This series has been about having too much of something. I argued that Mark Zuckerberg is spending a fortune he never had to justify because his Meta ad engine funds every bet before anyone knows if the last bet was win, lose or draw. Robert Moses transformed New York for over four decades without ever winning an election, because he drew from a seemingly bottomless well of state power. Neither man ever had to choose. And when you never have to choose, nothing you pick can turn out to be the wrong pick – not for years, and sometimes not until it all comes apart at once.

This one is a little different. It’s about a less concrete kind of abundance – not Meta’s money or Moses’s concrete. But as with Zuck and Moses, what’s in ample abundance here is firm conviction about what’s right and wrong for the world. Unlike those two, the man in this case is fictional – though the people who held their own surplus of certitude in 1985 were not. And as I saw myself in that year, they had no intention of arguing about it.

The pioneering comic book series turned graphic novel Watchmen turns 40 this fall, but it is set a year before its 1986 release. The setting is an America where Richard Nixon is still not being a crook somewhere around his fifth term, the 22nd Amendment having been repealed by a grateful nation after the Trickster successfully convinced a naked blue physicist to win Vietnam for us.

That’s the setting, but it’s not the milieu. Nixon was just a cutout. No: the dread, the nuclear freeze rallies, the certainty among educated people that the arms race had only one logic and it was one that ended in fire – all that comprises a politically correct take on Reagan’s America, straight from 1986, imported whole.

Alan Moore, the Englishman who wrote it, hinted at it: In the final issue of the comic, in the fictional New Frontiersman, a far-right, Lyndon LaRouche-inspired screed published by a pair of ink-stained wretches in a greasy downtown garret – he bandies about hints about the candidate running against Nixon in 1988, identified only as “RR.” In 1986, readers were expected to assume that was a reference to the Gipper, before the editor reveals it’s Robert Redford, scoffing, Who wants a cowboy actor in the White House?

So, why the cutout? Because if you use Reagan in 1986, you have to make the argument. You have to persuade the reader that the man deploying Pershings in Europe is driving the world toward annihilation rather than toward the negotiating table, given – as it was in 1986 – that America and the USSR were military equals doomed to possibly centuries of escalation and brinksmanship. Moore copped out and inserted Tricky Deck, the evergreen bête noire by acclamation. The regime’s illegitimacy was pre-installed by Watergate’s own plumbers. It’s a clever shortcut and it gets Moore where he wants to go, but nearly every ugly thing that follows in the book inherits a moral authority, by virtue of their presumed opposition to The Man, that is never earned.

This cheat happens to be the identical one the book’s ambiguously idealistic villain, Adrian Veidt, commits. Not that Veidt, the smartest man in the world, guessed wrong; it’s that he treated a model of the future – the one integrated into Alan Moore’s own worldview – as knowledge of the future, and then treated that knowledge as a license. Without ever proving that his premises are valid, he acts on them, killing three million people to supposedly prevent a war he, despite the abundance of his TV screens and impressionistic deductions from its messages of increasing global anxiety, never really demonstrates would have happened. Moore builds his story the same way he builds his villain: assume the apocalypse, proceed from there.

I graduated college the year Watchmen is set, and the Cold War was both an academic pursuit and a moral obsession. So I took international relations, Soviet politics and Soviet economics, and I read a good deal of Solzhenitsyn. And as a budding conservative activist, I spent those years watching an information operation land in real time – and I got nowhere in my pre-Internet efforts at explaining that it was one.

Hear me out, even though they wouldn’t at the time.

The proposition on offer was that Reagan’s policies were walking the world into Armageddon. Not risking it – walking into it, on purpose, or out of cowboy stupidity. The Soviets worked that proposition hard, manipulating elite opinion, European wobblies and Democrat opposition through the freeze movement and against the Pershing and cruise deployments. The Reds understood that a West too frightened to modernize its own deterrent was a West they could outlast.

To my conservative pals and me, this was not a subtle read. It was transparent commie agitprop. We said so, and were told we were paranoid – or that we were the ones itching for the war.

It was a hell of an effective op, and what made it effective was where it struck: right on an open door. On the credentialed: the anchors, the faculty, the clergy, the serious magazines, the people whose entire training was supposed to inoculate them against this. By 1983 you had The Fate of the Earth on every syllabus, a hundred million people watching Kansas burn on ABC, nuclear winter arriving with a physics paper attached, and the Catholic bishops issuing a pastoral letter on the subject. These people weren’t taking orders from Moscow, but you’d hardly know the difference if it had been. The main thing was that they were all useful intellectuals.

I ran the College Republicans on my campus, which is a stately way of saying I was the College Republican. Toward the end I was, after being “noticed” by shady off-campus provocateurs, recruited to start a student group supporting the Strategic Defense Initiative – Star Wars, as everybody called it, sneer included. The flyers I put up for our initial meeting went up in the evening and were gone by morning. Nobody came to the meeting either, though in fairness that probably had nothing to do with the posters; most people were studying, which I only learned much later is what college students are supposed to be doing. But somebody, or somebodies, took the trouble to walk around at night pulling down notices for a meeting about missile defense. The freeze was a position. Missile defense was a thing you removed.

(It works, incidentally.)

What the op was reacting to was a President who represented an existential threat to the Soviet system, and on that point, it was the Reds who were the clear-eyed ones in the room. Reagan did end them.

He didn’t do it alone, obviously, and the task was not nearly as difficult, ironically, as those who feared Armageddon thought it must be. The Soviet economy was rotten from the inside; Gorbachev had to make impossible choices; the captive nations had had enough; Afghanistan turned out, despite Solzhenitsyn’s doubt, to absolutely be the Soviets’ Vietnam.

But the wager was Reagan’s, and it was the reverse of Veidt’s, and all the other very smart people. The supposedly far-seeing Veidt – whose name my Yiddish ear keeps hearing as the German weit, distant, which it isn’t – believed the confrontation had an inherent logic terminating in catastrophe, and somebody had to break the game from outside, and that somebody was he. Dumb old Reagan believed the confrontation was a contest that could be won, that Soviet power was weaker than it looked, and that you could call it an evil empire on Tuesday and cut a deal with its general secretary on Thursday. For this, Reagan was widely regarded as a lunatic.

The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was signed in December 1987. Two years after that, the Berlin Wall tumbled. Two years after that, no more USSR. The apocalypse that everybody who knew, knew was structurally inevitable turned out to be a policy choice – a question that got answered.

Physicist-turned-superbeing Jon Osterman – known after his involuntary transformation as Dr. Manhattan – is another cheat, because by virtue of his omniscience he makes judgment look like observation. He sees quarks; he experiences time sideways. So when he treats an outcome as fixed, the line between “this is what I perceive” and “this is what must be” disappears, and his prestige converts a contingent political guess into something with the imprimatur of nothing less than physics in it.

In other words, he’s the personification of the once-vaunted Doomsday Clock, that propaganda prop of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that, by virtue of their academic and research leadership, arrogated to themselves strategic and political expertise as well. A thermometer reading 103, however, is doing something categorically different from a committee of Ph.D.’s confidently informing the world that the time is now “ninety seconds from midnight” – midnight being, yes, the Armageddon thing.

But there are no ninety seconds; there is only metaphor, wielded by a bunch of guys in white coats who mostly knew about counting atoms in a chamber but were saturated with unexamined strategic assumptions and moral valuation. The distance between “our analysis suggests serious risk, so free societies should take prudent measures” and “our expertise establishes an emergency, so ordinary restraints must yield” is the distance between advice and priesthood. The Herr Doktor Professors of the ’80s chose priesthood.

The book’s anti-hero Rorschach – the viciously violent, shortsighted, moralistic proto-Punisher – doesn’t save the day; he’s a cutout too. (To be fair, it is a comic book.) Rorschach’s obsession is urban decay – muggers, pimps, the gangrene of a city that spread from the subway tunnels up. And that decay was the live subject in the New York I remember from those days – the era of Charles Bronson and Death Wish, embodied for one crazy night by Bernhard Goetz – but Moore wants no part of that discussion. The dodge works well, because Rorschach’s Reaganesque insistence on the link between urban degeneracy and political permissiveness has legs. Instead, Moore raises the stakes to Armageddon, purposely making that old “caped hero” mission look quaint and the man devoted to it – who mistakes Veidt’s plan to force the Final Reckoning for a mere vengeance-based rubout operation – seem like a period piece with a bad childhood, a character out of West Side Story. The sexy threat – the political, ideological, existential threat – is too large for a homely masked tough who thinks in terms of city blocks. Moore evades the liberal naiveté roasted even in the 1950s by songs such as “Officer Krupke,” where the delinquents explain to a mock court that their depravity is a function of their deprivation, and saves his scorn, like Veidt, for the real meanies: Cowboy Presidents.

