life. But don’t let that stop you from advocating for a future where your children and grandchildren are in control of their retirement and healthcare choices. Demand that their individual rights be respected by phasing out (not “saving” or “reforming”) Social Security and Medicare.

And if you’re that child or grandchild being robbed of 15% of every paycheck (your employer pays half) to finance your parents’ and grandparents’ entitlements without getting anything in return, that’s a cause for legit moral outrage. You too should demand that your individual rights be respected by letting you be in control of your retirement and healthcare choices.

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The reasons are many and overwhelmingly good: Access to the pill and abortion give women control over when and when not to have children; reduced infant mortality removes the necessity to have a large brood just to ensure enough of them survive to adulthood; higher living standards reduces the need for “free” child labor, etc.

But according to many politicians and pundits, the human race is doing reproduction wrong. Birthrates are “too low,” we’re told, or, in the past, “unsustainably high.” Either way, they claim, we’re headed for some demographic cliff that will apparently destroy civilization unless ordinary people start having the “right” number of babies on schedule. The proposed solutions vary—tax credits, subsidies, penalties (for example, the disastrous and immoral Chinese one child policy)—but the premise never changes: your reproductive choices are now a matter of public concern.

Well, they’re not.

Under capitalism—properly defined as the social system that protects individual rights—birthrates are not a problem to solve, a target to hit, or a lever for policymakers to pull. They are irrelevant. The idea that a country can have the “wrong” number of children is not an economic insight—it’s a notion put forth by collectivists that put the nation, “society,” “the common good,” or some other grouping above the individual.

Having a child is not a civic duty or a patriotic act. It is a personal decision with lifelong consequences for the people directly involved. If you want kids and are willing to take on the responsibility, great. If you don’t, also great. No one else gets a vote.

The moment someone asks “But what does society need?”, the conversation has already gone off the rails. Societies do not reproduce. Individuals do. “The economy” does not have children. People do. Framing reproduction as a national concern treats human beings as cogs in a societal wheel—future workers, taxpayers, or caregivers—rather than as individuals with lives of their own. That framing is not neutral. It implicitly assumes that people exist to serve collectivist goals.

Much of the current birthrate panic comes wrapped in economic anxiety. We’re told that fewer babies mean fewer workers, fewer taxpayers, and too many retirees drawing benefits. Translation: the system depends on a steady supply of new people to keep the math working. If true, the problem isn’t that people aren’t having enough kids. The problem is a statist political system built on compulsory redistribution that requires population growth to stay afloat.

In a genuinely capitalist society, no one is entitled to other people’s future labor by default. Retirement is something you plan for. Healthcare is something you insure against. Old age is not a bill automatically sent to the next generation. If a statist government program collapses unless citizens reproduce on cue, that is not a moral argument for more babies—it’s a flashing warning sign that something else is morally Wrong; that the system is running out of other people’s money.

On the other end of the spectrum, there was the fear of overpopulation: too many people, not enough resources, impending doom. This view treated humans as passive consumers who show up, eat stuff, and strain the system. Capitalism takes a radically different view. People don’t just consume; they produce. They invent, adapt, and solve problems. Prosperity comes from human ingenuity, not population quotas. The more minds, the better.

Which brings us to the policies. Once birthrates are declared a “problem,” government inevitably steps in to “fix” them. Subsidize parents. Penalize the childless. Nudge behavior with tax codes and benefits. Dress it up as “support,” but the logic is the same: use state power to steer private life decisions toward politically approved outcomes.

Whether the goal is more or fewer births doesn’t matter. Incentives, penalties, and demographic planning all rest on the same assumption—that individuals may be manipulated for collective ends. That assumption is incompatible with capitalism which takes individual rights seriously, meaning that your bedroom, your family plans, and your long-term commitments are off limits to policy makers.

The language alone should make us uneasy. “Replacement rates,” “demographic sustainability,” “population shortfalls.” These terms reduce people to inputs in a statist maintenance plan. They turn both children and parents into economic units. That’s not how a free society talks about human life.

None of this is an argument against children or family. Quite the opposite. Children matter precisely because they are not a means to someone else’s goal. Parenting is meaningful because it is chosen, not conscripted. A child should be wanted by their parents—not demanded by economists, politicians, or headline writers.

