Donald Trump did not create the crisis that transformed the American right. He exposed it. He broke through institutions that had become insulated from the people they supposedly served, shattered political assumptions that had hardened into dogma, and gave millions of Americans a way to express grievances the political class had spent decades refusing to hear. He demonstrated that the old Republican coalition was no longer capable of speaking for much of its own electorate, and that the institutions claiming to protect democracy had become remarkably hostile to democratic accountability whenever voters threatened their power.

A political movement cannot govern indefinitely through disruption. A wrecking ball can clear a condemned structure, but it cannot become the foundation of the building that replaces it. Eventually, a movement must decide how it will govern when in power.

That is the task now before the American right.

The Republican establishment that existed before Trump cannot be restored. It defended free markets while tolerating corporate capture, praised limited government while allowing the administrative state to expand, and spoke reverently of the Constitution while accepting the steady transfer of legislative authority from Congress to executive agencies, courts, international organizations, and private institutions working in concert with government. It also celebrated globalization without adequately considering national resilience, social cohesion, industrial capacity, or the interests of the citizens whose country it governed.

Permanent populism is not an adequate replacement. Populism is a warning system. It is exceptionally good at identifying betrayal. It is less reliable as a philosophy of government because popular anger, like elite arrogance, can become unconstrained.

A reborn conservative movement must therefore be constitutionalist without becoming antiquarian. It must be populist enough to hear ordinary citizens but principled enough to resist mob politics. It must be pro-market without defending corporate capture, national without becoming tribal, morally serious without attempting to enforce every virtue through government, and technologically capable without surrendering human freedom to technological systems. It must be institutionally constructive without defending institutions that have abandoned their purposes.

Most importantly, it must understand that society and government are not the same thing.

This distinction has been lost across the political spectrum. The progressive left increasingly treats every social problem as evidence that government lacks sufficient authority, funding, or administrative reach. Parts of the populist right have begun responding with an inverted version of the same impulse, arguing that government should use centralized power to impose conservative outcomes. Both approaches confuse political control with social health.

Government has an important but limited role in shaping the conditions under which a healthy society can flourish. It can punish crime, protect marriage as an institution, defend religious liberty, prevent public censorship, preserve educational freedom, and maintain competitive markets. What it cannot do is supply the virtues those institutions depend upon. Fidelity, faith, honesty, parental responsibility, wisdom, diligence, and honorable conduct have to come from individuals, families, communities, and culture.

A conservative platform must therefore begin outside government. The first responsibility belongs to individuals, families, churches, communities, educators, businesses, and civic institutions. Only after establishing what society must do for itself can we properly define what government should do.

That sequence is not rhetorical. It is the architecture of liberty.

I. Non-Government Conservative Solutions to Societal Problems

1. Restore Human Agency and Responsibility

A free society must begin with the assumption that human beings possess agency. People are influenced by their circumstances, formed by their cultures, helped or hindered by institutions, and subjected to forces they do not control. They are not, however, products of those forces.

The denial of agency is one of the most destructive ideas in modern political life. It appears compassionate because it relieves people of blame, but it also strips them of power. A person who is told that his failures are entirely the product of systems, identities, traumas, economic classes, or historical forces is also being told that he has little ability to change his condition. He may be offered sympathy, political recognition, or material assistance, but he is denied authorship over his own life.

Conservatives must reject both cruelty and fatalism. It is cruel to pretend that everyone begins from the same position or faces the same burdens. It is fatalistic to treat disadvantage as destiny. The proper response to unequal circumstances is not to deny human agency but to strengthen it.

That begins with the language we use. A conservative movement should speak to people as capable adults rather than permanent victims. It should recognize injustice without constructing identities around grievance, and it should offer help without making helplessness a prerequisite for receiving it. It should tell people that the obstacles before them may be real, unfair, and difficult, but that their choices still matter.

This principle must be practiced before it can be legislated. Individuals must accept responsibility for their conduct, their habits, their families, and their communities.

Freedom means the right to make choices, but it also means bearing the consequences of those choices. A culture that celebrates autonomy while rejecting responsibility eventually demands that someone else absorb the cost of every mistake.

Personal responsibility does not require radical individualism. Human beings depend on one another, and a healthy society creates networks of obligation, support, instruction, and forgiveness. The point is not that every person must succeed alone. The point is that assistance should restore a person’s capacity to act rather than replace it.

Conservative institutions should judge their work by whether or not they increase agency.

The same standard should apply across civil society. Mentoring should leave people more capable of directing their own lives, addiction ministries should pursue recovery rather than permanent management, and charities should judge success by restored independence rather than continued enrollment. Schools should prepare students to reason, work, and participate in self-government, while churches should form people who understand that grace and obligation belong together.

The restoration of agency is the foundation beneath every other non-government solution. Families cannot thrive without responsible adults, and markets cannot function without trustworthy participants. Constitutional government cannot survive without citizens capable of self-restraint, and a nation of people who no longer believe they are responsible for themselves will inevitably be governed by tyrants.

2.Recover the Moral Architecture of Liberty

Liberty cannot survive on procedure. A constitution can divide power, courts can enforce rights, and elections can transfer authority peacefully, but none of those institutions can substitute indefinitely for a people capable of governing themselves.

A free society requires more than political rules. It requires a moral architecture.

That architecture begins with the belief that human beings possess inherent dignity independent of government, that right and wrong exist outside political power, that individuals possess moral agency, and that freedom carries responsibility. It assumes that human beings are imperfect, which is why power must be restrained, but also redeemable, which is why people cannot be permanently reduced to their worst act, their ancestry, their economic class, or the sins of a group to which they belong.

These principles do not require every American to share the same theology. They do require enough agreement about human value, truth, responsibility, honesty, justice, mercy, and the limits of coercion to make a free society possible.

The Judeo-Christian tradition supplied much of that framework to the West. Greek reason and natural law helped refine it, and the Enlightenment translated much of it into political principles. The resulting civilization placed the individual above the state while placing moral law above both.

If the state stands above morality, whatever the state commands eventually becomes moral. If the individual stands above morality, liberty becomes license and society breaks down. In either case, self-government becomes impossible.

The conservative answer is not to give government the power to enforce a national theology. That would contradict the principles we are trying to preserve. Moral formation therefore belongs primarily to families, churches, communities, schools, friendships, and conscience.

Those institutions must again teach that honesty matters even when lying is advantageous, that fidelity matters when infidelity is tempting, that duty does not disappear when it becomes inconvenient, and that freedom does not mean freedom from consequence. They must teach that justice applies to individuals rather than racial, religious, sexual, or economic classes, and that forgiveness remains possible because people are more than the worst thing they have ever done.

A society must have enough shared moral ground that strangers can trust one another, disagreements can remain peaceful, laws can be viewed as legitimate, contracts can be honored without constant supervision, and political opponents can remain fellow citizens.

When that moral consensus disappears, the state has to replace trust with procedure and conscience with enforcement. Rules multiply as informal restraint disappears. Bureaucracies grow when families and communities weaken, and surveillance becomes attractive once nobody trusts anyone else.

Eventually we get a society built on compliance rather than virtue.

I would much rather have a nation built on virtue.

The purpose of liberty has never been to free human beings from moral responsibility. It is to leave them free to exercise it.

3. Rebuild the Family as the Primary Social Institution

The individual is the basic moral unit of a free society, but the individual is not its basic social unit. That role belongs to the family.

The family is where human beings first encounter authority, obligation, sacrifice, forgiveness, trust, and love. It teaches children that they possess rights, but also that other people possess them too. Family teaches that actions have consequences, that promises matter, and that membership in a community creates duties that cannot be reduced to immediate self-interest.

No government program can reproduce the daily moral formation of a stable family. A caseworker cannot replace a father any more than a public benefit cannot replace a mother. A school cannot fully compensate for a home without stability, discipline, affection, or expectation. Government may intervene when families become abusive or dangerous, but even necessary intervention is an emergency substitute for something that has already broken.

Conservatives have often spoken of family values as though stating support for them were enough. It is not. A movement that claims the family is foundational must organize its social behavior around that belief.

Men must be taught that fatherhood is not an optional accessory to sexual freedom. Women must be supported in motherhood without being told that care, sacrifice, and family formation represent failures of ambition. Marriage must again be treated as a serious covenant rather than a temporary arrangement of convenience, and children should be understood as members of families who require formation, protection, and guidance.

This cannot be achieved through legislation. It requires churches that prepare people for marriage before officiating weddings, and it requires older couples willing to mentor younger ones. It requires fathers who bring other fathers into networks of responsibility, and employers who understand that stable families create stable workers and communities. It requires relatives who remain present when families experience illness, financial hardship, disability, addiction, or loss.

A family-centered conservatism should also recover intergenerational responsibility. Parents owe duties to children, adult children owe duties to aging parents, and each generation inherits obligations from those that came before it. The alternative is a society in which every natural obligation is gradually transferred to an institution.

The stronger the family becomes, the less government must attempt to become a substitute. That does not mean every family will be healthy, intact, or self-sufficient. It means public policy should be designed around the recognition that government cannot improve society by making family formation more difficult, or parental authority less meaningful.

The rebirth of the family begins through example. Conservatives must live as though marriage matters, children matter, fidelity matters, and obligations endure even when they become inconvenient. Culture is transmitted most powerfully by what people repeatedly do.

4. Rebuild the Institutions Between the Individual and the State

A free society is not composed of isolated individuals standing before a national government. Between them lie churches, charities, neighborhood groups, professional associations, unions, clubs, fraternal orders, schools, volunteer organizations, local businesses, extended families, and countless informal networks of cooperation.

These institutions allow people to solve common problems without transforming every disagreement into a national political conflict. They give individuals places to belong, responsibilities to fulfill, and opportunities to lead. They create trust by bringing people into repeated contact with one another. They also distribute authority, knowledge, and problem-solving capacity throughout society.

The decline of civil society creates a vacuum that government is eager to fill. When communities no longer care for their own members, distant institutions take over. A conservative renewal must therefore be an institutional renewal.

Churches should recover their role as centers of service, instruction, mutual aid, and community formation. Charities should focus on relationships and outcomes rather than grant acquisition and program growth. Business organizations should mentor entrepreneurs and connect young people to trades. Retirees should be brought into schools, civic groups, and mentorship programs rather than treated as though their useful lives have ended, and veterans should be recognized as reservoirs of leadership and public service.

Civil society should address problems at the scale where relationships remain possible. Addiction recovery, homelessness, youth mentorship, reentry after incarceration, care for the elderly, support for young mothers, and assistance to families facing temporary hardship are all strengthened when the people providing help know those receiving it. Local knowledge reveals distinctions that centralized programs cannot see. It can distinguish a person experiencing a temporary crisis from one trapped in addiction, an individual seeking work from one avoiding it, and a family needing short-term assistance from one requiring sustained intervention.

Non-government institutions must also guard their independence. When charities, universities, professional associations, and religious organizations become financially dependent on government, they can gradually become extensions of government. A nominally private institution that depends on public money and implements public priorities is not fully part of civil society. It is part of the administrative system.

Conservatives should build institutions that can survive without ideological permission from government, major corporations, or centralized philanthropic networks. That requires donors willing to fund durable organizations rather than temporary campaigns.

Political victories are temporary. Institutions endure. The left understood this long ago. A conservative movement that wins elections but fails to rebuild civil society will repeatedly inherit a government surrounded by institutions committed to defeating it.

5. Reclaim Education as Formation Rather Than Credentialing

Education is not primarily the transfer of information. It is the formation of people capable of understanding reality, exercising judgment, participating in a civilization, and governing themselves.

A society that does not know its own history cannot preserve what it inherited. A citizen who cannot understand an argument cannot evaluate political claims, and a voter who cannot distinguish correlation from causation, price from value, or evidence from assertion is easily manipulated. An employee who possesses credentials without useful knowledge has been cheated, even when the credential was expensive.

Parents must reclaim responsibility for education whether their children attend public schools, private schools, religious schools, charter schools, or are educated at home. Sending a child to school does not transfer the moral responsibility for that child’s formation. Parents should know what their children are learning, what books they are reading, how they are being evaluated, and what assumptions are being presented as unquestionable truths.

Conservatives should expand homeschool networks, tutoring cooperatives, private scholarship funds, classical academies, vocational programs, and apprenticeships. Businesses should partner directly with schools and civic organizations to teach useful skills. Tradesmen should take apprentices, and retired professionals should teach.

Education must also recover civic formation. Students should understand the Constitution, federalism, the separation of powers, natural rights, the history of slavery and abolition, the development of religious liberty, and the long struggle to apply equality before the law consistently. They should learn that the American inheritance contains failures and contradictions, but also contains the principles through which those failures could be addressed. Ours was never formed as a perfect union and perfection is unattainable, which is why our Constitution promises only a “more perfect union.”

Children who study only the faults of society don’t make it “more perfect” as adults. They burn it down.

Civic education should not become conservative indoctrination though. Students should be taught how to examine claims, compare evidence, recognize incentives, and identify assumptions. A confident civilization does not require history to be sanitized. It requires history to be taught accurately, without political axes to grind.

Economic education is equally important. Students should understand that wealth must be created before it can be distributed, that prices communicate information, that inflation destroys purchasing power, that debt transfers obligations into the future, and that incentives influence behavior even when policymakers have benevolent intentions. These are not partisan doctrines. They are necessary tools for understanding the systems in which citizens live.

The same principle applies to higher education. Families should stop treating a university degree as the only respectable path into adulthood. Employers should reconsider degree requirements that have little relationship to job performance, and students should compare the expected value of a credential with its cost.

Education will improve when families and communities stop behaving as captive consumers.

6. Restore Work, Production, and Stewardship

An economy exists to create value. It allows people to cooperate, specialize, exchange, innovate, produce, and improve their material conditions. Profit is not the purpose of society, but in a functioning market it is a signal that an organization has created something other people value at a cost they are willing to bear.

The answer is to rebuild a culture of production and stewardship.

Businesses should measure success over years rather than reporting cycles, and executives should understand themselves as stewards of institutions that include workers, customers, investors, suppliers, and communities. That does not mean every firm must pursue a politically defined collection of social goals. It only means leadership should create durable value rather than doing things that make a short-term profit at the expense of long-term viability.

Companies should invest in workers, apprenticeships, process improvement, resilience, and productive capacity. They should shorten the distance between decision-makers and the consequences of their decisions. Leaders who never encounter customers, production floors, local managers, or failed processes eventually begin managing abstractions.

Workers also bear responsibilities. A productive economy requires reliability, discipline, adaptability, and a willingness to learn. Conservatives should resist political narratives that treat workers as interchangeable inputs or permanent victims, but they should also resist romanticizing workers in ways that deny individual responsibility. Employers can behave badly, institutions can become exploitative, and workers can fail too. A healthy market requires accountability in every direction.

Consumers possess more power than they often realize. Every purchase rewards a producer, a supply chain, and a set of practices. Consumers should ask whether businesses deliver value, tell the truth, and accept responsibility for failure. They should be willing to support local firms, emerging competitors, and companies that resist political coercion even when doing so requires modest sacrifice.

Entrepreneurship must again become a form of civic renewal. Small businesses build local knowledge, distribute economic authority, train workers, create community leaders, and provide alternatives to national institutions. Conservative business networks should help entrepreneurs.

A pro-market movement should not be a movement that automatically defends every corporation. It should defend the process through which people create value, compete honestly, and bear the consequences of their decisions.

7. Rebuild Institutions Committed to Truth

A civilization cannot function without institutions capable of discovering, testing, and communicating truth. Journalism, science, education, law, and technology all depend on public trust that cannot be demanded. Trust must be earned.

The collapse of trust in media and expert institutions did not occur because ordinary people suddenly became hostile to knowledge. It occurred because too many institutions confused authority with credibility. They concealed uncertainty, suppressed disagreement, selected facts according to political usefulness, while treating criticism as evidence of ignorance or malice.

Conservatives should not respond by creating a mirror image of the institutions they oppose. Propaganda does not become truth when it supports the correct political positions. A conservative news organization that misleads its audience damages the same information system as a progressive organization that does so, and an institution cannot restore trust while rewarding whatever confirms the preferences of its consumers.

Independent media should distinguish reporting from commentary, disclose conflicts, link to primary evidence, correct errors conspicuously, and acknowledge uncertainty. Readers and listeners should reward institutions that challenge them rather than reassure them, and conservative audiences must stop treating emotional satisfaction as proof of accuracy.

Scientists and physicians should rebuild professional cultures in which disagreement is expected rather than punished. Data should be available whenever privacy and legitimate security concerns permit. Methods should be transparent and findings should be reproducible. Experts should distinguish clearly between what evidence demonstrates, what they infer from it, and what policies they prefer.

Conservatives should also stop treating the institutions arrayed against open discourse as though they form a perfectly unified ideological bloc. They do not. Their interests frequently conflict. Environmental organizations, authoritarian governments, multinational corporations, religious states, supranational regulators, and activist NGOs cooperate where their incentives align, but they disagree profoundly. Those contradictions should be exposed. Institutions claiming universal moral authority should be forced to apply their principles to their own allies as a system dependent upon coordinated conformity becomes less durable once its participants are forced to choose between incompatible commitments.

The solution to institutional failure is not the abolition of expertise. It is the restoration of humility, transparency, competition, and correction.

8. Build a New Intellectual Commons

We should not assume that existing institutions will reform themselves. They won’t unless forced to do so by market forces.

Universities, professional organizations, journals, media institutions, and credentialing bodies once developed because society needed mechanisms for transmitting knowledge, testing ideas, and identifying expertise. The institutions were not the source of knowledge, though.

The next intellectual class will emerge primarily from outside many of the institutions that claim intellectual authority. Its members will be people whose ideas remain accountable to reality: physicians whose treatments have to work, engineers and manufacturers whose designs must function, scientists whose findings must be reproducible, and tradesmen whose competence can be seen in what they build. Scholars can be part of this class as well, but only if they are willing to subject their arguments to the same kind of scrutiny and correction.

Reality still punishes such people when they are wrong, and conservatives should build new institutions around them.

Peer review can move into the open, allowing methods, evidence, assumptions, and criticism to be examined directly rather than filtered through institutional prestige. Independent journals and standards bodies can compete on rigor, while fellowships and other forms of support can give serious thinkers room to work without forcing them through ideological gatekeepers. Cross-disciplinary forums can reconnect fields that have become too isolated from one another, and apprenticeships can tie intellectual development back to production, practice, and demonstrable competence.

None of this requires abolishing universities. If universities return to their purpose, they can participate as well. Competition may even help restore them.

But some will fail, and they must be allowed to do so.

Credentials are useful signals only when the institutions issuing them remain competent. Once credentials primarily signal ideological or bureaucratic conformity, society must develop better credentials.

This principle applies to journalism, medicine, science, law, economics, and public policy. Expertise deserves respect only when it demonstrates expertise. It does not deserve deference simply because an organization has declared itself authoritative.

A distributed intellectual commons would make intellectual authority competitive again. Bad arguments could be challenged without permission. Failed predictions could be remembered. Successful methods could spread. New institutions could emerge around people who consistently demonstrate competence, while failed institutions would no longer be protected from competition by reputation alone.

Truth is not the property of institutions.

Liberty of mind precedes permission from gatekeepers, and a free people do not need permission to think.

9. Renew Citizenship and Assimilation

A nation is more than a government operating within a border. It is a people joined by history, institutions, obligations, habits, and a shared understanding of political membership.

American citizenship has never rested entirely on ancestry. It rests on allegiance to a constitutional order. That makes assimilation possible, but it does not make assimilation automatic. Newcomers should be welcomed into the nation as future Americans rather than maintained as permanent representatives of separate populations.

Assimilation also creates obligations for native-born Americans. A society cannot ask newcomers to join a culture its existing citizens refuse to understand, defend, or transmit. Millions of Americans born inside the country know little about it. They possess citizenship as a legal status but have not been formed in citizenship as a practice.

Churches, schools, community groups, employers, veterans’ organizations, and local governments should create pathways into American life, and immigrants should encounter neighbors willing to explain customs and expectations. Communities should celebrate naturalization, encourage civic participation, and make it clear that national belonging is real.

A healthy national identity is neither globalist nor tribal. Globalism treats the nation as an administrative unit whose people may be rearranged according to economic convenience. Tribal nationalism treats citizenship as the political expression of ancestry. American conservatism must reject both.

The nation exists to protect a particular constitutional civilization and the people joined within it. Citizenship carries both benefits and obligations. It is not an ethnic inheritance, a consumer product, or a temporary permit to occupy territory.

10. Build a Movement That Produces Statesmen

Political systems respond to incentives just as economic systems do. When voters reward theatrical aggression, candidates will become theatrical. When donors reward access, politicians will sell it, and when media reward outrage, public figures will remain outraged.

When parties measure success only through election results, they will pursue whatever produces votes in the next cycle, even when it damages the country over the next generation.

A conservative renewal requires a different standard of political leadership.

Conservative voters should judge candidates by more than ideology. They should ask whether a candidate understands the office being sought, whether he can explain the purpose of the institutions he proposes to reform, whether he has managed anything successfully, whether he can distinguish allies from followers, and whether he accepts limits on his own authority.

