By every conventional measure, David entered a profoundly unequal fight. Goliath had enormous physical size, armor, weapons and a shield-bearer. He had been trained as a warrior from his youth. David was a young shepherd whom Saul considered no match for a seasoned warrior like Goliath. He entered the field with a sling and five smooth stones.

That does not mean David was helpless. He had defended his flock from lions and bears, and he knew how to use a sling, which was a serious weapon. He rejected Saul’s armor because he was not accustomed to it. David brought courage, experience, judgment and real skill to the fight. But none of that made the contest equal.

More importantly, the biblical story does not tell us that David won because the setup was fair. Nor does it say that he worked harder, showed more moxie or arrived with a better business plan. David said that God would deliver him, and God did just that. The point of the story in the Bible is to show that faith and divine deliverance can bring victory despite a profoundly unfair situation. David’s courage and skill mattered, but the story presents his victory as divine deliverance, not as proof of a fair contest. By the Bible’s own account, David’s victory cannot be separated from his faith in God. That is precisely why it cannot be used as evidence that the setup itself was fair.

That distinction matters because we regularly use the David vs. Goliath story to excuse enormous differences in economic power. We all know that, in America and in life, some people begin life with far more money, education, security and opportunity than others. We all know that large corporations possess advantages that small businesses do not. We all know that people who already have power can use it to protect and enlarge their power. Then we point to the rare person or company that overcomes those disadvantages and say, in effect, “But David beat Goliath. The little guy can still win.” Then we treat that exception as proof that the old American model—capitalism and free markets—works because it gives anyone at least the possibility of winning.

We like to think we are a land of Davids.

And in a way, we are. But you cannot have a David and Goliath story without Goliath, and the current American model nurtures Goliaths by the hundreds. Across politics, banking, courts and markets, we may hand David a few smooth stones, but our government and economy are far more committed to keeping Goliath in armor. Our system has been optimized to help Goliaths win.

The biggest difference between America’s version of David and Goliath and the biblical story is that Goliath at least entered the field and faced David. In America, concentrated power often prevents a fair contest from taking place at all. Yet those rare openings that remain are presented as the best we Davids can hope for.

But possibility is not the same thing as fairness. An against-the-odds victory tells us that the odds were unequal; it tells us nothing about why they were so unequal in the first place. The victory may be worth celebrating, but the conditions that made it extraordinary are not. What does our appetite for David and Goliath stories say about the fairness of our model? If both sides entered the contest with a fair shot, we would not call it a David and Goliath story at all.

Sometimes an exceptional success story is used to excuse the status quo. If one person escaped poverty, why can’t you? If one small business defeated a corporate giant, why should we worry about concentrated economic power? If one employee reached the executive suite, how unfair could the workplace really be? David won against longer odds, so what’s wrong with you? The story stops being an inspiration and becomes an alibi.

A fair system should not be judged primarily by its most extraordinary outcomes. It should be judged by the opportunities it provides for ordinary people, for the Davids that live all around us. Do people who work hard and make responsible choices have a meaningful chance to build secure lives? Can a small business with a good idea compete without being crushed, copied or shut out by a company that controls the marketplace? Can ability and effort matter even when they are not supported by inherited money, powerful connections or an established institution?

Those questions do not require us to guarantee that David wins. A fair economic system does not eliminate competition, ambition, risk or reward. It does not punish Goliath simply for becoming large or successful. But it does make sure that Goliath does not get to own the battlefield, write the rules, choose the weapons and hire the referee. It prevents economic success from becoming the unchecked power to decide who else gets the opportunity to succeed. We do not need a better underdog. We need a fairer arena.

That is the difference between capitalism and concentrated power. Capitalism depends upon competition. Concentrated power allows those who have already won to narrow the opportunities available to everyone else—and then point to the occasional upset as proof that the system remains open. The purpose of fair rules is not to select the winner. It is to make sure the winner does not get to control the next contest.

I am not arguing against faith or denying the role of God in our lives. Quite the opposite. I am trying to take the biblical story seriously. People do survive circumstances that seem impossible. Faith gives people strength, grace appears where human institutions have failed, and God may help people overcome injustice. But none of that relieves us of our responsibility to confront the injustice itself. Faith can sustain us when justice fails. It should never be used to excuse justice from doing its work. Divine intervention is not an economic model, and we cannot build a society in which ordinary people need extraordinary courage, extraordinary luck or God’s direct help simply to have a meaningful opportunity.

Perhaps we do not need to retire the story of David and Goliath. We need to stop misusing it. It is a powerful story about courage, faith and the limits of human power. It reminds the powerful that their armor does not make them invincible, and it reminds the powerless that their circumstances do not have the final word. But it does not prove that a deeply unequal contest is fair, and it certainly does not provide a model for how an economy should operate.

A fair America is not one in which David can occasionally win. It is one in which David does not need a miracle to have a chance.

“I don’t do this to change the country,” Muste reportedly answered. “I do this so the country won’t change me.”

I have thought about that story often while writing these posts.

Of course, I would like something I write to change a mind, help someone see a problem differently, or give better language to an idea they already feel but have not been able to express.

But that is not the first reason I post every day.

The first reason is to keep the country from changing me.

I do not say that to congratulate myself. Posting an essay is a very small act. I sit in a comfortable chair, type some words, and press a button. I understand its scale. It is literally almost the least I could do.

But small acts can still matter, particularly to the person performing them. Courage is partly a habit. Silence can become one too. I also do not want to become a person who decides there is nothing he can do.

Fifteen or twenty years ago, I would have expressed many of these same ideas publicly without giving it much thought. I would have worried about whether the argument was right, whether the writing was clear, and whether I was being fair. I would not have spent much time calculating what might happen to me simply because I criticized the government or the people running it.

Today, I have to make that calculation.

I think about whether something I write could be pulled out years from now and used against me when I am being considered for a position or an opportunity. I travel internationally, and I have caught myself wondering whether my political posts could make returning to my own country more difficult. I think about who might see a post, who might save it, and how it might look when separated from its context and placed in front of someone with power over some part of my life. I also wonder how it might affect other people in my life.

I cannot say that I expect any one of those things to happen. That is not the point.

The point is that I now have the second thought.

I also recognize that I make this calculation from a position of considerable security. I have more protection than many Americans do. I am nearing retirement, and the professional risks are smaller for me than for many others. People whose employment is less secure, whose visa status is uncertain, whose business depends on a government contract, or whose next opportunity can be quietly taken away have far more reason to remain silent. A constitutional right is important, but the practical ability to exercise it often depends on how much punishment a person can afford.

That is one of the central ideas behind my thinking about economic citizenship. Formal freedom can become a privilege when only secure people can use it without fear.

Some Democrats describe what is happening in America as fascism. I understand why, and much of what we are seeing may deserve the word. But the label can also become a distraction. Call it fascism, and people begin arguing about definitions and whether we have crossed some historical line. Myocardial infarction may be the clinical term, but heart attack makes the danger plain. Fascism may or may not be the right political diagnosis. Governing by fear names the behavior Americans can already see and feel.

Whatever the diagnosis, a culture of fear is taking root in America.

I do not mean that every American is afraid or that government agents are coming for everyone who disagrees. I mean that ordinary criticism is beginning to prompt the kind of personal calculation I described, and I doubt I am alone in making it. Could criticizing a president or governor affect a job, a contract, an investigation, a grant, an appointment, a trip, or an opportunity? Most of the time, no one has to tell us to be quiet. The second thought does the work.

That is how fear becomes politically useful. A government does not have to punish everyone who criticizes it. It only has to make punishment seem possible. If enough people begin censoring themselves, it does not have to ban speech. If people start offering obedience in advance, it does not have to demand it.

Historian Timothy Snyder made “Do not obey in advance” the first lesson in his book On Tyranny. His point is that power often grows because people anticipate what a more repressive government may want and adjust their behavior before anyone orders them to do so. One person deletes a post. Another avoids a subject. An institution changes a policy. Each decision may seem small and sensible.

But the country changes one second thought at a time.

That is what I am trying to resist in myself. I do not want to become accustomed to what should remain unacceptable. I do not want caution to become silence, silence to become acceptance, and acceptance to become obedience. I want to remain the kind of person who says what he believes and accepts honest disagreement in return. I do not want to look back and realize that no one actually took away my voice—that I surrendered it because I was trying to stay out of trouble.

Across centuries, Edmund Burke, John Stuart Mill, and Martin Luther King Jr. each warned, in different words, that wrongdoing flourishes when good people remain passive or silent.

There is also value in letting other people see someone speak. A like, a comment, or a repost is not a movement. It is not a heroic act. But even deciding whether to click one can now produce the same second thought: Who will see this? Could it be used against me? When one person speaks, it can make it a little easier for the next person to speak. A like or a share can be a small public refusal to pretend and a quiet way of saying, “I see this too.”

America was built for its citizens to do exactly this. The First Amendment protects criticism because government belongs to the people, and the people must remain free to challenge how government power is being used. A president is not the country. A political party is not the country. Disagreement with either is not disloyalty to America.

Speaking freely is not only a right. It is also a responsibility of citizenship.

So, I post every day.

I do not imagine that each post will change America. I do it to remind myself that America is still mine to question, criticize, defend, and improve. I do it to keep the second thought from becoming the final word.

In the story, A. J. Muste held a candle. I press “Post.” The acts are not equal, but their purposes are related.

I post because I do not want fear to teach me how to be less free.

I’ve been scrambling over the last twelve days to get all this down and meet my self-imposed deadline to give voice to my thoughts about where we need to go as a country. There is no doubt that Donald Trump, along with all those who enable him in their own pursuit of power, wealth, or simply relevance, represents an unprecedented challenge to the safety and prosperity of our country. It is right and just that we continue to fight back against that challenge.

But a fight against a threat is not enough, because even if Donald Trump disappeared tomorrow, the circumstances that created him will still exist. The more important fight is a fight for a better America, because creating a better America is really the only way to drive a stake through the heart of Trumpism.

That’s where this series fits. I began this series by saying that it is not America that is broken. It is the model of how America works that is broken. That distinction matters because the American promise is still worth keeping. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness remain as powerful and relevant today as they were when Thomas Jefferson put them on paper 250 years ago. What has failed is the collection of rules, habits, relationships, and assumptions we have built around that promise. The old model tells us that what benefits business will eventually benefit everyone, that wealth is evidence of competence, that government is naturally suspect, that legal permission is the same as opportunity, and that the goal Americans should aspire to is earning enough to escape the public systems everyone else depends on. Over these twelve essays, I have tried to make the case that those ideas have helped create Premium America, weaken competition, concentrate power, reduce ordinary freedom, and leave millions of people feeling that the game is rigged. A New American Model would not abandon the American system. It would use that system, with more courage, to change the rules operating inside it.