A capitalist society does not need the “right” number of babies, because it is founded on individualist principles: voluntary choice, personal responsibility, and above all respect for individual rights. If those are in place, people will make the decisions that make sense for them. Some will have enough kids for a soccer team. Some will have none. Some generations will grow. Others will shrink.

So the next time someone announces a birthrate crisis and starts eyeing your life choices, be on your guard. Your life is yours. You are not a demographic lever. You are not a national resource. And your reproductive decisions are yours and your partner’s alone.

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While many of the reasons for the exodus are self-inflicted, U.S. federal law adds insult to injury. Keeping up with the Joneses has always been expensive, but few have managed it for quite as long—or at quite the same cost—as the “family” behind the Jones Act, part of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920. This antiquated piece of legislation still quietly dictates how goods move between American ports, what kind of ships they travel on, and who’s allowed to crew them. It is old enough to have witnessed Prohibition, the Great Depression, the moon landing, and the smartphone, yet it remains firmly in charge of your groceries, fuel, and building materials. Not bad for a law most Americans couldn’t pick out of a multiple-choice quiz.

At its core, the Jones Act is simple. Any cargo shipped between U.S. ports must travel on a vessel that is built in the United States, owned by Americans, flagged in the U.S., and crewed primarily by Americans. Miss even one requirement and the shipment is illegal. A foreign ship may deliver goods from overseas to one American port, but it cannot then carry those same goods to another American port; the cargo must disembark and wait for an approved ride.

The law emerged from the anxious aftermath of World War I. Lawmakers feared the United States lacked sufficient maritime capacity for national defense. A protected domestic shipbuilding industry and a robust merchant marine were seen as strategic necessities. In that historical context, charitably interpreted, the Jones Act may have made a certain kind of sense; it was designed as a shield against vulnerability. A century later, it operates more like a fence—one that you and I as Americans are required to pay for every time we shop.

The scope of the Jones Act reaches far beyond shipping companies and port authorities. Its effects are felt most acutely in places that depend on maritime transport not as a convenience, but as a lifeline: Hawaii, Alaska, and—yes, you guessed it—Puerto Rico (Guam, American Samoa and U.S. Virgin Islands are exempt). In these states and territory, the Act more so than for the rest of us quietly inflates the cost of living. Food, fuel, vehicles, and construction materials cost more—not because they are rare, but because the law forbids cheaper and more efficient ways of moving them.

The absurdities are easy to spot once you know where to look. Foreign ships routinely pass U.S. ports carrying goods, legally barred from making a domestic stop. It can be cheaper to ship oil from Texas to Canada and then back to the United States than to ship it directly from one American port to another. Even worse, the right ships may not be available: During a 2018 New England cold snap, energy companies were forced to import liquified natural gas (LNG) rather than getting it from the U.S. Gulf Coast, as no LNG tankers existed that met the requirements of the Jones Act.

So why does the Act endure? Because the “family” of interests opposed to repeal are well-organized, well-funded, and highly motivated. Domestic shipbuilders benefit from protection against foreign competition and have little incentive to welcome rivals who build ships more cheaply and efficiently. U.S.-flag shipping companies enjoy a legally enforced moat around their business. Maritime labor unions support the Act because it restricts competition for jobs and keeps wages artificially high for a relatively small number of workers. These groups form a durable coalition: concentrated benefits, dispersed costs, and a law obscure enough to avoid sustained public scrutiny.

Layered on top of these economic interests is a national-security argument that carries emotional weight. The Act’s defenders warn that repeal would weaken maritime readiness and leave the country dependent on foreign shipping in a crisis. This claim does not hold up under scrutiny as shipping capacity is readily available from our allies around the globe, but its rhetorical power is unfortunately undeniable. And hiding behind claims of “national security” is convenient for politicians who don’t want their financial backing scrutinized.

However, all of these arguments should be overshadowed by something more fundamental than corporatist industry preferences or statist policy traditions: the rights of individuals. The Jones Act does not exist to protect individual rights—our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. On the contrary, it violates those rights by prohibiting peaceful, voluntary exchange based solely on who built a ship, who owns it, and who crews it. If a business owner in Puerto Rico wants to hire a foreign-built ship to carry goods from Florida, and a shipowner is willing to provide that service, the Jones Act says no. Not because anyone is harmed, but because the transaction fails to serve a protected economic arrangement. That is the immoral consequence of the Jones Act.