Parties should recruit leaders from local government, the military, business, education, churches, and civic organizations. Candidates should be developed before they become national personalities, and governing competence should be considered a conservative virtue.

Let the incompetent run on the political left.

Donors and media organizations should stop rewarding candidates whose only ability is attracting attention. Attention can be useful, particularly when entrenched institutions must be challenged, but it is not a substitute for judgment. A movement composed entirely of provocateurs will eventually provoke itself into irrelevance.

This also requires clear boundaries. A reborn conservative movement must reject cults of personality, permanent emergency politics, right-wing centralization, ancestry-based nationalism, the suppression of lawful speech, corporatism, politicized law enforcement, state-enforced virtue, and mob rule. These are nothing more than progressive methods attached to different priorities.

A conservative movement must also refuse to govern through permanent fear.

Frightened people accept powers they would reject under normal circumstances. They tolerate censorship, emergency authority, selective enforcement, executive shortcuts, and violations of ordinary restraints because they have been convinced that normal rules cannot survive the emergency. Once politics enters that state, every election becomes the most important election in history and every opponent becomes an existential threat.

The left has repeatedly fallen into this trap. The right cannot answer it by building an inverted version of the same thing.

Conservatives cannot oppose the abuse of power only when that power is directed against them. Censorship, lawfare, weaponized agencies, and political violence do not become legitimate when their targets change. A movement that condemns those methods while out of power and adopts them once in power has not restored constitutional government. It has only changed who controls the machine.

A conservative government must dismantle politicized power rather than inheriting it.

That requires calm leadership even when politics becomes heated. Emergencies should be treated as temporary departures from normal government, not opportunities to redefine it. Political opponents remain fellow citizens, and disagreement cannot be converted into disloyalty. Criminal law should judge conduct rather than political identity, with justice applied to individuals rather than groups.

The point of winning power is to restore normal government, not to make emergency government permanent under new management.

Trump proved that the old order could be broken. The next generation must prove that something better can be built.

II. A Political Platform for a Reborn Conservative Movement

A conservative government must protect natural rights, preserve public order, defend the nation, enforce contracts, administer equal justice, and provide essential public goods that cannot be supplied effectively through voluntary action, and it must do these things competently.

Limited government does not mean weak government.

The platform that follows is not a rigid catalogue from which no conservative may dissent. First principles are not the same as policy preferences. Conservatives may agree on the proper purpose of an institution while disagreeing about the best mechanism for achieving it. They may reach different empirical judgments about tax rates, benefit structures, trade restrictions, or regulatory design. A governing philosophy should establish the architecture within which those disagreements occur, and it should identify the ends government may legitimately pursue, the means it must reject, and the tests by which its actions should be evaluated.

A conservative government should not begin by asking how much it can do. It should ask what it must do, what it is constitutionally authorized to do, and how it can accomplish those duties without consuming the institutions it exists to protect.

1. Protect Natural Rights and Equal Citizenship

The first obligation of government is not to give people rights. It is to protect rights people already possess.

Natural rights exist prior to government and therefore limit what government may legitimately do. Freedom of speech, conscience, religion, peaceful assembly and association, property, contract, self-defense, and the rights retained by the people under the Ninth Amendment are not favors granted by Congress, courts, presidents, or popular majorities. Government does not own them and therefore cannot distribute them according to political preference.

These rights belong to individuals.

That principle requires equality before the law. Government cannot divide citizens into moral castes according to race, sex, ancestry, religion, economic class, political affiliation, or some bureaucratically defined position within a hierarchy of oppression.

Past injustice does not create hereditary guilt. Neither does membership in a historically disadvantaged group establish an individual entitlement to compensation from people who committed no wrong.

Where actual harm can be demonstrated, justice should be specific. A person who was wrongfully injured should be able to identify the responsible party, demonstrate the injury, and pursue compensation through the legal system. Civil court exists specifically for this.

Government reparations based on ancestry, racial preferences, collective punishment, and systems that assign benefits or burdens according to group identity violate the 14th Amendment, detaching responsibility from conduct and transforming equality before the law into political accounting between demographic categories.

The same rule applies when government invents new positive rights that can exist only by compelling another person to provide them. A right to speak requires government to leave you free to speak. A supposed right to someone else’s labor or property requires the government to compel another person to provide it.

Government may choose, through legitimate democratic processes and within constitutional limits, to establish safety nets or public services. Those programs should be defended as policies rather than converted rhetorically into natural rights. Calling a government benefit a right does not remove its cost or the obligation to determine who must provide it.

Equal citizenship means one law, applied to individuals according to their actions. A reborn conservative movement should defend that principle without exception, including when abandoning it would temporarily benefit conservatives.

2. Restore Constitutional Government and Federalism

The first commitment of a conservative government must be to restore our constitutional structure.

The constitutional separation of powers depends on keeping each branch within its proper role. Congress makes the law, the president executes it and remains accountable for the executive branch, and the courts interpret it. Administrative agencies should not be allowed to collapse those functions into a single institution that writes rules, enforces them, and then judges alleged violations with only indirect accountability to voters.

We also have to reject the ‘living document interpretation’ of the Constitution, and a written Constitution can restrain government only if its words have meaning. The Constitution says what it says, based upon the definitions of words as understood when it was written. It does not say what unelected judges think it should say at any given moment in time. The ‘living document’ view makes the Supreme Court become a legislature of last resort, and that is not the role of the court.

Constitutional change is sometimes necessary. The Founders knew that and created the amendment process accordingly.

The Commerce Clause should govern commerce among the states rather than serve as a general authorization to regulate every human activity that might have some eventual economic effect. The Necessary and Proper Clause should permit Congress to choose reasonable means of exercising powers actually granted to it, not to create new powers federal officials consider useful.

Stability in law matters, but precedent cannot permanently convert an unconstitutional power into a constitutional one simply through age.

The modern tendency to transfer difficult decisions away from elected representatives must be reversed. Congress has delegated broad authority because delegation allows members to claim credit for desirable goals while blaming agencies for unpopular consequences. This arrangement weakens accountability at every level. Citizens cannot effectively govern themselves when no identifiable official is responsible for the rules governing them.

Federalism must become an operating principle rather than a ceremonial reference to the Tenth Amendment. Authority should rest at the lowest level capable of exercising it effectively. Cities and counties should handle local matters. States should serve as the primary laboratories of domestic policy. The federal government should act only where the Constitution assigns national responsibility, or where a problem cannot be addressed effectively at a lower level.

Decentralization is not a philosophical preference. It is a corrective mechanism. When authority is distributed, failed policies can be identified, compared, abandoned, and replaced. Citizens can move between jurisdictions, and governors and legislatures can learn from one another. A national policy, by contrast, makes the entire country dependent on a single decision and allows failure to spread everywhere.

Federalism also reduces the stakes of national elections. When every major social question is decided in Washington, each presidential election becomes an existential contest. Citizens come to believe that losing control of the federal government means losing control over every important part of life.

The federal government currently taxes money from citizens in the states, routes it through federal departments, attaches conditions to it, and then returns some of it to state and local governments through grants. Every step requires administrators, regulations, reporting systems, compliance personnel, audits, and duplicated state bureaucracies created solely to satisfy Washington. This arrangement also allows the federal government to influence policies it has no constitutional authority over.

That must change.

When a function belongs to the states, the federal government should stop taxing citizens to finance that function. Federal taxes should be reduced accordingly, leaving states free to raise the revenue necessary to provide whatever services their own citizens choose.

California cannot tell Japan what to do. It should not be able to tell Michigan either.

A state that wants a large public program should have the constitutional authority to create it where individual rights are protected, but it should also have to ask its own citizens to pay for it. A state that believes the same service can be provided more efficiently should be free to prove it. People can then compare systems and, ultimately, vote with their feet.

The constitutional balance requires a peaceful mechanism through which states can resist federal overreach without relying entirely on federal courts to restrain federal power. A conservative movement should therefore support a State Nullification Amendment.

The amendment should establish that two-thirds of the state legislatures have the constitutional authority to nullify any federal law, regulation, or ruling that they believe exceeds the federal government’s enumerated powers. This must be a collective state power rather than unilateral. A single state cannot simply announce that federal law no longer applies within its borders, but when two-thirds of the states agree that Washington has exceeded the authority those states granted it, the federal government should be forced to concede.

The amendment should also prevent federal authority from expanding through interpretation. No fundamentally new federal power should come into existence without the collective consent of two-thirds of the states.

This does not place individual rights at the mercy of state governments. The Bill of Rights and the protections incorporated against the states through the Fourteenth Amendment would remain restraints on state power. States would receive a structural mechanism for resisting federal expansion, but not authority to violate the natural and constitutional rights of their own citizens.

The purpose is to restore the missing check between the governments that created the federal system and the government they created, restoring final say in interpreting the Constitution away from the Supreme Court, and back to the states.

Restricting the Federal Government to its intended size and scope has another important benefit: it makes the United States potentially attractive for other like-minded nations to join. We should be open to that, as an expanded United States gives absolute military protection to new members while making the only government on Earth bound to protecting liberty even more powerful.

Emergency powers must also be constrained. Emergencies sometimes require rapid action, but temporary necessity has repeatedly become permanent authority. Every emergency declaration should expire unless affirmatively renewed by the legislature. If the emergency power is a fundamentally new federal role, it should require ratification by two-thirds of the states.

Emergency programs, spending measures, regulatory waivers, and restrictions on liberty should include automatic expiration dates and public review.

Conservatives must apply these limits even when a conservative president holds office.

3. Dismantle the Permanent Government and Restore Accountability

The administrative state has grown into a semi-independent governing structure. Career officials write rules with the force of law, determine how those rules will be enforced, shape the information elected leaders receive, and maintain relationships with outside organizations that reinforce administrative priorities.

Expertise is necessary. Permanence without accountability is not.

The president is elected to lead the executive branch and must possess the authority to remove officials who obstruct lawful policy. Civil-service protections should prevent arbitrary patronage and retaliation, but they should not create a class of officials empowered to govern against elected leadership. A bureaucracy that can resist every president it dislikes has ceased to be a neutral instrument of constitutional government.

Every federal agency should undergo recurring constitutional, financial, and performance audits. A permanent Department of Government Efficiency, or an institution serving that function, should make institutional review a continuous part of government.

The constitutional audit should ask whether each agency, program, regulation, and expenditure rests on legitimate federal authority. The financial audit should trace money through grants, contractors, state programs, nonprofit organizations, and administrative overhead, comparing stated purposes with measurable outcomes.

Programs that cannot demonstrate value should not continue just because they employ people, satisfy constituencies, or possess impressive names. Agencies that repeatedly produce results contrary to their purposes should be restructured, devolved, or abolished, and functions duplicated across departments should be consolidated or returned to states.

The audit process must also examine incentives. An agency rewarded with larger budgets when a problem worsens has little institutional reason to solve the problem, and a regulatory body dominated by the industry it regulates may serve incumbents rather than consumers.

The same accountability problem exists in public-sector compensation.

Collective bargaining in the private sector occurs between competing interests. Management cannot promise compensation indefinitely without eventually passing the cost to customers, reducing investment, losing market share, or going bankrupt. Reality eventually disciplines contractual agreements.

Public-sector bargaining is different. Government employees may help elect the same officials with whom their unions negotiate. Compensation can then be shifted into future pension obligations that will not become fully visible until after the politicians who approved them have left office.

That separates the decision from the consequence.

Public compensation must be fully transparent, honestly valued, and funded when it is promised. Governments should not conceal compensation through pension assumptions that make future obligations appear cheaper than they are, nor should elected officials be permitted to use deferred benefits to purchase present political peace while sending the bill to future taxpayers.

Collective bargaining cannot transfer legislative or budgetary authority away from elected government. Contracts should not make it practically impossible to discipline serious misconduct, remove chronically poor performers, restructure obsolete functions, or reform public institutions when those institutions fail.

Public employment exists to deliver public value. It cannot become a separate political economy in which the people negotiating compensation are insulated from the people required to pay for it.

Government should also end the practice of allowing outside activist organizations to drive policy through coordinated litigation. Agencies should not quietly develop legal arguments, pass them to favored groups, accept lawsuits based on those arguments, and then use consent decrees to impose policies elected officials never approved. Existing consent decrees should be reviewed regularly, and no decree should bind future administrations indefinitely without renewed judicial findings.

Transparency must follow public money. Organizations receiving federal grants should disclose the source, purpose, and use of those funds. Taxpayers should be able to determine when supposedly private advocacy is financed by the government it is lobbying.

Congress should also reconsider the assumption that an appropriation must always become an expenditure.

In ordinary circumstances, congressional appropriations should establish the maximum amount the executive branch is authorized to spend in carrying out the law, not a command that every authorized dollar be spent. The president must faithfully execute laws enacted by Congress. That does not mean executive agencies should be required to waste money Congress authorized as an upper limit.

Where Congress has created a specific legal entitlement or directed a specific expenditure, the executive must follow the law. Where Congress has authorized up to a particular amount to administer a program, the executive should possess reasonable authority to deliver the required outcome for less.

That authority should be exercised transparently, in good faith, and subject to congressional and judicial review. It should never become a presidential line-item veto.

The same constitutional limitation must follow federal money after it leaves government. Congress cannot evade constitutional restraints by financing an NGO, contractor, university, nonprofit organization, or other third party to perform acts government lacks authority to perform. If government lacks the authority to do something, it can’t outsource the power it does not have to a third party.

A permanent government-efficiency function should therefore follow federal money all the way through the system and ask not only whether the spending was wasteful, but whether the activity being financed was constitutionally legitimate in the first place.

The purpose is not to wage war on public employees. It is to restore a clear chain of authority, responsibility, and correction. Most employees respond to the systems in which they work. A government that produces unaccountable behavior must redesign the system rather than simply replacing one group of bureaucrats with another.

4. Restore Fiscal Discipline and a Stable Dollar

A government that cannot control its spending cannot remain self-governing. Debt allows the political class to distribute benefits without immediately collecting the taxes required to pay for them. It separates public desire from public cost and transfers obligations to people who did not vote for them.

The federal budget should be evaluated in relation to the economy that supports it. Nominal numbers matter less than spending, deficits, and debt as percentages of gross domestic product. That does not make large deficits harmless when the economy grows. It gives citizens an honest way to evaluate whether government obligations are becoming more or less sustainable.

Government spending cannot sustainably exceed the revenue capacity of the economy plus whatever modest monetary expansion is consistent with a stable currency. Historically that has been about 27% of GDP plus another 2% for the target rate of inflation, or 29%. 29% is not a hard number - it is an historic marker based on current conditions.

Congress should adopt a binding path toward structural balance. That path need not require immediate balance during recession, war, or genuine national emergency, but ordinary operations should not depend on borrowing year after year. Spending growth must remain below sustainable economic growth long enough to reduce the government’s burden relative to the economy.

Entitlement reform must be honest and gradual. Promises made to people who organized their lives around them cannot be discarded, and neither can younger workers be forced indefinitely into bankrupt programs. Existing beneficiaries and those near retirement should be protected while future benefits, eligibility, contributions, and private ownership options are restructured around solvency.

The goal should be a retirement system in which individuals possess greater control over their savings, benefits are financially sustainable, and assistance remains available for people who cannot provide for themselves. A transfer program should not masquerade as an investment account, and political leaders should stop promising benefits without identifying who will bear the cost.

For younger workers, the long-term objective should be a transition from intergenerational transfer toward individual ownership.

Mandatory retirement contributions should increasingly flow into individually owned, diversified investment accounts that accumulate real assets over a worker’s lifetime. Those assets should belong legally to the worker rather than existing as a political promise of future benefits.

The accounts should be broadly diversified, portable, protected from political appropriation, and designed to avoid turning retirement policy into speculative gambling.

Those who do particularly well in these accounts can be taxed to provide, at a minimum, what the current system would have provided had it continued.

Monetary policy must also have a clear purpose. The Federal Reserve should have a single overriding mandate: preserve the long-term stability of the dollar.

Employment depends on millions of decisions made by employers, workers, entrepreneurs, consumers, and governments. Attempting to fine-tune employment through monetary expansion distorts prices, encourages debt, inflates assets, and transfers purchasing power away from people whose wages and savings cannot adjust quickly. We learned under Jimmy Carter that the dual-mandate does not work. End it now.

Monetary transparency should increase, and the relationship between federal borrowing and monetary policy should be made visible to the public. The central bank must not become a permanent mechanism for shielding Congress from the consequences of fiscal irresponsibility.

Interest rates are prices as well. In a functioning market they convey information about savings, time, risk, and demand for capital. When monetary authorities hold rates artificially away from those underlying conditions for long periods, the distortion moves into asset prices, leverage, housing, financial markets, and investment decisions.

The stock market is not the economy, and rising asset prices cannot substitute indefinitely for rising productive capacity or purchasing power.

Monetary policy should therefore stop treating asset inflation as evidence of prosperity. The Federal Reserve should not use monetary expansion to conceal fiscal insolvency, protect investors from ordinary losses, or turn every economic correction into another reason for permanently cheaper money.

The objective should not be to freeze prices. Individual prices must move as supply, demand, productivity, scarcity, and technology change. The objective is to preserve the integrity of the dollar as a measuring stick.

Wage growth relative to inflation should remain one of the most important measures of economic health. When wages consistently grow faster than prices, ordinary Americans become wealthier. When prices consistently grow faster than wages, they become poorer regardless of what the stock market or headline GDP says.

Sound money is not an abstract concern. It is a moral commitment to workers, savers, families, retirees, and future generations.

5. Tax for Revenue, Not Retribution

Taxation is a means of funding legitimate government, not an instrument for expressing resentment. The proper question is not how much government can take from whichever group is currently unpopular. It is how government can raise the revenue necessary to perform its legitimate functions with the least damage to economic growth, individual liberty, investment, and production.

A tax rate is not the same thing as tax revenue. People change their behavior when incentives change. They move income, defer transactions, alter investments, create shelters, move businesses, relocate capital, or simply stop engaging in activities that no longer produce worthwhile returns.

A dollar earned and spent by one person becomes income to someone else, who may spend it again. Economic growth expands the number of taxable transactions throughout the system. A government can sometimes collect more revenue from a lower rate applied to a larger and more active economy than from a higher rate applied to an economy that has been slowed by taxation. The goal should be to identify rates that maximize sustainable long-term revenue while minimizing distortion.

That means rejecting wealth taxes designed primarily to punish accumulated success. Most large fortunes are not mountains of cash waiting to be seized. They are ownership interests in businesses, farms, factories, technology, and productive assets. Taxing those assets forces their owners to sell or restructure them and can reduce the value of the productive capacity upon which workers, retirees, and consumers depend.

It also means ending the political fiction that large government programs can be financed indefinitely by someone else. Ultimately the cost of government is borne by the productive economy. When politicians refuse to collect that cost honestly through taxes, they frequently collect it dishonestly through inflation.

Inflation is taxation without a bill. It reduces the value of wages and savings and falls hardest on people who own few appreciating assets. It is among the most regressive forms of taxation government can impose.

A conservative tax system will also recognize that businesses pay no taxes, but rather pass them on to consumers, employees, or investors, through higher prices, lower wages, or lower profits. Corporate taxes sound good to those who do not understand economics, and there is nothing wrong with taxing corporations as long as we do not tax them more than do other nations (in which case we will have fewer of them), but it is more efficient to tax consumers, employees, or investors directly than it is to hide a tax through corporations that we know will be shouldered by others.

A conservative tax system should therefore be simple enough to understand, broad enough to finance legitimate obligations, stable enough to allow long-term planning, and restrained enough to preserve growth.

Taxation should finance government. It should never become a substitute for justice.

6. Restore Competitive Markets and End Corporate Capture

Government should protect markets, but not manage outcomes within them. Its proper role is to enforce contracts, protect property, punish fraud, preserve competition, and prevent private actors from using political power to escape market discipline.

The United States does not suffer from an excess of genuine free enterprise. It suffers from a system in which the language of markets is often used to defend arrangements insulated from competition.

The economic philosophy underlying these reforms is what I have called Systemic Free-Market Realism. Markets are not machines to be programmed from above, but living systems created by free people interacting voluntarily. They depend upon natural rights, limited government, moral responsibility, honest information, and the rule of law. Government therefore has two legitimate economic functions: to protect the conditions under which markets operate efficiently, and to provide those genuine public goods that markets cannot efficiently provide themselves. Even in the second case, government should interfere with the functioning of markets as little as practical.

We tend to debate supply-side economics vs. demand-side economics, but both forms of subsidies are Keynesian in nature and in violation of the nature of a truly free market. We should reject Keynesian stimulus in all forms.

Corporate subsidies, targeted tax privileges, bailouts, regulatory carveouts, licensing restrictions, and government-created barriers to entry should be systematically eliminated. Firms should not be protected from failure just because their collapse would embarrass policymakers or impose losses on influential investors. When the cost of failure is shifted to taxpayers, profit no longer signals value creation. It signals access.

Occupational licensing should be limited to fields in which a clear and substantial public danger justifies it. Licensing requirements frequently protect existing providers by making entry expensive without meaningfully improving safety. People should not need political permission to perform ordinary work.