I’m an advertising guy, and I’m supposed to be good at this kind of thing, but I struggled with what to call this. A New American Model was the best I could do. My goal was to describe what I believe the different parts of society are supposed to do and what they owe one another. The Constitution our founding fathers wrote was a two-dimensional model that detailed the relationship between the people and their government. But today, we live in a three-dimensional world shaped by people, government, and business. The people are sovereign. Government is the democratic instrument they use to protect rights, establish fair rules, and build the public foundations of a free country. Business creates, competes, employs, invests, and earns profits within those rules. A New American Model would judge each of those institutions by the original standard: Does it help make life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness more real for ordinary Americans? Who benefits? Who pays? Who gains more control? Does it distribute opportunity and freedom to everyone, or are those just perks available only in Premium America? Those are the key questions, not whether something sounds capitalist or socialist. Capitalism, socialism, markets, and even government are all just tools. The test is whether they help fulfill the American promise.

Over the course of these twelve articles, I’ve articulated seven key principles that should be at the heart of a New American Model. Some may sound like principles that already exist, but we have allowed power and money to corrupt our commitment to them.

The first principle of a New American Model would be human citizenship. Political rights belong to human beings, not to artificial entities with access to enormous corporate treasuries. Conception and incorporation cannot be treated as the same thing. Yes, corporations need legal protections. They must be able to own property, enter contracts, publish information, receive due process, and challenge unlawful government action. But those protections should not automatically grant a corporation political rights equal to those of a citizen or allow corporate money to drown out the voices of actual people. In light of Supreme Court decisions like Citizens United, we need a constitutional amendment making that distinction clear. Citizens should govern corporations. Corporations should not govern citizens or have the ability to influence elections. But human citizenship also requires accountability in the other direction. The corporate form should not become a hiding place for people who knowingly direct, reward, or conceal criminal conduct. Limited liability should protect legitimate investment risk. It should not protect criminal decision-making. When a corporation breaks the law, the inquiry should not automatically end when the company pays a fine. If identifiable people knowingly caused the wrongdoing, responsibility should be traced back to them.

That principle will become even more important as corporations increasingly act through artificial intelligence and autonomous agents. A company should never be allowed to avoid responsibility for harm by claiming that no human being made the decision. Human beings decided to build, purchase, authorize, configure, and continue using the system. They gave it its goals and the authority to act. They decided which safeguards to install and which warnings to ignore. A machine may deny a loan, set a price, screen a job applicant, make a trade, or recommend dismissal. But a human being decided to let the machine make that decision. Automation may delegate action. It cannot delegate responsibility. Corporations act through people, even when people act through machines. Artificial intelligence should never lead to artificial accountability. In a human-centered economy, every meaningful exercise of corporate power must lead back to an identifiable human being or group of human beings responsible for supervising it.

The second principle would be shared responsibility. The old model has allowed successful people and companies to benefit from America while reducing their obligation to maintain it. A New American Model would, for instance, apply Social Security taxes to all wage income rather than stopping at a level most Americans never reach. It would tax comparable economic gains more consistently, even when wealthy people use sophisticated arrangements to change what those gains are called. It would make it harder to turn a great fortune into a permanent, tax-protected enclave of Premium America that can be passed from one generation to the next. It would stop using the tax code to subsidize withdrawal into Premium America. People could still send their children to private schools, own second homes, fly privately, or buy every legal comfort they can afford. But private choices would not cancel public obligations. You can opt up. You cannot opt out. And when a company receives public money, tax breaks, infrastructure, or special treatment, the public should receive enforceable commitments in return. Public support should buy measurable public value, not simply a press release announcing jobs.

The third principle would be real competition, backed by a government willing to protect it. The old model preaches capitalism but dreams of monopoly. The old model fights to have government stand down in the name of free markets, and then allows one successful company after another to buy competitors, lock in customers, dominate suppliers, control access to markets, and convert a temporary advantage into corporate entitlement. A New American Model would examine the effect of mergers on workers, suppliers, communities, and future competitors, not just whether the price on the shelf might rise next month. It would later review approved mergers to determine whether the promised benefits ever materialized. And it would ask a simple question after every major consolidation: Who can still say no? Can the customer walk away? Can the worker find another employer? Can the farmer find another buyer? Can the small business reach customers through another platform? Competition is not merely a tool for lowering prices. It distributes the power to say no. Capitalism without competition turns America into a company town.

The fourth principle would be meaningful freedom. The old model defines freedom mainly as legal permission: no law forces you to stay in a job, accept a loan, sign a lease, or buy from a particular company. But freedom is thin when saying no means losing healthcare, housing, income, or any practical alternative. A New American Model would preserve competition so people have somewhere else to go. It would support healthcare that does not disappear with a job, bankruptcy and credit rules that allow recovery, worker bargaining power, consumer protection, accessible courts, and enough short-term support to keep one setback from becoming a lifelong trap. Personal responsibility would still matter, and choices would still have consequences. But a free economy should allow people to be wrong without requiring them to be ruined. Before yes can be meaningful, no must be possible.

The fifth principle would be to keep power from becoming permanent. Power has three great currencies: money, access, and time. A New American Model would constrain all three. Power should pay its fair share toward maintaining the country that makes it possible, and it should not be allowed to unfairly amplify the voices of the wealthy. Power should be visible early enough for the public to understand and challenge it. It should not receive a secret room, a private entrance, or a special lane through our political and judicial systems. And power should expire. That does not mean any particular company, fortune, office, or institution must disappear on a particular day. It means that exceptional authority and special privilege should not automatically perpetuate themselves and should be renewed only when they still serve a clear public purpose. Political power should return to the voters. Elected officials should not serve indefinitely. Emergency authority should end when the emergency ends. Public incentives should be subject to review and expiration. Dominant market positions should remain open to challenge and renewed competition. Wealth may be passed down, but superior citizenship and control over the future should not be. Power should reflect the shared voice of people living with today’s needs, not the lingering residue of wealth and exclusivity rooted in success achieved decades earlier.

The sixth principle is professional government. None of the other promises matters if government cannot carry them out. Who will enforce antitrust laws against companies with armies of lawyers? Who will evaluate whether tax incentives create public value? Who will collect taxes fairly from companies and fortunes capable of constructing elaborate ways to avoid them? Who will oversee artificial intelligence, protect workers, administer Social Security, maintain infrastructure, and make sure temporary privileges actually expire? Passing a law is only the beginning. A law government cannot administer is little more than a press release. A right government cannot protect is only a promise. A New American Model would make public management a profession worthy of national investment. We would recruit, educate, and train people to manage public institutions with the same seriousness that companies recruit and train business managers. Career public servants would be protected from partisan loyalty tests and political retaliation, while still being held to clear standards of ethics and performance. Protection from political firing is not protection from accountability. Political officeholders will come and go, but expertise and professionalism should remain.

The seventh and final principle is that America should measure what it claims to value. We should continue measuring economic growth, employment, business investment, and the stock market. Those things matter. But they do not tell us whether the country is keeping its promise. We have a president today who repeatedly points to the stock market—and especially the Dow Jones Industrial Average, a measure of just 30 large companies—as a central scorecard of success. A New American Model would create a simple American Promise Scorecard. Are Americans living longer and healthier lives? Are fewer mothers and infants dying from preventable causes? Can working people afford housing, healthcare, childcare, education, transportation, and retirement? Are children receiving a real opportunity regardless of family income or ZIP code? Can workers change jobs without losing everything? Are new businesses being created, or are dominant companies controlling more of the market? Are Americans participating in elections and trusting public institutions? A country should measure what it claims to value. If life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are the promise, then they should be more than words we recite on patriotic holidays. They should be outcomes we regularly examine. As one of my old bosses said, it’s what you inspect, not what you expect, that gets done.

The political choice before us is often presented as one between restoration and revolution. Republicans offer what they call a restoration of greatness, but it is instead a return to an earlier model that seeks weaker government, releases business from public restraint, and directs blame down at the powerless rather than up at the powerful. Democratic socialists offer revolution—a more fundamental replacement of capitalism and, in some cases, major American institutions. Their diagnosis treats the dominance of power and wealth in our institutions like mold in a flooded house—an infestation so severe that only gutting the house can remove it.

A New American Model would instead offer reconstruction. It would preserve constitutional democracy, private ownership, markets, entrepreneurship, profit, individual success, and political pluralism. But it would change the rules so that those institutions serve the American promise instead of becoming ends in themselves. The changes would be substantial. They would require constitutional amendments, legislation, regulation, taxation, public investment, and a government capable of administering them. They would also operate through the American system rather than seeking to destroy it. Change the model, not the system. Change the rules, not the regime.

These twelve articles do not constitute a finished platform. Some of the proposals need more research. Some will have consequences I have not considered. Some may need to be changed substantially, and others may prove unworkable. I began this series hoping to contribute to a conversation, not end one. But I believe the direction is becoming clear. Human citizenship. Shared responsibility. Real competition. Meaningful freedom. Power that pays, remains visible, and eventually expires. Professional government capable of putting those principles into practice. And one consistent standard for judging the results: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The old model tells us that our largest problems are simply the price of freedom. It says that some Americans must remain sick so that others can have choice. Some workers must remain powerless so that businesses can remain free. Some communities must remain poor so that wealth can remain lightly taxed. Some citizens must have less political influence so that corporations can exercise theirs more.

I do not accept that bargain.

America can solve hard problems. The system gives us the tools. What we need is the courage to use them, the discipline to use them well, and the willingness to confront the people and institutions that profit from the model we have now.

The old model is broken, but I still believe in the American promise. The pursuit of happiness is a race we must all run together.

Lace up your shoes.

I once had a client who hated his product. I am not a kiss-and-tell kind of guy, so I will be intentionally vague about who he was and what he sold. The product was something of a commodity or ingredient, and his brand was fourth or fifth in its category, just behind the store brands. He did not use the product himself. He did not like any of the dishes made with it. He resented the fact that his was a regional brand and a relatively minor player. But what he disliked most were the people who bought it. He called them “bottom-feeders,” “slugs,” and “illiterates.” As you might imagine, it was difficult to do good work for this man. He rejected every idea that tried to elevate the product, celebrate the occasions when it shined, or build on the heritage and nostalgia the brand had earned with its customers. Things finally came to a head in a meeting when his insults about the audience became both racial and personal, prompting our strategy director to tell him exactly what she thought of him. We dropped the account not long afterward. The brand continued its downward spiral under his marketing leadership. That was not especially surprising. It is difficult to improve a brand when the person in charge despises the product, the customers, and almost everything the brand represents.

I mention that story because I recognize something similar in the way the dominant Republican message talks about government. Many Republican candidates campaign for the opportunity to run an institution they describe as inherently corrupt, wasteful, and incompetent. They describe the money government collects as theft. They describe public employees as lazy, dishonest, or incapable. They frequently describe the people who depend most visibly on public programs as cheats, freeloaders, or personal failures. Then they present this contempt as the main qualification for putting them in charge.