In a free society, individuals are not tools for achieving collective economic outcomes. Our lives, labor, and property exist for our own sake. The right to trade—to buy, sell, contract, and cooperate voluntarily—is not a privilege granted by policymakers when convenient. It is an extension of the right to act on one’s own judgment. When the government blocks peaceful exchange to prop up favored industries, it reverses this principle. Citizens are compelled to serve goals not of their choosing.

The Jones Act is government coercion, plain and simple. It tells individuals that their freedom to trade exists only conditionally—only so long as it aligns with an approved economic plan. The higher prices paid by millions of consumers are not unfortunate side effects. They are the mechanism by which the law works.

Yes, all laws restrict freedom in some sense. But the distinction lies in purpose. Laws that prohibit murder, theft, and fraud, etc., protect individual rights. Laws that prohibit voluntary exchange violate them. The Jones Act belongs squarely in the latter category. Its longevity is not evidence of its virtue. It survives because its beneficiaries are visible and vocal, while its victims are scattered and anonymous. Every family paying more for groceries in Hawaii, every builder facing inflated material costs in Alaska, every household absorbing higher energy prices in Puerto Rico, and every U.S. mainland resident paying a few extra dollars here and there due to expensive coastal shipping options is subsidizing a protected few.

Repealing the Jones Act would be a morally Right act of justice strengthening the respect for and protection of individual rights, not hostility toward workers or national defense. It would be an affirmation of a basic moral truth: that peaceful people have the right to trade freely, using the means they judge best, without being conscripted into someone else’s morally Wrong, statist economic strategy.

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Despite fresh branding, Instagram-ready slogans, and a hip New York aesthetic, today’s democratic socialism is not radical or new. No, it is deeply reactionary; a recycling of moral and political ideas that have already been tried, tested, and thoroughly discredited by every collectivist regime that has implemented them, no matter if socialist, communist, theocratic or fascist/Nazi.

For many subscribers to Think Right or Wrong, Not Left or Right, this doesn’t come as a surprise. But as democratic socialism refuses to go away, let’s recap why collectivism and its political expression, statism, are immoral—and why individualism and capitalism are their moral antidotes. Perhaps it will lead to one or two Mamdani followers having second thoughts (do share among progressive family members and friends, or gift them a copy of the book). Let’s dive in.

At its core, collectivism is the idea that the individual exists to serve the group, whether that group is “the people,” “the working class,” “society,” a race, faith, nation, family, majority, minority, or some other classification. Under collectivism, moral worth is not inherent in the individual but derived from one’s contribution and sacrifice to collective goals as defined by the leadership of the group in charge.

This worldview treats human beings not as sovereign agents with their own lives to live, but as resources to be managed. It justifies coercion—taxes, regulations, mandates, expropriations—on the grounds that some people’s labor, income, or property may be rightfully seized for the benefit of others.

History has refuted this idea, and for good reasons. From the Soviet Union to Nazi Germany and Maoist China, from Cuba to Khmer Rouge Cambodia, and from North Korea to Venezuela, collectivism has led to the same results: economic collapse, political repression, mass poverty, and the systematic violation of individual rights, including the death of millions, and suffering of countless more. These outcomes are not accidents. They flow directly from a moral framework that subordinates the individual to the collective and empowers the state to enforce that subordination. The only “warmth” it radiates is from the living hellfire.

Democratic socialism attempts to soften this reality by promising kinder administrators and gentler rhetoric. But the moral premise remains unchanged: individuals are means to collective ends, and the state is the enforcer. Lipstick on a pig.

Whether it wears the uniform of communism, fascism/Nazism, theocracy, or democratic socialism, the political expression of collectivism is statism: the belief that the state should control economic and social life in pursuit of collective goals. It assumes that centralized authority can plan outcomes better than free individuals acting on their own knowledge and values.

Statism always expands. Once the state is empowered to redistribute wealth, regulate speech, or control production “for the common good,” there is no principled limit to its reach. Every problem becomes an excuse for more power, more taxation and more regulation.

History shows that statism does not eliminate inequality: it entrenches it, replacing market competition with political favoritism. It does not protect the vulnerable: it makes them dependent. And it does not foster solidarity: it breeds resentment and conflict.