The boundlessly endowed Veidt is the limit case, which is why he’s worth the trip. Zuckerberg has money nothing competes for; Moses had power nobody could make him answer for. Both, however, at least operated among other people. Adrian’s missing counterparty is a peer. The smartest man in the world is a man for whom no thought ever has to beat another thought, and what he does with that condition is kill three million people on a firm hypothesis confirmed by his award-winning neurons.

Moore’s saving grace is that he refuses Veidt the verdict. Adrian, having won, asks the god Dr. Manhattan – who, like the hydrogen atom that is his symbol, also dwells alone; the only possible match for Veidt in limitless perspective and molecular insight – whether he did right. The god declines to close the books. He tells Veidt that no, he has not ended the runup to the final conflict, because nothing ever ends; there is no vantage point from which the ledger balances, despite Veidt’s abundant certainty that he had found the formula to do just that.

And far from Veidt’s polar Olympus, on the other sleazy opposite end of the social and economic world of the Watchmen, the only ones who just might get it are the two ink-stained wretches putting out The New Frontiersman – despite its over-the-top antisemitic, anti-everyone cartoons and its blunt angry-white-man voice. In contrast, the upscale Nova Express, respectable and adversarial and doing everything a smart and stylish investigative magazine is supposed to do, got played in its fawning interview of Veidt like a fiddle.

In a series full of ironies and inside-out morality, it is perhaps no surprise that Moore spends twelve issues stacking the deck against the marketplace of ideas and quaint concepts such as liberty, courage and freedom, only to let the grubby marketplace actually work – through the disreputable end of it, where it usually does.

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Suppose Mark Zuckerberg – who has made a lot of very, very good decisions in his life – is right again. Suppose superintelligence is arriving on something like the schedule he believes, and suppose Meta can be one of the two or three companies that build it. If both of those are true, then spending 98 cents of every operating dollar on data centers isn’t reckless – it’s playing to win. Not a single board member should be counseling prudence, and no shareholder has grounds to complain. You don’t hedge against the discovery of fire.

And fire, after all, is what it looks like at Meta – the good kind. “En fuego” fire. During the quarter that produced that spending, Meta’s advertising business grew 27 percent. Impressions rose fourteen percent, average price per ad twelve percent. The gold mine is fine – better than fine. It just posted the fastest revenue growth Meta has seen since 2021.

Unless you think cash is super important, that is – because despite that deluge of revenue, Meta’s free cash flow fell from $8.55 billion to $784 million. Because Zuck spent the magical ad engine’s output faster than the ad engine could produce it.

Sometimes abundance can fool you, I’ve been saying in this series. When somebody inherits a reserve he didn’t build and mistakes it for a permanent feature of the landscape, it seems almost inevitable that he’ll spend it down while insisting it refills itself. The premise is always that what seemed like a permanent store of abundance was sadly overestimated.

For Meta, though, the bonanza is real. The company’s business absolutely, really and concretely is one of the most durable cash machines ever assembled. Nothing in the second-quarter numbers suggests it’s slowing down. But $784 million of free cash flow on $60.8 billion – man, that ain’t right.

It’s not that Zuckerberg is drawing down a reserve that won’t come back. It comes back, fresh and green and legal tender for all debts, public and private. It came back last quarter faster than it ever has. No, this time the mismatch really was caused by the abundance rather than by its unanticipated absence.

I’ve spent this series arguing that people, institutions and other entities go broke assuming that because they’re rich today, they’ll be rich tomorrow. But the sort of formal “broke” that Meta is experiencing at the moment is a different kind of failure in the making, whose economics are older than the Internet. I happen to have learned them from the right man’s textbook.

The economist William Baumol taught a generation of undergraduates, me among them, and one of the models he’s known for describes a firm with secured market power that stops maximizing profit and starts maximizing sales, subject only to earning enough profit to keep the shareholders quiet. His insight isn’t that such managers are lazy or crooked; it’s that once revenue is safe, the firm – very rationally – optimizes to maximize whatever the people running it actually want.

And what they usually want is size, reach, and consequence. Profit stops being the goal and becomes a constraint to be satisfied.

Meta’s constraint appears to be roughly $784 million.

The British economist John Hicks put the general version more memorably: “The best of all monopoly profits is a quiet life.” He meant slack – the discipline that stops operating when nothing forces it to. There’s a counterintuitive part that stuck with me since my days as an econ undergrad: The measurable cost of monopoly, the deadweight loss you draw triangles about, turns out to be fairly small whenever anyone troubles to measure it. The expensive part never appears on the graph at all – it’s the decisions nobody was ever forced to make well.

Turns out it’s actually not so good to be the king. Consider, after all, what scarcity actually “does,” from the point of view of that most dismal of sciences.

Economists look at budgets not primarily as limits, but as a way of translating or converting spending into ranking. If I have a dollar and I contemplate two different ways to use it, I have to make a choice, because I can’t spend the same dollar twice. I have to decide which is better – and the moment I make that decision, I’ve staked my claim about how good I am at reckoning value. Six months later the funded thing either worked or it didn’t, and the unfunded thing either turned out to be the better bet or it didn’t, and either way I’ve learned something I couldn’t have learned any other way. The constraint of scarcity is what makes strategy falsifiable.

Now take the constraint away. At 98 percent of operating cash flow going to a single bet – those data centers – you could say that nothing at Meta competes with anything. The AI buildout didn’t win an argument against the ad platform, or against Reality Labs, or against a buyback, or against a dividend, because there never was such an argument – and not just because Zuck runs Meta like the potentate he is. Meta was and is so damned rich that there was never a tradeoff in any meaningful sense. No tradeoff means no decision, and nothing to be wrong about.

Not nothing to be wrong about ever – the reckoning comes; just ask the French king – but nothing to be wrong about on a schedule short enough for anyone to act on, or perceive a need to. No one experiences, perceives or suffers from the error, if it’s an error, until eventually someone (i.e., “the market”) circles back and realizes that, as the quants put it, the math don’t math.

This isn’t decadence. No one can accuse Zuck of coasting – far from it! By every account he’s working ferociously hard, with real conviction, on things he knows with every fiber of his being are the most important objects in the world.

And that’s precisely the trouble: He’s working ferociously hard on projects that have never once had to survive the scrutiny that comes with a perceptible limitation.

This way of running things doesn’t have legs – kind of like the kids in the Metaverse, from which Meta gets its name. That’s because the Metaverse was – Zuck knew – the future of his company. Reality Labs, the Meta unit that developed the Metaverse, has lost more than $80 billion since late 2020. Not $80 billion invested – $80 billion in operating losses, against cumulative revenue that wouldn’t cover a decent quarter of the ad business. For most of that stretch the losses generated no institutional information at all, because they never cost anyone at Meta anything Zuck could feel: The ad engine covered every penny. Every quarter the Metaverse failed to arrive was a quarter in which its failure was fully funded, which is to say a quarter in which nobody had to decide anything.

The correction did eventually come: budgets cut, staff moved over to AI, the Metaverse quietly demoted from destination to overlay. It came in year five. A company – a rich company, a company with plenty of capital for research and development, a company well off enough to fund risk – but one that still had to choose – would have known in year two.

I’ve made a version of this argument before, about Disney, whose theme park operations covered a decade of studio failure and thereby kept anyone from learning what the studio’s results were trying to teach. The mechanism is the same. What’s different at Meta is that Disney fooled Wall Street for years, until it didn’t. It certainly wasn’t going to spill the beans by writing a manifesto.

But Zuck, he’s different. And on Monday, Zuckerberg published 6,500 words titled “The Future Is for Everyone.” Its job is to explain, in advance, why the returns Meta investors aren’t going to see for a long time are the right returns not to see. And why is that? Because, Zuck explains, superintelligence will do the innovating – not just the sweating, the fabricating, the iteration. Artificial intelligence won’t just replace labor, it will generate universal abundance on its own, which is the only way to understand a universe in which all the things will be free, or nearly free, to all the people.

The quantitative proof of this promise? Not included. Troubled by the paradox that the way to create AI that will bestow everything on everyone for nothing is to absorb every current resource for possibly ever? No! That means it’s working!

Disney lost the signal by accident. Meta is telling you to disregard that cash-burning man behind the curtain!

And I’m not saying that I’m taking this personally, but I won’t deny that among the essay’s promises is one aimed at my profession. Imagine, Zuck writes, that everyone has a superintelligent lawyer – and in that world, he says, justice would be achieved more fairly.