Regulation should focus on preventing identifiable harm rather than directing markets toward politically selected outcomes. Mandates and subsidies that manufacture demand distort prices and conceal whether consumers actually value what is being produced. When government selects industries for success, capital flows toward political favor rather than productive use.

Antitrust policy should protect competition rather than punish success. Size alone is not evidence of wrongdoing, but size combined with government privilege, collusion, exclusionary conduct, or control over essential channels of commerce requires scrutiny. The purpose is not to give regulators broad authority to redesign industries according to ideological preference. It is to ensure that incumbents cannot use either private power or government relationships to prevent competition.

At the same time, sometimes Antitrust enforcement really is necessary. No investment house should be allowed to manage more than a set amount of assets, and that amount is less than what BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street currently manage. The correct threshold must be determined and these companies must be broken up. When the CEO of BlackRock lists his job as controlling the corporations under his management - there needs to be enough competition in the investment world that such thinking would put him out of business.

Trade policy must distinguish free exchange from national dependency. Trade with reliable partners can increase prosperity and strengthen alliances. Dependence on adversarial governments for medicine, energy, military components, communications infrastructure, or strategically essential goods creates vulnerabilities markets may not price adequately as businesses do not bear the cost of disruption until it occurs.

A conservative trade policy should defend broad market exchange while preserving national security. Trade agreements do not create free trade so much as they create exceptions to it, and the longer a trade agreement is, the more exceptions it has. We should simply have a policy of reciprocity in which if a country trades freely with us, we will trade freely in return, but where we reserve the right to protect industries where we have a clear national security interest, and we reserve the right to respond in kind to violations of free trade committed by our trading partners.

The standard should remain value. Does a policy create a more competitive, resilient, innovative economy, or does it merely transfer wealth to a favored constituency? Truly free trade among friends benefits all parties involved.

7. Restore Housing Abundance and the Path to Ownership

For millions of younger Americans, the failure of our economic system is visible every time they look at the price of a house.

Homeownership has been one of the primary mechanisms through which working and middle-class families accumulated wealth. A mortgage gradually converts housing expense into ownership. Property provides collateral, stability, inheritance, and a tangible stake in a community.

A system that permanently converts younger Americans into renters does more than raise their housing expenses. It changes the distribution of ownership throughout society.

Housing policy must begin with supply.

Local zoning restrictions, lengthy approval processes, unnecessary building mandates, climate rules, ESG requirements, and regulatory obstacles have made it increasingly difficult and expensive to build housing in many parts of the country. When government restricts supply while demand continues to rise, higher prices are the predictable market response. If a population grows, housing must be allowed to expand accordingly.

The first conservative response should be to remove government-created barriers to construction wherever those barriers do not serve a legitimate safety or property-rights purpose. This does not require Washington to become a national zoning board. Most land-use policy belongs at the state and local levels. It requires conservative governments at every level to ask whether each rule protects the public from an identifiable harm or merely makes housing more scarce.

Institutional ownership also requires scrutiny, particularly where the institutions acquiring homes benefit from monetary policy, regulatory preference, government guarantees, or access to capital unavailable to ordinary families. Large investors should compete under the same rules as everyone else rather than use government-created advantages to transform entire neighborhoods into financial portfolios.

The goal is not to punish investment. Rental housing is necessary and investment capital can create supply. The goal is to stop government from simultaneously restricting housing production and subsidizing or financially advantaging the institutions most capable of buying what little supply remains.

A conservative housing policy should be judged by a simple measure: are ordinary working families gaining or losing a realistic path toward ownership?

The answer cannot be permanent subsidies for ever-higher prices. We have tried that model in healthcare and higher education. Subsidizing demand while restricting supply simply moves prices higher.

The solution is abundance, competition, sound money, and a functioning path from work to ownership.

8. Pursue Energy Abundance Through Innovation

Energy policy should make energy cleaner by making technology better. It should not make energy more expensive, as that makes people poorer.

Reliable and affordable energy is not a luxury. It is embedded in the price of transportation, food, housing, manufacturing, heating, cooling, medicine, agriculture, communication, and nearly every good and service people use. A policy that deliberately makes energy scarce makes almost everything else more expensive.

Environmental concerns are legitimate. Carbon dioxide levels can be measured, pollution can cause real harm, and environmental costs should not be ignored. The conservative error would be to answer ideological environmentalism with ideological indifference.

The proper response is technological.

Nuclear power can provide enormous quantities of reliable baseload electricity with minimal carbon emissions. Natural gas provides abundant energy with substantially lower emissions than coal. Carbon-capture technologies offer a mechanism for reducing emissions without requiring the destruction of industrial capacity or modern living standards.

A serious environmental policy would aggressively remove irrational obstacles to nuclear construction, allow abundant domestic natural-gas production, improve the infrastructure necessary to move energy efficiently, invest in carbon-capture technologies where they demonstrate value, and export cleaner American energy to countries still relying on dirtier fuels.

Different energy technologies should be judged according to total system performance rather than political symbolism. Cost, reliability, land use, storage requirements, transmission, resource dependence, resilience, environmental effects, and the ability to deliver energy when needed all matter.

Government should not hide those tradeoffs by subsidizing politically favored technologies while forcing competitors to absorb costs that are excluded from the comparison. Nor should environmental policy become the pretext for a surveillance state. Carbon allowances, personal energy quotas, mandatory digital identities, restrictions on ordinary travel, and systems that condition participation in society on approved consumption patterns are incompatible with a free people.

Prosperity and environmental stewardship are not opposites. We should seek a country with cleaner air, cleaner water, abundant energy, productive industry, technological innovation, and rising living standards.

Any environmental program whose solution requires permanent scarcity should be rejected outright.

9. Rebuild Education Around Parents, Knowledge, and Citizenship

Education authority should be returned as close as possible to students and families. The federal government is not a national school board.

Federal involvement should be eliminated from primary education, funding should be made portable where federal money remains, and states should be encouraged to devolve authority to communities, schools, and parents. Families should be able to choose among public, charter, private, religious, vocational, online, and home-based education without being financially trapped in institutions that fail their children.

School choice is not a market reform. It is a civil-rights reform for families without the means to move to better districts or pay tuition in addition to taxes. No child should be assigned to a failing institution because of an address.

Choice must be accompanied by transparency. Parents should have access to curricula, reading lists, instructional materials, disciplinary policies, and meaningful measures of student learning. Schools should not conceal ideological instruction behind claims of professional expertise.

Higher education finance must be restructured so that institutions bear some responsibility for the value of the credentials they sell. Unlimited public lending allows universities to raise prices while transferring risk to students and taxpayers. Schools that encourage students to assume substantial debt for programs with little economic value should share the consequences when those loans fail.

The University of Michigan had a program in which qualified students could attend for free, and in return they contracted to give the university a percentage of their income for a period of time after graduation. The viability of such programs should be explored in every public university.

Accreditation should be opened to competition, alternative credentials should be recognized, and employers should remove degree requirements unrelated to actual job performance.

Returning authority to states and families requires eliminating the federal Department of Education. Education is not among the enumerated responsibilities of the federal government, and the country educated generations of Americans before the department was created. Its primary effect has been to place another administrative layer between the people delivering education and the families receiving it.

Decentralization must also change what schools measure.

Educational standards should describe competence. Literacy means the ability to read and understand written material, while numeracy requires a working command of mathematics. Scientific competence depends on understanding both established knowledge and the method by which claims are tested. Students should know history well enough to distinguish what happened from later interpretations of it and to judge those interpretations against the evidence. Civics should give them the same grounding in the Constitution, federalism, separation of powers, individual rights, and the responsibilities that come with citizenship.

Students should learn personal and national finance. A population that does not understand debt, interest, inflation, taxation, and compound growth cannot govern a country whose political arguments revolve around those things.

We need to teach civics again. Students should know what our Constitution says and why it matters.

Educational disparities should be treated as information rather than automatic evidence of injustice. Different students, teachers, schools, and methods will produce different outcomes. Variation allows us to identify what works. Successful methods should be copied. Failed methods should be corrected or abandoned.

Teachers must also be competent in the subjects they teach. Training and professional development should focus first on mastery and teaching ability. Persistent inability to teach effectively cannot be protected indefinitely by credentials, administrative procedure, or seniority.

The objective is not equality of educational outcomes. It is a system capable of transmitting competence from one generation to the next.

Public education should form citizens capable of self-government, instead of producing clients of the state.

10. Restore Consumer Sovereignty in Healthcare

Healthcare cannot function as a normal market when prices are hidden, consumers are separated from payment, providers are protected from competition, and government repeatedly increases demand without increasing supply.

The conservative objective should not be to abandon people facing illness. It should be to build a system capable of providing care without making patients financially powerless and administratively dependent. Prices should be transparent before treatment whenever circumstances permit. Patients should be able to compare providers, facilities, pharmaceuticals, and insurance products. Contracts written in language ordinary people cannot understand should not be considered meaningful expressions of consumer choice.

Routine care and catastrophic risk should be treated differently. Insurance is most effective when it protects against large, unpredictable losses. When every transaction passes through a third party, administrative costs rise and price signals disappear. Patients should be able to purchase routine services directly, save in portable health accounts, and insure themselves against major expenses.

Competition across jurisdictions should be expanded, telemedicine should remain broadly available, and licensing rules that unnecessarily restrict the supply of qualified providers should be reconsidered. Scope-of-practice laws should protect patients rather than professional monopolies.

Insurance should also belong to individuals rather than jobs.

The tax code should treat individually purchased insurance and employer-provided insurance neutrally so that changing jobs does not automatically require changing health coverage. Insurance can then return toward its proper function, protecting people against large and unpredictable financial risks rather than serving as an administrative layer through which every ordinary medical transaction must pass.

Routine and predictable care can increasingly be purchased directly.

Patients can pay a fixed amount for continuing access to ordinary primary care, while health savings accounts can give individuals control over predictable expenses and catastrophic insurance protects against serious illness or injury.

The poor and uninsured should be assisted directly and transparently.

Routine care should not default to hospital emergency departments simply because federal law guarantees emergency stabilization. Emergency care is extraordinarily expensive and is poorly designed to manage chronic or routine conditions. States and communities can instead subsidize Direct Primary Care memberships, community clinics, chronic-care centers, and other lower-cost access points while preserving universal emergency stabilization.

Hidden cross-subsidies should also be exposed. When Medicare or Medicaid reimburses providers below the cost of treatment, the difference is shifted into private insurance premiums and cash prices. If taxpayers choose to subsidize care, that subsidy should appear openly in a public budget rather than being disguised inside someone else’s insurance bill.

Medical quality should be transparent as well. Hospitals and providers should publish comparable measures such as cost per case, infection rates, complication rates, and medical outcomes in formats ordinary patients can understand.

Equal treatment does not require identical amenities. Every patient requiring the same procedure should receive the same clinical standard of care, but a shared recovery room and a private suite need not be financed as though they are the same medical necessity. Comfort can vary without allowing medical competence to vary.

Finally, malpractice law should preserve accountability without rewarding defensive medicine. Liability should turn on actual negligence rather than the fact that medicine sometimes produces a bad outcome. Safe harbors for accepted protocols, qualified expert review, medical review panels, or specialized courts can reduce abusive litigation while protecting patients genuinely injured by negligence.

The Lean rule remains the same throughout: standardize outcomes where necessary, not every method used to achieve them.

Government programs should disclose their real costs and measure outcomes rather than enrollment. Medicare, Medicaid, veterans’ care, and other public systems should be evaluated according to access, health outcomes, patient experience, long-term sustainability, and the dignity afforded to those who use them.

The safety net must remain. A civilized society does not allow people to die because they lack money. The existence of a safety net, however, does not require government to control the entire healthcare system. Public assistance can protect those in genuine need while preserving competition and choice for the broader population.

Healthcare policy should increase the agency of patients, the accountability of providers, and the honesty of prices.

11. Replace Permanent Dependency With Pathways to Agency

Government assistance is sometimes necessary, but its purpose should be to preserve dignity while restoring agency wherever restoration is possible. Programs should distinguish temporary need, long-term disability, and behavioral dysfunction. Treating every recipient as though the same intervention is appropriate wastes resources and fails the people receiving assistance.

Benefits should be structured to avoid punishing work, marriage, savings, or family formation. A person should not lose more in assistance than he gains by accepting a raise or additional hours. Parents should not be placed in a stronger financial position by remaining unmarried. Modest savings should not disqualify a family from temporary help and thereby encourage it to remain assetless.

Able-bodied adults receiving long-term assistance should be expected to work, train, pursue education, care for dependents, or perform community service when suitable opportunities exist. These expectations should not be administered as humiliation. They should reflect the truth that participation, competence, and contribution are essential to dignity.

Administration should occur as locally as practical. States, counties, churches, charities, and community organizations possess different forms of knowledge and should be able to coordinate assistance without being forced into a single national model. Public programs should leave room for private organizations rather than crowding them out.

Success should be measured by restored independence, family stability, employment, recovery, and reduced need. Enrollment is not an outcome.

The same principles should guide homelessness, addiction, foster care, and reentry after incarceration. Housing without treatment will not solve addiction. Treatment without accountability will not create recovery. Punishment without pathways back into society does not solve crime. Each system must distinguish among problems rather than applying a single ideological answer to all of them.

Compassion without accountability becomes maintenance. Accountability without compassion becomes abandonment. Conservative policy must hold both together.

12. Protect Families and Preserve Civil Society

Government cannot create strong families, but it can stop weakening them.

Tax and benefit systems should be reviewed for marriage penalties. Parents should retain the primary authority to direct the upbringing, education, medical care, and moral formation of their children, subject to the government’s legitimate responsibility to prevent abuse and serious neglect.

Public institutions should not treat parental involvement as interference. Schools, healthcare providers, and government agencies act as temporary servants of families, not permanent replacements for them.

Adoption and foster-care systems should prioritize safe, durable family placement over bureaucratic process or ideological conformity. Religious and private organizations should be allowed to participate according to their convictions so long as children are protected and legal standards are met.

Government should also recognize the independence of churches, charities, associations, and nonprofit institutions. Public funding should not be used to force private organizations to abandon their missions or beliefs. Religious liberty requires more than permission to worship privately. It protects the ability of people to organize institutions around their convictions and to carry those convictions into public life.

At the same time, religious liberty does not create a right to impose religious law on others. Government must protect freedom of conscience equally, including the freedom to adopt, reject, change, or leave a faith.

13. Protect Speech, Information, and Scientific Integrity

The First Amendment prohibits government from censoring speech. Government should also be prohibited from accomplishing censorship indirectly through threats, regulatory pressure, coordinated requests, funding relationships, or informal demands made to private platforms.

Public officials should not be permitted to evade constitutional limits by inducing corporations to do what government cannot lawfully do itself. Communications between government agencies and media or technology platforms concerning moderation of lawful speech should be recorded, preserved, and subject to disclosure.

National-security and law-enforcement exceptions should remain narrow, specific, and reviewable. General claims of misinformation, extremism, public safety, or social harm cannot become licenses for suppressing political disagreement.

The rule of law also depends on stable language.

Government cannot hold people accountable under standards whose meanings change according to political fashion. Laws must define prohibited conduct clearly enough that ordinary citizens can understand what is required of them before government punishes them.

Terms such as violence, threat, harassment, discrimination, extremism, misinformation, public safety, and harm cannot be stretched indefinitely. Words can be cruel, dishonest, offensive, manipulative, or morally reprehensible without becoming violence. The distinction between speech and conduct must remain meaningful or the government eventually gains authority to suppress speech by redefining it as conduct.

Government should likewise avoid compelled ideological terminology. Public officials may define technical terms where administration genuinely requires precision, but government should not force citizens to affirm contested political or moral claims as a condition of employment, education, licensing, benefits, or participation in civic life.

A claim that conduct “could cause harm” cannot substitute for demonstrating what happened, who was harmed, how the defendant caused it, and which preexisting law was violated. Administrative convenience must not eliminate ordinary standards of causation and proof.

Government measurements require the same discipline. When agencies change definitions, classifications, statistical methods, or metrics, those changes should be disclosed clearly enough that citizens can determine whether reality changed or only the measurement did.

Language exists to describe reality. Once government gains the power to make reality conform to language, the law becomes whatever those controlling the definitions want it to be.

Government-funded research should be transparent. Data, methods, conflicts of interest, and limitations should be disclosed to the greatest extent compatible with privacy and legitimate security. Scientific agencies should separate research findings from policy recommendations and identify uncertainty honestly.

Emergency declarations should not suspend scientific disagreement. In fact, emergencies make disagreement more important because decisions are made rapidly with incomplete information. Policies adopted under emergency conditions should be revisited as evidence changes, and officials should acknowledge error rather than rewriting the history of their recommendations.

Whistleblowers who expose illegality, fraud, manipulated data, or serious public danger should receive meaningful protection. Public-records laws should be strengthened, and agencies should not evade transparency by conducting official business through private intermediaries.

Government advertising, grants, and subscriptions should not become hidden subsidies for politically aligned media. Public communication should inform citizens, not manipulate them.

The proper answer to false speech is generally more speech, better evidence, open criticism, and the protection of channels through which error can be corrected.

14. Protect Access to Financial and Communications Infrastructure

Modern censorship does not always prohibit speech. It can make speech economically or technologically impossible.

The most visible speech platforms sit on top of a much larger infrastructure. Payment processors, banks, credit-card networks, donation systems, app stores, operating systems, cloud providers, hosting services, domain registrars, content-delivery networks, advertising exchanges, search engines, and other intermediaries can determine whether lawful organizations can function at all.

A writer who is technically free to publish but cannot receive payment has not been formally censored, but his ability to build an audience has been removed. A communications platform removed simultaneously from app stores, cloud infrastructure, and payment systems may remain legal while becoming practically impossible to operate.

The answer cannot be for government to dictate political viewpoints to private businesses. That would reproduce the same centralized system under conservative management. Government should instead protect competition, due process, and viewpoint neutrality where access to essential infrastructure has become a practical prerequisite for participation in ordinary economic or civic life.

No government agency should pressure a bank, payment processor, technology company, cloud provider, advertiser, or other intermediary to deny lawful service to someone government cannot directly punish.

Where institutions exercise extraordinary gatekeeping power, terms of service should be public and applied consistently. Customers removed from ordinary financial or communications infrastructure should receive notice of the rule allegedly violated and a meaningful way to challenge factual errors.

Where platforms can be shown to enforce their terms of service inconsistently, tort law should apply.

Lawful political belief should not become a substitute for credit risk, fraud, security risk, or unlawful conduct.

Government should also resist digital identity systems that combine financial access, political compliance, health information, carbon usage, location, or ideological scoring into a single mechanism through which participation in society can be granted or denied.

15. Keep Technology and Artificial Intelligence Under Human Authority

Technology should serve human beings. Human beings should not be reorganized to serve technological systems.

Government use of algorithms and artificial intelligence must remain subject to constitutional due process. No person should lose liberty, employment, benefits, licenses, access to essential services, or legal standing solely because an automated system produced a score or recommendation.

Consequential decisions must include meaningful human review by an identifiable official who possesses authority to alter the outcome and bears responsibility for it. Citizens should be told when an automated system materially influenced a decision affecting them and should have access to an understandable explanation and appeals process.

Algorithms used by government should be auditable for accuracy, bias, security, and reliability. Proprietary claims cannot become a shield when private software exercises public power.

The same concern extends beyond government systems.

Artificial intelligence increasingly influences hiring, search, news distribution, lending, insurance, education, communication, and the information people encounter before they make decisions. A system can shape society without possessing formal government authority.

AI models learn patterns from training material and then respond to incentives created by feedback systems, developers, evaluators, safety rules, and the institutions that define acceptable outputs. Transparency matters.

Companies developing consequential artificial intelligence should disclose enough about the broad sources, filtering standards, feedback processes, and governing assumptions used in training that users can understand what kinds of bias the system may contain. Trade secrets and proprietary code need not automatically become public, but “the algorithm decided” cannot become an impenetrable answer to legitimate questions about systematic discrimination or ideological manipulation.

The people creating feedback loops matter as much as the data. If everyone evaluating a model shares the same worldview, the model can mistake ideological consensus among its trainers for objective truth. Intellectual and disciplinary diversity should thus be treated as a mechanism for error correction rather than as a political quota.

AI developers should also build meaningful systems for identifying and correcting demonstrated bias. When users expose recurring factual or ideological errors, those corrections should improve the system rather than disappear into an opaque process.

Competition among AI systems is essential. Government should never designate a single politically acceptable model, ideology, or information standard to which private systems must conform.

If we reward accuracy, correction, openness, and usefulness, it can become an extraordinary instrument of human flourishing. If we reward conformity, it will become extraordinarily good at conformity.

Mass surveillance should be rejected. The fact that technology makes comprehensive monitoring possible does not make it constitutional. Government access to private communications, location data, biometric information, financial activity, or personal records should require lawful authority proportionate to the intrusion.

A conservative government should also resist technological central planning. Innovation occurs when people are free to experiment, compete, fail, and improve. Regulation should focus on concrete harms, fraud, coercion, privacy violations, and violations of rights rather than attempting to determine in advance which technologies should succeed.

Children deserve particular protection from systems designed to exploit attention, dependency, or immature judgment. The proper balance among parents, platforms, states, and federal authority will require continuing debate, but the governing principle should remain clear: technology must not dissolve parental authority, human agency, or constitutional rights.