Imagine a company hiring a chief executive who distrusted its employees, resented its customers, hated its product, and promised that the best evidence of his success would be making the company smaller and less capable. No responsible board would call that a management philosophy. Yet we routinely accept it as a philosophy of government.

Government certainly needs critics. Programs can fail. Agencies can become slow, wasteful, or unresponsive. Rules can outlive their usefulness. But there is a difference between identifying an institution’s failures because you want it to fulfill its purpose and creating failure because you need the institution to prove your argument. Reform begins with believing that something has a purpose worth fulfilling. Sabotage begins with needing it to fail.

Part of the problem is the familiar demand that government should be run like a business. Given that Americans have grown to worship business, this is not surprising. Government can learn many things from well-run businesses. But government cannot be run according to the same purpose as a business because it has a different job. A business can choose which customers it wants. It can leave a market that is not profitable, discontinue an expensive service, close an inconvenient location, or focus its attention on the people most able to pay.

Government, on the other hand, must serve the people it has. A fire department cannot decide that a remote neighborhood is too expensive to protect. Public schools cannot admit only the easiest children to educate. Courts cannot promise equal justice only to people who can pay the full cost of receiving it. Government cannot abandon rural communities, people with disabilities, struggling families, or disaster victims because serving them produces a poor return on investment. A business exists in large part to create value for its owners by serving selected, profitable customers. Government exists to create value for its citizens by protecting rights, maintaining public infrastructure, fostering competition in the marketplace, and serving every citizen fairly.

Supporters of the old American model have had three key priorities: finding ways to justify lower taxes, reduced oversight, and anti-competitive behavior. To do this, they have spent decades weakening government and then pointing to the resulting weakness as proof that government does not work. These tactics have been practiced for years, but the Trump administration has turbocharged them.

It is a familiar game plan. Underfund an agency. Leave important positions vacant. Drive experienced employees away. Politicize professional decisions. Replace internal expertise with outside contractors. Put people who distrust the mission in charge of carrying it out. Then, when service declines, announce that government is incapable of doing anything well. It is a remarkably effective cycle. We would not hire a football coach who hates football and then act surprised when the team loses. We would not hire someone to run a hospital who thinks medicine is a fraud. Yet Americans routinely place people in charge of government who have spent their careers insisting that government has little legitimate purpose—and those officials then do their best to fulfill those lowered expectations.

The ultimate point of weakening government is to transfer power from institutions that are publicly accountable to institutions that are not. When an agency loses expertise, the knowledge does not simply disappear. It may move to contractors, consultants, lobbyists, and corporate law firms whose first responsibility is not to the public. A government that lacks internal skill becomes more dependent on the very private interests it is supposed to supervise.

A New American Model would treat public management as a serious profession worthy of national investment. America trains people to manage companies, hospitals, universities, military operations, nonprofit organizations, construction projects, and technology systems. We should prepare, more broadly, people just as deliberately to manage government. Public management requires specialized knowledge of budgeting, procurement, personnel, administrative law, ethics, technology, cybersecurity, data, program evaluation, regulation, crisis response, and communication. Public administration already exists as a field, but we do not treat it with the visibility, investment, or recruiting urgency that we give business management. We should support public-management majors, minors, and certificates in universities and community colleges. We should offer scholarships in exchange for several years of work in federal, state, local, tribal, or territorial government. We should create paid internships and apprenticeships so public service is not limited to students whose families can support them while they work for free. We should provide serious midcareer education for people already managing public programs and create easier pathways for engineers, accountants, technologists, healthcare administrators, and experienced private managers who want to move into public service. This is not about creating a protected priesthood of government experts. It is about building a bench of people who know how to make public institutions work.

Yet as I write this and you read it, can you even imagine a presidential candidate making such a pledge? Can you imagine a candidate promising to make American government the envy of the world? To build a national capability in public administration that rivals our military in competence and becomes a global competitive advantage? We have been so thoroughly conditioned to think of our government negatively that even as I propose this, I worry it is an unwinnable position.

Actually, if Republicans truly believed that government should be run like a business, that is what they would campaign on. A BHAG—a big, hairy, audacious goal—to provide efficient, professional service across every touchpoint of one of the largest and most complex organizations in world history would be a business-style call to action. But the existence of that kind of government would not serve the interests of power. It would earn broad public support and have the power to hold business and wealth to account.

That is why every other part of A New American Model depends on this one. Who will enforce antitrust laws against companies with armies of lawyers? Who will determine whether a tax incentive creates real public value? Who will collect taxes fairly from businesses and fortunes capable of constructing elaborate ways to avoid them? Who will protect workers, oversee healthcare, administer Social Security, maintain infrastructure, secure public data, and make sure temporary privileges actually expire? Passing a law is only the beginning. A law government cannot administer is little more than a press release. A right government cannot protect is only a promise. Competent government is not bureaucracy for its own sake. It is part of the infrastructure of freedom. The old model asks us to distrust government, puts people who share that distrust in charge, and then tells us that the resulting dysfunction proves it was right. A New American Model would expect more. It would recruit people who believe public service matters, prepare them to do it well, protect them from partisan retaliation, and hold them responsible for results.

That is what a professional government looks like.

And yet no one campaigns on that. Republicans still campaign on the idea of smaller government. On the surface, that appears to be a way of justifying lower taxes. But the hidden agenda is not merely lower taxes. It is weaker government. We are seeing that play out now, in real time, right in front of us.

If we want to counter wealth and power, we need a professional, efficient government. To get it, we need to elect people who want a strong government so it can make a difference—not people who want a weak one so they can make a buck.

To borrow a sentence structure from the apostle Paul, power has three great currencies: money, access, and time. But the greatest of these is time. Money gives power resources. It buys lawyers, lobbyists, advertising, data, expertise, and protection from immediate consequences. Access gives power reach. It gets meetings, phone calls returned, private conversations, and a place in the room where it happens. But time is what allows power, fueled by money and access, to become permanent. A corporation can keep a legal dispute going until the employee, consumer, or small business on the other side can no longer afford to continue. A dominant company can endure temporary losses until a competitor disappears. A wealthy interest can wait for public anger to pass, a regulation to be delayed, or a more favorable administration to take office. Power does not always win because it has the better argument. Sometimes it wins because it can remain in the argument after everyone else has run out of money, energy, time, or attention. We all recognize that public attention is increasingly fragmented, and power bides its time, counting on us to eventually look away.

Power can also run the clock in the opposite direction. It can slow a decision when delay works to its advantage. But it can also demand that everyone move immediately when speed serves its purpose. A company seeking a subsidy may tell a city council that the deal must be approved now or the opportunity will disappear. A major merger may move toward completion before workers, customers, suppliers, or communities understand what is about to change. A bill can appear late, receive little public review, and be pushed to a vote while the people affected are still trying to read it. A powerful employer can give a worker a few days to sign an agreement, while reserving months or years to respond to the worker’s complaint. Power gives itself extensions and gives everyone else deadlines. It can wait until opposition is exhausted or rush ahead before opposition has time to form. Power is not only the ability to influence a decision. It is often the ability to control when the decision must be made.

That control over time helps explain why so many Americans feel stuck. We talk about inertia as though it means no one has enough power to act. Often, inertia means that the people benefiting from the current arrangement have enough power to prevent anyone else from acting. If you benefit from the status quo, delay is not neutral. Delay is victory. A temporary tax preference remains in place for another year. A concentrated market becomes a little more concentrated. A special government arrangement becomes the basis for the next special arrangement. An officeholder gains another term to build relationships, raise money, reward allies, and control appointments. An exception becomes a precedent. A precedent becomes a tradition. A tradition begins to feel inevitable. And what feels inevitable no longer has to defend itself. That may be power’s greatest trick: making the result of accumulated choices look like the natural order of things.

Our American system is already wired, in places, to limit power’s control over time. Elections require public officials to return periodically to the people to renew their authority. After Franklin Roosevelt won four presidential elections, the Twenty-Second Amendment limited future presidents to being elected twice. The Constitution also gives Congress the power to secure exclusive rights for authors and inventors only for “limited Times.” Patents create a temporary economic advantage to reward invention, but that exclusive right eventually expires so the wider public can benefit. These are different kinds of power, but they reflect the same basic wisdom: even power that is lawfully gained, socially useful, or honestly earned should not always last forever. Around the edges of the old two-dimensional model—the people and their government—we have acknowledged the danger of power without time limits. A New American Model must apply that wisdom more consistently in the three-dimensional world of people, government, and private economic power.

There are three broad ways to keep power from becoming permanent. First, power should pay. People, companies, and fortunes that benefit most from the American system should make an appropriate contribution to maintaining it. That was the argument of the article on citizenship and taxes: success should be rewarded, but success should not excuse anyone from the responsibilities that made it possible.

Second, power should be visible. Wealth should not buy a secret room, a private entrance, or a privileged lane through our political and judicial systems. Political spending, lobbying, ownership, public incentive agreements, and other uses of influence should be open early enough for the public to understand and challenge them. Disclosure after a decision has effectively been made is not meaningful transparency. And a legal right is not much protection when one side can use years of delay and millions of dollars to make the other side abandon it. Justice should depend on the merits of a claim, not on which side can afford to keep the fight going longer.

Third, perhaps most importantly, power should expire. It should not be allowed to use tenure, inheritance, delay, exclusivity, or inertia to convert a temporary advantage into permanent control.

An expiration date does not always mean that something must automatically disappear on a particular day. It may mean an election, a sunset clause, a public reauthorization, a new competitive bid, a review of whether a merger produced its promised benefits, or a requirement that a special privilege continue to demonstrate public value. Emergency powers should end when the emergency ends. Public incentive agreements should not protect favored businesses from competition indefinitely. Political leadership should rotate rather than becoming a lifetime possession. A dominant market position should remain open to challenge rather than becoming an accepted form of private government. Parents should be allowed to help their children, and people should be allowed to build and pass down wealth. But inherited wealth should not become inherited control over markets, government, or the political rights of everyone else. Money may last. Knowledge and experience should last. The political and economic power that money purchases should not become hereditary. Experience should accumulate. Unaccountable power should not.

So many people feel that they are not the only ones stuck; America itself feels stuck—culturally, politically, socially, whatever dimension you choose. I would offer that power’s ability to use time to its advantage is part of the problem. Too many Americans look at Washington and see leaders, institutions, and arguments that have held their places for decades. New leaders must be able to challenge entrenched leaders. New ideas must be able to challenge traditions that no longer work. People who lose one round must have the chance to recover and compete in the next. The old model increasingly allows the people and institutions that won yesterday to control the rules, the schedule, and the opportunities of tomorrow. They do not merely enter the next contest with an advantage. They can use that advantage to decide when the contest occurs, who is allowed to enter it, and how long everyone else can afford to remain.