The easy response is that he doesn’t know what lawyers do, though he’s certainly spent plenty of time in their company. Yes, I will spot him this: a good deal of what I bill for could in principle be done faster, and some of it probably should be. Because of AI, a lot of it already is. My clients benefit from it, and I do too. But – justice? Most of what lawyers do has nothing to do with achieving, or resisting, justice in a courtroom; it involves helping people make, keep and use money and the things money can buy.

Zuck is not the only person to make this category error, but he may be the most consequential one – that is, looking at a lawyer as an input to justice the same way he looks at a dollar as an input to superintelligence. Make the input infinite and the output takes care of itself.

That’s not what lawyers are, though, and it isn’t how money works either. Ask any client who’s had to hear the sentence he least wants to hear from me – for example, that his idea for a lawsuit is real, and winnable, but not worth what it’ll cost to win. You may find this hard to believe, but I tell this to people waving money at me many times a month.

Every legal case is a series of decisions about what not to do: which claims not to plead, which motions not to file, which documents not to demand, which ruling to swallow instead of appealing. A litigator relieved of those constraints isn’t a better litigator; he’s a man with no reason to ever stop.

Now hand one to everybody, on both sides, free of charge (or in the case of public corporations, free of consequence for the expense). My superintelligent lawyer meets your superintelligent lawyer, and neither of us is a step closer to justice. What we’ve done is remove the only thing that ever made a case end – somebody running out of money, patience, or argument. Infinite legal capacity doesn’t produce more justice than finite legal capacity produces. It produces more law and more private jets for lawyers.

So yeah, it’s not all bad. But Zuckerberg’s answer to a system that works by forcing choices seems to be making choosing unnecessary. He ran that experiment on his own company first and “got away with it.” The $80 billion flushed away at Reality Labs may end up paling in significance to what’s dumped into Meta’s present AI adventure, and so what?

The gold mine is fine, and nothing on the horizon suggests it’s going to play out – except one little thing: Mark Zuckerberg. He’s throwing everything he and his shareholders have into his vision of the superintelligence world because he knows – he knows – that the ore cannot last forever, and Meta needs a place to live its future. That place won’t be the Metaverse, but maybe it will exist in a superintelligence era – the one in which there are never really, ever, any constraints on the possibilities of material and hedonic consumption.

Grant him even that. It doesn’t help. Knowing the mine runs out someday tells him he needs somewhere to go; it doesn’t tell him this is the place. The Metaverse was a successor too, and it got its five years for the same reason – nothing ever had to lose to it.

And look at what he’s actually buying. A man who has never had to choose is spending a fortune he never had to justify, in order to deliver the rest of us a world where nobody has to choose either. That’s the product. Unconstraint, universally distributed, from the one person alive with the least evidence that it works.

There’s a mountain called Fordow near Qom, Iran, and inside it some people set up a machine shop to make some things. To put a finer point on it, for the better part of two decades Iran’s rulers have been burrowing deep, deep, deep into that mountain. They dug deeper than anyone could see, deeper than anyone could reach. In these caverns almost measureless to man the mullahs decreed a stately pleasure dome – for what could be more pleasurable for an apocalyptic death cult than enrichment halls sitting 80 to 90 meters down, under reinforced concrete, under the whole weight of the mountain besides?

It wasn’t a cheap thing to build. It took years, and money, and a kind of patience most governments, and certainly ones that give a damn about the welfare of their citizens, can’t manage. And it rested on a single, reasonable proposition: that if you put enough dirt and rock between your centrifuges and the sky, the sky can’t touch them.

Give these lunatics their due, because they earned it. This wasn’t paranoia and it wasn’t waste. The Iranians watched, over the years, what happens to a nuclear facility that trusts the open air – Osirak in an afternoon, the Syrian reactor in a night – and they drew exactly the right lesson from exactly the right evidence. Depth is cheaper than a war. A mountain doesn’t defect, doesn’t miss its intercept, doesn’t need to be talked into standing its post. The Israelis can’t bribe it. Against the threat they’d actually seen – a bomber, a payload, a facility that could be reached – Fordow wasn’t a foolish answer – it was close to the correct one. The IRGC’s engineers weren’t stupid. They were wicked smart.

How smart? Here’s what happened when the Yanks came for Fordow in June of 2025. The rock did what rock is supposed to and held like rock. Twelve of the largest conventional bombs in the US Air Force’s arsenal – the 30,000-pound penetrators built for precisely this mountain – dropped in six places, two to a spot to widen the wound, and the halls, 80 to 90 meters down, weren’t reached. If the match had been the bomb against the mountain, the mountain won on points.

But that wasn’t the contest, because the Americans have some clever folks at work too. The Air Force didn’t aim at the rock. By every indication it aimed at the holes, just like Luke Skywalker: the vents, the throats, the openings that as a matter of physics you have to have in a mountain you use to build, operate and live in. Especially the first two, because a centrifuge hall isn’t a bunker you climb into to wait out the storm. It’s a factory, it’s a working plant, it needs entry and exit for supplies, oxygen, carbon dioxide, stuff you’re making and also Iranians. Depth can do a lot of protecting but when it comes to something that works for a living, it’s not really a long-term plan.

So yes: The mountain kept its promise, all of it. Abundantly.

A little too abundantly. Because what the USAF did was turn that abundance of depth, that impenetrable layer of terra firma, into the world’s deadliest seal.

Iran had built a vault and then locked what it valued most; what it dearly desired to protect at all costs, tight within it. Its enrichment hall became an enrichment crypt. The centrifuges are, by every indication, down there still, safe and secure forever.

Well, who among us hasn’t suffered one buried facility? You can’t win ’em all. What turns a defeat into a fallacy is what you do the morning after – and here Iran has been generous enough to show its work.

Yup, they’re digging again. South of Natanz, in the Zagros range, stands a taller mountain than the one over Fordow, and inside it Iran has been carving a new set of halls since 2020. The Americans call it Pickaxe Mountain, which is certainly a real American thing to call a huge hunk of stone. And by stone I mean granite – not the limestone and dolostone that sat over Fordow, but hard rock, chosen because, like the stubbornest of mullahs, granite soaks up and scatters the shock of a bunker-buster better than softer stone does.

Depth failed in Fordow, but Iran’s answer wasn’t less depth. It was more of it, in harder currency.

But Ron, you protest, Fordow was last year, and you just said Pickaxe Peak started popping in 2020! I did say that but guess what: It’s happening now. Satellite imagery from this past February s

hows crews at Pickaxe pushing rock and earth back over a tunnel mouth and pouring a fresh concrete headworks to carry still more cover – reinforcing the new mountain against precisely the strike that had just gutted the old one. The IRGC’s deposit is being made as I write this sentence. They’re shoveling more mountain onto the same mistake, because, they seem to think, the problem at Fordow was that the tomb wasn’t tomby enough. Needs more tomb.

This mental habit isn’t confined to rock; it’s how the Islamic Republic has always kept its books. The virtually limitless oil wealth poured into a ring of proxies, on the theory that the money and the menace were bottomless – and then Hezbollah, the Syrian corridor, the whole expensive network, degraded or gone in a season, the assets destroyed alongside the men they were meant to shield. The martyr’s willingness and the regime’s own legitimacy, drawn down for 40 years as though the well refilled itself while nobody watched the level.

Whether it’s physical depth, petrodollars, or unquenchable bloodlust: three accounts, one accounting error. Each was real. None, not even the last one, will ultimately prove to be in infinite supply. Proxies and suicide bombers are enthusiastic, but “idealism” only gets you so far. All these murder operations run on money, and Iran’s money ships out through one place: Kharg Island, a coral speck in the Gulf that loads something like nine of every ten barrels the Republic sells. Washington has spent the summer openly weighing whether to simply take it. Which is why the economic outlook in late July is, shall we say, not quite as robust as it was even in June – back when there was still a ceasefire, and the terminal that funds the whole enterprise wasn’t one Presidential order away from changing hands.

What Iran has left is now, fittingly, unknowable – to Iran most of all. The inspectors have been gone since February, thrown out along with the last people equipped to tell Tehran what it actually still holds. Estimates of the surviving centrifuges are exactly that, estimates, models built in the dark by outsiders. A regime that mistook insanely deep piles of dirt for permanence has arrived at the last cost of that mistake: it can’t count its own reserves, because it evicted the only ones doing the counting.

So there are two mountains now. One is sealed, keeping its useless promise over a crypt full of the safety it failed to deliver. The other is still open at the top, still taking deposits, granite going in by the truckload against the day the sky comes back. The men ordering the shoveling have already seen how this ends. They watched it end at Fordow a year ago. But in true Islamic Republic fashion, they’re digging anyway – deeper this time, into harder rock, certain, the way you can only be certain of a thing that’s never yet run out on you, that this mountain will be the one that holds.