The future should be technologically advanced but recognizably human.

16. Restore Citizenship, Borders, and National Sovereignty

A nation that cannot control entry into its territory cannot meaningfully govern itself. Border security is not hostility toward immigrants. It is a prerequisite for lawful immigration, public confidence, and national sovereignty.

The federal government should secure the border, enforce immigration law, maintain accurate entry and exit systems, and remove people who have no lawful right to remain after due process is complete. Sanctuary policies that deliberately obstruct lawful federal enforcement should not be subsidized by federal taxpayers.

Legal immigration should serve the interests and capacities of the nation while preserving America’s historic ability to welcome people who wish to become Americans. The number and composition of immigrants admitted are legitimate subjects of democratic decision-making. They should not be determined by corporate demand for labor, activist litigation, administrative discretion, or the accumulated consequences of unenforced law.

Immigration levels must also remain within the country’s capacity to assimilate newcomers. Assimilation is not automatic. It is a process, and like every process it has a capacity. That capacity depends on the strength of the host culture, the institutions available to transmit it, the pace of immigration, geographic concentration, language acquisition, schools, housing, labor markets, civic organizations, and the expectations placed on newcomers after arrival.

Below the assimilation threshold, newcomers enter a confident culture and gradually become part of it. Above that threshold, the process can reverse. Parallel institutions become self-sustaining, neighborhoods become permanently separated, political appeals increasingly occur through group identity, and administrative systems expand to manage conflicts culture previously resolved informally.

Annual immigration levels should be determined partly by demonstrated assimilation capacity rather than by the assumption that more immigration is automatically better or automatically worse.

This is not an argument for ethnic uniformity. American assimilation has never required Americans to eat the same foods, attend the same churches, possess the same ancestry, or erase every tradition brought from somewhere else. We do however require a common civic framework.

English should become the shared public language. Constitutional law must remain supreme. Men and women receive equal protection. Speech and conscience remain free. Citizens may change religions, reject religions, criticize religions, and marry outside them. Violence and coercion cannot be excused through cultural tradition.

Immigration policy should also stop treating population growth as a substitute for reforming insolvent entitlement systems. Importing more future taxpayers merely postpones the structural problem when those taxpayers will eventually retire as well.

The purpose of immigration policy is to strengthen an American nation capable of absorbing new Americans.

The number should follow that purpose.

Enforcement must remain humane and constitutional. The government should distinguish violent criminals, security threats, recent unlawful entrants, long-established residents, children brought into the country by adults, and people with plausible claims for protection. Distinctions are not weakness. They are evidence that law is being applied intelligently.

Assimilation should become an explicit objective of immigration policy. Naturalization should require meaningful knowledge of English, American history, constitutional government, and civic responsibilities. New citizens should affirm the supremacy of the Constitution and equal civil law.

No system of religious, tribal, or customary authority may supersede American law. Freedom of religion protects Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, atheists, and every other person equally. It also protects individuals inside religious communities from coercion, including the freedom to criticize, convert, or leave.

Citizenship should never become ancestry-based. America is a nation built around a constitutional civilization that people from many backgrounds can join. The alternative to open borders is not ethnic nationalism. It is ordered citizenship.

Foreign governments and international institutions should not determine domestic policy outside the constitutional treaty process. Cooperation among nations can be valuable, but sovereignty cannot be quietly transferred through administrative agreements, transnational regulatory networks, or judicial claims never approved by the American people.

A national government must first answer to its own citizens.

17. Reestablish Equal Justice and Public Order

Liberty cannot survive where government cannot protect people from violence, theft, intimidation, and disorder. Neither can it survive where law enforcement becomes an instrument for punishing political enemies.

A conservative criminal-justice platform should begin with equality before the law. The identity, ideology, wealth, political affiliation, or institutional influence of an offender should neither shield him from accountability nor expose him to selective prosecution.

Equality before the law must apply upward as well as downward. Public office cannot become immunity from ordinary criminal law. Officials who knowingly falsify evidence, conceal fraud, obstruct legitimate investigations, protect criminal conduct, or abuse public authority for partisan purposes should be investigated under the same legal standards applied to everyone else and prosecuted when the evidence warrants it.

Prosecutorial power must be constrained by clear law, transparent standards, due process, and judicial review. Broad statutes should not be stretched to criminalize conduct that was not clearly unlawful when committed. Civil penalties, licensing actions, tax investigations, and criminal charges should not be coordinated to destroy political opponents.

The same standard applies to police. Communities need effective law enforcement, particularly in neighborhoods where ordinary residents bear the highest cost of crime. Police should possess the authority and resources necessary to protect the public, but that authority must be accompanied by training, supervision, evidence, and accountability.

Policing should remain primarily local because conditions vary and accountability is strongest near the people being policed. Federal involvement is appropriate where the Constitution assigns jurisdiction, where crimes cross state lines, or where local institutions violate constitutional rights. It should not become a national mechanism for directing ordinary law enforcement.

Criminal justice must distinguish among dangerous offenders, nonviolent offenders, addicts, the mentally ill, juveniles, and people capable of rehabilitation. Violent offenders should be incapacitated when necessary to protect the public. Nonviolent offenders should not be placed in environments that make them more dangerous.

Sentencing, bail, diversion, and rehabilitation policies should be evaluated by outcomes rather than ideology. Do they reduce violence, protect victims, discourage repeat offending, and restore people capable of returning to society? Policies that produce more crime should be corrected regardless of whether they were promoted as compassionate or punitive.

Victims should not disappear from the system. Their safety, losses, and dignity matter. Restitution should receive greater emphasis where it is possible, and communities should not be asked to absorb predictable disorder in the name of theories developed far from its consequences.

Public order is not authoritarianism. It is one of the conditions under which ordinary people can exercise liberty.

18. Defend the Nation Through Strength Guided by National Interest

The United States requires a military capable of deterring enemies, defending its territory, protecting its people, and fulfilling legitimate commitments. Military weakness invites conflict. Military power without strategic restraint creates conflicts that have no clear relationship to national security.

A conservative foreign policy should combine strength with disciplined purpose.

Before military force is used, political leaders should identify the national interest involved, the objective being pursued, the authority under which action is taken, the likely costs, the conditions for success, and the means by which the commitment will end. Vague claims about credibility, democracy, international order, or humanitarian concern cannot substitute for strategy.

Congress must recover its constitutional responsibility for war. Presidents require sufficient authority to respond to immediate threats, but prolonged military action should require legislative approval and public accountability.

Alliances should be reciprocal. The United States should honor its commitments, but allies must contribute meaningfully to their own defense. Security guarantees that encourage dependence or reckless behavior should be restructured.

The military should be organized around readiness, lethality, logistics, technological superiority, discipline, and the care of those who serve. It should not become a laboratory for domestic social theories or a substitute for diplomacy, development, and trade.

National resilience also requires secure energy, communications, transportation, manufacturing, food, medicine, and defense supply chains. A nation unable to produce essential military components or sustain its population during disruption is not secure even if its weapons are advanced.

Foreign policy should distinguish other nations’ interests from our own. America can defend its values without assuming responsibility for governing every society, resolving every conflict, or remaking every culture. Prudence is not isolationism. It is the recognition that power is finite and consequences are real.

19. Govern Through Lean Systems, Measurement, and Correction

The preceding platform will fail if it is implemented through the same institutional habits that produced the problems it seeks to correct.

It begins by identifying purpose. Once purpose is clear, we identify the critical measurements that tell us whether the system is achieving it. Changes should then be evaluated against those measurements, preferably through pilot programs, comparisons between jurisdictions, or other mechanisms that allow us to separate improvement from coincidence.

Government should only keep changes that improve the system.

That sounds obvious, but it represents a radical departure from the way government normally operates. Laws are usually judged by intentions, constituencies, spending levels, or the political cost of repeal. Once enacted, programs develop employees, contractors, interest groups, and beneficiaries whose livelihoods depend on continuation. Failure then becomes an argument for more funding rather than evidence that the intervention should be changed.

Lean reverses that incentive.

In Lean Government, the citizen is the customer rather than the raw material of government. Value and quality must therefore be defined from the citizen’s perspective, with liberty, security, constitutional rights, competent service, and the least necessary burden treated as measures of quality.

Major policies should begin with predetermined measures of success and failure. Those measurements should be publicly available, tracked over time, and resistant to political redefinition. Where possible, changes should be introduced incrementally so that their effects can be distinguished from background variation. If a policy produces measurable improvement, it can be expanded. If it does not, it should be modified or reversed.

Frontline knowledge matters because the people closest to a system often see problems long before distant administrators do. Teachers, nurses, police officers, and local officials work directly with the conditions that higher-level bureaucracies try to govern through reports and abstractions. A healthy system therefore allows information to travel upward from the people experiencing the consequences of policy, rather than assuming that wisdom flows only from the top down.

The operating rule should be simple: standardize legitimate outcomes, but do not unnecessarily standardize methods.

Government should determine what must be achieved where it possesses legitimate authority to do so, measure whether it was achieved, and leave as much room as possible for people closest to the work to discover better ways of achieving it.

Government data should be understandable to citizens. Budgets, performance reports, regulatory effects, debt projections, and program outcomes should not be buried in formats only specialists can interpret. Transparency that technically releases information while making it practically unusable is not transparency.

Conservative leaders must also be willing to correct their own policies. No philosophy eliminates uncertainty. No platform can anticipate every consequence. Systems thinking does not promise perfect foresight. It creates institutions capable of recognizing error before error becomes permanent.

This is where statesmanship differs most clearly from ideology. Ideologues treat evidence of failure as evidence that their preferred policy was not applied aggressively enough. Statesmen ask whether the policy served its purpose.

The conservative standard should be value. Did government protect liberty? Did it preserve order? Did it strengthen the capacity of citizens and institutions to act? Did it solve the problem it claimed to address? Did it create new dependencies, distortions, or concentrations of power? Could the same result have been achieved at a lower level of government or outside government entirely?

A government that cannot answer these questions should not ask for more power.

From Revolt to Renewal

Conservative renewal begins with the recognition that human beings possess inherent dignity, natural rights, moral agency, and responsibilities that exist before government. Constitutional limits matter because power eventually escapes the intentions of those who first exercise it, while decentralized authority provides the feedback and correction that centralized systems lack. Markets should be defended as mechanisms of voluntary value creation, but not confused with the interests of corporations seeking protection from competition or the consequences of failure.

That same philosophy places the family at the center of social life and preserves civil society as the space between the individual and the state. Citizenship carries reciprocal obligations rather than just legal status. Technological progress should be welcomed without allowing machines or systems to replace human judgment and responsibility, and national loyalty should rest on shared citizenship and constitutional principles rather than ancestry, tribal identity, or devotion to a political personality.

This conservatism will not promise to eliminate suffering, perfect mankind, equalize every outcome, or make political conflict disappear. Those are utopian promises, and utopian promises are eventually enforced through coercion.

It offers something both more modest and more ambitious: a society in which people possess the freedom and capacity to direct their own lives; families and communities are strong enough to solve many problems before government intervenes; markets reward value rather than influence; institutions are accountable to their purposes; and government is powerful enough to perform its legitimate duties but constrained from becoming master of the people it serves.

Let us be more than politicians seeking the next victory.

Let us be statesmen.

I’ve heard it said that race and gender don’t really exist. Both are cultural constructs.

Race and gender do, of course, exist. Culture does not give some people ovaries and others testicles, and culture does not make some people darker than others. What culture creates are the category names. Culture also decided to call one animal a ‘cat’ and another a ‘dog.’

We could, of course, use different classifications, but changing what we call “men” and “women” would not change the physical differences between them anymore than calling “dogs” and “cats” by the same word would make dogs and cats the same.

Classifications are useful for differentiating between different things.

Human variation is continuous. As such, while calling someone whose ethnicity is from Northern Europe “white” while calling someone from Sub-Saharan Africa “black” may make sense, what do you do to differentiate between someone from Greece and Italy, or Southern Spain and Northern Morocco? Such people may have different languages and cultures, but ethnically, they are almost identical.

One of the many ethnic classifications is ‘Semite,’ and the word ‘Semite’ is defined in my American Heritage Dictionary (from 1985 - before the ‘War on Words’) as, “1. One of the people of Caucasian stock comprising chiefly Jews and Arabs but in ancient times also including Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, and others of the eastern Mediterranean area. 2. One of the people descended from Shem.” According to Genesis, Shem was one of Noah’s sons.

Note that ‘caucasian’ includes not only Europeans, but also many peoples of North Africa, the Middle East, the Caucasus, and even parts of South Asia. Ancient Israelites would not have looked like northern Europeans, but nor would they have looked like Sub-Saharan Africans or East Asians. They were indigenous Levantine peoples, sharing ancestry with the Canaanites, Phoenicians, Arameans, and others. Modern genetic studies show continuity between ancient Levantine people and modern Jewish communities, as well as with other peoples of the Levant.

Before discussing Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, or Palestine, we first have to know what those words actually mean.

An Anti-Semite is defined as, “a person who is hostile toward or prejudiced against Jews,” although many Anti-Semites today prefer the word “Anti-Zionist.”

The word ‘Anti-Zionism’ is not in my dictionary, but ‘Zionism’ is defined as “1. A plan or movement of the Jewish people to return from the Diaspora to Palestine. 2. A movement originally aimed at the re-establishment of a Jewish national homeland and state in Palestine and now concerned with the development of Israel.”

‘Diaspora’ is a new word for me, so I looked that up too. It means, “1.The body of Jews or Jewish communities outside of Palestine or modern Israel. 2. The body of Jews living dispersed among the Gentiles after the Babylonian captivity. 3. A dispersion of an originally homogeneous people.”

Taken together, Anti-Zionism is opposition to the movement of the Jewish people from the Diaspora back to Palestine and, today, to the existence of the State of Israel. But what is ‘Palestine’? That too is not in my dictionary, likely because it has never been a state.

Fortunately, we know what it is. Palestine is a geographic region in the eastern Mediterranean between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The word ‘Palestine’ comes from the Philistines.

Some historians believe that the eruption of the Thera volcano on the Minoan civilization’s central island of Strongyle, now known as Santorini, caused the plagues that led Pharaoh to let the Israelites leave Egypt. Whether or not that is true, it definitely led to the eventual destruction of the Minoan civilization, from which the Philistines most likely came.

The Philistines were the Israelites’ primary enemy from the period of the Judges to the period of the unified Kingdom under Saul, David, and Solomon.

The unified Kingdom also included Reuben, Gad, and half of Manasseh, on the east side of the Jordan River. Ancient Israel was on both sides of the river, and I’m including a map of the unified Kingdom with modern Israel superimposed.

Modern Israel Superimposed on Ancient Israel

After Solomon died, Rehoboam became king. Representatives of the northern tribes, led by Jeroboam I, asked him to eliminate taxes used to pay for the First Temple, and Rehoboam refused. The northern tribes broke away to form the Kingdom of Israel, with its eventual capital at Samaria, and were eventually conquered by the Assyrians.

This can be confusing because the unified Kingdom was also called Israel. The northern kingdom retained that name until it was conquered by the Assyrians. The southern kingdom became known as Judah. It survived the Assyrians, but was later conquered by the Babylonian Empire before being restored under the Persian Empire.

The name “Judah” took several linguistic forms as the region passed from empire to empire. The Persians called it Yehud Medinata (or “Province of Yehud”). When Alexander the Great came, the Greeks called it Ioudaia (or “The Land of Judah”). Eventually the Hasmoneans gained independence from the Seleucid Empire during the Maccabean Revolt and called it simply “Judah” again.

When Rome conquered the Hasmonean Kingdom of Judah and subjected it to Roman rule, it used the Latin version of the existing name: Judaea. Following the Jewish Bar Kokhba Revolt in AD 132-136, Emperor Hadrian renamed the province Syria Palaestina, after the long-vanished Philistines. This was intended to deemphasize the Jewish Kingdom of Judah.

From this Roman insult comes the modern word Palestine, which then became a territory of the Byzantine (eastern Roman) Empire, various Islamic caliphates, the Crusaders, the Mamluks, the Ottomans, and finally the British.

During the British Protectorate, the term “Palestinian” referred to everyone in the region, including Jews, Christians, and Muslims. The Palestine Post (now the Jerusalem Post) and the Palestine Symphony Orchestra (now the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra) were Jewish. The modern political use of “Palestinian” developed much later.

The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) declared Palestine a state in 1988. The PLO did not list its supposed geographic borders, but the UN decided to give them the land Israel’s neighbors lost by attacking Israel in 1967. This included the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem.

The Oslo Accords created the Palestinian Authority (PA) as an interim governing body in the early 1990s. The PA was separate from, but closely connected to the PLO, and for decades the UN, the US, and Israel all tried to negotiate borders, but no version of the PA, Fatah, Hamas, or the PLO has ever agreed on any set of borders that does not include Israel. In the case of Hamas, it has been very clear that it wants not only to take over the land of Israel, but also to exterminate the Jews and Muslims living there.

In spite of the fact that Hamas wants to exterminate Israel, Israel pulled completely out of the Gaza Strip in 2005. Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian election in Gaza and took control of the Gaza Strip, while the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority continued to govern parts of the West Bank.

Hamas horrifically attacked Israel on October 7, 2023. According to Hamas, Israel has since killed 73,000 people in Gaza, and also according to Hamas half of the people Israel has killed are Hamas militants. The rest are civilians.

How accurate those numbers are is difficult to say as Hamas has been known to inflate casualty counts, but suffice it to say that a one-to-one ratio of militant to civilian deaths is much lower than anyone else has ever managed in modern urban warfare. Israel is going to great pains to avoid civilian casualties as much as possible while fighting a group that uses civilians as human shields, and that brags that they “love death more than you love life.”

Somehow people seem to broadly understand that there is a difference between disagreeing with Judaism as a faith, and with disliking Jews as a people. It is also possible to disagree with specific actions of the state of Israel without being anti-Israel or Anti-Semitic.

As we already established, Anti-Zionism is the belief that the Jewish people have no right to national self-determination in their historic homeland through the existence of the State of Israel. Many people today claim to be Anti-Zionist without being Anti-Semitic on the grounds that they want to see a secular Palestine, rather than a Jewish or a Muslim state. This almost sounds reasonable on its face, and there have been secular states in the region. Lebanon was a Christian-majority country where Christians, Jews, and Muslims all lived peacefully together, until civil war broke out in the 1970s and Lebanon let Hezbollah in. Today Lebanon is about 70% Muslim and 30% Christian.

Lebanon has no Jewish people left at all.

I have a litmus test for Anti-Zionists who claim they are not Anti-Semitic. There are 10 countries that use the Qur’an as their Constitution and Sharia as the official law of the land. Another 13 have Islam as the official religion but have mixed civil/Sharia legal systems. I have yet to see anyone claim those states have no right to exist, and I have yet to see anyone protest them. Anyone who is OK with the world having 23 Muslim states, but who is not OK with the world having a single Jewish state, is Anti-Semitic.

Anti-Semitism is hatred against a specific group of people, and the equivalent with Muslims should be some form of anti-Muslim bigotry, but most definitions of ‘Islamophobia’ include hostility toward the religion. The word is regularly used when the religion itself is criticized. Islamophobia then becomes an umbrella under which Islam as a religion can hide from criticism.

Judaism teaches that human beings are created in the image of God, possess free will, are morally accountable for their actions, and are called to pursue justice, mercy, and righteousness. It emphasizes obedience to God’s commandments, repentance for wrongdoing, charity toward those in need, and hope for the eventual redemption of the world.

Unlike many missionary faiths, Judaism does not seek the universal conversion of mankind, nor does it teach that non-Jews must become Jewish to live moral lives. Traditional Judaism recognizes that non-Jews may stand in relationship with God by observing a limited set of universal moral principles, commonly known as the Noahide Laws, rather than the full body of Jewish religious law. Those are the laws Christians and Jews both say God writes onto our hearts, forming our conscience.

Christians are called upon to spread their faith through the word (‘spreading the Good News’), and Muslims are called to spread Islam through the word when possible, and through force whenever words fail. Judaism is unique in that it is designed as an inheritance rather than as something the faithful are called upon to spread.

Islam is centered on Muhammad, whom Muslims regard as the final prophet of God. Its central teachings are found in the Qur’an, which Muslims believe to be the literal word of God, and the Sunnah, the recorded words and actions of Muhammad preserved in the Hadith. Together, these form the foundation of Sharia, standing as the comprehensive body of Islamic law that has historically governed not only religious practice, but also civil, criminal, commercial, and family law.

The major schools of Islamic law all recognize penalties for apostasy and blasphemy, imposing distinct legal obligations and restrictions upon non-Muslims living under Muslim rule. They also all regard Sharia as the only possible foundation of civil government.

People try to equate these religions by pointing to the brutality in the Old Testament (the first five books of which are also the Torah), but it is important to differentiate between things that a religious text says historically happened at a specific time and place, and things that a religious text commands followers to do today.

It is also important to understand that religions are not only sets of beliefs and customs, but are also moral systems.