A New American Model would continue to reward achievement, invention, leadership, experience, and success. But power would have to keep earning its legitimacy. It would pay its fair share. It would operate where the public could see it. And it would periodically return to the voters, the marketplace, the courts, or the public for review.

Money gives power resources. Access gives power reach. But time gives power permanence. Power should pay. Power should be visible. And power should have an expiration date.

If America is going to remain dynamic, power cannot be allowed to own the clock.

There is a scene from the movie The Gambler that appears in my social-media feed fairly often. John Goodman’s character is explaining the value of having what people commonly call “F-you money.” He is not really talking about buying a mansion, a yacht, or everything else someone might want. He is talking about having enough money to walk away. Enough money to leave the job, reject the deal, survive the emergency, or tell the person trying to control you that you no longer need what they are offering. That is what F-you money really buys. It buys the privilege of saying no.

But sometimes the privilege of no costs much less. Sometimes just having a thousand dollars in the bank can provide it. That may be all it takes to see a doctor instead of loading up on OTC cold meds, to say no to an extra shift that would keep you from seeing your kid play football on Friday night, or to refuse a payday loan that would make a bad situation worse. One of the most frustrating features of the old American model is that millions of people can see exactly how little it would take to give them the breathing room and control they need, and they still cannot get there. The old model does not merely concentrate wealth. It hoards breathing room.

Supporters of the old model tell us that everyone is free because everyone already has the right to say no. No law requires you to stay in your job, sign a lease, accept a loan, or buy from a particular company. You are free to walk away. But that is a pretty thin definition of freedom. A worker may be legally free to leave a bad job, but leaving may mean losing the family’s health insurance before the next paycheck arrives. A borrower may be free to reject a terrible interest rate, but the car may be the only way to get to work. A patient may be free to choose another hospital, but there may not be another hospital within a reasonable distance. In each case, the person has the formal right to say no. What is missing is the practical ability to survive what happens next. The old model calls the decision voluntary because no government official issued a command. But being forced to say yes because you don’t have the practical option of saying no is not freedom.

One way to understand the Constitution is as a system for deciding who gets to say no. Congress can say no to a president. A president can veto Congress. Courts can say no when the government violates the Constitution. States and the federal government place limits on one another. Much of the Bill of Rights gives individual Americans protected ways to say no to government: no, you may not compel my speech or religion; no, you may not search my home without justification; no, you may not take my liberty without due process. The founders understood that freedom requires the ability to resist power. But they were principally designing protections in a two-dimensional world - the people versus the government.

Modern Americans, though, live in a three-dimensional world, where markets and wealth have created enormous private power. Employers, insurers, banks, landlords, hospital systems, technology platforms, and dominant corporations can all control choices that shape the course of a person’s life. The Constitution protects our right to say no to government. The government formed under that Constitution also has a responsibility to preserve a competitive economy, establish fair rules, and provide a measure of economic security so that we have the power to say no to private institutions. The old model has allowed the power to say no to become a privilege reserved largely for people who can afford it.

The old model reserves the privilege of no for the privileged. We need a new model that makes it part of ordinary freedom.

That is why competition is about much more than price. We usually defend competition by saying it lowers prices, and often it does. But the deeper value of competition is that it gives people somewhere else to go. Another employer. Another bank. Another hospital. Another buyer. Another supplier. Another company willing to compete for the customer’s business. A merger might pass government review because the companies promise not to raise prices, but that does not mean the deal has no other costs. The merger may eliminate the other employer a worker could have joined, the other buyer a farmer could have approached, or the other platform a small business could have used. The right question is not only, “Will this raise the price?” It is also, “After this deal, who will still be able to say no?” Can the customer walk away? Can the worker? Can the supplier? Can the community? Competition distributes the power to say no. Concentration gathers it into fewer hands. Capitalism without competition does not merely make things more expensive. It gradually removes the alternatives that make a marketplace free.

Personal responsibility, of course, belongs in this discussion. People sometimes make choices that narrow their future options. Someone may fail to save, take on too much debt, or make some other decision that makes saying no harder later. Freedom includes the freedom to make mistakes, and no economic model can erase every consequence.

But not every choice that limits our options is a bad choice. Having a child, starting a business, buying a home, caring for an aging parent, or getting married all create responsibilities that affect what we can do next. Sometimes freedom means choosing what will obligate us. The important distinction is between a responsibility we knowingly accept and a system that traps us because we never had a realistic choice. And even when people do make bad decisions, one mistake should not necessarily take away their economic freedom for the rest of their lives. One illness, layoff, divorce, failed business, or missed payment should not make every later decision for them.

A free economy should allow people to be wrong without requiring them to be ruined.

The fear of being wrong can take away freedom before a decision is even made. People remain in jobs they dislike because they cannot risk losing insurance. They do not start businesses because a failed attempt might cost the family everything. They decline educational opportunities because the debt could follow them for decades. They stay where they are because moving might not work out. And it is not hard to understand why some people delay having children when one job loss, one medical bill, one childcare crisis, or one rent increase could leave the family with nowhere to turn. Having a child is not a bad financial decision. It is a chosen commitment that naturally changes the choices that follow. But the old model has made ordinary commitments feel like irreversible financial bets. The opportunity to say yes depends not only on having choices in front of us. It depends on believing that one wrong choice will not destroy every choice that comes after it. Before people will risk saying yes to a new job, a new business, a new city, or a larger family, they need to believe they can recover if things do not work out.

No one will try to jump over a stream unless they know how deep the water is.

A New American Model would not promise everyone F-you money, and it would not make every decision painless or consequence-free. It would try to make ordinary freedom possible without requiring a fortune. That means preserving real competition, so people have somewhere else to go. It means healthcare that does not disappear the moment employment ends. It means bankruptcy and credit rules that allow recovery rather than permanent punishment. It means worker bargaining power, consumer protections, accessible courts, and enough short-term support to keep one setback from becoming a lifelong trap. These are not merely benefits handed out by government. They are ways of creating the margin people need to make genuine choices. Economic security is not the opposite of freedom. A basic amount of security is often what makes freedom usable.

The old model reserves the privilege of no for those who can afford Premium America. A New American Model would define freedom as the ability to make meaningful choices not only in our relationship with government, but in our economic lives.

We do not need to give everyone F-you money. We need an economy in which ordinary freedom does not require it.

Years ago, when I worked in the grocery business, one of the competing grocery stores in town had a terrible fire. I knew the people who ran it, and I felt bad for them. I certainly did not celebrate what happened. But when their store closed, sales at my store went up. Some weeks, we became the number-one store in our group, and I was rewarded for it. I had not suddenly become a better manager. Our prices had not improved. Our service had not transformed overnight. A competitor had simply disappeared, and my business benefited. Later, during my years in advertising, none of my clients ever told me they wished they had more competitors fighting for their customers. Part of my job was to help clients reduce the competition for whatever they were selling. That is not evidence that businesspeople are bad.

It is evidence that what is good for an individual business is not necessarily what is good for a competitive marketplace.

We often use the words capitalism and competition as though they mean the same thing. They do not. Capitalism gives people the ability to own businesses, invest money, take risks, create products, and earn profits. It is competition, not capitalism, that forces those businesses to keep earning their success. It pushes them to lower prices, improve products, treat customers better, and offer workers better wages or conditions. It gives new businesses a chance to challenge established ones, and it gives customers somewhere else to go. If capitalism were working as advertised—if most Americans had real choices among employers, banks, hospitals, insurers, airlines, internet providers, media sources, and retailers—I suspect fewer people would feel that the deck was stacked against them. But in too many parts of American life, the competition works in only one direction. Workers compete with one another for jobs. Communities compete with one another for businesses. Suppliers compete for contracts. Small companies compete for access to a dominant platform. Meanwhile, the largest companies increasingly do not have to compete very hard for the people who must buy from them.

That is an uneven playing field.

On one side of the equation, workers must convince an employer to choose them, communities must “win” a relocation competition, and small suppliers must accept unfavorable payment terms established by their biggest customers. On the other side, when there is only one realistic hospital system, one dominant employer, a handful of banks, four major airlines, or a platform that controls the path to an entire market, the business can dictate wage terms to employees, tax terms to communities, payment terms to suppliers—and, of course, price terms to consumers. That helps explain why so many Americans believe the game is rigged. They are participating in markets where they are told that competition is the source of freedom, while the businesses they depend on have steadily protected themselves from having to compete. The company wins once, then uses its size, money, data, political influence, or control of the market to make sure it never has to win again.

Capitalism without competition thus becomes corporate entitlement.

Businesses can reduce competition in many ways. They can buy a growing competitor before it becomes a serious threat. They can acquire one small rival after another until very few independent companies remain. They can lock suppliers or retailers into exclusive agreements, use control of a platform to favor their own products, make it harder for customers to switch, or impose terms that a smaller competitor cannot survive. Some mergers do create real efficiencies and better services. A large company is not automatically a bad company, and dominance earned through a better product should not be punished. But the public question should be clear: does government policy keep pushing the company to compete and keep earning its place in the market, or can the company influence government enough to gain approval for practices that prevent real competition?

America has antitrust laws and government agencies assigned to enforce them. The deeper problem is that, across the government, resistance to consolidation has often been fragmented, reactive, and remarkably weak. Between 2004 and 2023, the FDIC processed 2,209 bank-to-bank merger applications. It approved 2,054 and formally denied none, although some applications were withdrawn after regulatory review. Eight major domestic airlines became four through mergers between 2008 and 2013; subsequent studies generally found higher fares and lower service quality on routes where a merger eliminated a competitor, even though competition later improved in some parts of the market. By 2016, 90 percent of metropolitan hospital markets were considered highly concentrated, and under the current federal standard, 97 percent of health-insurance markets qualify as highly concentrated. Patients in nearly half of metropolitan areas had only one or two hospital systems providing inpatient care. Four companies handle 85 percent of the nation’s purchases of steers and heifers and 67 percent of hog purchases. In media, the FCC has long described competition, localism, and viewpoint diversity as goals of its broadcast ownership limits—an acknowledgment that concentration affects not only prices, but what communities see and hear. The current FCC still invokes those goals even as it has begun weakening long-standing ownership limits intended to protect them.

Of course, not every merger behind those numbers was harmful, and not every concentrated industry can be repaired by breaking companies apart. But the overall pattern matters. Like so many of the problems with the old American model, competition did not disappear in one dramatic act. It disappeared one acquisition, one exception, and one government-approved consolidation at a time. In fiscal year 2025 alone, companies reported 2,006 transactions under the federal premerger notification program. The two agencies took just 18 merger-enforcement actions. That does not mean the great majority of those transactions were improper. It does show how selective government intervention is compared with the constant pace at which private economic power is being combined.