Let’s start by being fair to Disney: at some point earlier than a lot of other companies, it realized that leveraging intellectual property is the best business there is. You make a character once; people fall in love with it; they pay you for iterations and stuff that delivers that character more or less forever – on the screen, on the lunchbox, on the bedsheets, on a nine-dollar churro in Orlando. Rinse and repeat across generations.

And no money center bank ever owned more of these little ATM’s than Disney, or had built anything like the apparatus Disney built around them – parks, cruises, streaming, licensing, spinoffs, remakes. So the studio could afford to miss in a way nobody else could. When you can bankroll a movie with the line for Space Mountain, you can eat a box-office flop that would put a normal studio into Chapter 11.

So when Disney decided it could take the library it spent ninety years building and retrofit it for “modern audiences” – recast it, reboot it, lecture it – the decision was far from crazy; it was canny as hell. The company had a vault stuffed with goodwill, and history showed it could draw on that vault approximately forever.

And for a while, it did. The Marvel run up through Endgame proved it. Think Scrooge McDuck jumping into his vault full of gold coins: that much proof. What could go wrong, as I love to ask?

What could go wrong is forgetting that brand equity is a reserve, not an income stream. Disney confused the two, which is like confusing principal for interest. Brands should never, ever, be spent. They are assets that add value, a premium, to other things. But they have to be real things.

Consider a real franchise – not in the Hollywood sense. A franchise is a built-out version of a trademark: a promise to deliver the product promised on the package. Buy a McDonald’s or a 7-Eleven and they hand you a phone book called the Standard Operating Procedure and gently explain that you are not an artist. A Big Mac in Tulsa has to be the same sad, perfect Big Mac you remember from Yonkers. The franchisor enforces this like a beat cop, and not because he’s fussy. He does it because the enforcement is the asset. Quality control isn’t the price of selling the brand, it’s the thing the franchisor is selling and which all the franchisees (who depend on uniformity from everyone in their category) are buying.

The minute you stop policing what goes out under your name, the law has a word for what you’ve done, and the word is abandonment. This isn’t meant to convey some emotionally fraught status; it’s a legal reality. A trademark, a brand, you won’t defend is one you’ve thrown in the trash.

Think of Pierre Cardin, once a genuinely prestigious, avant-garde Paris fashion name that became the classic cautionary tale for over-licensing – slapped on hundreds of product categories, far beyond apparel, with weak control over quality and distribution. The issue was not licensing per se; luxury and fashion brands license all the time. The problem was that the mark showed up everywhere, on too many unrelated goods and at too many price points. The brand lost scarcity, coherence, and fashion authority.

Disney didn’t lose Star Wars and Marvel to bad luck, or bad reviews, or some unexplained nationwide collapse in the human appetite for a good story. It abandoned them – close enough to the legal meaning to make a lawyer’s ears prick up – and it called the abandonment a strategy. Today’s Star Wars movies dwarf the original in budget, special effects and maybe, I guess, some other good stuff that doesn’t happen to be the Big Mac audiences showed up for.

That’s not reinventing the franchise; it’s selling it. The equity’s gone.

Disney’s biggest problem, ironically, was its brilliant, diversified business portfolio – precisely that multifaceted cash machine that insulated it from perceiving that it was burning down its own warehouse.

Most studios live and die by the box office, because the box office is all they’ve got. Disney has Orlando. It has Anaheim. It has cruise ships, a streaming service, and a licensing operation that staples Mickey onto roughly everything sold to a human under the age of nine. So when a movie flopped – and they flopped in rows, like dominoes – the loss vanished into a balance sheet big enough to hide it. Meanwhile, the turnstiles kept spinning, almost entirely because customers kept coming back for iterations and “experiences” associated with the old, yummy Franchiseburger they liked. The economic reality of Disney’s creative and marketing incompetence was covered out of the rest of the empire, the way a guy with a good salary can run a credit card for years and tell himself he’s fine because the minimum payment clears.

So the irony is that the cross-subsidized business lines that made Disney a blue chip stock actually anesthetized it into costly mediocrity with respect to the one resource it could never allow to run out of: Imagination. Abundance in the parking lot at the Magic Kingdom paid for depletion on the screen, and everybody got to keep pretending the screen was fine.

But Wall Street, eventually, and despite the efforts of the cooperative “access media” that never lets its conscience be its guide, keeps its own books. Over the last three years – mid-2023 to now – the S&P 500, the whole market, the thing you buy precisely when you’ve given up believing you can pick a winner, is up about 70 percent. Disney’s up about 16%. So an investor who did the single laziest thing on offer – bought everything, learned nothing, checked nothing, went back to sleep – beat the people running the most valuable brand vault on earth by better than four to one. Stretch the window to five years and it’s worse: Disney’s actually down about 40 percent while the market climbed.

And while it went on whistling while it worked, Disney did the other thing you do when you think a reserve is bottomless. It overspent.

Here Disney could’ve learned something from baseball, of all places. When I was a kid, American League and National League teams never met except in the World Series. That was the whole point – the scarcity was the product. You waited all year for it. Baseball eventually watered that down with interleague play, and it cost them some magic, but give them this: they knew they were spending something. They rationed; interleague play was still a “feature” of the schedule, not an everyday event.

Disney did the opposite. It took Marvel and Star Wars – properties that worked precisely because there wasn’t too much of them – and opened the spigot. Show after show, movie after movie, a Captain This and a Ms. That, until brands that used to mean “drop everything” came to mean “I’ll get to it eventually” – a phenomenon admittedly made far worse by the dominating rise of streaming.

But just ask Pierre Cardin: You can’t gorge a fandom and call it abundance. You’re not feeding them. You’re inflating the currency until it takes a wheelbarrow full of Marvel pushed by a wheezing Robert Downey Jr. to buy what one used to.

That’s the difference between an oil well and a fountain. Twenty-first century Disney ran its brands like oil wells – pump hard, book the revenue, never once ask where the grease will come from when that well runs dry.

There’s something else that happens, besides ubiquity, that harms the over-exploitation of a brand: Remember quality control? The guys at the top aren’t taking pay cuts, but quietly the message goes down through to the production lines to look for “places to cut.” For a stretch Disney’s animation shops were reportedly hiring less for whether you could draw than for how many boxes you could check for the Human Resources folks. Politics aside, that’s just never not going to be a quality-control problem. You can’t rely on the Standard Operating Procedure manual when your worker ants can’t read.

The lever-pullers don’t own the vault. They rent it. A man like Bob Iger isn’t optimizing for where Disney sits in ten years, because in ten years it won’t be his problem. He’s optimizing for the length of his own contract – and inside that window the Fallacy isn’t even a mistake. It’s a rational plan. The reserve only has to last as long as he does. “Bottomless” was never really the claim. “Bottomless until I’m gone” was, and that one’s easy to believe, because it’s usually true, even for a guy like Iger who was gone, and then came back.

People don’t build institutions anymore. They harvest them. Iger sits atop a board with no more skin in the game than he has, all of them drawing down an inheritance none of them earned and none of them will be around to refill. That isn’t a culture that fails by accident. It’s a culture working exactly as designed – for everyone except the company.

Which is why the usual fix won’t touch it. Every few months somebody decides Disney needs a sharper CFO, a turnaround artist, the right grown-up in the room. It doesn’t. You can’t hire your way out of contempt. A company that’s stopped believing Job One is to please its audience and that Job Two is guarding its brands so it can do Job One isn’t suffering a math error a new hire or even a new CEO can correct.

Disney’s prince is not coming. It strip-mined a century of creativity and left the country in the dead of night

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Representative Jasmine Crockett held her thumb and forefinger about an inch apart and explained to her podcast audience that the knife wasn’t really a deadly weapon. Given the size of it, she said, you wouldn’t even think it was deadly. One of her guests helpfully proposed that it might have been one of those Swiss Army numbers, the kind with the little scissors.

It wasn’t that kind at all. In fact, the knife was a 3.5-inch folding blade that sliced right through Austin Metcalf’s chest and shredded his heart by the hand of Karmelo Anthony, a black high school student who owned not only the knife, but the deed. “I’m not alleged,” he is recorded telling the arresting officer on bodycam. “I did it.”

Obviously the hot takes took themselves on this one: Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett measuring a murder weapon with the teeny gap between her fingers, then assuring the world that the jury’s guilty verdict was nothing but racial. Stop pretending there’s anything black people can do in their behavior to prevent racism, she pronounced. Given that “racism defines the entire system,” facts, law and sense have no place at the table.

Crockett handily served up the ingredients for the hot takes, but the secret of her recipe is what invokes the Fallacy of Abundance.