The truly progressive move would be to abandon these failed collectivist/statist ideals altogether and embrace individualism and the only social system that has consistently delivered freedom, prosperity, and human flourishing: capitalism, grounded in the respect for and protection of individual rights, including property rights.

Individualism begins with a simple but truly radical proposition: each person is an end in themselves, not a sacrificial animal for society. Every individual has a moral right to their own life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; not as permissions granted by the state, but as inherent rights that exist prior to government.

Under individualism, people are free to think, produce, trade, innovate, and associate voluntarily. Cooperation is not centrally planned. Instead of being coerced by law, it emerges through mutual consent, shared benefit, and voluntary exchange.

This is the moral foundation that made scientific progress, artistic achievement, and economic growth possible on an unprecedented scale over the past 200 years. It is also the foundation that democratic socialists are undermining by framing success as exploitation, wealth as theft, and independence as selfishness.

Ironically, individualism is the most inclusive moral system imaginable. It does not divide people into classes, identity groups, or moral hierarchies like collectivism. It recognizes one standard for all: equal rights, equally protected.

Capitalism, the only social system compatible with individualism, is not a system of cronyism, or corporate or political favoritism. It is a system based on private property, voluntary exchange, and the rule of law, with the sole function of a very limited government being the protection of individual rights.

In a capitalist system, wealth is not seized or redistributed by force. It is created by individuals who offer goods or services that others freely choose to buy. Profit is not evidence of exploitation; it is evidence of value creation.

Capitalism aligns morality with reality. It rewards productivity, innovation, and responsibility while allowing people to fail, learn, and try again, without bureaucrats deciding who deserves what. This is why capitalism has lifted billions out of poverty, extended life expectancy, and expanded opportunities wherever it has been allowed to function. Calling capitalism “unjust” while advocating systems that require constant coercion is not progressive. It is a moral abomination.

The irony of modern progressives is that they present themselves as bold and forward-thinking while clinging to reactionary ideas that have failed every time they have been tried. Dressing collectivism in kinder language does not change its immoral essence or its real-world consequences.

For democratic socialists who are genuinely in favor of progress—moral, social, and economic—the path forward is not more state control, more redistribution, and more collective sacrifice. No, the path forward is a commitment to individual rights, limited government, and capitalism based on freedom, not force. Unlike collectivism, it will result in both material and spiritual warmth. That is truly radical.

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And yet, when looking at what lies beneath, the seeds of extraordinary progress are being planted.

The parallels with the 1970s and early 80s are instructive. In popular memory—and I’m old enough to remember—it was a period of malaise. Stagflation gnawed at living standards. Energy crises exposed fragility. Trust in government collapsed under the weight of Vietnam and Watergate. Commentators fretted openly about the “end of growth,” the “population bomb,” and the limits of modernity. It was not an era that inspired confidence about the future.

Far less visible at the time was what was happening beneath the surface. In university labs, research parks, and hobbyist garages, the foundations of the computer revolution were being laid. Intel released the early microprocessors. TCP/IP was being refined. The ARPANET quietly linked researchers. Xerox PARC experimented with graphical interfaces and the mouse. None of this felt world-shaking in 1975. It looked niche, fragile, and uncertain.

Then came the 1980s, 90s and 2000s. Personal computers spread from enthusiasts to households. The internet leapt from academia to the public. Productivity surged, new industries emerged, and daily life was transformed. The pessimism of the 1970s didn’t stop the digital revolution; it obscured its gestation.

Today feels eerily similar.

While public debate fixates on political trench warfare, let’s take a look at a few technological domains—each potentially transformative on its own—that are quietly approaching inflection points: Longevity science, nuclear energy, supersonic flight, and biotechnology have all endured decades of slow, foundational progress. Now the compounding effects are becoming visible.

Consider longevity. For most of history, aging was treated as inevitable rather than solvable. That assumption is dissolving. Researchers are increasingly framing aging as a collection of biological mechanisms that can be measured and targeted. Immunis is developing therapies to clear damaged cells. Altos Labs is pursuing cellular rejuvenation through epigenetic reprogramming. AI-driven drug discovery platforms such as Insilico Medicine are dramatically compressing discovery timelines. Even incremental progress—adding healthy years rather than simply extending life—would reshape healthcare, retirement, and how people plan their futures.