The steakhouse agreement I discussed in the previous article offers a small local version of the same problem. The city did not merely commit millions in public support to help one restaurant relocate. The agreement also restricts the city from offering certain comparable assistance to a directly competing steakhouse without the favored restaurant’s consent during the life of the arrangement. The deal does not legally prevent another steakhouse from opening, but it gives the existing recipient a protected advantage in access to future public help. I do not fault the restaurant owners for negotiating the best agreement they could get. That is what businesses do. But government’s job is different. It should not use public money to choose one business and then promise not to treat a future competitor equally.

The example above is definitely business-friendly, but it is difficult to call it competition-friendly.

One of the strangest features of American politics is that antitrust enforcement has become a question of political philosophy. Protecting competition should not be a left-wing or right-wing idea. Republicans and Democrats can disagree about whether a particular merger should be approved, whether a particular company has abused its position, or which remedy will work best. But they should agree on the duty itself. We generally do not ask whether national defense is conservative or liberal. We debate the nature of the threat and how the country should respond. Antitrust should be understood in much the same way. National defense protects America from domination by foreign powers. Antitrust protects Americans from domination by private economic powers. It is not an attack on capitalism. It is the part of government that keeps capitalism capitalist.

A New American Model would treat competition as essential public infrastructure. Government would examine patterns of acquisitions rather than pretending each deal occurs in isolation. It would consider the effects of mergers on workers, suppliers, communities, new businesses, and customers, not simply whether prices might rise immediately. Public incentives would be transparent and based on rules that comparable businesses could meet. Government would not negotiate protections designed to shield a favored company from future competition. Regulators would have enough staff, expertise, and courage to confront companies whose legal and financial resources can overwhelm public enforcement. And once a merger was approved, government would look back to see whether the promised benefits actually appeared. Approval should not be the end of government responsibility when the public consequences continue for decades.

The purpose of stronger oversight of competition is not to punish success or allow government to pick winners. It is to keep markets open and active. In a New American Model, politicians wouldn’t campaign on being the most pro-business or business-friendly candidate; they would campaign on being the most pro-competition candidate.

Competition makes America better. Capitalism without competition makes America a company town.

In American public life, business has become something close to a civic religion. We do not simply appreciate the value that businesses create. We often treat success in business as evidence of wisdom, character, leadership, and competence in almost every other area of life. We say government should be run like a business, even though government has a completely different job. We celebrate states and communities for being “business-friendly” as though the phrase describes an unquestioned public good. Governors boast about business rankings. Cities compete for corporate projects. Reporters announce the number of jobs a company promises to create, and the size of the tax break that helped attract it is often treated as a secondary detail. There is nothing wrong with wanting businesses to succeed. Successful businesses create products, employ people, serve customers, support suppliers, invest money, and generate wealth. But our deference goes well beyond respecting their contribution. We have reached the point where government is routinely expected to prove that it is friendly to business, while business is rarely asked to prove that it is friendly to the community.

As I was working on this series, I went back to something I had written in 2017. At that time, I had written about the need for a three-dimensional view of American society. Our Constitution is built mainly around a two-dimensional view of power—the relationship between the people and the government they created. It gives citizens the means to govern themselves while protecting them from a government that might become too powerful. But modern American life includes a third great center of power: business. Large companies can determine whether people have jobs, healthcare, credit, housing, transportation, communication, and access to entire markets. They can collect extraordinary amounts of information about us and spend extraordinary amounts of money influencing the government that is supposed to regulate them.

Today’s world requires a new three-dimensional view of power in America.

The old model has tried to handle the growing importance of business within the old two-dimensional model by treating business as though it belongs inside the category of “the people.” Businesses are owned by people, employ people, and serve people, but that isn’t the same as being “the people.” A corporation represents its owners and pursues its own interests. That is legitimate. But it is also different from representing the public. In a New American Model, the people remain sovereign, government acts as their democratic instrument, and business creates and competes within rules established for the good of the whole country.

Let’s return to the idea of “business-friendly” as an example of how we have created a whole ecosystem that is tilted towards accommodating business. Consider the practice of ranking cities and states for how business-friendly they are. Some rankings are broad and consider infrastructure, education, workforce quality, access to capital, and quality of life. Others focus more heavily on taxes, regulation, permitting, land, utilities, and labor costs. One major ranking is based directly on the opinions of CEOs, presidents, and business owners. Another gives extra weight to labor costs, meaning that a lower wage can improve a place’s score as a business location. From the employer’s side of the ledger, that makes sense. Wages are a cost. From the worker’s side, the same number is income used to pay rent, buy food, raise children, and save for retirement. The ranking is not necessarily dishonest. It is incomplete. It views the community from the side of the person deciding where to place capital. When I compared prominent business-friendly rankings with broad rankings of states as places to live, there was little consistent relationship between the two. That does not prove that being friendly to business makes a state a bad place to live. It proves that a good business climate and a good human climate are separate accomplishments. One does not automatically produce the other.

Tax incentives make the imbalance even easier to see. When a company considers moving into a community, the first public question is usually how many jobs it will create. And jobs matter. A good job can change a family’s life, and a major employer can strengthen an entire region. But job creation is not the whole public ledger. What will those jobs pay? Will they include benefits? Will local residents be hired? How long will the jobs last? What will the company pay in taxes after the incentives are deducted? What new roads, schools, utilities, police protection, fire protection, and workforce training will the public be expected to provide? Too often, the company’s jobs are counted as a sufficient contribution to the community while the company’s taxes are treated as a burden government should help it avoid. The theory is that the new workers will pay income, sales, and property taxes and that their spending will eventually replace the tax revenue normally paid by the company. In effect, the workers become the replacement tax base while the company becomes the subsidized customer. The company receives an immediate and guaranteed benefit. The community receives a projected benefit that depends on the company keeping its promises and remaining long enough for taxpayers to recover their investment.

The imbalance between government and business is not just about big businesses and the national government. Near where I work, local media are reporting that a community of about 30,000 people is offering more than $4 million through a public-private partnership to persuade a local steak restaurant—a steak restaurant—to move roughly 18 miles from its current location in a community of about 3,500. And yes, they serve a pretty good steak, but this deal seems miles beyond the idea of simply being business-friendly. It creates a situation in which a business—again, a steakhouse—has the leverage to pit two communities against each other, and the only way one of them is going to “win” is by committing enough public dollars to their business. It also creates a situation in which the “winning” community now has a financial incentive to keep the new steakhouse from failing. Another condition of the deal is that the city cannot offer a similar deal to any other steakhouse concept, so the city is helping to protect the business from competition instead of fulfilling the role government should have in a capitalist society—which is to facilitate and encourage competition. And the jobs created? Not great high-paying jobs, but 35 restaurant jobs in an industry where federal law allows employers to pay tipped workers a direct cash wage below the regular minimum wage, so long as tips bring them up to the full minimum - another example of how an industry has used its political clout to create a business-friendly legal exception at the cost of workers.

But hey, everyone on the winning city’s city council can say they are being business-friendly.

This does not mean every tax incentive is wrong. There is a real difference between using public policy to build something the country needs and paying an ordinary business to change its address. Strategic incentives might help establish a new technology, build a semiconductor or advanced-battery supply chain, create healthcare capacity in a rural region, support research around a university, or attract investment to a place that has been persistently left behind. Those investments may create capabilities that would not otherwise exist and benefits that extend well beyond one company. But that is different from subsidizing a warehouse, car dealership, restaurant, hotel, or steakhouse to move across a county or state line. Public support should create new public value for all the people, not simply create private value for some people. Communities should compete by becoming better places to live and work: with good schools, reliable infrastructure, skilled workers, safe neighborhoods, fair taxes, efficient permitting, and competent government. Those investments make communities people-friendly first, and remain after any one individual company leaves.

Calvin Coolidge is usually misquoted as saying, “The business of America is business.” His exact wording was, “The chief business of the American people is business.” To be fair to Coolidge, he also said in the same speech that the accumulation of wealth could not be justified as the chief end of existence and that “the chief ideal of the American people is idealism.” However, the misquoted line about business is the part that survived, perhaps because so many people saw it as true. The shortened, misquoted version correctly captured a creed for the old American model. It validated our collective decision to place business at the center of national life and judge government by how well it served owners, executives, and investors. In that sense, those words are almost civic blasphemy against the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration does not say governments are created to improve the business climate, increase corporate returns, or make life easier for investors. It says governments are created to secure the rights of human beings to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Business is one of the great tools Americans use to create prosperity. It deserves respect, a fair hearing, and room to succeed. But it is not the purpose of the country.

The business of America is not business. The business of America is people.

“Freedom isn’t free” is one of those phrases almost every American knows. We usually hear it in connection with military service, and that is entirely appropriate. Americans have fought, sacrificed, and died to protect this country and the freedoms it promises. But I’ll say this: most Americans also act as though freedom should be free. Our freedom as citizens is not protected only on battlefields, and the threats to it do not come only from foreign armies. Everyday freedom depends on a public foundation that costs money. Courts are not free. Elections are not free. Roads, schools, police and fire departments, clean water, public health, scientific research, national defense, and the financial systems that allow businesses to operate are not free. Neither are the laws that protect property, enforce contracts, defend patents, and keep markets working. The military protects us from threats that could destroy our freedom.

But millions of Americans also face threats closer to home that narrow their choices, their options, and their happiness. At this point, a Republican reader may be ready to say amen and explain that government is the source of those domestic threats. Government can certainly threaten freedom, and we should guard against that. But government is not the only institution capable of limiting it. So can an employer, a monopoly, a hospital system, an insurance company, a landlord, or any other institution with enough power to dictate the terms of ordinary life. We can disagree about how much government should do, how much it should cost, and whether it is doing its work well. Those are necessary arguments. But we should stop pretending that freedom is simply what remains after government gets out of the way. Freedom also depends on the institutions we build and pay for together.

If freedom isn’t free, neither is citizenship.

The problem is that Americans have gradually been taught to see citizenship as a customer relationship. The customer asks, “What am I personally getting for my money?” The citizen should also ask, “What are we building and maintaining together?” I may not have a child in public school, but I still need a country filled with educated nurses, electricians, teachers, engineers, mechanics, police officers, business owners, and voters. I may rarely call the fire department, but I still benefit from living in a community where one exists. I may pay off my mortgage, but that only ends my obligation to the bank. It does not end my reliance on the roads, drainage systems, emergency services, schools, courts, utilities, and public protections that make my home livable and valuable. Taxes are not simply charges for services we personally consume. They are our contribution to maintaining a country and a community in which life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is possible. That does not mean every tax is fair or every dollar is spent well. Government should be expected to use public money carefully, transparently, and competently. But waste is an argument for better government. It is not an argument for pretending that a functioning country can be operated without anyone paying for it.