Every verdict rests on something nobody budgets for and everybody spends: the willingness of the side that lost to treat the result as binding, win, lose or draw. That’s the difference between a jury’s verdict and a fist-pumping mob, and it’s the only reason the word “verdict” carries any weight at all. And like so much other equity, this – the legitimacy of the system – is being exhausted all around as though it can’t run out.

The distrust Crockett is drawing on, and which has funded her and many other political careers, is obviously not her invention. It was earned, deposit by deposit, by a system that took a long time earning it. When O.J. Simpson was acquitted in 1995 in the face of obvious evidence that he had murdered white people, Gallup found that 78 percent of Black Americans thought the jury got it right. That’s how little credibility the courts had banked with Black America after years of Mark Fuhrmans, Fuhrman being the detective whose own recorded voice handed O.J.’s defense its whole theory of the case. Were the people who cheered that acquittal endorsing a double murder? Or were they voting on the criminal justice system, starting with its leading edge, the LAPD, as an institution, and declaring it had earned this humiliation by a black man?

Two wrongs don’t make a right. Even if they were only voting on the institution rather than endorsing a double murder, the celebration still can’t be defended morally – but that, empirically, is what it was: a verdict on the system. The law-school-exam questions this week – even the real one, that the prosecution struck every black juror, which is far more credible than Crockett’s “teeny weeny knife” defense – are not the point.

Anthony admitted the stabbing. His own defense witnesses, the ones his lawyer chose to call, conceded that he’d been told to leave the tent more than once; that he wasn’t surrounded, that Metcalf had tried to defuse the confrontation. His subsequent shove of Anthony was answered with a blade – a blade he had brought to a track meet – to Metcalf’s chest, and Anthony puffed out his own to take credit.

The jury was out three hours, which in and of itself is impressive under these facts. Shouting and screaming that the guilty verdict here was a race thing goes beyond the Remember Fuhrman! point of view that could in 1995 argue, with some internal logic: “our man” walks, whatever the evidence shows, and especially if the cops and prosecutors are junior varsity. That was bad enough, but in 2026 it has metastasized into: our man cannot be convicted, whatever the evidence shows, and that if twelve jurors convict him anyway the procedure must be a fraud.

This doesn’t just go beyond the O.J. line, it erases it. If you applaud the jury that nullifies for “your man” on Monday because, hey, that’s the system; live it or live with it – how do you condemn the jury that convicts “your man” – not one like O.J. who denies he was even there, but one who owned his conduct like a medal – on Tuesday? You do it by asking the rest of us to disregard the fact that the verdict was never the thing you cared about. Neither was Fuhrman; neither was the LAPD; neither was anything but “our man” versus all y’all.

Anthony filed his Batson appeal of the jury strikes the next day, seeking relief from an appellate court that sits a rung higher than the trial court but still part of the very system Crockett and company insist is defined, top to bottom, by racism. Anthony’s whole hope now is that the courts are, in fact, not so apartheid; not so structurally racist; in fact, are legitimate enough to catch an error and correct it. How can you lodge your plea for salvation with a tribunal you spent the night before calling apartheid without conceding the system is either real, or that the fake system sometimes cuts your way?

Many of the people who see this and are calling it out on social media are black. They don’t take their cues from the likes of Jasmine Crockett. My friend CJ Pearson, asked how he as a black man could fail to feel for Anthony, responded that he’s black, not a murderer. Deon Joseph gave it the length it deserved: race wasn’t a factor, poor choices were. A pastor called the case open and shut. A schoolteacher noted that the boy had brought a knife to a school track meet, which used to be the end of a conversation rather than the opening of one. These people aren’t carrying water for Collin County; why would they?

What they’re doing is trying to prevent the complete exhaustion of a well they know every American of every race must be able to draw on. They are motivated by the frightening prospect of their entire community, which by its own rhetorical lights is not part of or welcomed to the same America as white people, engineering precisely the exclusion they insist is already operative. What will happen when Anthony’s appeal fails? How long and hot will the summer of 2026 be?

These black voices reject Jasmine Crockett’s assumption that the reserve of systemic legitimacy is bottomless – that you can go on declaring the verdicts you dislike to be frauds and still have, waiting in the vault for the day you finally need it, a court whose word the whole country will take.

But legitimacy isn’t a spring that refills overnight. It’s a deposit. It took deposits to build, including the ugly ones that funded Crockett’s account in the first place. Spend it on the knife that wasn’t a deadly weapon, and it won’t be there for the knife that is. A very large percentage of the country that Jasmine Crockett condemns has, after the shameful performance and weaponization of the criminal justice system, begun to come to its own conclusions about its legitimacy. They’re a mirror image of hers.

When Jasmine Crockett held her thumb and finger an inch apart, she was showing us just how much social equity is left in the tank of the criminal justice system – and how much hope there is for all of us if the remaining fumes disperse

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There’s a story every serious person knows about military decline, and we tell it after every war: The shooting stops, the victor exhales, and within a budget cycle or two the disarmament begins. Recruiting targets are lowered, then missed anyway. Stockpiles shrink as weapons and ammunition are not replaced, because the war that drew on them is over and no one will miss their non-replenishment. Yards that once launched a hull a month launch one a year, while vessels that already served are mothballed and scuttled. Intelligence services fold in and dissipate networks and resources once deemed invaluable.

This is the famous peace dividend, collected on credit. We’ve been collecting it since 1945 – just as we did in 1919. Whether men, munitions, ships, the human capital of people who understand the enemy, it’s reliably and, by all lights, rationally drawn down because, obviously, the danger which justified maintaining them in readiness is gone. Gone, just as any toddler will tell you that the grownup playing peek-a-boo with him is gone when that grownup can’t be seen.

Everyone not in thrall to the nihilistic dream of pacificism can tell this story. But it’s not the real story.

Yes: the hollow arsenal is the easy story, the one a reader can absorb without being asked to change his mind about anything, and it can be fixed. The bottleneck is money and will, not metaphysics. Money and will can and do ebb and flow cyclically; thus Ronald Reagan, facing only a notional threat from the Soviet Union, led a post-Vietnam renaissance in military capacity that won a notional war. But the empty magazine cannot be a real problem.

The real problem is the one we decline to fix even when the fix is in reach. It’s the reserve that has actually run dry, the one we won’t concede is a reserve at all: our willingness to believe that the world abounds with people who do not want what we want – or, sometimes, with people who want what we have.

Liberal societies have spent down their inheritance of hard power not because they forgot how to forge weapons, but because they can’t bear to come to terms with a world in which the party on the other side of the table is not a frustrated liberal awaiting the right confidence-building measure. We close our eyes to the adversary who’s told you, in plain language and plainer action, that he means to take what he wants from you.

If you’d like to know how plain, consider the week we’ve just had.

Begin with Iran, and disregard the standard take, which is its own form of iterated refusal to learn. In April the United States and Iran agreed to a two-week ceasefire, brokered by Pakistan. What happened to “unconditional surrender”? Well, not so fast. Notwithstanding the “jaw-jaw instead of war-war” jawing, who has kept a naval blockade clamped on Iran’s ports for the better part of two months, throttling Tehran by, on our own accounting, half a billion dollars a day? Who struck Iran again in May and June and has told his commanders to stay ready – and who, in the same breath, dangles a reconstruction framework and pronounces the talks to be proceeding at a “rapid pace,” over a ceasefire he has himself called “on life support.” You can follow the herd and chalk up the “rapid pace” to the usual self-deception if you like, but it’s not. It’s the opposite. The former New York real estate developer in charge is not waiting for the enemy to reveal himself as a frustrated liberal. He doesn’t believe Iran wants peace, because no one with an ounce of common sense does – so, then, why perform the peace at all?

Because the primary audience for the performance isn’t in Tehran, which knows very well the pressure it’s under. The audience is you and me and the opportunistic politicians who will never let a good crisis go to waste. The leader of a liberal society is required, as a condition of the office, to be seen questing for peace – to keep a deal eternally almost-in-reach – whatever he knows about the man across the table. That’s why Churchill gave us his “jaw-jaw” formulation. If anyone in the previous century was not guilty of the ceasefire fallacy, it was he.

But this performative imperative is the fallacy in its terminal form: it no longer needs anyone to believe it, only to speak it, because the permission to say the plain thing aloud – they want to take what is ours, and no signing ceremony will stop them – has been spent down to nothing. And Iran isn’t betting that America has been fooled; it’s betting that America’s leaders are obliged to act as though they had been, and that this will give them a margin to survive.

This bet pays the same dividend either way: the same purchased time, the same threatened second front.