What’s striking is how much faster this field could move absent individual rights violating regulatory regimes that treat aging interventions as suspect by default. Clinical trial rules designed for acute diseases often slow or block therapies aimed at prevention or biological optimization, despite informed consent from willing adults. The science is accelerating; the bottlenecks are primarily political and bureaucratic.

Energy tells a parallel story. Nuclear power spent decades frozen by fear, politics, and regulatory overreach rather than physics. Innovation slowed down to a trickle. Today, a new generation of companies is reviving the field. TerraPower is developing advanced reactors with improved safety profiles. NuScale is commercializing small modular reactors designed for flexible deployment. On the fusion front, companies like Commonwealth Fusion Systems are making credible progress toward net-energy gain. These technologies promise abundant, reliable energy—something no modern society can thrive without.

Here, the contrast between technological capability and regulatory reality is stark. Nuclear projects often take decades not because of engineering difficulty, but because of overlapping approvals, shifting standards, and political veto points. Here the current administration does deserve rare credit for trying to clear some of the regulatory hurdles. But as illustrated by the SPEED Act and associated amendments currently making its way through Congress, politicians are more interested in catering to their financial benefactors than respecting and protecting the individual rights of the American people.

Supersonic flight offers another example of potential reawakening. After Concorde’s retirement, faster-than-sound travel was widely declared dead—too loud, too expensive, too constrained by regulation. As a result, flight times have not improved since I boarded my first flight in 1976.

But advances in aerodynamics, materials, and simulation are changing that calculus. For example, Boom Supersonic is developing Overture, a commercial supersonic aircraft designed to fly without an audible sonic boom over land.

The technology is racing ahead of the rulebook. Many current restrictions date to the 1970s, when low-boom designs were impossible. The FAA recently cleared supersonic flight over land which is a step in the right direction. But completely removing the red tape would drastically shrink the world once again, with enormous economic and cultural benefits.

Biotechnology may be the most profound frontier of all. Biology is becoming programmable. Cheap DNA sequencing, CRISPR gene editing, machine learning, and automated labs are turning life sciences into an information discipline. Moderna demonstrated how rapidly mRNA platforms can be adapted once the infrastructure exists. CRISPR Therapeutics is delivering gene-editing therapies for previously untreatable diseases. Companies like Ginkgo Bioworks are building “cell programming” platforms with applications ranging from medicine to materials.

Yet biotech innovation is routinely slowed by regulatory frameworks that assume worst-case misuse rather than empowering individuals to make informed choices about their own bodies. Excessive precaution doesn’t just delay progress; it quietly costs lives by postponing cures that already work.

What unites all of these domains is timing. Each has accumulated decades of knowledge. Each is now benefiting from cross-pollination with AI, computation, and advanced manufacturing. And each is constrained less by scientific uncertainty than by regulatory systems that almost without exception violate individual rights in the name of hypothetical collective risk.

The analogy to the 1970s isn’t that everything will suddenly feel harmonious. The computer revolution brought upheaval alongside prosperity. It disrupted industries and institutions even as it expanded opportunity. The coming wave of breakthroughs will do the same. Some of the companies I’ve linked to in this article may go bust tomorrow; but others will survive and thrive.

Nor is the level of regulations comparable; according to some estimates the number has skyrocketed from 400000 to over 1 million, costing the United States between $1.9 and $3 trillion per year in compliance and stunted progress (2023 and 2022 estimates).

But history’s lesson is clear: societal pessimism can coexist with technological renaissance. Foundational advances don’t announce themselves with comforting headlines. They build quietly, often in defiance of the prevailing mood, until they cross a threshold and redefine what’s possible.

As the year closes, it’s worth holding two ideas at once. Yes, politics feels strained and the present can seem claustrophobic. But beneath the noise, the future is being assembled—longer, healthier lives; abundant energy; faster global travel; and biological mastery once thought unimaginable.

We should fight for pairing that technological momentum with thinking morally right or wrong, not politically left or right, that is, with massive deregulation-induced, renewed respect for and protection of individual rights. This would ensure the next decade arrives with a bang, much like those that followed the turbulent, pessimistic 1970s and early 80s. And before we know it, we’d be on our way to catching up with a future that already should have been here.

Happy Deregulated New Year!