This obligation applies most strongly to the people and businesses that have benefited most from America. That is not resentment of success. Success should be celebrated, and wealth honestly created is not something for which anyone should apologize. But no great American fortune was created without public support. It depended on educated workers, public infrastructure, functioning markets, financial stability, legal protections, government research, and customers supported by the same system. The larger the fortune, the more extensively it depends on that foundation. Extraordinary success should therefore carry greater responsibility for maintaining it. A nurse, teacher, mechanic, or small-business owner should not pay Social Security tax on a larger share of every wage dollar than someone earning millions. A billionaire should not be able to hire enough accountants and lawyers to transform economic gain into something the tax code barely recognizes as income. Philanthropy is valuable, but it is not a substitute for paying taxes. Charity allows wealthy people to choose which public purposes deserve support. Taxes allow citizens, through democracy, to make that choice together. Generosity is voluntary. Citizenship is not.

The same principle should guide the way we treat Premium America. People should remain free to send their children to private schools, buy second homes, join concierge medical practices, fly in private planes, or purchase other comforts and conveniences. But the public should not subsidize their decision to withdraw from common systems. The tax code should not make private-school tuition cheaper while public schools struggle. It should not give special help to someone purchasing a second or third home while first-time buyers cannot find one they can afford. A private jet may be privately owned, but it still depends on public airspace, airports, weather services, security, air traffic control, and emergency response. Exceptionally valuable private assets that depend heavily on public systems can reasonably carry additional responsibility for supporting them. The same is true when enormous fortunes are passed from one generation to the next. Parents should be able to help their children, but inherited wealth should not become a permanent pass into a separate class of citizenship. A New American Model would not tell successful people that they cannot purchase more.

It would tell them something simpler: You can opt up. You cannot opt out.

None of this means that citizenship should depend on how much money someone contributes. A poor American is not a lesser citizen, and a billionaire is not a greater one. Rights belong equally to both. Responsibilities differ because ability and benefit differ. Someone struggling to pay rent cannot carry the same financial burden as someone with several homes. A neighborhood business cannot be expected to contribute on the same scale as a global corporation that depends on American courts, infrastructure, workers, consumers, and financial markets. Fairness does not mean demanding the same number of dollars from everyone. It means asking everyone to contribute honestly and asking more from those who have received more. Citizenship also involves more than taxes. It means voting, serving on juries, following laws, participating in community life, respecting the rights of others, and supporting public institutions even after our own direct use of them has ended.

Citizenship is not a subscription we cancel when we decide we no longer need one of its services.

Republicans have been extremely successful at presenting taxes as something government takes from us rather than something Americans contribute to one another. They tell working people that everyone should pay their own way, but rarely apply that principle with equal force to corporations, billionaires, inherited fortunes, or people wealthy enough to retreat into Premium America. During the 2016 presidential debate, when Hillary Clinton suggested Donald Trump may have paid no federal income tax, he answered, “That makes me smart.” That sentence captured the old model perfectly: avoiding the common obligation is treated as proof of intelligence, at least when wealth gives someone the means to do it.

A New American Model should reclaim the language of common responsibility and fight back against the demonization of taxation. Everyone should pay a fair share. Everyone should receive a meaningful chance to benefit from the country being maintained. Those who gain the most from America should not be shamed for their success, but neither should success become an excuse for leaving the bill to everyone else.

Yes, freedom is not free. It is time we stopped giving it away to people and companies that continue to use everything America provides while using their power to escape the obligation to pay for it.

The biggest freeloaders in America are not on welfare. They are on Wall Street.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is often described as a warning about science and the arrogance of man. But it is also a story about creation without responsibility. Victor Frankenstein gathers pieces from different bodies, assembles them into something new, brings that creature to life, and then recoils from what he has made. Strictly speaking, Donald Trump is not our generation’s Frankenstein. Frankenstein was the creator. Trump is the creature the old American model made. I have no interest in softening my judgment of him. I find him vulgar, dishonest, selfish, cruel, intolerant, and dangerously unfit for public office. His lack of empathy, his self-dealing, his willingness to harm people, and his relentless lying are all legitimate reasons to oppose him. Trump is fully responsible for those choices. But if that is all we say about him, we learn very little from his success. His personal failures explain why millions of Americans reject him. They do not explain why millions of others overlook those failures and believe that he is fighting for them. Trump was assembled from parts of American life that existed long before he entered politics. Our reverence for wealth. Our assumption that business success proves competence. Our suspicion of government. Our tolerance of concentrated power. And the growing anger of people who no longer believe that the economy or their government works for them.

The first important part is that Trump did not present himself merely as a businessman. He presented himself as a billionaire businessman. Those two words gave him both credibility and access. His image as a businessman encouraged people to assume that he understood economics, management, negotiation, leadership, and how to make large institutions work. His image as a billionaire gave him visibility, status, influence, and the ability to command attention that a person with the same conduct but without the money would never have received. Had Donald Trump possessed the same character, grievances, vulgarity, and ignorance but worked as a teacher, public employee, minister, labor leader, or middle manager, he would never have been treated as a plausible candidate for president. Wealth did not simply help finance his political rise. It caused millions of Americans to take him seriously in the first place. That tells us something uncomfortable about the old model. In America, wealth buys more than comfort and influence. It creates a presumption of wisdom, character, and competence, even when the evidence points in the opposite direction. Trump is not merely a spokesman for Premium America. He is one of its clearest products.

The other parts from which Trump was assembled came from the people the old model left behind. As someone who spent most of my career in advertising, I have heard people say a zillion times that advertising lies. Sometimes it does. But advertising that works usually begins with something true about the people receiving the message. It recognizes a desire, fear, frustration, or hope that already exists. As I tell my students, advertising cannot make people do something they have no desire to do. It can recognize that desire, give it language, and connect it to a proposed solution. Donald Trump did not create the anger that powers Trumpism. He recognized it. Millions of Americans believe they are working hard and still falling behind. They feel that the rules are different for people with money and access, that the deck is stacked against them, and that no one in government cares very much about what happens to them. They worry that their children will have fewer opportunities than they did. They see extraordinary fortunes being created while housing, healthcare, education, and retirement security move farther out of reach. Trump tells them they are not imagining it. In that important respect, he tells them the truth. Democrats make a serious mistake when they respond by treating everyone who hears that truth as stupid, hateful, or morally defective. Some people are undoubtedly attracted to the ugliest parts of Trump’s message. But many others support him because, for all his faults, he is the only person on the stage they believe is talking to them rather than about them. Someone who has stopped expecting to win economically may still value the victory of finally feeling recognized.

The deception begins with Trump’s explanation of who did this to them. He points sideways and down. He tells people that immigrants, racial minorities, diversity programs, universities, public employees, or some other group of ordinary Americans received an advantage that should have belonged to them. Much of the attack on DEI carries exactly that message: you did not lose because wealth and power changed the rules; you lost because someone less deserving was handed your place. The deck really has become stacked, but it was not primarily stacked by the other people sitting at the table. It became stacked through the steady accumulation of money and power: tax rules that protect wealth, companies that purchase their competitors, weakened worker bargaining power, disinvestment in public institutions, corporate influence over government, and the ability of successful people to withdraw into Premium America while maintaining control over the America everyone else depends on. None of this requires a grand conspiracy. Business does what business does. Wealth tries to protect and reproduce itself. Politicians seek votes, money, attention, and power. If those forces operate long enough without strong democratic limits, they produce exactly the kind of model we now have. We did not choose Premium America in one election. We allowed it to accumulate one decision at a time.

That is why Trumpism is bigger than Donald Trump. His vulgarity, dishonesty, cruelty, and contempt are his own. But the economic assumptions underneath his politics have been part of Republican thought for decades. Take away the insults and personal grievances, and it is easy to imagine many of those ideas coming from Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, or Mitt Romney. Business is generally good. Government is generally the problem. Taxes punish success. Regulation threatens freedom. Public assistance encourages dependence. Wealth signals achievement and competence. Private enterprise will eventually solve public problems if government will simply step aside. Reagan, Bush, and Romney expressed those ideas with more discipline, greater knowledge, more civility, and far more respect for democratic limits. Trump did not invent the old model. He stripped away its polite wrapping. He combined it with celebrity, billionaire access, grievance, scapegoating, and a willingness to exercise power without restraint or shame. The old model had been speaking politely for decades. Trump gave it a vulgar voice. He did not replace traditional Republican economic thinking. He revealed what it could become when separated from empathy, responsibility, and respect for democratic institutions. Donald Trump himself may not have been inevitable. But after decades of worshipping wealth, weakening government, concentrating economic power, and leaving millions of people feeling unheard, someone like him became increasingly likely.

That is why defeating Donald Trump personally will not be enough. Democrats can and should continue pointing out his lies, corruption, cruelty, and unfitness for office. But most Americans have already reached a judgment about the man. The larger task is to compete for the human need that he recognized. Democrats must be willing to tell people: You are right that the game has become less fair. You are right that hard work no longer provides the security it once promised. You are right that wealth and influence have changed the rules. But the people sitting beside you did not cause the problem, and fighting them will not fix it. Trump tells you that another coach passenger took your seat so that you will not ask who owns the plane. A New American Model must reject the scapegoats, identify where the power actually went, and offer a believable way to bring that power back under democratic control. It must challenge our reflexive deference to billionaires, restore competition, rebuild worker power, strengthen public institutions, and insist that wealth does not buy a separate class of citizenship.

Trump was not an accident. He is the monster the old model made—and defeating him will mean changing more than the man.

The problem begins when the upgrade is no longer about comfort and starts buying a different version of citizenship. Better healthcare. Better schools. Safer neighborhoods. Better legal representation. Greater access to political leaders. Fewer consequences when something goes wrong. At that point, wealth is buying more than nicer things. It is buying a level of security, opportunity, and influence that most Americans cannot reach. American culture increasingly sells success as admission to Premium America. The basic version is where most people live, work, attend school, receive medical care, and depend on public institutions. One of the perceived perks of Premium America is being able to withdraw from those institutions and then use that withdrawal to justify not supporting them.

If you can stick with me on this for a moment, the ideal of American society is like an airplane. There is a first-class cabin and a coach cabin. I have no problem with first class. The seats are better, the food may be better, and someone has paid more for the experience. But despite those differences, everyone is still on the same plane. First-class and coach passengers depend on the same pilots, the same engines, the same maintenance, the same air traffic controllers, and the same safe arrival. Everyone is invested in whether the flight works, and everyone shares the same journey toward the same destination. That sense of common responsibility and direction has helped keep America moving forward for 250 years.

Increasingly, that sense of shared responsibility is under attack. Staying with the airplane metaphor, the problem begins when one part of the public no longer has to fly with everyone else. Those who can opt out of the shared flight and take a private jet are no longer sharing the same journey or the same daily stake in whether the common flight works. Over time, they can begin to feel less obligation to contribute to the common success of the country. They may even come to resent the planes carrying the rest of us for taking up runway space.