When Jesus was asked to give the most important Commandment, he instead paraphrased all of the Commandments: love God above all things, and love other people as much as you love yourself. Some call this the ‘golden rule,’ and Jesus gave it as a summary of Judaism’s Commandments such that Judaism and Christianity share this central belief. The ‘golden rule’ acts as the moral system Jews and Christians both try to live by.

Islam also has two central tenets: submit fully to Allah through strict adherence to Sharia, and force others to do the same.

While Muslims who submit fully to Allah within their own lives can be compatible with classical liberalism, those who want to force others to do the same are not, and the religion’s core texts call for the more violent of the two.

Radical Imams in Western nations often radicalize the newly devout by pointing out that Muhammad said even he was not guaranteed a spot in paradise; only those who die in violent Jihad are. They will say some version of, “You have until now lived the blasphemous, decadent life of a Westerner. If Muhammad, the perfect prophet of Allah, is not guaranteed a place in paradise, what chance do you have? There is however one way for you to overcome your sinful past and find paradise. It is Jihad. I have a suicide vest for you.”

The radicalization in the West is so effective that Saudi Arabia has banned British Muslims from coming to Saudi Arabia out of the fear that British Muslims would radicalize Saudi Muslims.

Note that forcing people to submit to Sharia is completely incompatible with any concept of individual rights.

Individual Muslims can be compatible with classical liberalism, but the faith as a whole cannot be. Some would call me ‘Islamophobic’ for saying this, but I am not criticizing Muslims as people. I am criticizing Islam as a faith. I am criticizing beliefs that come from within that faith.

Christians and Jews criticize one another’s faiths every time we discuss Jesus, and yet Christians and Jews generally get along very well. Both groups want not only to bask in God’s love ourselves, but also to reflect that love toward others. Imperfect as we may be as individuals, this is what our religious texts tell us to do.

Atheists and agnostics have no issue criticizing Judaism and Christianity, and though the faithful may debate them, we don’t take the disagreements personally. We certainly don’t try to convert people by force. Similarly, in a classically liberal, free society, it should be perfectly permissible to criticize Islam.

Classifications are useful. Islam is not a race, but a religion. People possess rights. Religions do not.

Imagine two political commercials. One is from a candidate who says, “Our markets are hyper-regulated and over-taxed by a government that cares more about feeding itself than about the health and welfare of the people. I’m not running for office to coddle you, or to feed you, but to get the yoke of government off your neck so you have an easier time taking care of yourself.”

The other candidate says, “My opponent is a vile racist who has been accused of rape. He has fascist leanings and he seems to want to kill trans people. He wants to put babies in cages and if elected, he might even try to segregate the population on racial lines and reintroduce Jim Crow. His wife was essentially a prostitute and he is the most vile and evil human being that has ever walked the Earth. He does not deserve your compassion, much less your vote.”

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that most of the people who read my work are more persuaded by the first candidate’s commercial, but there is a tremendous amount of what statisticians call ‘selection bias’ in that sample.

Richard Lau and colleagues’ major 1999 meta-analysis examined dozens of studies of negative political advertising. It found that negative advertisements were better remembered and generated greater knowledge about campaigns. Lau, Sigelman, and Rovner’s updated 2007 meta-analysis reached a similar conclusion. Negative campaigning can affect attitudes and reduce trust or political efficacy.

We can also combine the two types of commercials into a hybrid, such as the following:

“Hi. I’m Chuck Nubert and I’m running for mayor. You may know my opponent, Dave Laffery. As a business owner, he was accused of racial bias. He is running on closed borders, which in my book makes him a white supremacist. He endorses policies that could be used to take food away from babies, and has a hyper capitalist mindset that I would call ‘fascist’. He is a fascist, in my opinion. Me? I’m all for you. I want every family to get three squares. I will make sure everyone has a home, will provide for the healthcare of everyone in our community, and will open our borders to be welcoming and inclusive. We don’t care who you are or what you look like. You belong here, and NOBODY in our city will be without housing, healthcare, food, or comfort. I am about all things for all people, whereas Mr. Laffery is only about himself and those who look like him. This November, let’s send a clear message to the white supremacists that our city says no!.”

That message appears to do both, and it is particularly clever because it promises to give people things without saying how it will do so. Chuck Nubert never says he will raise taxes. He never says that someone else must surrender a portion of their income so that these promises can be kept, and if pressed he will simply say, “the billionaire class,” or “the rich” will pay for it. He never says that government bureaucrats will decide who receives housing, healthcare, or food, or what those benefits will cost. He simply promises that everyone will receive everything. He even extends the promise to anyone who wishes to join the community, as if he is offering to end scarcity for the world.

He also attacks his political opponent in ways that imply horrific things about him, while using carefully crafted language to avoid being sued.

If everyone deserves the things Nubert promises, why do they not already have them? There are only two possible answers. Either Nubert’s promises are more difficult to fulfill than he has acknowledged, or someone is preventing his promises from being delivered.

Pointing out the first possibility requires explaining scarcity, incentives, taxation, debt, opportunity costs, and the limits of government power, as well as acknowledging that every dollar the government spends must first be taken from someone else or borrowed from future generations. Those are complicated conversations, and complicated conversations rarely fit into thirty-second commercials.

As Ronald Reagan said, “If you are explaining, you’re losing.”

The second explanation is far more politically attractive. If the promises are good, and they are achievable, then the reason people still struggle must be because someone is standing in the way. The villain can change with the audience. It may be billionaires, or it may be corporations. It may be the wealthy, landlords, banks, colonialists, white people, men, Christians, Jews, or some other group perceived to possess power. The important thing is not the identity of the villain but the existence of one.

The promises become believable only if someone can be blamed for preventing their fulfillment.

This is an old pattern. In the French Revolution, the aristocracy and clergy were blamed for the suffering of ordinary Frenchmen. Some criticisms were well-founded, but the search for enemies escalated into the Reign of Terror. In the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin and later Stalin portrayed the kulaks, bourgeoisie, and “class enemies” as responsible for poverty and inequality.

Hitler blamed Germany’s humiliation, inflation, unemployment, and national decline on Jews, communists, and other supposed internal enemies. Mao blamed landlords, intellectuals, teachers, and “capitalist roaders,” depicting them all as obstacles to equality and revolutionary purity.

Hutu extremists in Rwanda portrayed the Tutsi minority as existential enemies responsible for the nation’s problems. As with the Jews in Nazi Germany, dehumanization preceded genocide.

Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge blamed professionals and educated people. Even those who wore glasses became symbols of exploitation and corruption.

You read that correctly. The Khmer Rouge blamed people with bad eyesight for oppression based on the likelihood that glasses might make them look smart. That’s not as crazy as it sounds either - it is the logical extension of identity politics.

Nor is it always governments who do this. Osama bin Laden argued that Muslim suffering was the fault of America, Jews, secular governments, and their local collaborators. Violence against those groups became a moral obligation.

Once politics becomes a search for villains rather than solutions, demonization becomes necessary. The opponent cannot simply be wrong about tax rates or immigration policy, as that provides no moral justification for treating opponents as obstacles to justice. Opponents need to be portrayed as selfish, hateful, corrupt, or evil. Motives in this context become more important than arguments, and arguments quickly become seen as a waste of time.

This is why modern political campaigns increasingly resemble morality plays rather than debates. One candidate presents himself as the champion of the oppressed while identifying a class of oppressors responsible for society’s failures. The other is not just someone with different ideas, but someone whose continued existence in public life is an injustice.

This is a powerful form of persuasion that appeals to two separate, deeply rooted human needs. The first is the desire to believe that our hardships are not ultimately our responsibility, and the second is the desire to see ourselves as righteous people standing against evil. When those two desires are fused together, politics ceases to be a disagreement over the proper role of government and becomes a struggle between the virtuous and the wicked.

“Your lot in life is not your fault, and I can help you get even with those whose fault it is,” is the oldest lie ever told. A version of this is what the serpent told Eve, what Osama bin Laden used to recruit terrorists, and what Democrats increasingly use as a political platform today. It is the language of Cain against Abel, and it should be no surprise that this rhetoric increasingly leads to violence. If someone believes Trump to be as bad as Hitler, or believes Charlie Kirk really did want to kill trans people, they are also apt to believe violence against such people is justified - and we see in polling that many Americans do believe violence is justified.

An April 2025 study by the Network Contagion Research Institute and Rutgers University found that 55% of respondents identifying as left of center believed the murder of Donald Trump would be at least somewhat justified. Nearly 49% said the same of Elon Musk.

That’s not to demonize Democrats. Republicans would likely use this technique too if they could, but the nature of American conservatism makes it difficult, as we cannot offer ‘free’ in a market economy and it is the promise of ‘free,’ and the notion that ‘free’ does not exist because of oppression, that makes this level of demonization possible. All Republicans can do is kind of a demonization-lite, such as Trump calling a reporter stupid.

That’s not to say Republicans don’t demonize. Of course they do - I’m watching Republicans demonize one another in the Michigan Governor’s primary every day. Republicans, however, have to do so in different ways, as the inability to promise ‘free’ takes the technique Democrats use off the table, and makes Republican demonization less effective.

What I will demonize Democrats on is dishonesty regarding political violence. According to an Anti-Defamation League (ADL) study on extremist political killings between 2013 and 2024, 75.5% of all of them were committed by someone on the political right, vs just 3.4% on the political left.

This study had two major problems. First, the ADL did not classify killings based on the motive for the murder. It classified perpetrators according to what it considered their broader “extremist connections,” then assigned the deaths to an ideological category even when that ideology had little or nothing to do with the killing. The ADL expressly says it tracks murders involving extremists “regardless of motive,” including domestic violence, drug-related crime, organized crime, personal disputes, and confrontations with police.

Second, the ADL played fast and loose with what it considered ‘right-wing’ vs ‘left-wing’ extremism, deciding for itself what beliefs, associations, tattoos, online posts, gang memberships, or prior affiliations were sufficient to classify someone as being ‘extreme’.

Based on the ADL’s methodology, Charlie Kirk’s assassination would have been lumped into right-wing extremism based on reports (later shown to be false) that the killer was right-wing, and Luigi Mangione would not be considered an extremist, so his killing would not be counted at all. Nor was any of the left-wing violence that led to death, related to the George Floyd riots, included, as the rioters were not considered extremists.

The methodology of this ‘study’ was structured in a way guaranteed to inflate one category while excluding other politically charged violence, using what I call the Garb of Science. Nobody should ever cite that ‘study’ as it is pure political propaganda.

The left plays fast and loose with the word ‘science,’ and it plays fast and loose with other words as well. Once the War on Words changed the definition of the word ‘racism’ to ‘power + prejudice,’ with subconscious prejudice being assumed as universal, ‘racism’ was reduced to just ‘power,’ and since white people are assumed to be in power, this meant racism=white.

This transition led to the belief that white people are inherently racist, and that it is impossible for anyone else to be. Throw in the oppressed/oppressor narrative and the notion of the United States as being supposedly built on white supremacy, and suddenly anyone not white is invited to believe they are oppressed. Add into the mix the notion that horrific acts done by the oppressed are really just the oppressed acting out against their oppression (hence not being ‘extremist’ to the ADL), and suddenly those who believe they are oppressed can explore the most vile temptations humans are capable of.

This form of politics does not just demonize people either. It demonizes everything that has come before, holding the current system accountable for the need to pay rent, or to buy food, or to do anything else related to living. This then makes those who defend what came before guilty of denying others everything being promised for free, which is not a political argument so much as a moral condemnation of the past.

This argument cobbles together those who feel oppressed along with those who wish to be the angelic saviors who end that oppression, offering moral goodness devoid of effort. Vote for the right people and you are inducted into sainthood. It also separates intent from effect such that any policy failures that follow can be blamed on political opponents instead of on the policies that caused harm.

Even if it were possible to seize the assets of the rich, that would not cover the costs of everything the left wants to do for more than a few months, which is why every country on Earth that actually supplies those things without going bankrupt takes the money from the poor and middle classes. That is the Scandinavian model - it takes from the poor and middle classes and then supports them with their own money. Also note that the Scandinavian countries are not rich and are not socialist. They flirted with socialism in the 1970s and by 1990 they were forced by economic necessity to revert back to free markets. They kept their generous welfare programs, and are far on par with the poorest US states in per-capita income as a result, even before taking into account their much higher tax rates.

Another problem with this kind of politics is that putting disparate groups together on the pretense of supposed oppression also makes that perceived oppression a political currency. Each group competes to be the most oppressed, as being so also makes it the most powerful. One would think someone might notice that no group can be both powerful and oppressed at the same time, but nobody playing the Oppression Olympics seems to notice this particular absurdity.

This process is also additive. The more a group is believed to be oppressed, the more the enemies of that group are hated within the political mob, and with Islamophobia being now the greatest threat to New York City (according to Mayor Zohran Mamdani), hatred of groups Muslims tend to hate has become politically acceptable.

Qur’an 5:82 depicts Jews as being the most hostile people on Earth; Qur’an 5:60, 2:65, and 7:166 associate Israelites with apes and pigs and call them cursed covenant-breakers. Qur’an 9:29 commands that the People of the Book be fought until they submit and pay tribute. These verses are supplemented with a hadith predicting an apocalyptic Muslim war against the Jews. Islamic scripture and tradition contain unusually severe condemnations of Jews, and modern Islamist movements have repeatedly transformed those passages into political Anti-Semitism.

The 2014 Anti-Defamation League’s Global 100 Survey found that 49% of Muslims worldwide met its threshold for “antisemitic attitudes,” defined as agreeing with at least 6 of 11 Anti-Semitic stereotypes.

Anti-Semitism is vile and disgusting. It needs to stop.

If we actually care about the wealth and prosperity of the American people, then the most important statistic is the difference between the rate of inflation and the rate of wage growth. Whenever wages grow faster than inflation, the American worker is becoming wealthier, and whenever inflation runs higher than wage growth, the American worker is becoming more poor. This is a metric that is not based on greed, ideology, resentment, or anything else. It is a simple, objective way to gauge performance.

There are, of course, other objective measurements, but this is one of the few aggregate numbers that starts to look into the health of the economy instead of just its size. Nobody talks about numbers such as this one precisely because they are objective, and nobody wants to be measured that way - Democrat or Republican - and my next book will delve into all of the metrics that look at the health of the economy as I think it is important for people to know how to use metrics to gauge political performance.

Here is another hypothetical campaign commercial:

“Four years ago, you hired my opponent to manage the economy. Since then, wages have grown an average of 3.2 percent per year while inflation has averaged 5.1 percent. That means the average American worker can buy less with an hour of work today than when he took office. Before that, under my administration, wages grew faster than inflation by an average of 1.7 percentage points each year. That meant your paycheck bought more food, more gasoline, more rent, and more opportunity every single year. My opponent says he’s compassionate. I say compassion is measured by results. He says he cares about working families. I say working families should judge him by what happened to their purchasing power while he was in office. He wants to talk about billionaires. I want to talk about your paycheck. He wants to talk about intentions. I want to talk about outcomes. If you think you’re better off today than you were four years ago, vote for him. If you want your wages to grow faster than inflation again, I’d be honored to earn your vote.”

Imagine that. No accusations of racism. No claims that the other candidate secretly hates women, minorities, immigrants, or democracy. No promises to give you things that somebody else must pay for, and best of all, nothing that justifies violence. Just an objective measurement of whether life became better under one administration than another. How about we all agree to vote for people who tell us the policies they support and why they support those policies, without demonizing the other side?

We may question the basis of other people’s morality, of course, but looking at moral codes as systems and then gauging what different moral systems are designed to produce - that’s honest. That’s the hard work of trying to be correct.

That is how politics ought to work. Candidates should compete on performance rather than sanctimony, and on measurable outcomes rather than theater. If politicians believe their ideas produce prosperity, let them prove it with numbers. If they believe their opponents’ ideas produce suffering, let them prove that the same way.

Free people should not have to choose between competing stories about who is good and who is evil. None of us are the Second Coming of Christ, and none of us are the Antichrist. We are all somewhere in between.

We should be choosing between competing records of what actually works.

Imagine three girls born in the same year.

The first is Phoebe, daughter of Bill and Melinda Gates. Before she takes her first breath, she is already the beneficiary of one of the largest fortunes in human history - the largest ever at the time she was born. She attended the best schools, lived in the safest neighborhoods, traveled the world, and had access to opportunities most people don’t even dream about. She will never know want, will never face need, and will never write a resume. She will instead spend her life working for her parents’ foundation while inheriting their fortune.

The second is Chelsea Clinton. Her advantages are political, being born into one of the most connected families on Earth. Presidents, senators, ambassadors, journalists, billionaires, and world leaders are inside her social environment, and doors open because of her name.

Chelsea will also inherit a fortune, but her money was made through political maneuvering rather than economic activity. Her parents got rich primarily by buying and selling power through the Clinton Foundation with transactions that, even if entirely legal, were corrupt. Like Phoebe Gates, Chelsea will never know want or need, and will never send anyone a resume as jobs are thrown at her to gain access to her parents, their network, and their foundation.

The third girl is Becca Johnson. Becca was born on Detroit’s east side. Her mother worked two jobs and she never knew her father. She attended Detroit Public Schools and dreamed of becoming a doctor, but by the time she graduated high school she was already raising her first child. Her family had neither wealth nor power, and the closest thing she had to a blessing was living within walking distance of Cloverleaf Bar and Restaurant, which has some of the best Detroit-style pizza in the world.

No serious person could believe these three girls would begin life with equal opportunities. Opportunity creates disparity such that the only way to make them equal is to eliminate opportunity altogether until all of their parents are equally miserable, and equally poor.

And equally close to Cloverleaf pizza.

We cannot give every child a billionaire or a former president as a parent. We cannot manufacture generations of family wealth, social connections, political influence, and cultural capital out of thin air, and it would be folly to try, yet modern politics behaves as though equality requires exactly that.

The real question is not whether these three girls have identical opportunities. They do not, and they never will. The real question is whether or not the girl from Detroit has any opportunity at all.

If we are honest, our attempts to create equal opportunity through the War on Poverty have destroyed the opportunities and lifestyles of generations of impoverished Americans, whose families traded opportunity for dependency, with rules that precluded having a father in the house. Milton Friedman famously called the War on Poverty “a war on black people,” predicting not only continued poverty, but also the rise in crime rates, drug use, anti-cop sentiment, and rioting, right down to the time frame within which those things would occur.

A society devoted to liberty seeks to expand opportunity. A society devoted to equity seeks to eliminate differences. The first goal is difficult but doable while the second is impossible, and though we cannot eliminate differences, we can do a great deal of harm trying.

We don’t need to worry about Phoebe or Chelsea, but we do need to worry about Becca, and in this essay I am going to spell out why our current system fails her, while illustrating alternate systems that would not.

There are only a handful of people with the kinds of advantages Phoebe Gates or Chelsea Clinton have enjoyed, but there are untold millions of people who grew up like Becca, whether in an inner city like Detroit, the hollers of Appalachia, or any of the other places across our country where ample opportunity does not exist.

Without opportunity, ‘liberty’ is a slogan. This essay is about making it a way of life, not just for the economically powerful and the politically connected, but for everyday Americans as well, including those with the least opportunity today. It is not a question of what we can do for Becca so much as what we can do to ensure that the Beccas of the world have every chance to succeed.

The Shift from Opportunity to Equality

The American ideal was never equality of outcomes. It wasn’t even about equality of opportunity. It was only about equality before the law.

The Founding Fathers did not promise that every citizen would become equally wealthy, equally successful, or equally influential, and nor did they promise an equal start in life. They only promised that a poor farmer and a wealthy merchant would stand equal before the courts, and that a laborer and a landowner would possess the same rights.

Over time, however, the national focus began to shift.

Equality before the law gave way to equality of opportunity. This seemed like a reasonable and worthy goal. If Becca Johnson possesses the intelligence and determination to become a doctor, she should not be denied that opportunity because of her race, religion, sex, or social class.

Of course, she should not be given opportunity because of her race, religion, sex, or social class either, which gets into the heart of the problem: we do not all start from the same place. If we are treated equally under the law, those with a better starting place will tend to do better than those without.

The question is how we deal with that disparity.

Lyndon B. Johnson dealt with it by establishing the War on Poverty and Affirmative Action, which he described in a commencement speech at Howard University: “Freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: ‘Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.’ You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity - not just legal equity but human ability - not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”

The problem is not the intent of the statement so much as the delivery. Affirmative Action has been, at best, a mixed bag. In higher education it dramatically improved the acceptance rates of minority applicants, but it also increased the dropout rate for the same applicants. It turns out that someone in the 90th percentile in math is very well suited for UCLA, but not MIT, where the average student is in the 99th percentile, and saddling someone with the debt of attending a premier school when they will not earn a degree is not helping them.

It is noble to try and take an 18-year-old who has been held back by failing schools and try to erase thirteen years of inadequate education, but it cannot be done. What can be done is to use prep schools to prepare that student further before pairing them with a college, and though Lyndon Johnson could have made prep schools free for those who need them most, he did not choose to do so.

Better yet, we could have improved the schools in our inner cities to give those who live there the same quality of education as students in the suburbs. Not only did we not do that - we lowered educational standards, which ended up increasing the disparity. Furthermore, when inner city parents tried to send their children to charter schools in order to get around failing public systems, like in Detroit, the teachers’ unions fought to have charter programs banned.