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A capitalist society morally upholds individual rights and limits government to their protection. It offers opportunity without guarantees. It treats each person as an end in himself, free to rise or fall by his own choices.

A welfare-statist society immorally elevates the alleged rights of the collective—nation, class, faith, ethnicity, tribe, age cohort, majority or minority—above the individual. It redistributes wealth, expands government, and turns bureaucracies into arbiters of who receives what. In doing so, it violates individual rights under the banner of phrases such as “the common good.”

No fully capitalist country exists today. All are welfare statist (at best), with a mix of individual rights protections and violations.

These opposing social systems send very different signals to the world.

A capitalist country attracts people seeking freedom, responsibility, and the chance to build a life by their own effort. A welfare-statist country attracts those drawn to its state-administered guarantees. This is not cynicism; it is the simple fact that human beings respond to incentives.

The recent large-scale fraud case in Minnesota illustrates the point. The perpetrators and their accomplices—not any immigrant or other group per se—bear the guilt. But the incident reveals how expansive welfare programs create predictable opportunities for manipulation by everybody, not only immigrants. When the state violates individual rights by forcibly transferring wealth, the question is not whether abuse will occur but when, how much, and by whom.

A society that limits government to protecting individual rights sends a different message: wealth must be earned, not seized; success depends on one’s work, not one’s access to benefits. Immigrants who choose such a country come for freedom, not for handouts.

Under capitalism, immigration becomes a self-selecting phenomenon. Those who seek independence come. Those who seek government-guaranteed support look elsewhere. And the few who have problems adjusting to the individual rights based moral principles of their adopted country are quickly brought back in line by their own immigrant communities, as deviant behavior reflects badly on everybody; there’s little or no “old country” tribal alliances overshadowing the laws of the new land. And if that is not enough, law enforcement is standing by to ensure individual rights are respected. See Jason Riley’s account of how problems in early European immigrant communities were addressed back when the U.S. was much less welfare statist.

Immigration is not random. A nation that rewards self-reliance attracts the self-reliant. A nation that institutionalizes redistribution attracts those who expect or require it. Every society gets the immigrants it deserves because every society gets the immigrants its moral premises invite.

If America wants a different kind of immigration, it must become a different kind of country. ICE raids and mass deportations will not fix the problem. Making the U.S. more respectful of individual rights, that is, more capitalist—and welcoming of those who share this moral foundation—will.

Are you wondering what immigration might look like under a capitalist system? Look no further than the “Think morally Right or Wrong, not politically left or right” immigration market place solution.

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Where do these universal “get out of jail free cards” come from? The doctrine of original sin. Even if many people don’t believe in it explicitly or haven’t even heard of it, its fingerprints are all over the way Western culture talks about human nature. It may be the most influential idea we don’t know we’re borrowing.

Original sin, in its classic theological form, says that humanity inherited a fundamental flaw from the misadventures of Adam and Eve. One bite of the forbidden fruit, and the whole species got stuck with a moral software bug. Whether we learned this in church or just absorbed it through cultural osmosis, the message lingers: humans are flawed, error-prone creatures who can’t help themselves.

Over centuries, this doctrine gradually transformed into everyday slogans like “We’re only human” and “Nobody’s perfect,” which now serve as the all-purpose air purifier for putrid moral actions. Instead of grappling with wrongdoing seriously, we spray these phrases over ethically questionable behavior and declare the situation freshened.

Those phrases originally carried a kind of comfort—gentle reminders that we shouldn’t beat ourselves up for honest mistakes. But somewhere along the way, they evolved into convenient shields against personal accountability. Sometimes they’re used to excuse minor slip-ups like forgetting a birthday. Other times, they’re used to excuse bigger things.

In recent years, a noticeable part of the population—people who otherwise consider themselves upstanding, conscientious, moral citizens—have begun using “we’re all flawed” rationalizations to defend politicians who behave like raccoons digging through the nation’s garbage cans (sorry, raccoons, but you do deserve the bad rap).

This is especially apparent with figures like Donald Trump, though he’s by no means alone in benefiting from the “moral mulligan” culture—you can probably come up with ten names across the traditional left-to-right political spectrum without much effort. It’s as if we, the electorate, have turned into chummy golf buddies on every bad shot: “Don’t worry, that doesn’t count. Give it another go!”