Even when the passenger leaves the shared flight entirely, the private jet still needs the community. It depends on public airspace, airports, weather systems, security, air traffic control, emergency services, and a government capable of maintaining them. That is the part our culture of Premium America tends to leave out. Wealth can make public systems less visible, but it does not make them unnecessary. Don’t take away from this metaphor that the problem is that some people can afford a private jet. The problem begins when they act as though success releases them from paying for the air traffic system—or when wealth gives them greater power to decide how well the common flight is maintained for everyone else.

We see the same pattern throughout American life. A family may choose a private school, but that choice should not erase its responsibility to support the public schools that educate the country. Even when money is not the issue, we have weakened the sense that we owe something to the common good. Research on school-bond elections has repeatedly found that older voters without children in the schools are less likely to support new investment, while also being more likely to turn out and vote. That does not mean older Americans do not care about schools. Many continue to support them because they care about their communities and understand that good schools protect property values and strengthen the local economy. But the pattern reveals the danger of treating taxes as payment only for services we personally use. We should not support public schools only while our own children occupy a desk. We should support them because every generation of children needs an education, just as the generations before them did, and because America’s greatness depends on public education.

The public responsibility does not end when the personal benefit does.

The same principle extends into other parts of life. Someone may choose concierge medicine, but that should not reduce the obligation to help maintain a healthcare system for people who cannot afford a membership fee. A person may live in a gated community, but the gate does not make public roads, fire departments, courts, clean water, police protection, or regional infrastructure unnecessary. A wealthy person may hire private security, private transportation, accountants, lobbyists, and a team of attorneys, but those private advantages still operate inside a public system of laws and institutions.

The choice to purchase something extra is not the problem. The problem is the belief that purchasing the extra option allows someone to withdraw support from the basic one. It is perfectly reasonable to say, “I want something more, and I am willing to pay for it.” It is not reasonable to say, “Because I can buy something more, I should no longer have to help pay for what everyone else needs.” A New American Model would put that distinction into one simple rule:

You can opt up. You cannot opt out.

This matters because life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness should not be premium benefits. The Declaration does not promise that everyone will be equally healthy, equally wealthy, or equally happy. It describes a country built around every person’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That promise becomes hollow when access to the things that make a good life possible depends almost entirely on money. Life means more when people can see a doctor before an illness becomes a crisis. Liberty means more when workers can leave a bad job without losing healthcare for their families. The pursuit of happiness means more when a child can receive a good education even if the child’s parents cannot afford private tuition or a house in the right ZIP code.

Wealth will always expand a person’s choices. It should not determine whether someone receives competent healthcare, a good education, equal treatment under law, or a meaningful political voice. Those are not luxury amenities. They are part of what makes citizenship real. The American promise was never supposed to be an upgrade package.

There is also a larger cultural cost when success is defined as escaping ordinary America. For many, the goal becomes earning enough money to avoid the schools, hospitals, neighborhoods, transportation, parks, and public services everyone else uses. Once people leave those systems, they have less personal reason to care whether they work. They may still vote on their funding, lobby for lower taxes, or use their influence to shape the rules, but they no longer experience the consequences of those decisions in the same way. That is how two Americas begin to form: one for people who must depend on the country we share and another for people wealthy enough to build a separate country around themselves.

We do not all need to want the same life or arrive at the same personal destination. But we do need to remain invested in the roads, schools, laws, institutions, and democratic systems that give people a chance to reach their own destinations. America should be more than a convenient place to make money. It should be a country we continue to build together.

A New American Model would not prohibit first-class choices. It would draw a firm line between premium choices and premium citizenship. People could still send their children to private schools, own second homes, fly privately, join concierge medical practices, and purchase every legal comfort they can afford. But the tax code should not subsidize their withdrawal from public institutions. Private choices do not cancel public obligations. Extraordinary use of and benefit from public systems should carry an appropriate cost. Great wealth should not buy greater political rights, special access to government, or freedom from the responsibilities everyone else carries. The goal is not to pull successful people down. It is to keep success connected to the country that made it possible. There can be first class, but there must still be one dependable flight. There can be private choices, but there must still be public systems worth choosing. There can be wealth, but there should not be a separate America available only to the wealthy. The American Dream should not be to buy Premium America. It should be to build a better America.

America was not founded to prove an economic theory right.

The Declaration of Independence does not promise capitalism, socialism, or communism. It promises life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Constitution gives us the machinery to govern ourselves, but the Declaration makes a promise about what America is supposed to be working toward. We should design our economic system to keep those promises, not adjust those promises to serve an economic system. A New American Model should begin with the American promise and ask which tools will help us keep it.

I am not anti-capitalist. I spent most of my career working with businesses, and I have seen the creativity, discipline, energy, and progress that business can produce. Private enterprise gives people room to imagine something new, take a risk, build a company, hire people, solve problems, and create wealth. Markets can move quickly and respond to what people want. Competition can make products better and less expensive. But none of my clients ever asked for more competition. Part of my job was to help them make their products more distinctive and less vulnerable to competitors. There is nothing sinister about that. It is what businesses do. But it should remind us that competition may be good for the marketplace even when less competition is better for the individual business.

Profit can be a powerful reward for doing something useful well. Those are real strengths, and we should not be embarrassed to say so. But capitalism is still a tool, and tools are useful because of what they help us accomplish. We do not organize our lives around protecting a hammer. We use the hammer when it is the right tool, and we put it down when it is not. Capitalism deserves the same clear-eyed treatment. A business exists to serve customers and produce a return for its owners. It may also treat employees well, support its community, and act responsibly, but those things are not guaranteed simply because it is a business. Sometimes what is good for a company is also good for the public. Sometimes the company earns more by paying people less, buying its competitors, avoiding taxes, shifting costs onto a community, or convincing government to give it special treatment. We should not be angry at business for behaving like business. We should be honest enough to build rules around the expectation that companies will act in their own interests.

America has never operated under a pure economic system anyway. We have always mixed private enterprise with public action. We have privately owned farms and public agricultural research. We have privately owned cars and publicly built roads. We have private hospitals, public hospitals, Medicare, Medicaid, employer insurance, and veterans’ healthcare. We have private schools and universities alongside public schools and universities. We have private retirement accounts and Social Security. We have companies that develop new medicines and a government that funds basic research, protects patents, reviews drugs for safety, and often pays for the final product. None of this is an accidental departure from capitalism. It is how America has actually worked.

We use markets where they work well. We use government when something must be available to everyone, when private incentives do not produce what the public needs, or when one side has enough power to take advantage of the other. Calling every public action socialism does not help us decide whether the action is wise. It only shuts down the discussion before it begins. A fire department is not a threat to freedom because everyone pays for it and anyone can call it. A public school is not a failure because it is not operated for profit. The useful question is not whether an idea is capitalist or socialist. The useful question is whether it works, whom it serves, what it costs, and whether it moves us closer to the country we say we want.

Even so, Republicans have been remarkably successful at making capitalism sound like an American founding principle and government sound like an unfortunate necessity. But big business does not exist outside government. It relies on courts to enforce contracts, police to protect property, schools to educate workers, roads and ports to move products, patents to protect inventions, financial rules to make investment possible, and national defense to provide stability. Businesses frequently ask for tax breaks, grants, subsidies, government contracts, favorable regulations, and protection from foreign competitors. They do not reject government when government helps them. What they often reject is a government strong enough to set limits on them.

That is where the old model has gone wrong. We have come to treat private economic power as natural and benign while treating government power as suspicious or even evil. We worry constantly that government might become too strong, which is a legitimate concern, but we spend far less time asking what happens when a corporation, employer, hospital system, landlord, insurance company, or technology platform becomes too strong. Government can limit freedom. So can private power. A worker who cannot leave a job without losing healthcare is not fully free. A small business negotiating with a company that controls an entire market is not negotiating as an equal. A family with only one hospital system, one internet provider, or one realistic insurance option does not have much of a market.

Freedom is not just protection from government. It is protection from power, whoever wields it.

Today, the democratic socialist movement is responding to real failures in the current model. It is right to say that concentrated wealth has gained too much influence, that workers have lost bargaining power, and that healthcare, housing, education, and retirement security have become harder to obtain. It is right to question an economy that produces extraordinary fortunes while so many working people feel less secure. And people are smart enough to know that correcting those failures will require more than a few adjustments to the old model.

But we do not need to conclude that private ownership, profit, markets, and individual success are the enemies. We can break up monopolies without abolishing business. We can guarantee access to healthcare without insisting that every form of healthcare must be provided in exactly the same way. We can strengthen workers without eliminating employers. We can tax extraordinary wealth more fairly without treating wealth itself as immoral. We can require corporations to operate within democratic rules without asking government to run every corporation. The choice is not between protecting capitalism exactly as it now operates and replacing it entirely. We can demand that capitalism earn its place by producing competition, opportunity, innovation, and broadly shared progress. When it does those things, we should support it. When it produces monopoly, exploitation, political control, or a Premium America available only to the wealthy, we should change the rules.

That is the heart of A New American Model. It does not begin by asking whether government or business should win. It asks what each is supposed to do. Business should create, compete, invest, employ, and earn profits. Government should protect rights, preserve competition, provide the things a free society must make broadly available, and act when private power becomes strong enough to limit the freedom of others. Citizens should have opportunities, but citizenship also brings responsibilities. Success should be rewarded, but great success should not release anyone from supporting the country that made it possible.

The model should be judged by the American promise. Does it protect life by helping people live healthier and more secure lives? Does it protect liberty by giving people real choices rather than rights they cannot afford to exercise? Does it give people a meaningful chance to pursue happiness through education, work, family, community, and hope for the future?

Then comes the most important question: Are we willing to fight for the promise, or have we mistaken the tool for the thing worth protecting?

But I don’t think the American system is broken.

I think we have confused the system with the model operating inside it. The system is our constitutional democracy. It gives Americans ways to gather together, organize, speak, vote, pass laws, regulate business, collect taxes, challenge government action, and amend the Constitution. The model is the collection of rules, assumptions, habits, and relationships we have built within that system. It determines how government relates to business, how workers relate to employers, how wealth becomes influence, how opportunity is distributed, and what responsibilities come with success. The system gives us the means to change all those things. What we have lost is much of the courage required to use it.

That distinction matters. If the American system itself were beyond repair, we would have only two choices: live with its failures or tear it down and replace it. I don’t accept either choice. We do not need to overthrow the American system to make fundamental changes in American life. We need to use it more fully, more honestly, and with more courage.

America has done that before.

We created national parks because Americans were willing to tell businesses that some land would not be mined, logged, or developed. We established a minimum wage because we decided that the market alone should not determine the least a person could be paid. We limited child labor because a company’s desire for inexpensive workers did not outweigh a child’s need for safety and education. We created Social Security and Medicare because old age and illness should not automatically lead to poverty. We passed civil rights laws because legal rights meant very little when states, businesses, and local institutions could prevent people from exercising them.