Teachers’ unions pretend to be for students and for education, but a teacher’s union is no more for students than an automotive union is for cars. Unions are for their members, and the interests of teachers often conflict with the interests of their students, just as the interests of a factory worker often conflict with the interests of the company they work for.

Detroit Public Schools has become a case study in failure. Despite spending billions of dollars over decades with the highest per-student spending in Michigan, the district continues to rank among the lowest-performing school systems in the nation. According to the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, just 5 percent of Detroit fourth graders were proficient in reading and only 7 percent were proficient in mathematics. By eighth grade, proficiency rates were 6 percent in reading and just 4 percent in mathematics.

The Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) does not measure high school students, but unless the high schools are vastly superior to the middle schools (they are not), we can assume that the vast majority of Detroit’s high school graduates cannot proficiently read, and yet we expect them to find gainful employment anyway, or to live in government dependency for yet another generation. Let that sink in.

Detroit also has a very large charter school system. Some of the charter schools are outstanding and others are not, but overall, they outperform Detroit’s public schools. Unlike public schools, which often get bigger budgets when they fail, the worst charter schools go out of business, encouraging upward growth.

While many individual teachers in Detroit’s public schools work tirelessly under extraordinarily difficult circumstances, the unions protect the ones who do not and the system has failed generations of children as a result.

A child who spends thirteen years in a school system where fewer than one in ten students achieve proficiency in core subjects is not equipped to compete in a modern economy, and no amount of rhetoric about equity can substitute for an education that teaches children to read, write, think critically, and solve problems. Some say that charter schools are immoral as they attempt to profit from educating students, but that is a moral judgement that ignores the damage done to people like Becca, who need better schools much more than they need public ones.

By the time someone is an 18-year-old high school graduate, it is too late to address the root problem holding that person back, and while I can accept dealing with symptoms for people where it is too late for an actual solution, it is unconscionable that we have never gone back and fixed the root issue of failing schools.

Not only that, but Detroit is a city designed for two million people with a population of just over 600,000. How can we expect Detroit to attract young families to live in the city without addressing the failing schools? Detroit has a thriving business district, and some neighborhoods are thriving as well, but the city overall will not grow until the boat anchor of a school system holding it back is finally addressed.

The same is true with hiring. Lyndon B. Johnson’s solution was not to offer training programs to up-skill the disadvantaged, but to mandate that minority candidates get hired first even if they are less qualified. As a temporary measure to address symptoms for a generation, I get it, but once again the root cause of the discrepancy was never even on Johnson’s radar, and has never been a part of our national discourse.

In 1971 the Supreme Court decided, in Griggs v. Duke Power Co., that any employment practice could violate civil rights law even if it was neutral on its face, provided it produced a disproportionate impact on protected groups and the employer could not justify it as a business necessity.

Initially, employers could still defend hiring standards by demonstrating legitimate business needs directly related to the work being performed. Over time, however, that safeguard was weakened through subsequent court decisions, Congressional action, and expanding federal regulations. These things, along with the ever-present threat of litigation, all worked together, increasingly forcing employers to conclude that defending legitimate standards was more expensive than abandoning them.

Many businesses stopped asking whether a hiring practice selected the best candidate and instead began asking whether it produced the right demographic outcome. What began as an effort to benefit the disadvantaged gradually evolved into a system where avoiding statistical disparities became the required legal end, regardless of whether those disparities reflected discrimination, or differences among applicants.

The economy is global. We have to compete against other countries that don’t have such rules, and though using affirmative action to address symptoms may have made sense for one generation while addressing the root problem, never addressing the root problem of underdeveloped talent in our inner cities (and other poor areas) is unconscionable.

It is tempting for some to look at people in disadvantaged locations and think that they have failed - and they have - but as long as we, as a society, refuse to have the difficult discussions about how to address the root issues that lead to a lack of opportunity, we are failing as well. It is not enough to help the disadvantaged of each subsequent generation. At some point we have to advantage them with better schools and better opportunities. People like Becca deserve nothing less.

Sadly, while we did not address the underlying problems, we did not sit still either. We instead moved further in the wrong direction, looking for easy fixes to complicated problems.

Thomas Paine and the Problem of Unearned Advantage

When Thomas Paine published Rights of Man in 1791, he launched a devastating attack on hereditary monarchy and aristocracy. His argument was that the son of a king did not earn his throne, and nor did a duke earn his title just because his father held it. Political authority inherited through bloodlines was, to Paine, unearned, and it lacked moral legitimacy as a result.

Paine was of course correct, and the American Revolution was in part a rejection of inherited political privilege. We replaced hereditary monarchy with representative government, believing that public office should be earned. This was one of the great moral advances of Western civilization.

The problem is that good ideas often refuse to stay in their lane, and can become bad ideas when misapplied.

If inherited political power is illegitimate because it is unearned, why should inherited wealth be viewed differently? Why should children benefit from parents who built successful businesses? Why should one child inherit a stable family while another inherits poverty? Why should anyone benefit from being raised in a culture that prizes education, hard work, delayed gratification, or entrepreneurship? Why should a person born with extraordinary intelligence, beauty, athletic ability, or musical talent receive advantages they did nothing to earn?

A religious person might say they were born with Divine Providence, or ‘gifts,’ by a God who wants those gifts put to good use, but how does the atheist justify different people being born with different levels of advantage or disadvantage, due to no fault or effort of their own?

Once the principle of inherited advantage is detached from hereditary government, the category of “unearned privilege” can quickly expand into absurdity. In the American system, Becca is born with far less advantage than Chelsea or Phoebe.

Interestingly, when we look at the politically powerful in America, many of them were born without any advantages at all.

Abraham Lincoln was born in a one-room log cabin. Ronald Reagan grew up in a poor family during the Great Depression. Barack Obama was raised primarily by a single mother and her parents. Bill Clinton was raised by a widowed mother and an abusive stepfather in rural Arkansas. Their beginnings did not determine their path.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez worked as a bartender after her father’s death, while finishing college. Ilhan Omar arrived in the United States as a refugee, after spending her childhood in a Kenyan refugee camp. Raphael Warnock grew up in public housing, and Maxwell Frost drove for Uber to support himself before winning election to Congress.

The success of these people does not prove that opportunity is equally distributed, but it does prove that birth does not dictate destiny, and that Becca, though disadvantaged by starting point, is not bound to that disadvantage and can absolutely improve her lot in life. It may take time and effort, but she can do it, and in fact the Brookings Institution (which is left-leaning) showed that if someone avoids children out of wedlock, finishes high school, and works consistently, it is hard to stay poor even if they want to.

Doing just those three things virtually assures that someone makes it into the middle class, and even if someone does not think the effort is worth it for themselves, I would ask them to think about their children. Future parents can solve this problem all on their own, in but one generation, by making better choices.

Ironically, people like Ilhan Omar disparage our nation as a place without opportunity, in spite of the fact that she, and others, stand as living proof otherwise.

We see similar patterns with immigrants. When immigrants arrive from disadvantaged countries, they tend to struggle. Their children struggle less, and the grandchildren of the original immigrants tend to have the same economic outcomes as the national average.

This works in the opposite direction too, with the descendants of those who come from countries where immigrants do much better than the average American also trending toward the mean. The difference is that it takes more than three generations. Successful cultural traits seem to break down more slowly, on average, than do cultural traits that hold people back.

The exception to this rule is that of the African American whose ancestry goes through the Antebellum South - the very people most impacted by the War on Poverty and Affirmative Action. Africans immigrating from Africa show tremendous upward mobility, as do Black Caribbean immigrants. They share the same skin color as do African Americans with ancestry through the Antebellum South, but they lack the generational damage on family structure and economic drive that was caused by the War on Poverty.

I don’t blame affirmative action, per se. I blame the War on Poverty primarily. The problem with affirmative action is that we treated it as a solution rather than as a temporary fix to help those for whom it was too late to address the root problem. At some point we have to address the actual problem, and then allow ourselves to become a meritocracy.

Unfortunately, we moved from blaming failure on disadvantage to also blaming success on unearned advantage. That expansion marks one of the most important philosophical shifts of the last two centuries. The question ceased to be whether inherited political authority was legitimate. It became whether any inherited advantage could be legitimate.

That question lies at the heart of modern equity. Once every inherited advantage is viewed as immoral, society no longer seeks to protect equal rights. It begins searching for ways to compensate for unequal starting points. That impulse is understandable, but impossible to satisfy. No government can equalize the circumstances into which human beings are born, but they can do a great deal of harm trying.

Give advantage, yes - of course. But do not take advantage away.

From Fairness to Oppression

Once all forms of advantage or disadvantage came to be viewed as unfair - and more to the point, as something for the government to correct - any persistent disparity becomes evidence that something is fundamentally wrong. That assumption arose through a body of scholarship known as Critical Theory.

Critical Theory differs from traditional scholarship in that while traditional scholarship begins with a question and then follows the evidence, Critical Theory begins with the unproven assumption that society is necessarily organized around relationships of power. Critical Theory then asks how those relationships perpetuate oppression.

I touch on the difference between actual science and ‘science’ based on unproven theories in the essay The Garb of Science. This distinction is not central to this essay, but if you want more on this subject, I encourage you to read it.

Under a traditional approach, if one group consistently outperforms another, the investigator asks why. Perhaps discrimination is responsible, or perhaps the explanation lies in education, family structure, geography, religion, culture, incentives, or any number of other factors. Perhaps there are multiple causes. Every hypothesis is tested, and evidence points to the most likely explanations.

Don’t underplay geography. The entire continent of Africa has only one river system that is navigable from the interior to the coast: the Nile. Every other river on the continent has to run from an internal shelf to a much lower coastline, and it is thus no surprise that the Egyptian Empire rose where it did. A lack of navigable rivers has always held Africa back.

North America lacked pack animals until the Spaniards introduced the horse. Without pack animals, travel was limited, preventing the Native Americans from developing as quickly as the Europeans, who were blessed with both navigable rivers and pack animals.

People like to blame colonialism for disparity across regions, but most of the rich nations on Earth are either in Europe, or are former British colonies. We forget at great peril that everywhere the Union Jack was raised, so too was the Magna Carta, and though the British treatment of those in their colonies was often regrettable, the successful former colonies are the ones who kept much of what Britain gave them.

I just approached a problem rationally. Critical Theory does not approach problems that way.

Once the purpose of inquiry is to expose oppression, no other explanations are allowed. Looking at culture becomes “victim blaming.” Differences in values become stereotypes, family structure becomes an attempt to blame the disadvantaged for their own circumstances, and individual choices become evidence that the critic has failed to appreciate systemic barriers.

This is one of the reasons debates over race, poverty, education, and crime have become so frustrating. The participants are no longer arguing over evidence. They are operating from different rules of inquiry. One side asks, “What best explains the disparity?” while the other asks, “How does this disparity reveal oppression?” Those are fundamentally different questions, and they inevitably produce different conclusions most of the time.

There are times where they produce the same conclusions. When people say ‘systemic racism,’ I say ‘the War on Poverty.’ Lyndon B. Johnson was an avowed racist so I hold it as entirely possible that the harm his program caused may have been intentional. The War on Poverty really did act as systemic oppression, and of course it did. The idea that one can solve poverty through dependency is absurd.

But not every disparity has oppressive roots.

In the United States, Critical Theory expanded into Critical Race Theory, Critical Gender Theory, Queer Theory, Disability Studies, Fat Studies, Postcolonial Theory, Critical Pedagogy, Whiteness Studies, Intersectionality, and countless other fields that reinterpret society through the relationship between the supposed oppressor and the supposedly oppressed. Universities offer degree programs in these fields in spite of the fact that assuming oppression as the basis of all disparities flies in the face of the Scientific Method, and in spite of the fact that such a degree offers no marketable job skills.

One might even call such degree programs oppressive in the sense that they saddle people with college debt without providing job skills.

What these fields did do is to make sex a struggle between men and women. Sexual orientation became a struggle between heterosexuals and LGBTQ individuals, gender identity became a struggle between cisgender and transgender people, immigration became a struggle between citizens and immigrants, and so on. The entire country was broken down into different groups of the supposedly oppressed, all vying to get even with the nation they blame for their oppression.

This necessarily creates a two-tiered system of justice in which the actions of individuals are viewed through the lens of their oppressed or oppressor state, which is precisely why the Pakistani Grooming Gangs in Britain were allowed to operate for so long, and is why in many cases they are still allowed to operate today. Authorities knew for decades exactly what was happening but did not want to marginalize an oppressed group, and so more than 250,000 British girls, mostly from white, working-class families, were systematically raped, gang-raped, and prostituted, repeatedly, for decades, according to The Independent Rape Gang Inquiry Report, led by British MP Rupert Lowe and presented to the British Parliament. Not all claims have as of yet been independently verified so the total number could change, but whatever number it ends on will be far too high.

I’ll say that again - the authorities knew it was happening for decades and refused to do anything about it, other than cover it up while actively suppressing the voices of victims, if they dared complain. Even today, the British leadership seems more concerned with making the controversy go away than with stopping the human trafficking and rape of untold numbers of underage British girls.

Nor is this just in Great Britain. Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, and Australia have all found similar grooming gangs.

I’m picking on grooming gangs because they are such an egregious example, but it is only one example. All of the rioting, looting, arson, and violence that occurred around the country after the death of George Floyd was tolerated for the same reason. We were told these riots were ‘mostly peaceful’ even though CNN could not find camera angles that did not show fires, and we were told this while the rest of the public were locked in their homes under penalty of law to prevent the spread of Covid-19.

Supposedly rioting was safe, as if a virus could tell the intent of those who were not locked down, or as if the oppressed are somehow immune from disease.

Critical Theory tends to make problems worse rather than better by excusing the guilty. In the case of the underage British girls, they were effectively sacrificed on the altar of Islamophobia. In Becca’s case, she needed good schools, but Critical Theory takes that solution off the table by calling it victim-blaming.

The Death of Merit

Richard Dawkins argued that free thought has no possible scientific explanation and that, as such, it does not exist. He said there is no difference between believing in free thought and believing in God. As an atheist, Dawkins wrote God off, and so he wrote off free thought as well. He described our brains as computers, driven by programming in the form of DNA, and data in the form of lived experience, and claimed that we act in entirely predictable ways based upon those two things.

As Dawkins put it, we are ‘mere meat machines,’ that are sufficiently complicated to ‘think that we think,’ but actual free thought and free will are simply not possible, and thus cannot possibly exist outside of a purely religious context that any rational person must reject.

Ironically, we cannot be rational without free will, but then I’m not a supporter of Dawkins’ argument so his contradictions don’t bother me…

I argued in a previous essay that the modern rejection of agency is a method of control. If our choices are nothing more than the inevitable product of DNA and environment, then agency disappears, and our successes and failures are reduced to the predictable output of a biological machine. I will not repeat that argument in detail here, but the implications are profound and I encourage you to read that previous essay, as this is where the modern concept of equity reaches its logical conclusion.

If people possess no meaningful agency, then there can be no meaningful differences in merit. If culture cannot explain disparities because that is “victim blaming,” and individual choices cannot explain disparities because they are determined, then there are very few explanations left. Phoebe Gates, Chelsea Clinton, and Becca Johnson become, for all practical purposes, interchangeable human beings. They should, absent oppression, arrive at the same destination, and when they do not, the disparity becomes an indictment against the whole of society.

The assumption is no longer that people are unique individuals with different talents, ambitions, values, and choices. The assumption is that they are fundamentally identical. Every meaningful difference has been explained away as either an unearned privilege or an injustice, and this philosophy has been moving toward that conclusion for generations.

Paine questioned inherited political privilege. Johnson questioned whether equal legal rights were sufficient. Griggs questioned whether equal rules were enough. Critical Theory questioned institutions. The rejection of free will questioned the very existence of human agency.

Once every meaningful difference is dismissed as either oppression or privilege, there is only one conclusion left to reach: people are interchangeable. If they are interchangeable, then any difference in outcome becomes proof that someone, somewhere, must be cheating.

The ridiculousness of that assumption seems self-evident, and yet it seems like every policy prescription coming from the political left, today, assumes it is true. This, incidentally, is the assumption that has turned Robert Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Bill Maher, and others away from the modern left. In the quest for youthful relevance, the Democratic leadership is leaving its moderates behind. Many of them may vote Republican.

At the beginning of this essay I introduced you to three girls.

Phoebe Gates was born into one of the wealthiest families on Earth. Chelsea Clinton was born into one of the most politically connected families in history. Becca Johnson was born into circumstances that gave her neither wealth nor influence, attending one of the worst public school systems in America and beginning life from a severe disadvantage as a result. Aside from a loving mother and access to good pizza, Becca started with nothing.

Nothing the government can do will make those three starting points equal. Government cannot manufacture family wealth or create generations of social connections. It cannot give every child parents who remain together, neighborhoods free of crime, or schools that prepare them equally well for adulthood. Those differences have always existed, and they always will.

The question, then, is not whether Phoebe and Chelsea possess advantages they did not earn. Of course they do. Every child is born with advantages and disadvantages they did nothing to deserve. Some inherit wealth, others intelligence, others strong families, others extraordinary health, and still others a culture that prizes education and delayed gratification. Likewise, some inherit addiction, broken homes, failing schools, crime, abuse, and poverty.

Human beings have never begun life from identical starting points, and they never will.

The mistake modern politics makes is in concluding that because those differences are unfair, they must be eliminated.

Let me ask a different question. As a father, I view it as my job to ensure that I give my children every advantage I can to help them succeed. I don’t view that as ‘privilege’ so much as ‘good parenting,’ and perhaps we should begin to ask the question of what our society might look like if every parent did the same.

Doing otherwise turns society’s attention toward those who already possess advantages rather than toward those who lack them. Instead of asking how to improve Detroit’s schools, we ask why Elon Musk is a trillionaire. Instead of asking how to strengthen families, we ask why some children grow up in stable homes, and instead of asking how Becca can build a better life, we ask why Phoebe’s life is so much easier.

Poverty is not hard to explain. We are born naked, cold, and hungry. That is our natural state. Wealth is hard to explain as it has to be built, and even the poorest among us is lucky to be born in the United States instead of somewhere else, as we are one of the wealthiest nations in the world.

A free society accepts that people are individuals with different abilities, different ambitions, different values, and different goals. Some will succeed spectacularly. Others will fail despite doing everything right. Still others will overcome extraordinary hardship to accomplish things that seemed impossible. The purpose of liberty is not to eliminate those differences. It is to ensure that no one has to worry about artificial barriers preventing them from making the most of whatever gifts and opportunities they have.

Those who succeed do not just benefit themselves either. Elon Musk can put a satellite into orbit for a fraction of the price of what NASA can do it for. We all benefit from that cost savings as it makes everything that uses a satellite less expensive to use. Elon Musk is even looking at putting AI data centers in orbit so he can use solar energy to power them. Yes - he is fabulously wealthy - but he is making all of us better off, and he is keeping just a tiny fraction of the wealth he is creating for the world.

That is why the real measure of justice is not whether Becca becomes Phoebe Gates. It is whether Becca has more opportunity than she would have had otherwise, and whether her daughter will have more opportunity than Becca had.

A society that continually expands opportunity is moving in the right direction, even though it will never achieve equal outcomes. Equal outcomes are not the goal - better outcomes are. A society that obsesses over equality while neglecting opportunity will achieve neither.

And really, Phoebe Gates is not the girl we should be offended by. Her father co-founded the company Microsoft, which has done more to bring in the computer revolution than any other company on Earth. Microsoft has benefited lives around the world, so if the Gates family got rich doing so - that’s what drove Bill Gates forward and I’m OK with that.

The one we should be worried about is Chelsea Clinton, whose parents got her ahead as public servants, using political means to help themselves and to help their daughter. Unlike what Bill Gates did, which grew the world economy exponentially, Bill and Hillary Clinton truly did run a zero-sum game. Their wealth really did come at the expense of others.

In the end, this essay has never really been about Bill Gates, Chelsea Clinton, Lyndon Johnson, Thomas Paine, Richard Dawkins, or even the Frankfurt School. They are but chapters in the story, not the story itself. The story has always been about Becca, and there are millions upon millions of people like her around the country, and around the world.

The Beccas of the world do not need us to pretend that people are interchangeable, nor do they need us to tear down those who have been more fortunate. They need good schools, safe communities, strong families, economic freedom, and the opportunity to build something better than what they inherited.

Without opportunity, liberty is little more than a slogan. With opportunity, it becomes the means by which each generation leaves the next one better off than the last. That has always been the American promise, and it still can be if we are willing to pursue opportunity and leave the politics of grievance behind.

I promised a solution, so let me close with one. Milton Friedman suggested replacing the minimum wage and all welfare systems with a negative income tax, which I wrote about in some detail a little over five years ago.

Imagine that every adult is guaranteed an income of $30,000 per year. Someone with no earnings would receive the full amount. If they earn $10,000 working, they would not lose the entire benefit. Instead, half of each additional dollar earned would reduce the payment, leaving them with $35,000 in total income. At $20,000 in earnings they would have $40,000, and so on, until the benefit eventually phases itself out.

Every hour worked leaves the person better off than they were before. The system rewards work instead of punishing it while still ensuring that no one falls below a basic standard of living.