That second front didn’t even need a shot. Even while we narrated the brisk progress of our imaginary negotiations, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard openly threatened to choke the Bab el-Mandeb – the lane its Houthi clients have strangled before – and to close the Strait of Hormuz a second time, not after the ceasefire collapsed but inside the window in which we were still calling it a ceasefire. That isn’t the conduct of a frustrated partner who needs better terms. It’s the conduct of an adversary who has correctly priced the measure at zero, because he’s watched us extend it every time he pockets it. It’s every single challenger to American power since Vietnam. It usually works – as it did in Beirut and in Mogadishu. What if they declared a ceasefire and only one side showed up?

Ask Ukraine about the truce that took effect in April – the one that was to be the beginning of the end. It’s been violated, by Ukraine’s own count, at least 469 times, the bulk of them drone strikes. That’s not just a lot of times, that’s a lot of hundreds of times. That’s not a truce; it’s a document one party signs as a tactic and the other signs as a prayer.

All too often a ceasefire is a loan extended against a deposit of good faith one side fervently believes the other side is holding for it. It wasn’t; it hardly ever is.

And is where the Fallacy of Abundance operates on the strategic level – the truly deadly level because it wears the mantle of restraint; of humanity; of hope.

Westerners are taught from an early age that, despite everything they see on the playground and everything their parents experience in the great wide world, the supply of good intention is effectively bottomless. Hostility is always a misunderstanding, every adversary is a partner who has yet to be offered the right terms, the architecture of peace sustains itself because surely, underneath everything, they want the same boring prosperous quiet we want. The only rule is the Golden Rule, we say. And, after all, didn’t our Founders warn us against an idle standing army? Isn’t being peaceable the idealized American way? Doesn’t Cincinnatus return to his plow after serving to repel rare and unwise aggression?

This series of essays began with the Castro letter, where the reserve at issue was the American–Israeli strategic architecture, and the fallacy was imagining you could pick at it during a hot war at no cost.

The strategic military version for a great power is the same error, almost always on a different plane. It’s obvious that we let the arsenal hollow out because we don’t expect to need it, but the real problem is that this expectation is premised on our refusal to believe in the enemy who will show us we do need it. Always? Unfortunately, close enough to always that we should treat it as always.

We have to overcome our illusions about the world without despairing of our own collective cultural goodness. Our goodness deserves that we do so.

Our enemies have never suffered from the Fallacy of Abundance. More than we do, they trust in us and our goodness. The fallacy is in our refusal to understand that we have enemies at all, and that we can afford to forget and re-learn the harsh truth forever.

The first two installments of this series argued that the Fallacy of Abundance applies to alliances and to cities. The fallacy is not confined to either. This week: the institutions most responsible for producing the people who run both. The news pegs are two: Yale’s April Report of the Committee on Trust in Higher Education, and a May open letter from the University of California’s mathematics and STEM faculty calling for the reinstatement of standardized testing. The surprise is not what either says. The surprise is that the institutions themselves are saying it.

Read Part 2: Out of Abundance

In April, the Committee on Trust in Higher Education at Yale University delivered a report to President Maurie McInnis. Its findings, which Yale itself commissioned, are unsparing. Nearly a third of Yale undergraduates are afraid to express their political beliefs on campus, up from 17 percent a decade earlier. Yale’s faculty across the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Law School, and the School of Management – the three faculties most responsible for shaping what an educated American knows and how an educated American processes ideas – register as Democrats over Republicans at a ratio of 36 to 1. Post-doctoral fellows and international scholars at Yale hesitate to speak publicly about their own research. President McInnis, to her credit, accepted the committee’s recommendations on April 15 without reservation.

The report identifies other concerns – grade inflation, bureaucratic bloat, rising tuition, what it euphemistically calls “controversial admissions practices” – but the headline finding is the one neither Yale nor other higher education brand leaders are willing to state in plain English: institutions of higher education do not reliably produce graduates who can think critically, write clearly, reason from evidence, debate opposing views, or exercise independent judgment. While Yale’s 1974 Woodward Report, which the new report explicitly invokes, took it for granted that intellectual freedom would produce intellectual capacity, the 2026 report admits, in the diplomatic language of institutional self-audit, that the well of intellectual capacity taken for granted a generation ago is running dry.

Grant the most favorable possible reading of how Yale got here. Grant that selecting for demographic representation in admissions, hiring, and curricular composition was meant to widen the pool of contributors to intellectual life – to remedy a historical narrowness that excluded talent the institution should have nurtured. Grant that diverse teams might, perhaps, in some situations, produce measurably better decision-making. Grant that institutions left to their own habits will reproduce inequities. For the sake of argument, grant that every motive for the trade made by Yale was sincere and every premise about the upside was defensible.

Even granting all of that, the trade was silently, but solidly, based on the premise that great American universities possessed such a deep reservoir of intellectual rigor – accumulated over five centuries of testing, refinement, curation and reinvestment – that they could spend two generations substituting demographic and ideological selection criteria for cognitive ones without consuming what made them universities.

The deposit that universities have drawn down is the stuff that makes an educated mind. A university – the genuine article, not the brand-equity coast it is increasingly mistaken for – is a centuries-old concept, based on a handful of hoary practices: reading texts written by people who did not share its students’ priors, steel-manning arguments students find objectionable, selecting from competing explanations on the strength of at least arguably empirical evidence rather than the comfort of conclusion, writing clear prose that expresses and then demonstrates a thesis, defending positions in dialogue with seasoned and scholarly adults.

The principal that accumulates over generations such practices does not replicate itself.

Yet the Fallacy of Abundance, applied to the university, mistakenly drives policy on the premise that this deposit is so deep that these practices, and the selection mechanisms they reinforce, can be substituted without appreciable cost to the quality the original mechanisms produced. Thus for two generations American universities have, in admissions, replaced selection on demonstrated aptitude for selection on demographic representation; in faculty hiring, they have switched out disciplinary mastery for selection on ideological alignment; in grading and curriculum, they have traded rigor for accommodation; in intellectual honesty, they have swapped a willingness to test conclusions against contrary evidence with dogma and sacred cows. Each substitution was made on the assumption that the next generation of intellectual capacity would be produced regardless because the institution was so robust, the standards so internalized, the practices so durable, that the underlying competence would replicate itself because that’s what smartness was supposed to do.

Smartness did not do the smart thing, however – or maybe it did. It is not dumb to choose advancement and flattery over challenge and rigor, unless any consideration is made for the long term. And therefore the competence has not replicated itself. Employers in law, journalism, and finance report that graduates of even the most selective American universities can’t read the literature their predecessors read in high school, can’t write prose that survives a single round of editing, can’t construct an argument that proceeds from evidence to conclusion rather than from conclusion to selectively-curated evidence, can’t tolerate disagreement without severe emotional upset.

This is not the perennial complaint that the kids are not all right. It is the finding of every longitudinal study of student writing, critical reasoning, and disciplinary knowledge that has tracked outcomes over the last two decades.

It is tempting to read the Yale Report as a story about the humanities and social sciences – disciplines where the substitutions could plausibly be defended on the theory that what was being lost was hard to measure anyway. That escape route was closed this month, however, when faculty in the University of California’s mathematics departments, joined by colleagues from across the STEM disciplines, published an open letter to the UC Regents calling for the reinstatement of the SAT/ACT mathematics requirement effective with the 2027 admissions cycle. The letter is unambiguous. “We now observe preparation gaps so severe,” the faculty write, “that instructors must reteach middle school mathematics” while simultaneously trying to deliver university coursework. Across the UC system, the number of entering students whose mathematics skills fall below high school level has increased nearly thirtyfold over five years. Seventy percent of those students fall below middle school level. And for three consecutive years, twenty to thirty percent of UC Berkeley first-semester calculus students have displayed severe preparation deficits on diagnostic testing. “Obscuring preparation gaps,” the UC letter concludes, “harms both students individually and the University collectively.” That is the Fallacy of Abundance restated by the people who watch its consequences arrive in their classrooms every September.

What makes the Yale Report and the UC letter distinctive, taken together, is not their diagnosis, which is by now a commonplace, but their source. Yale, long regarded by many as the institution that has perhaps benefited most from the unwarranted assumption that its name on a diploma certifies not only competence but a lot of it, has been forced by its own loss of public trust to convene a committee, fund the committee’s work, and publish its findings. UC, the system that eliminated the SAT requirement in 2020 over the objection of its own task force – a task force whose 2020 report predicted, with embarrassing precision, the outcomes the 2026 letter now documents – has had its STEM faculty publicly contradict the policy under which they have been forced to operate. The institutions are auditing themselves because it has reached the point where they just cannot fake it any more.