Supporters who might never excuse similar behavior from their children, coworkers, baristas, or car mechanics somehow find endless understanding for elected officials. It’s an odd form of empathy—an empathy seemingly mostly reserved for people with power.

Why? Because the theological residue of original sin has primed many people to think that moral fallibility is not only expected but practically inevitable. If perfection is impossible, why get worked up when leaders fall short? Aren’t they just “being human”? And perhaps we—consciously or subconsciously—take comfort in the thought that overlooking moral shortcomings in others will give us that “get out of jail free card” next time we don’t live up to our own, or don’t meet others’, moral expectations?

Unfortunately, this thinking blurs the line between honest human error and habitual moral dumpster-diving. It encourages us to wave off serious misconduct with the same casual tone used for showing up late to a brunch appointment. But the consequences aren’t just lukewarm huevos rancheros and stale mimosas.

When leaders are repeatedly excused for dishonesty, corruption, cruelty, or gross irresponsibility because “everyone makes mistakes,” accountability withers. A culture that accepts permanent moral immaturity from its leaders will eventually get exactly that from the population at large.

But there’s an alternative—one that asks more from us than poor excuses and rationalizations but doesn’t demand flawlessness either. It starts with a simple idea: Rational Self-Interest (aka: being good is good for you).

Humans are not omniscient. We make mistakes. But that doesn’t mean we can’t strive for moral excellence. Acknowledging our fallibility isn’t a license to stop trying; it’s the very reason we must try. Since we’re not born knowing everything, we have to think, learn, and correct ourselves. And that’s where striving for moral perfection comes in. Not the impossible kind that involves glowing halos or ascetically turning down dessert. No, we’re talking about the down-to-earth moral perfection of using reason consistently and honestly.

This perspective rejects the idea that being human means being doomed to having the moral deck of cards stacked against us. Instead, it suggests that being human means having a mind—and that using it well is the core of moral living.

There’s a crucial difference between two kinds of human fallibility:

• Honest mistakes: You acted on your best understanding and later discovered you were wrong.

• Moral failures: You knew better but didn’t want to deal with the inconvenience of acknowledging the facts.

The first is because we’re not omniscient. The second is because, being equipped with free will, we’re capable of evasion. Both are aspects of human nature that we have the power to manage.

The pursuit of moral perfection doesn’t mean never being wrong. It means never refusing to know better. It means updating your views when reality taps you on the shoulder and says, “Hey, quick question—are you sure about that?”

This is where rational self-interest comes into play. Acting rationally—meaning, acting in accordance with facts, truth, and one’s actual long-term well-being—is not only morally admirable, it’s practical. A life built on evasion, lies, or sloppy thinking eventually collapses under its own contradictions. A life built on clarity and consistency stands taller.

Why does this matter for politics (and dinner table arguments)? If voters adopted a morality based on rational responsibility instead of built-in excuse-making, the entire political landscape would begin to straighten itself out like a spine that finally made it to the chiropractor.

• Leaders couldn’t rely on the “nobody’s perfect” cop out whenever they behaved badly.

• Citizens would demand honesty, competence, and integrity—not perfection, but sincere effort.

• Mistakes would still happen, but they’d be acknowledged and corrected, not defended.

• The moral bar would rise to a normal adult human height instead of hovering somewhere near toddler level.

And, most importantly, we’d reclaim the distinction between a human mistake and a habitual abandonment of moral responsibility.

In summary, moral excellence is a choice, not an accident. The original sin derived idea that human nature is flawed beyond repair doesn’t just let leaders off the hook; it lets all of us off the hook. It’s a philosophy of pre-excused behavior.

A better approach acknowledges both that humans lack omniscience and therefore make mistakes and that we are supremely capable of building lives—and societies—based on reason, honesty, and integrity.

Moral perfection, properly understood, isn’t about being flawless. It’s about exercising the uniquely human ability to think, choose, correct course, and act with rational purpose. It’s about thinking morally right or wrong, not politically left or right.

And if we start expecting that from ourselves, we might start expecting it from our leaders. Imagine a political culture where “nobody’s perfect” and “we’re only human” stop being shields, and “nobody’s omniscient” becomes a simple fact that inspires us to improve, not evade and make excuses.

Now that would be a checkmark in the human progress column.

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