Lyndon B. Johnson could have implemented such a program. Milton Friedman recommended that he do so, but Johnson decided to address poverty through dependency instead, and to this day, long after Lyndon B. Johnson has passed away, Becca continues to pay the price.

She deserves better.

We’ve all seen the yard signs: “In this house, we believe Black Lives Matter, Women’s Rights are Real Rights, No Human is Illegal, SCIENCE IS REAL, Love is Love, Kindness is everything.”

The first statement sounds simple enough until you realize that it presupposes the existence of a large number of people who disagree. Where, exactly, are these people? In a nation with a population of over 330 million, there will always be a small number of racists, but as a political force white supremacy is dead.

The second statement sounds similarly benign. Of course no human is illegal. But the thing is that this presupposes that people cannot do illegal things, and of course people can.

“Women’s rights are real rights” is also a benign statement. Of course they are. The real question is what rights, specifically, do women have that men do not. Rights that are specific to a certain group generally come at the expense of other groups, and in this case that would be unborn children.

Whitney Houston sang, “Learning to love one’s self is the greatest love of all,” but whenever I hear that lyric, I think making self-love the greatest love of all not only goes against the golden rule, but it is also inherently narcissistic. Also, are we supposed to excuse pedophilia based on ‘love is love’?

Some love is better than others, and some love is just plain wrong.

Finally, we have ‘kindness is everything’. Certainly kindness is something, but there are many things, and being kind to the wrong people at the wrong time can turn suicidal.

Of all the slogans on the sign, however, one deserves special attention: ‘Science Is Real.’ Today, many people keep the language, credentials, and prestige of science while quietly abandoning its methodology. Many wear the garb of science while serving power, money, ideology, or something else, and many put up yard signs when in reality what they believe is what they are told is ‘science’ by those who have no interest in science proving them wrong.

Science is not a set of approved conclusions. It is a method: empirical observation, transparent data, and falsifiability. If a hypothesis is disproven, theories are supposed to change, and when the label of “science” is kept but the method is abandoned, the result is propaganda and control.

Religious Authority Subordinating Science

During the Renaissance, the Catholic Church was the greatest supporter of science in Europe, funding universities, building observatories, and supporting scholars across the Catholic world. For a long time, the Church was the most important patron of scientific inquiry in the Western world.

But there was a catch.

Scientific findings were expected to remain consistent, not only with Biblical interpretation but with official Catholic doctrine as well. The Church did not object to science as long as it stayed within approved boundaries, but whenever evidence began to contradict established theological teachings, the church intervened.

Take the case of Giordano Bruno. He was chained to a stake, stripped of his clothes, gagged, and burned alive. Bruno argued that the universe was infinite, containing many suns orbited by many worlds, which was an idea that, at the time, threatened the Church’s doctrine. He died a slow and excruciating death in spite of the fact that he was a pious and faithful man.

The most famous example is Galileo Galilei. Galileo made astronomical observations that supported Copernicus’s heliocentric model that the Earth, and the other planets, revolved around the Sun. This directly challenged the Church’s long-held view that the Earth was motionless and at the center of the universe.

Galileo was a devout Catholic who believed God had written both the Book of Scripture as well as what Galileo called ‘the Book of Nature’, and he believed both deserved to be studied. When his findings clashed with official doctrine, the Church forced him to recant under threat of torture, placed him under house arrest for the rest of his life, and banned his books.

The church is no longer suppressing scientific discovery (and is still a prominent supporter of science), but the underlying motivations that drove the church are very similar to the motivations that drive the suppression of modern science today.

Subjugating science to ideology is not unique to the Christian world either. Under Islam, openness to Greek philosophy and rational inquiry gave way to greater emphasis on religious orthodoxy. The renowned physician and chemist Abu Bakr al-Razi (Rhazes) was reportedly beaten on the head with one of his own books until he went blind, for expressing views that offended religious authorities. Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), widely regarded as one of the founders of the scientific method, is believed to have feigned insanity while imprisoned to avoid execution under the Fatimid Caliph Al-Hakim.

In Confucian China, imperial authorities often subordinated astronomical and scientific observations to maintaining the official cosmic and social order. Court astronomers whose predictions contradicted the emperor’s divinely sanctioned calendar could face demotion, exile, or execution.

Religious authority does not always oppose inquiry - it often supports it - but it insists that science must remain subordinate to doctrine. When evidence conflicts with ideology, the evidence is disallowed.

Corporate Profit and Manufactured Doubt

For decades after the link between smoking and lung cancer became clear, tobacco companies poured money into studies, think tanks, and friendly scientists to deny, downplay, or muddy the evidence. Their internal strategy was captured perfectly in a famous memo: “Doubt is our product.” They didn’t need to prove smoking was safe. They only needed to create enough apparent scientific disagreement to delay regulation until they could replace American demand with demand overseas. To accomplish this, big tobacco cherry-picked data, funded studies designed to sow confusion, attacked legitimate researchers, and created front groups that only looked independent.

A more modern version would be Al Gore. With no background in climate science beyond one class on greenhouse gases, Gore positioned himself as a leading global authority while putting together an investment group to manage carbon output. He aggressively promoted carbon cap and trade systems that, had they been implemented in the United States, would have made him a billionaire overnight.

For decades, companies like DuPont and 3M knew that PFAS chemicals (used in nonstick cookware, waterproof clothing, food packaging, and firefighting foam) were highly toxic and persistent. Internal documents show they had evidence of liver damage, birth defects, and other harms as early as the 1960s, yet they suppressed studies, misled regulators, and continued widespread production. They used the same tactics as Big Tobacco: attacking independent researchers, hiding internal data, and creating doubt about the dangers while the chemicals spread around the globe.

The sugar industry distorted nutrition science through the 1960s, when early research began linking sugar consumption to heart disease, the Sugar Research Foundation secretly paid Harvard scientists to write a major review that downplayed sugar’s risks and shifted the blame almost entirely onto saturated fat and cholesterol. The funding was not disclosed, and the paper, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, helped shape decades of dietary guidelines that focused on fat while giving sugar a relative pass.

In all of these examples (and there are many more), the language of science was used to advance positions for financial gain. The “science” was arranged afterward to justify pre-ordained conclusions, and even today, after the IPCC has admitted that it has been driving alarmism by using extreme models it knew were inaccurate, the ‘science’ of climate alarmism persists deeply within the mind of most yard-sign wielding households.

Ideological Pseudoscience

Sometimes the corruption of science is purely ideological, and one of the clearest and most disturbing examples is the Nazi regime’s Ahnenerbe.

Created in 1935 by Heinrich Himmler as an SS research institute, the Ahnenerbe existed to prove Aryan racial superiority, and the mystical destiny of the Nazi state. They sent expeditions to Tibet, Scandinavia, and the Middle East looking for evidence of ancient Aryan civilizations. They measured skulls, conducted bizarre archaeological digs, and produced academic-looking papers that always reached the same conclusion: the Aryan was the ‘master race’. When evidence did not support the ideology, it was ignored, distorted, or fabricated. Falsifiability, the heart of real science, was rejected outright.

The Ahnenerbe used the trappings of science, including institutes, academic titles, expeditions, laboratories, and scholarly language. But it was never science. It was propaganda.

On the other end of the spectrum, biologist Trofim Lysenko rose to power in the Soviet Union by promising that Marxist ideology could reshape agriculture. He rejected genetics as “bourgeois science” and claimed that plants and animals could be permanently transformed through environmental conditioning. Soviet leaders loved this idea as it fit their ideology to a tee.

Lysenko’s theories were enforced through the rule of law. Dissenting biologists were fired, imprisoned, or executed, and soviet agriculture suffered catastrophic failures as a direct result. Millions of people starved to death.

In both Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union, the word “science” was hijacked. Real scientific institutions, language, and procedures were used, but the scientific method was not. Evidence was only acceptable if it confirmed the pre-chosen political or racial conclusions, and the same thing happened in Mao’s China, and a host of other places where actual science took a back seat to one-party rule.

The moral of the story is that when ideology fully captures the process of ‘science,’ the word ‘science’ becomes a weapon. The prestige and authority of science are used to silence opposition, justify atrocities, and close off lines of inquiry. The method dies, but the label remains, giving the worst ideas the appearance of objective truth, and giving those who believe falsehoods the perception of being intellectually superior to those who do not.

The underlying corruption is the same one we saw with religious authorities and corporate interests: power decides the conclusions first, then demands that “science” support them.

Modern Political and Ideological Capture

This same pattern continues today, often with the approval of media and academia.

The famous Card-Krueger study on minimum wages claimed that raising the wage did not hurt employment, and may even increase employment levels. This quickly became accepted wisdom even as later studies using better data found that higher minimum wages did cause higher levels of unemployment, especially for low-skilled workers.

Another great example is the Hockey Stick Graph by Michael Mann, which became a central visual for catastrophic global-warming claims. Questions about its statistical methods, proxy selection, and data handling were often dismissed or downplayed, even after Climategate emails showed internal concerns about how the science was being presented.

Michael Mann’s team used a statistical method that gave extra weight to any tree-ring records that showed a strong upward trend in the 20th century, while downplaying or ignoring records that showed normal ups and downs in earlier centuries. When other researchers later tested the same method on completely random numbers (with no pattern), it still produced a nice, clean “hockey stick” shape.

In other words, the methodology produced the hockey-stick shape they were looking for independently of the data, but the graph was so persuasive that millions of Americans still believe in it to this day.

Claims about gun violence have also been manipulated. A study titled, Violent Death Rates: The United States Compared with Other High-Income OECD Countries, by Erin Grinshteyn and David Hemenway, published by The American Journal of Medicine in March of 2016, found that the US gun homicide rate was 25.2 times higher than in other high-income OECD countries. For ages 15–24, the US gun homicide rate was 49 times higher, and the US accounted for 90% of all women, 91% of children (0–14), 92% of youth (15–24), and 82% of all people killed by firearms among the countries studied, despite having only about 31% of the combined population.

This paper (and earlier related work by Hemenway) is the primary source cited in media and policy discussions for the “US is an extreme outlier” narrative on gun violence in developed nations. Hemenway, however, never provided his data sets. He described his methodology, but refused to provide the underlying data.

John Lott used publicly available data to recreate Hemenway’s studies. On a per capita basis, he found America’s rate of mass public shootings to be remarkably average. Norway has a higher level of gun death than we do. American gun violence is also heavily concentrated in specific urban areas marked by poverty and gang activity. If we exclude gang activity, the United States is suddenly one of the safest countries.

When publishing More Guns, Less Crime, Lott made a minor methodological error in one early analysis that he corrected in later editions. That small mistake has been used to dismiss John Lott entirely.

With the help of the mainstream media, the political left has become very good at destroying the careers and reputations of any actual scientist that disagrees with them.

Restoring Credibility

Whether the driver is religious authority, corporate profit, personal enrichment, or political ideology, the corruption of science occurs in steps.

First, the desired conclusion is chosen and treated as sacred. Second, selective data and faulty methods are used to support that conclusion. Unfavorable evidence is ignored, downplayed, or attacked. Favorable evidence, no matter how weak or poorly designed, is repeated ad nauseum. The outward appearance of science is carefully maintained: academic language, institutes, studies, charts, and expert credentials.

Next, researchers who reach the wrong conclusions face professional attack, funding cuts, public ridicule, or worse. Minor errors in dissenting work are magnified into fatal flaws, while far more serious problems in supportive work are ignored.

Finally, media outlets and powerful institutions declare a “scientific consensus.” The public is told the matter is settled and that the debate is closed. Anyone who disagrees is treated as not credible and derided accordingly.

This pattern repeats across centuries and across different sources of power. The Catholic Church subordinated astronomy to doctrine. Tobacco companies manufactured doubt to protect profitability. The Nazis built the Ahnenerbe to “prove” racial superiority. Soviet authorities enforced Lysenkoism to flatter Marxist ideology. Modern examples, such as minimum wage studies, the hockey stick graph, selective gun violence narratives, and asymmetric scrutiny of dissenting researchers, show the exact same mechanics at work today.

The label “science” has enormous authority in the modern world, which is why it is so tempting, and so dangerous, when that authority is misused.

The growing public distrust in “science” is not anti-science. It is often healthy skepticism toward institutions that have repeatedly shown they value narrative over truth. People have watched “science” get twisted too many times, such that now when the label of science is used to shut down debate instead of encouraging it, people stop trusting the label.

Real science requires courage. It also requires admitting when you are wrong and changing hypotheses when the facts demand it.

Science is not a priesthood. It is a rigorous, and often uncomfortable process, never settled by consensus or institutional power.

Until we insist on the actual method instead of the label, we will continue to be ruled by corrupted data that serves powerful interests while covering up reality. The policies underwritten by such data tend to fail, and society follows.

John Lott is not apt to be killed for dissenting on gun violence with actual data, but on a cold, February morning in 1600, Giordano Bruno was. Hypatia, Servetus, Lavoisier, Ibn Rushd, al-Razi, and Ibn al-Haytham - all brilliant minds spread across centuries and civilizations - were persecuted once their findings threatened sacred conclusions held by those in power.

Today, the word ‘science’ is often just a slogan on a yard sign, and if we want to build a better tomorrow, we need to demand that it become something more again. We need to demand not just scientific credentials, but scientific methodology as well.

Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, was one of the highest-ranking nobles in France and a cousin of King Louis XVI. He was about as close to the monarchy as someone could get without wearing the crown, but unlike much of the aristocracy, he embraced the Revolution.

He opened his Palais-Royal estate in Paris to political clubs, radical speakers, and revolutionary parties. The Palais-Royal became one of the major centers of revolutionary agitation. Some historians even view it as one of the incubators of the Revolution, and as the Revolution radicalized, so did he.

He renounced his noble title. He abandoned the name “Orléans,” and adopted the name “Philippe Égalité.” When King Louis XVI was put on trial, Philippe Égalité voted in favor of executing his cousin.

This did not save him, as once the Revolution moved into the Terror phase, loyalty no longer helped.

Revolutionary systems radicalize through competition, with every faction needing to prove itself more revolutionary than the last, and eventually Philippe Égalité was accused of insufficient revolutionary purity based on his royal birth, and based on his son, also of royal blood, having very wisely fled France.

And so it was that on November 6, 1793 (16 Brumaire, Year II, in the calendar the Revolution had created), the man who had renounced nobility, changed his name to the French word for ‘equality,’ supported the Revolution, enabled the radicals, and voted to execute his own cousin, was guillotined.

Philippe Égalité demonstrates that revolutionary movements built upon unconstrained political power do not stabilize, and eventually eat their own.

Restraint is a recurring theme throughout Western Civilization. The Judeo-Christian God gave man free will. Lucifer embraced free will but wanted it unrestrained by God’s moral order, and rebelled.

One person in a closed system can of course do whatever they like, but when we start to add other people, freedom needs to be restrained by morality to function. Similarly, power can be absolute if we only care about those in charge, but once we start worrying about everyone else, power needs to be restrained.

Without restraint, the logic of ideological purity never ends. These kinds of revolutions are like ropes lit from both ends, burning off first the extremes and then moving ever inward until everyone is gone, unless someone like Napoleon intervenes. We are increasingly making the same mistake by confusing democracy with liberty. The two things are not only different, but are often in direct conflict with one another.

Democracy is the right of a people to vote to decide what they will do. Some compare it to two lions and a gazelle deciding what to have for dinner.

Liberty is the right of the individual to live his or her life however they want, provided they allow others to do the same. Liberty is what protects the gazelle from the lions, and it is also what protects us from one another in a country where we select representation based on majority rule.

Democracy decides who controls the government. Liberty limits what the government can do. The Founders understood this distinction very well, which is why the United States was founded not as a democracy, but as a constitutional republic.

In a functional system, liberty restrains government, morality restrains liberty, and government enforces the law. All three are necessary and the balance between them matters. Every system that throws out any one of those components fails.

James Madison argued in Federalist No. 10 that the greatest threat to free government was not the minority, but the majority. A minority can be voted down whereas a majority can vote to steal from any minority it chooses. It can, in fact, steal from all of them, even if when combined those minorities form a majority. The central challenge of government, then, was not allowing the people to govern themselves, but limiting the scope and power of government.

Imagine seven groups of equal size. Someone suggests stealing all of the wealth from one of the groups - call it ‘the rich’ - and everyone votes. The motion to steal all of the wealth from the rich passes, and the rich are now poor.

Next someone suggests stealing all of the wealth from the next richest group. The motion passes with support from six of the seven groups, and now the second group is also poor. Someone suggests stealing all of the wealth from the next group and the same thing happens, and again until all of the wealth from all of the groups is gone.

Nobody would have voted to have their own wealth stolen, but by breaking society up into pieces and having each person vote against all of the other groups, that is precisely what happened.

Preventing this is the purpose of constitutional restraint. The Senate, the Electoral College, separation of powers, judicial review, federalism, and the Bill of Rights all exist to slow power down, fragment it, and limit its scope. The defining characteristic of a republic is not the vote, but that there are things the government is not allowed to do, even if a majority of the public wants it to. Our Constitution, in fact, specified what the government can do, and specifies that it can do nothing else.

Even when the government should do something, the founders understood that the more local government is applied, the more responsive it will be, which is why the 10th Amendment left all powers not explicitly given to the Federal Government to the states or the individual.

We understand the need to constrain kings, so it should not be hard to understand the need to constrain other forms of government as well. People fear dictators, but there have been very benevolent dictators throughout history. Marcus Aurelius is a great example. He could have been an absolute despot, but he wanted to rule justly.

Democracies can be worse than kings. As Thomas Jefferson put it, “I would rather have one king 3,000 miles away than 3,000 kings one mile away.” Thomas Jefferson was not the only founder who believed democracy to be worse than monarchy, and had France followed Lafayette and built a constitutional republic, their Revolution would have been a success.

Human nature does not improve just because people group together. Majorities are more than capable of becoming every bit as selfish, emotional, shortsighted, and tyrannical as kings. In many cases, they are worse, as majorities can convince themselves that anything they do is morally justified. They are, after all, the majority, and the majority rules.

Mobs do not act as a group of moral individuals so much as a single immoral individual. The perceived morality of being a majority makes mobs narcissistic and psychopathic by nature, and as such we should fear the form of government less, and the scope of government more.

The French Revolution demonstrated this very clearly. What began as a revolution against aristocratic abuse quickly became a revolution against anyone accused of sympathizing with aristocrats, then against those insufficiently loyal to the revolution, and finally against rival factions within the revolution. Had it not been for Napoleon it would not have stopped there - it truly was a rope burning from both ends.

The underlying problem was not monarchy or empire, but unconstrained human nature, and the same impulses that corrupt political systems also corrupt economic ones, as the incentives are the same. Human beings respond to power, self-interest, fear, envy, greed, security, and moral justification regardless of the system they inhabit.

Consumption tends to concentrate in cities whereas production generally occurs outside of them. Producers and consumers often have very different political and economic incentives. Consumers benefit from lower prices, subsidies, wealth transfers, and public spending. Producers benefit from property rights, investment, profitability, and economic freedom.

This naturally pits cities against the rest of the country, or as we call it in America, New York and California against ‘fly over country.’ Most people live within cities, so in a democracy, consumers have the larger hand.

This dynamic is also what popularizes socialism: those in cities primarily work in banking, or in service roles, and are far removed from the farms and factories where physical goods are produced. They don’t know what all goes into putting food in the grocery store and have no real reason to care. They have every incentive to vote to get more food for less money.

Karl Marx assumed production was at worst fixed. He assumed that a nation that shows the capability to produce a certain amount should be able to produce that amount even if incentives change, but history has proven him wrong. History has shown that human beings respond to incentives, and incentives matter. When you disincentivize production by taxing it too much, production suffers.

We evolved to respond to incentives. Maybe that is selfish. Maybe not. Whatever the case we cannot unwire hundreds of thousands of years of evolution just because Karl Marx said that we should. The notion that we can is absurd, and attempts to rewire societies around what is not possible have killed hundreds of millions of people in the 20th century alone.

Our ability to kill at scale has only grown, so the 21st century has the capability to kill even more people if we do not get this right, and Marx’s vision of a stateless utopia of unrestrained freedom is exactly what Satan wanted when he rebelled against God. In both cases it sounds good on a surface level, but falls apart once you think it all the way through.

Once consumers gain the ability to permanently subsidize themselves through the taxation of producers, the majority will naturally continue increasing taxes, spending, redistribution, and public benefits until production is no longer profitable. Consumption initially rises to meet the increased demand, giving an initial illusion of success, but the damage arrives once investment collapses, productivity declines, and producers cease operating. Then people starve.

This pattern has repeated throughout history.

Venezuela was once among the wealthiest countries in South America. Over time, the Venezuelan government reorganized the economy around redistribution rather than production. Industries were nationalized. Economic incentives were distorted. Consumption was subsidized through oil wealth and public spending.

At first things appeared to succeed, which is why socialism remained popular as long as it did. Then production collapsed, inflation exploded, investment disappeared, and the economy fell apart. The country found itself struggling with shortages, starvation, black markets, and mass migration. It got so bad that the government suggested people breed rabbits and eat them to survive.