None of those changes happened because powerful interests suddenly became more generous. None happened simply because someone decided it was good for business. They happened because people organized, made their case, built a majority, won elections, and finally found leaders willing to say no.

This is a story we have forgotten about America.

We act as though America has always had weekends, overtime pay, safer workplaces, clean air, safe food, public schools, national parks, and retirement security. It hasn’t. Each was the result of a choice, and almost every one was attacked at some point as unreasonable interference with business, a threat to economic growth, or a dangerous expansion of government. Some of those concerns were sincere. Government can overreach. Regulations can be badly written. Taxes can be unfair. Public programs can become ineffective. Business should be heard when public policy affects business. But being heard is not the same as having the final word.

Business deserves a voice. It does not deserve a veto.

Yet for decades, we have been persuaded to give business something close to that veto. We ask what a new law will cost a company before asking what the absence of that law is already costing workers, families, consumers, and communities. We worry that taxes might discourage someone from becoming extremely wealthy but spend far less time asking whether extraordinary wealth is escaping responsibilities carried by everyone else. We are warned that antitrust enforcement punishes successful companies, even when those companies have used their success to buy competitors and make future competition nearly impossible. We discuss the freedom of employers while saying much less about the freedom of workers who cannot risk losing their paycheck or their family’s health insurance.

This didn’t happen by accident.

Large businesses and wealthy interests have spent decades teaching Americans that government is naturally the enemy of freedom and that private economic power is naturally harmless. But corporations rely on government every day. They rely on courts to enforce contracts, police to protect property, public schools and universities to educate workers, and public roads, airports, ports, utilities, research, patents, financial systems, and national defense to make business possible. They seek tax credits, grants, government contracts, regulatory approvals, and public subsidies. Big business is not opposed to government. It is opposed to a government strong enough to tell it no.

Political courage means being willing to do exactly that when the public interest requires it. Courage is not shouting louder, insulting opponents, breaking rules for attention, or making promises that can never be carried out. It means taking an action you believe is right when you know powerful people will punish you for it. It means enforcing antitrust laws when dominant companies can finance campaigns against you. It means asking wealthy Americans to contribute more when they can hire lobbyists and fund attack ads. It means protecting professional public servants when a president wants personal loyalty instead of honest advice. It means telling a profitable industry that the harm caused by its business model is no longer acceptable.

One proposal I intend to explore in this series is a constitutional amendment that would distinguish the political rights of human beings from the legal protections granted to corporations. Corporations need legal protections. They must be able to own property, enter contracts, publish information, and challenge unlawful government action. But those protections should not automatically give artificial entities political rights equal to those of human citizens or allow concentrated corporate money to overwhelm the voices of actual people. Some will call such an amendment an attack on the Constitution. I would argue that it is the opposite. The amendment process is part of the Constitution. We have used it repeatedly when Americans concluded that existing rules no longer matched the country’s principles. Using the Constitution to correct a problem is not a rejection of the American system. It is an act of faith in it.

The same is true of applying Social Security taxes to every wage dollar, breaking up monopolies, training professional government managers, protecting nonpartisan public servants, and ending tax subsidies for the trappings of Premium America. These are substantial changes. They would alter who pays, who benefits, and who has control. They would also be fiercely resisted by people and institutions that profit from the model we have now. But none requires us to abandon our constitutional system. They require us to believe in it enough to use it.

Republicans have spent years weakening faith in government because weak government serves the interests of concentrated wealth and big business. Ronald Reagan’s quip that the nine most terrifying words in the English language were “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help” was a brilliant bit of propaganda. It helped erode Americans’ understanding of the positive role government can play in our national model. On the other hand, the democratic socialist movement looks at many of the failures that decades of that thinking helped produce and concludes that capitalism, and sometimes parts of the American political system, must be replaced.

I think both answers surrender too much. One side tells us government cannot act. The other tells us our existing system cannot produce enough change. Both let us avoid the harder responsibility: gathering a majority, making the argument in language people understand, winning elections, writing laws, enforcing them competently, and standing up to the people who will fight to keep what they have.

The American system does not guarantee that justice will prevail. It does not protect itself from corruption, concentrated power, or public indifference. It does not correct bad policy on its own. It gives us the means to do those things. The rest is up to us. What is broken right now is not our ability to change America. It is our willingness to confront the people who benefit from keeping it as it is. The old model has taught us to be afraid of using democratic power. A New American Model begins by finding the courage to use it.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, the founders declared the promise. In the years that followed, Americans built a constitutional system that gives us the tools to pursue it. Courage determines whether we pick them up and put them to work today.

For years, particularly the last five, I’ve been listening to the American conversation with a growing feeling of bewilderment. Are these really our priorities? Are those really the solutions? Is anyone trying to solve any problems at all?

I spent most of my career in advertising, and I now teach it. That experience has made me attentive to the words people use in everyday life, how they decide what they need and what they don’t, and how they decide which messages to trust. It has also taught me that trying to say the right thing does not matter very much if no one understands what you are saying.

So, from that vantage point, I hope to contribute to the American conversation. I have a point of view about where we are as a country and what I think we need to do to get better. I want to offer a way of looking at these problems that others can question, challenge, improve, or reject. Perhaps one idea will spark another. Perhaps putting some of the pieces together will help us see a direction that has been difficult to see while arguing about each problem separately.

That failure to speak plainly has become a problem for Democrats.

Republicans have been much better at speaking the language of America. They talk about freedom, patriotism, opportunity, responsibility, faith, the founders, and the Constitution. Democrats certainly believe in those things, but they often respond in the language of programs, policies, interest groups, and carefully qualified position papers.

Much of that language may be more precise. It may also be more responsible. But it leaves a damaging impression: Republicans love America, while Democrats want to manage it. That is a terrible bargain, and Democrats should stop accepting it.

The founding promise of America does not belong to Republicans. It does not belong to Democrats either. It belongs to all of us. The promise is right there in the Declaration of Independence: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Those words are more than patriotic decoration. They give us a way to judge whether America is keeping its promise to all of us.

What does our commitment to life mean when access to good healthcare depends so heavily on money?

What does liberty mean when someone cannot leave a bad job because the family’s health insurance is tied to it?

What does the pursuit of happiness mean when housing, education, childcare, and retirement keep moving beyond the reach of people who work hard and play by the rules?

Being legally allowed to pursue something is not the same as having a real opportunity to pursue it. We can tell people they are free to buy healthcare they cannot afford, attend a college that will leave them buried in debt, or move to a safer neighborhood where they cannot pay the rent. That may be a technically correct description of freedom. It is also a pretty thin one.

Americans with very different politics increasingly understand that something is not working. They may disagree about the cause, and they certainly disagree about the remedy, but the uneasiness is difficult to miss. People question whether their children will have better lives than they did. They wonder whether they will ever own a home, whether they will be able to retire, and whether the institutions they depend on will still function when they need them. They see extraordinary wealth being created while the basic ingredients of a stable life become harder to afford.

Republicans see that dissatisfaction and promise restoration. They tell us that we can return to an earlier America if we remove enough restraints, punish the right enemies, and place enough power in the hands of a strong leader.

The growing democratic socialist movement sees much of the same dissatisfaction and often concludes that capitalism itself, and perhaps some of our governing institutions, must be replaced.

Most Democrats recognize the problems but have struggled to offer a clear, connected explanation of what has gone wrong. They present proposals, many of them worthy, but the proposals do not always add up to a story people can remember.

I think we need a different answer.

I do not believe the American system itself is broken. Our system gives Americans ample ways to organize, vote, pass laws, regulate business, collect taxes, amend the Constitution, and correct injustice. Those tools have never worked automatically or equally, but they are there.

What is failing is the model we have built within that system—and our courage to change it.

When I say model, I mean the relationship among government, business, wealth, work, and citizenship. I mean the assumptions we make about what each of those institutions is for and what each owes the others.

The model we have settled into treats business as naturally productive and government as naturally suspect. It assumes that what is good for business will eventually be good for everyone. It celebrates competition while allowing successful companies to eliminate it. It treats something as an opportunity if it is available for purchase, regardless of how many people can afford it.

It has also taught us that success means being able to withdraw from the systems everyone else depends on. Private schools. Concierge healthcare. Gated communities. Private security. Private transportation. Direct access to political leaders.

American culture increasingly sells wealth as admission to Premium America.

There is nothing wrong with buying greater comfort. There is something wrong when wealth buys a better grade of citizenship, allows people to abandon their obligations to the country we share, or gives them greater control over public systems they no longer depend on.

We do not need to eliminate first class. We do need to make sure we are still on the same plane.

A New American Model would begin with the American promise and work backward from it.

It would not ask first whether a proposal is capitalist or socialist. Capitalism is not the American promise. Socialism is not the American promise. They are ideas about how an economy might be organized.

Markets are tools. Government is a tool. The promise is the standard.

A New American Model would say yes to capitalism and no to monopoly. It would say yes to business but no to giving business a veto over the public. It would welcome success while insisting that success carries responsibility to the country that made it possible.

It would recognize that freedom means more than permission. It means having enough security and bargaining power to make real choices.

It would allow wealth to buy nicer things, but not a separate set of political rights.

And it would stop treating competent government as a contradiction. Government should not be run like a business. It has a different job. It should be run professionally by people who believe public service matters and know how to do it well.

Some of the ideas in the posts ahead will be broad. Others will be quite specific.

I will consider a constitutional amendment that distinguishes the political rights of human beings from the legal protections given to corporations. I will look at applying Social Security taxes to all wage income, rather than stopping at a wage level most Americans never reach. I will propose a national effort to educate and recruit professional government managers. And I will explore a tax policy built around a simple idea: people may purchase Premium America, but the public should not subsidize their decision to do so.

I will also write about competition, worker freedom, accumulated power, taxation, patriotism, Donald Trump, democratic socialism, and the courage required to say no to powerful interests.

These are working ideas, not a finished platform. I expect some of them to change. I may decide that some do not work. I hope readers will point out what I have missed and offer better answers where they have them.

But I want to begin with one belief that I am not willing to surrender.

America can solve hard problems.

Republicans often celebrate American greatness, then repeatedly tell us America cannot do hard things. They tell us America cannot provide dependable healthcare, reduce hunger, improve public education, limit gun violence, protect workers, or prevent wealth from overwhelming democracy. Those problems are presented as the price we have to pay for freedom. The truth is more specific: they are prices some Americans are expected to pay so that other Americans can enjoy those freedoms. I do not find that pessimism particularly patriotic.

Loving America should mean believing it can improve. It should mean having enough faith in our democratic system to use it, and enough courage to confront the people who profit from the model we have now. The promise of America is still worth pursuing.

Let’s start by agreeing on this: America is not broken. The model we are using is.

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