This is the Fallacy of Abundance in its most painful form: the depletion of an asset that took generations to accumulate, by people who believed they could spend it without consequence. The same logic applies to corporate America, where decades of substituting demographic and ideological selection for performance selection have produced the cycles of corporate DEI dismantling underway since 2024. It applies to the federal civil service, where loyalty hiring under successive administrations of both parties has produced the bureaucratic incoherence on display in every recent crisis. It applies to the journalistic, legal, and medical professions, where credentialing has come increasingly to substitute for demonstrated competence – and where the consumers of journalism, the clients of lawyers, and the patients of doctors have begun to notice. Indeed, one young law firm partner I know, who succeeded in grabbing the brass ring, walked away from annual seven-figure draws because of the DEI-infused hiring practices of his senior partners. “They’ve made their bundle,” he told me, “and they want to leave the firm’s future in the hands of people who simply can’t do the work at this level. I’m not hanging around for that.”

In every domain, the underlying assumption was the same: that the institution had accumulated enough capacity that its selection mechanism could be relaxed, redirected, or repurposed without consequence. The institution was so robust, the assumption ran, that its outputs would survive the substitution of its inputs. The assumption was wrong. The outputs have suffered. Graduates cannot think; engineers cannot engineer; lawyers cannot write; doctors cannot read EKGs the way their teachers could read EKGs. The institution is producing the marketplace credential without the underlying competence the credential was supposed to certify.

This is not a partisan diagnosis. The cycle of corporate DEI dismantling now underway is being executed by some of the same boards and CEOs who instituted the policies a decade ago. The university self-audits – Yale’s, but also the parallel reports from Harvard, MIT, and the University of Chicago – are being commissioned by presidents and provosts who themselves benefited from the substitutions they are now naming as costs. The conservative movement itself spent two decades treating the universities as too far gone to fix, abandoning them to whoever would have them, and is now surprised to discover that the people who took the abandoned institutions are running the country on the strength of a series of accumulated hollow “achievements.”

The fallacy is bipartisan because the assumption that the institutional reservoir was inexhaustible – that we could absorb it all because the well was so deep – was bipartisan.

Has the worm turned? On May 27 – six weeks after receiving the Committee’s report, three weeks after the UC faculty went public – Yale announced that it would once again require the SAT or ACT of every applicant, restoring the policy it abandoned in 2020. The dean who chaired the admissions review put the rationale in language that would have been unsayable on a selective campus eighteen months ago: standardized test scores, he said, are strong predictors of a student’s future academic performance after all. They help identify well-prepared candidates – especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds – after all. Which is to say: the external cognitive measure the institution discarded in the name of equity turns out to serve equity after all – and the institution has now said so in writing.

The reservoir cannot be refilled by a press release. But you cannot refill it at all until you have stopped draining it. One restored testing requirement does not reverse two generations of depletion, and it would be a mistake to read Yale’s reversal as a victory rather than as a first, partial accounting. The deeper substitutions – in faculty hiring, in grading, in what gets taught and what gets affirmed – remain in place, and the report that named them recommends only that each department spend the coming year counting what it has left.

This sounds good, if it happens, even though it is also an admission that the institution does not yet know how much remains, or whether what has been drawn down for two generations can be replenished at the speed a serious country requires. But a little bit of light can dispel a great deal of darkness, and Yale, at least, has lit more than a match: it has reached back for a tool it threw away and admitted, in writing, that throwing it away was a mistake made on the assumption that the institution was too rich to need it.

That assumption has a name. We have been living on it for a long time, in our alliances and our cities and now, by Yale’s own admission, at the well of scholarship, inquiry and knowledge from which Americans have desperately sought to have their children drink. What will be in the buckets they raise?

Last week’s piece on the Castro letter argued that the Fallacy of Abundance applies to alliances — that thirty members of Congress could only have demanded the dismantling of strategic ambiguity on the assumption that strategic ambiguity is inexhaustible. The fallacy is not confined to foreign policy. This week, the same premise turned inward, on the cities that have most fully tested it.

Read Part 1: Phony Reserves

A civilization runs, for a time, on the moral and material reserves accumulated by people who took for granted that they would have to be replenished. After enough time, those drawing on the reserves stop replenishing them, and forget that there were reserves at all. Until, suddenly, the cistern is dry.

New York City, always the experiment and never the control, has elected to demonstrate this generational truism in fast motion. It is going exactly as you would expect. In the past weeks, the mayor of New York City has declared a budget crisis of “historic magnitude” he proposes to close with a $12 billion state bailout Albany has already told him is not coming; allocated half a million dollars in the middle of it to fund “community conversations” on reparations; and, on Monday morning, called for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement because that’s exactly what he would do. And all the tenets of Mamdani-ism, such as it is, are based on the same premise: Abundance is forever; it is guaranteed; and it is there for the taking.

It is the same premise we saw a year earlier on the other side of the continent, when the hydrants in Pacific Palisades ran dry while the LAFD rolled out a strategic plan about belonging. When the wind came up, what burned was not a department’s HR policy. What burned was Pacific Palisades. It is the worldview at the heart of contemporary progressive governance and, indeed, all its notions about policy: that the accumulated wealth, competence, institutional capacity, and social cohesion enjoyed by advanced Western societies together constitute a reservoir so deep that we may safely deprioritize the practices that filled it. Standards, merit, sober assessment of risk, the willingness to call evil by its name — all of these can be relaxed, decorated with newer values, and seen as relics from a more anxious time. They do not merely believe that the reservoir is full enough to draw on freely; they do not recognize that it was ever even filled, much less how.

New York, LA, San Francisco and Portland voted for this because their progressive constituencies share a childlike faith in the Giving Tree. This outlook — a coalition of what Kurt Schlichter calls “trust fund Americans” and the aggrieved demanding their dues — is not blind: it sees that there is far more wealth in the world than there used to be. But it takes exactly the wrong inference from it. Yes, productivity has compounded; technology has produced surpluses our great-grandparents would have found magical. Literally no one needs to go hungry in the developed world. This happy development, however, confounds the Marxian labor theory of value at the core of what the callus-free hands of the Mamdani Kids clutch to their chests. Mamdanists do not pause to wonder where this bounty came from — what values, what mechanisms, what ways of life made it possible. Instead, they cling to a religious truism that those surpluses are a civilizational constant, a treasury of goodies so deep that not only the economic policies, but the social and cultural practices that made them, are dispensable.

They are not, of course. These values are how the surpluses got here, and they are what keeps them here. A city, a hospital, a fire department, a court system, a profession is, each of them, a deposit, not a gift of nature. It draws interest only as long as the principal is preserved.

In some of the smartest places in the world, it is not. What happened in Los Angeles in January 2025 happened in the wealthiest part of the wealthiest country in the world. What is now happening in New York City is happening in the wealthiest, most institutionally dense municipality on earth. If the fallacy can be tested in those two places and fail, as it is failing in cities only recently dripping in wealth such as Portland and San Francisco, it can fail anywhere.

Cities are perfect, if depressing, test tubes to watch this process play out, but the same dysfunction is endemic to the failure of innumerable other institutions. For example, the Federal Aviation Administration spent the better part of a decade replacing its skills-based hiring of air traffic controllers with a “biographical questionnaire” designed to engineer a particular demographic mix by screening out, before any cognitive test was administered, thousands of qualified CTI graduates whose answers fell on the wrong side of the targeting algorithm. Similarly, the country’s medical licensing examination, the cognitive test that for half a century sorted the qualified physicians from the unqualified, was quietly converted in 2022 to pass/fail on the official theory that taking it was producing too much stress in those whose jobs will, presently, involve the actual stresses of life and death. Universities, including those whose brand equity took centuries to build, have recklessly squandered it to produce a generation of students who cannot read the books their grandparents read in high school, while the institutions themselves coast on a prestige they no longer earn. The cities are simply the most visible because cities catch fire and bleed money in public. The other institutions are slower-moving and, officially at least, better paying for those running them into the ground. The logic is the same.

The reservoir from which we are drawing stores far more than money. It stores competence: the trained capacity of doctors to diagnose, of pilots to fly, of officers to police, of judges to judge — and of institutions to produce more such people. The Fallacy of Abundance is not another way of saying standards are falling, a complaint as old as every society and institution. It is the more specific claim that institutions have made datable trades — cognitive screening for biographical, technical proficiency for demographic mix, operational readiness for institutional belonging — on the assumption that the trades can be made without cost.

But the trades have costs. The fallacy is the assumption that they don’t. The consumption shows up not in the ledger but in the morgue, the courtroom, the cockpit, the operating theater, the crack house.

Edmund Burke called society a partnership “between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” He meant something specific by it: that the living do not own the institutional inheritance. They steward it. They draw what they need and they put back what they used. To consume the inheritance while persuading oneself that no inheritance was ever required — that one’s own moral preferences are sufficient to keep the lights on — is not a policy choice. It is a metaphysical mistake, symbolized powerfully by the obsession with pulling down statues, defacing cultural legacies and stripping buildings and institutions of once-revered dedications.

This categorical error is not the property of one party. The conservative movement spent the post-Cold War decades assuming that American military and economic primacy were the natural state of things and could be preserved by inertia. They could not. Neither could fundamental guardrails on our culture, institutions and moral standards. But the loudest, most theoretical, and most institutionally embedded version of the fallacy lives on the left, because the left’s policy ambitions are the most expensive, the most abstract, and the most dependent on the proposition that the existing order is already too rich to break. The case for free buses and city-run groceries in the middle of a Great-Recession-grade fiscal emergency is not a case that can be made under any premise other than infinity.

The cost of being wrong about that is borne, as always, mostly by the people without escape valves. The wealthy New Yorker who, in an unfortunate moment of white shoe meeting pavement, encounters uncollected trash will not forget it as his waiting car conducts him away. The wealthy Angeleno who watched the hydrants run dry has a place in Aspen. But the schoolteacher in Inwood, the pharmacist in Bayside, the small landlord in the East Bronx whose tenants need a building that works — they pay the bill when the institutions stop performing. The architects of the experiment are insulated from its outcomes with little exception, while celebrating the moral courage displayed by handing the thirsty masses the keys to a waterworks with nothing but bilge left to pump.

The bill is now arriving. It will keep arriving, in monthly installments, in Los Angeles and New York and probably Chicago and probably Philadelphia and possibly cities not yet on the list — and in places that are not cities at all: hospital wards and university lecture halls, recruiting offices and the airspace above our airports. There is nothing in the arithmetic that says we cannot pay it. There is also nothing in the arithmetic that says we will. What there is, is the prior question, the one that has to be answered before anything else can be: whether we are willing to admit that we ever owed anything in the first place — or whether we continue writing blank checks against the principal because we have convinced ourselves there is no principal to draw on.

On May 4—ten weeks into the active U.S.–Israeli war with Iran, as American pilots were conducting joint operations over Iranian territory, American servicemembers deployed across the theater, and the Israeli nuclear facility at Dimona under live missile attack—30 Democratic members of the United States House of Representatives decided the time was right to write to Secretary of State Marco Rubio demanding the public disclosure of Israel’s classified nuclear arsenal.

The letter, an initiative led by Representatives Joaquin Castro of Texas and Sara Jacobs of California, asks eleven specific questions. Among these are a demand to the U.S. government for disclosure by the State of Israel of warhead counts; for delivery systems; for fissile material production at Dimona. It demands the red lines Israel may have communicated to the United States regarding the conditions under which it would deploy a nuclear weapon. Castro announced the letter on X with three words: “The ambiguity ends now.” The co-signers range from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib on one flank to James McGovern of Massachusetts and Donald Beyer of Virginia on the other.

Let’s grant the signatories the most favorable possible reading of their motives. Assume they want Israel to be safe or at least are not antagonistic toward Israel’s safety. Grant that they want the American soldiers, sailors and airmen serving in the Persian Gulf to be safe. Accept their stated concern (congressional oversight of nuclear escalation risk during active hostilities) is a sincere expression of constitutional duty rather than a vehicle for something else they would prefer not to say out loud.

Even putting all context we know aside and stipulating all of that, Castro and company’s letter is impossible to defend under any premise except one: that the strategic architecture it picks at is so durable, so deep, so inexhaustibly fed by goodwill and tradition and habit, that thirty members of the world’s most consequential legislative body can publicly demand the dismantling of that architecture’s central doctrine—during an active war fought alongside the ally whose security depends on it—without imposing any cost on the capacity of that architecture to support the structure built on it.

The architecture here is not an accident, the result of a lack of American resolve or a failure of Israeli candor in dealing with its primary ally. It is, again, architecture: Something created by design—specifically, the doctrine of strategic ambiguity. It is an on-purpose thing that, in the U.S.–Israel context, dates back to a September 1969 once-secret agreement between Richard Nixon and Golda Meir that provided the United States would neither confirm nor deny what it knew about Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons. Israel, in parallel, has neither confirmed nor denied its own arsenal. Every American president since Nixon, across both parties, has maintained this posture. It is one of the most successful nonproliferation arrangements in modern history. It is also one of the most deliberate.

The arrangement works precisely because, to the rest of the world, it is opaque. The absence of public confirmation is, itself, the deterrent—every Iranian, every Saudi, every Pakistani planner has had to operate against an Israel whose arsenal is universally suspected and officially undeclared, without any guidelines regarding doctrine, red lines, or thresholds for use. The opacity is the deterrent. Planners cannot calibrate against unknowns. The parallel silence from Washington keeps that opacity diplomatically intact, preventing the open Israeli declarations that would, in turn, license open Iranian and Saudi ones. That is what makes it a nonproliferation agreement, notwithstanding that by design it was intended to prevent proliferation … by non-parties.

That darkness is the strategic asset. It kept the Middle East from a nuclear arms race domino for sixty years and it kept American military personnel from operating in a theater where military capability is a thing that players have routinely possessed, brandished, and all too often, deployed.

What Castro’s May 4 letter proposes is to turn the lights on. Not because anything will be learned that Iran does not already suspect; Iran has had its planners working from the same Federation of American Scientists estimates for thirty years. No, the illumination Castro’s crew seeks is meant to enlighten an antagonistic American audience and an eager United Nations.

And the asset Castro seeks to draw down is not information. Rather, the asset is doctrine—a reservoir of willingness, accrued over generations, from which every successive American administration is able to draw, maintaining strategic silence on behalf of an ally during a conflict that ally is fighting for its survival. As long as this reserve is in place, there is a very good chance that no one gets hurt, at least with a nuclear weapon.

The Castro Correspondence, like so much of left-wing policy, is premised on a fallacy of abundance. As applied to alliances, the premise—again, giving its proponents every benefit of the doubt as to intentions—is that the alliance architecture is so durable it can be picked at, criticized, partly dismantled, and undermined during a hot war without any consequences for the architecture itself.

And that premise is wrong, because the architecture is not an inheritance. It is a deposit. And it draws interest only as long as the principal is maintained, and what the letter proposes is to maintain the principal less.

The Middle East is where the false assumption of bottomless reserve shows itself most clearly—not in the policies but in the premises behind them. “Anti-war” voices, typified of course by the Obama-Biden school but including many on the right as well, urge policymakers to indulge Iran—extend every benefit of doubt about its program, treat its enrichment as a sovereign right, demand sanctions relief and the resumption of diplomacy—on the assumption that there is such an abundance of American power and goodwill that no risk attaches to any of it.

This is not playing with house money. This is playing with the lives of millions of people. And this threat is no longer hypothetical. Iranian missiles have landed not only across Israel but on Abu Dhabi and Dubai—including over the past two days, while the Castro letter was being drafted and signed. Thousands of American military personnel are within the blast radius of the nuclear weapon Iran does not have—and in the middle of this, thirty members of the United States Congress have written to the Secretary of State asking him to publicly disclose how many warheads our ally has on its submarines.

Motives really are beside the point because what the letter exposes is structural. It could not have been written by anyone who understood that the well of strategic ambiguity is finite, or that the American commitment to Israel’s nuclear opacity is so deep that no political grandstanding could drain it.

The fallacy of abundance is not confined to Israel. It is the controlling premise of the post-Cold War American foreign policy mindset, in which American primacy and American alliance commitments are treated as renewable resources rather than as accumulated deposits requiring maintenance. We cyclically hollow out the military, festoon it with rainbow decals and DEI, and assume the deterrent holds. We elect unserious leaders and assume the system runs itself. Isn’t there more of the good stuff where that came from?

History and the world around us teach us that reserves do run out. Start drawing on principal and you not only fail to accrue interest, you lose everything. The architecture of strategic ambiguity stands on the bedrock of accumulated commitment; there is no such thing as temporarily yanking out a pylon. Every Pakistani planner reading the Castro letter is now reading it as an indication of what the American Congress is willing to demand of allies in wartime. So is every Saudi planner. So is every Iranian planner. So is every American pilot, sailor and grunt currently rotated out of theater wondering whether the doctrine they were briefed under will survive their next deployment.

But things that matter have always mattered and they will continue to matter. Safety. Competence. Merit. Caution. The acknowledgment of evil where you see it, where you encounter it, and a readiness to confront it.

We are out of phony abundance, and we always were.