None of this happened through monarchy or dictatorship either. Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro were both popularly elected. Maduro did not stay in power through democratic means, but he did get there that way, and Chávez was popular right up until he died.

Nor was Maduro worse than Chavez. Margaret Thatcher said that the reason socialism fails is that “you always eventually run out of other people’s money,” and Maduro had the misfortune of being the guy in charge when the money ran out.

Argentina is now attempting to reverse the same collapse. After decades of inflation, subsidies, corruption, state intervention, and economic stagnation, the country is attempting to restructure itself around consumption. As expected, the transition is painful even as the economy starts to grow.

The same thing occurred in Britain under Margaret Thatcher. Entire industries that had depended upon state protection and government support contracted or disappeared entirely. Critics focused on the collapse of those industries and the pain associated with the transition while supporters focused on declining inflation, renewed competitiveness, rising productivity, and long-term growth. Critics pointed to the millions of people who had lost their jobs. Supporters pointed to the fact that most of them found new jobs that paid more.

Both sides were correct. Removing taxes on the productive parts of the economy and ending support for the unproductive parts meant that those who produced what people wanted thrived, while those who did not struggled. Some would call that fair, but others of course look at the people who lose their jobs when industries are no longer needed. We are a compassionate species. Our hearts bleed for the displaced even when we know some forms of economic churn are beneficial in the long term.

The Thatcher-era restructuring effectively reset the British economy. The recession from 1979 - 1981 was brutal, but from 1982 until the early 2000s, Britain experienced one of the longest sustained expansions in its modern history, and though many industries in Argentina are struggling, the economy is growing overall.

One of the great recurring patterns of human history is that people born under oppression tend to dream of freedom, while people born free often dream of chains. The former have experienced the danger of tyranny directly. The latter often assume such dangers no longer exist.

But those dangers never go away.

Tyranny is still out there, not because human beings are evil, but because human beings are human. Self-interest does not disappear when exercised collectively, and a majority is not only capable of abusing power, but apt to see such abuse as just.

Our founders understood that if the government does not have the kinds of power businesses want, there is no point in bribing, and it is no surprise that as the government has grown, so too has corruption. So too has fraud.

It is also impossible to have personal freedom without economic freedom. We are all a part of the means of production, so placing the means of production under government control means placing the people under government control. Every subsidy, tax, or mandate that pushes production away from the things people want to buy, and toward things they do not, makes us as a society less well off by making the things we want more expensive. Someone, after all, has to pay for those things.

Even a laissez faire system will have a defense industry, as just one obvious example of an industry based purely on government demand. We also need roads and a host of other types of infrastructure that would be difficult to maintain through private means, so there will always be a need for the government to take from what is profitable to pay for what is not.

The question is where that ends. My answer is that the government should do things that make the rest of the economy more efficient, and that it is OK to tax the rest of the economy for that, but the government should not do things that make the economy less efficient without very good justification, and now that the IPCC has admitted that climate alarmism was based on models it knew were inaccurate, we should be very careful letting the government justify making us poor, as it has done to great effect in Canada and across much of Europe, through net-zero mandates.

Lizzie Magie created the game Monopoly in 1903 to demonstrate the dangers of free markets, and it tied in very neatly with Karl Marx’s critique. This game was specifically designed to force wealth to accumulate into ever fewer hands until one person won.

That works in a game designed to make it work, but in the real world, free markets don’t work that way. Every monopoly that has ever existed that did not have direct government support either did not last long before some other company emerged to challenge it, or it became obsolete and was replaced by something else. The only exception is the New York Stock Exchange - which was a monopoly for 110 years, but no longer is.

Even where there are temporary monopolies, they do not last by raising prices so much as by reducing them faster than can competitors. The notion of monopolies using their position to take advantage of consumers may be theoretically possible, but if there are any examples of that happening without direct government support, I have never been able to get anyone to name one, and we spend an inordinate amount of time and resources fighting this particular boogeyman, even though he has never shown up.

We do so by tilting toward a very different boogeyman that has appeared many times. In addition to the French Revolution, we have the Soviet Revolution, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the Khmer Rouge, the Iranian Revolution, and countless others throughout human history.

Revolutions sometimes lead to positive outcomes, as evidenced by the upcoming 250th Anniversary of the United States - which worked because it restrained government - but even as we turn 250 some of the most popular voices in our country will point to the Revolution, not as the birth of our nation, but as the funeral for all of the people our country has supposedly oppressed.

We do live in an oppressive world, but the oppressor is the planet, which has a myriad of ways to kill us.

Life being anything other than brutal and short is a new phenomenon, and though we cannot undo millions of years of evolution in just a few generations, gender roles changed remarkably fast. Women today have all the same rights as men, and that has been true for decades.

People forget that before Thomas Jefferson wrote, “all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights,” the notion that all men were equal had never been considered, and slavery existed in all corners of the Earth.

Perhaps more to the point, these things happened in the past, and we cannot change the past. We can learn from the past, but even then the notion that people who did not live in those times owe something to people who also did not live in those times, because people who are long since dead did things to other people who are also long since dead, all based on what people look like today, is absurd, and if we ever want to move beyond racism and live in the world as true equals, that kind of thinking needs to stop.

The problem is that we don’t really want to be equal. We want that for others, but we all want more for ourselves. We want to be exceptional.

And unfortunately, people think that if they can gain a majority somewhere they can vote for whatever they want. It is hardly surprising that so many people want other people’s money. This is the ideology of grievance, and ideology, like a siren, calls societies onto the rocks.

Human beings are neither good nor evil, but a mix of the two, and we cannot live under any ideology if taken too far. We are not capable of that, needing both liberty, and restraint. Liberty abhors government, and yet liberty can only exist if the non-aggression principle is enforced.

Liberty is not the problem today, though. Empathy and compassion are. Though empathy and compassion are wonderful traits we should all have in our daily lives, when societies turn them into an ideology of absolutism and practice them without restraint, they become suicidal.

Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans was thinking ideologically when he changed his name to Philippe Égalité and voted to kill his cousin, the king. He inverted his morality and acted without restraint. Did his countrymen thank him for helping overthrow the monarchy?

No they did not. They cut off his head instead.

And that is where his kind of thinking always leads.

Alaska is 55% Republican. Its lone House seat is held by a Democrat.

Connecticut is 43% Republican and Delaware is 41% Republican. Hawaii is 37% Republican. Idaho is 30% Republican. Maine is 45% Republican. Massachusetts is 37% Republican. New Hampshire is 47% Republican. New Mexico is 46% Republican. Rhode Island is 42% Republican. Vermont is 32% Republican.

These states account for 30 House seats. Zero of those seats are Republican.

In fairness, there are just as many states with Democrat minorities that have no Democrat representatives, and most of them - for both parties - only have one seat. Still, gerrymandering is real, and as the parties become more and more belligerent toward one another, most states are gerrymandering more aggressively to create as many seats as possible for the party in power, in the run-up to the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election.

Neither party has all that much interest in democracy. Democrats want more power over the lives of everyday people and Republicans want the government to have less power over the lives of everyday people. Both parties are at this point more concerned with getting what they want than with how they get it, and neither really cares about the process as much as they care about winning.

Victor Davis Hanson recently posted to YouTube that the modern Democratic Party is modeled on the Jacobins from the French Revolution, and he’s correct, although when I made the same argument I focused more on the Directorate that ran revolutionary France. The most relevant section from my article follows (I encourage you to read the entire article):

Today, we are seeing large numbers of people, not only rejecting belief in God, but rejecting all that comes with belief in God, including the shared moral order that has always held Western nations together. If we do not regain that shared moral footing, we will either have mob morality (and the bloodshed that comes with it - England is bordering on this right now) or, more likely, state-defined morality.

State-defined moral systems always bend into tyranny, and tyranny knows no restraint.

Once restraint is severed, the intellectual class within our universities gradually ceases to be a steward of truth and becomes an architect of ideology. It is in fact the university system that is ‘teaching’ our children to reject our shared moral values.

Democrats, like the Jacobins, see themselves as intellectually and morally enlightened while they see others as backward, primitive, and corrupt. They claim that they want democracy, but they want a democracy only of the initiated. They do not care what anyone else thinks, and though they’ll give the appearance of the vote, if they are honest they don’t trust any system that can lead to Donald Trump.

Joe Biden went so far as to say, prior to the 2024 elections, “We’re going to do everything in our power that is consistent with the law and the Constitution to prevent another four years of Donald Trump.” Based on what the DOJ did, that included weaponizing law enforcement at both the federal and state levels.

Republicans are also against true democracy, preferring a constitutional republic where the government is limited, leaving individuals free to live their lives as they see fit provided they allow others to do the same. Based on their behavior leading up to this election, they are OK stacking the deck if it means that government stays limited.

On a moral plane, the parties reverse. Republicans want the country to remain grounded in the Judeo-Christian values it was founded on, whereas Democrats believe morality to be a product of culture. Being multicultural, they believe individuals should be free to create their own morality, giving us a morality of the lowest common denominator. That is functionally the same as having no morality at all.

Democrats have made the tolerance of immorality the only remaining moral virtue.

Republicans believe in individualism in all things but choosing morality. Democrats increasingly call individualism ‘racist,’ on the assumption that if we are left free, some of us might do better than others.

As Democrats behave more and more like the Directorate of the French Revolution, they are becoming more and more incompatible with Republicans, and their politics reflect this.

Republicans have, incidentally, moved as well. Democrats like to say that Republicans have become more extreme, but really the Republicans have moved to the left. Republicans just have not moved anywhere near as far as the Democrat base, which makes Republicans look more extreme by comparison. Positions that were routinely held by both parties, just ten or twenty years ago, are now considered radical by much of the left.

Trump is not just wrong to the Democrat. He is vile and disgusting, the lowest of the low, a worthless degenerate racist who hates humanity and steals from babies, someone who hates his own mother and bombs children, a pedophile and a rapist, a pig, a monster, a dog, a worthless con artist and thief, the spawn of Satan, a fascist lunatic and thug representing all that is evil and unholy in the world.

That’s not a real quote, but I’ll bet you heard Robert De Niro’s voice when you read it, and it is this kind of hatred that has both sides pulling out all the stops in the lead-up to the 2026 midterms.

Normally, states redistrict after each census, but when Texas tried to redistrict after the 2010 census, it was blocked by the Obama White House, and its post-2010 redistricting efforts have been tied up in litigation and federal oversight until recently when Texas got the green light to proceed.

Texas did not redistrict between censuses solely to skew the 2026 midterms. It did so because it finally won in court, and redistricting was overdue. It was a special circumstance that Gavin Newsom misrepresented for political advantage.

Gavin Newsom accused Texas of redistricting for partisan purposes and responded by also redistricting California between censuses, adding more Democrat seats to offset the changes in Texas. Then the floodgates opened and a number of additional states redistricted, gerrymandering more radically across the board.

Virginia tried to do so as well, but the Virginia Constitution has rules for how to do so and those rules were violated, causing the Virginia Supreme Court to strike the changes down. Virginia is now looking at ways to force justices to retire so it can build a new court.

Both sides gerrymander, but historically Democrats have been better at it than Republicans. This is not because Republicans are less willing to do so, but because of provisions in the Voting Rights Act that Democrats sued Republican states with, making them gerrymander in ways that created minority-majority districts, on the assumption that these districts would vote Democrat. As such, Democrats have been able to gerrymander not only the states they control, but through the courts they have been able to gerrymander some of the states they do not control, forcing those states to create as many minority-majority districts as possible.

The Supreme Court recently ruled in Louisiana v. Callais that while it is illegal to redistrict in ways that discriminate against minorities, states cannot discriminate for minorities either. Now many Democrats are losing their minds as Republican states who were forced by lower courts to gerrymander in ways that created extra Democrat districts are removing them.

And removing court-ordered gerrymandering is not racist, no matter how many claim otherwise.

As bad as gerrymandering is, it is but a symptom of something much worse, which is the hatred both parties are increasingly feeling toward one another. They are viewed as evil, illegitimate, and beyond redemption.

Hillary Clinton infamously dismissed millions of Trump supporters as “a basket of deplorables.” Robert De Niro has repeatedly referred to Trump as a “monster,” a “dog,” a “pig,” and said publicly, “I’d like to punch him in the face.” Kathy Griffin posed with a fake severed head of Donald Trump covered in blood.

Members of Congress, media figures, and celebrities routinely compare Trump to Hitler or Mussolini, while MSNBC contributor Jason Johnson once referred to Trump supporters as “a threat to the country.” After January 6, 2021, commentators and academics openly discussed the need to “deprogram” Trump supporters, language normally associated with cults or enemy populations rather than fellow citizens. Others argued that Trump should be removed from ballots, imprisoned, financially destroyed, or permanently barred from office.

Republicans and conservatives have also increasingly adopted the language of political hatred. Democrats are no longer merely described as misguided or wrong, but as enemies of the state.

Donald Trump referred to Democrats as “sick people,” “radical left lunatics,” and “the enemy from within.” Marjorie Taylor Greene once said Democrats are “the party of pedophiles,” while Kari Lake accused Democrats of “trying to destroy this country.”

Conservative media figures routinely describe Democrats as communists, traitors, groomers, or enemies of Western Civilization. Tucker Carlson warned that Democrats “hate America,” while others on the right have described the modern Democratic Party as “evil” or “demonic.”

After the riots of 2020, many conservatives stopped viewing Democrats as permissive on crime and began describing them as actively aligned with chaos and destruction. Online rhetoric has escalated even further, with some voices openly discussing “national divorce,” secession, or the idea that the opposing side is irredeemably corrupt and fundamentally incompatible with American life.

The point isn’t whether one or both sides are right in how they view the other side, but that the escalation of rhetoric pushes the sides even further apart. Both sides now frame political defeat not as a policy loss, but as an existential threat. Nor is this division transitory. The parties want to take the country in mutually-exclusive directions, making the division permanent, unless one or both parties change.

When Democrats discuss policy, it comes from the more radical elements of the party, such as Zohran Mamdani, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other Democratic Socialists. The Supreme Court, which is currently interpreting the Constitution based on an originalist interpretation (based on what it actually says using definitions from the time it was written) is increasingly called corrupt, racist, and illegitimate. According to a 2023 Marquette Law School Poll, 66% of Democrats want to expand the size of the court to stack it, and I don’t believe doing so has become less popular among Democrats now that Trump has been elected again.

More moderate Democrats have moved away from policy prescriptions, preferring to denigrate their opponents, calling them evil, stupid, and unfit for office. It is not that the moderates have no policy ideas. It’s that all of the political energy is with the radicals, and the moderates are getting out of the way.

And of course the power is with the radicals. The left draws from the same revolutionary tradition as the French Revolution, inspired by the writings of Thomas Paine. Paine aligned with the revolutionary factions within France, supporting the Revolution even after it became violent. Ironically, Paine was imprisoned during the Reign of Terror once the revolution ran out of enemies and began consuming its own.

Paine helped open the philosophical door that later revolutionary thinkers, including Karl Marx, walked through.

The French Revolution transformed Paine’s philosophical radicalism into political radicalism. Marx later transformed it again into economic and class radicalism. In the twentieth century, these same impulses evolved into ideological movements centered on perpetual social reconstruction, where every institution, norm, hierarchy, and cultural tradition became subject to political scrutiny, moral judgment, and rejection.

The modern left expanded this further. Today it extends into language, gender, race, history, family structure, religion, education, and even objective truth. Nothing is viewed as fixed, inherited, or outside the reach of political revision.

If every generation possesses not only the right, but the moral obligation to dismantle all inherited systems, then society becomes permanently revolutionary. Nothing can settle.

I’ve often said that each generation is a bridge, taking what it is given from the previous generation, discarding what no longer works while keeping the rest, adding to it as necessary, and then handing all of it over to the next generation. Today’s left wants to take everything that came before and throw it away. The arrogance of this belief that nobody who ever lived before had anything useful to share with the world seems lost on them.

What we are seeing with gerrymandering is a nation splitting apart. It is in fact not hard to imagine the United States splitting in three, with the West Coast, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado becoming a political unit, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan joining with Pennsylvania and the Northeast as another political unit (connected through Canada), and the central and southern United States becoming a third. If there were a civil war, it would be the West Coast and Northeast against the middle.

What happens if after the midterms, half the states declare that thanks to gerrymandering, they refuse to recognize the legitimacy of the new Congress? What happens if California declares that the Federal Government under Trump, with the new Congress, has no authority over California?

Other states would follow suit.

Imagine if Democrats take both houses of Congress and then someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wins the 2028 popular vote, while losing the Electoral College. What happens if the Democratic Congress listens to Pete Buttigieg and certifies the winner of the popular vote as President?

Texas and Florida might declare the new President illegitimate and declare that the Federal Government under that President has no authority over their states.

Once again, other states would follow suit.

People don’t just hate each other. Increasingly, they want to hurt one another. And that’s true on both sides. I mentioned Democrats and violence earlier, but January 6, 2021, had at least some level of violence too, and not all of it was caused by FBI informants. Most on the right may not say of the left, “They are communists, the enemy!” but if we are honest, we know people who think that way.

I’d love to see our political parties find some semblance of common ground, but each has its own news sources and its own sources of truth. Neither side gives much intellectual credibility to the other, and to the degree that the left rejects ‘truth’ as subjective, they don’t really care if they are technically correct. They believe they are morally correct, and they believe that to be enough.

We can see where this leads by looking at Europe and Canada, which are ten or twenty years ahead of us and are already experiencing the kinds of civilizational strain that can lead to civilizational collapse.

We differ from Europe and Canada only in that we are still allowed to disagree. Europe and Canada are increasingly banning dissent as ‘hate speech,’ and censoring content. Europe is going so far as to sue X (formerly Twitter) in European courts to try and get it to censor content as well. If X loses that suit, other social media houses will be forced to self-censor as well, lest they be sued.

If the European Union is allowed to censor American companies based on their materials being available in Europe, the First Amendment will be effectively dead, and the political left will win, giving them free rein to create a new version of the French Revolution, but on a global scale, which is of course what they are looking for.

My message to the left is simple: the French Revolution did not lead to the radically liberated civilization Thomas Paine imagined.

It led to Napoleon.

And then it led to war.

The first article I ever wrote was an opinion piece for my high school newspaper. One of the students was a girl named Toni from South Africa who wrote an article against Apartheid, and our teacher had a policy that every opinion piece needed to have a counter opinion. As the only conservative in the class, I was tasked with writing basically all of the counter opinions, including a counter opinion on Apartheid.

I was of course against Apartheid, so the best I could do was to write a highly nuanced article against America being the spearhead for sanctions, on the grounds that Jimmy Carter had applied them like cotton candy and nations no longer respected our use of them, and that sanctions would hurt, first and foremost, the black South Africans we were trying to protect. My article was against Apartheid, but also against America being the driving force behind sanctions.

The next article I wrote was on abortion.

I really latched onto a poll that had come out showing that 80% of Americans supported a ban on abortions in the third trimester and 80% opposed a ban in the first trimester. My article argued that we should have a Constitutional Amendment banning abortions in the third trimester and making them a true constitutional right in the first, leaving the second trimester up to the states. I also argued that Roe Vs. Wade was one of the worst decisions in Supreme Court history, conjuring up a right to ‘privacy’ out of thin air, and then tying a right to abortions to that mythical right, as if having an abortion related to privacy. I also said that short of a Constitutional Amendment, it should be left to the states.

I don’t think that polls today would still show the same support for allowing abortions in the first trimester, nor for banning them in the third. Too many people now view abortion rights as sacrosanct, and the science shows that fetuses develop faster than previously thought in terms of when they can suffer and feel pain.

Let me frame the abortion question correctly, today, by equating it to another subject where someone is sometimes allowed to kill someone else: self defense.

It is legal to kill someone in self defense in every state in our country, although the specific laws regarding when self defense is justifiable and when it is excessive, vary. The technical term for self-defense is ‘justifiable homicide.’

The question of abortion is not a question of women’s health, or reproductive rights. It is the question of when the killing of an unborn baby should qualify as justifiable homicide, and whenever the topic of abortion comes up, that is how I now frame it.

This is a framing abortion supporters have a hard time backing away from. They can’t deny that abortion is the killing of an unborn child. ‘Unborn child’ is a perfectly functional definition of a fetus. They can try to argue that a fetus is a clump of cells and that killing it is not murder, but that too is a justification for killing it, leading right back to whether or not the homicide is justified.

When I hear that a woman has a natural right to control her own body, my argument is that all people do. Women are no exception. If a fetus were a cancerous growth, of course a woman would have a right to have it surgically removed, but a cancerous growth kills its host, whereas a fetus grows into a separate person, which abortion kills. Once again, all roads lead to justifiable homicide.

Some pro-life people do not like this framing as they misread it as justifying homicide. It does nothing of the sort. I’m free to debate whatever position I want on when or where such homicide is or is not justified. From a pro-life perspective I can argue that it is never justified, and from a pro-abortion perspective, I can argue that it is always justified. Framing abortion as a question of justifiable homicide does not negate the argument. It simply makes it honest.

The modern pro-abortion position is not that the unborn child is nonexistent. Increasingly, it is that the unborn child’s right to life is subordinate to the autonomy, interests, or preferences of the mother. That really is an argument about justifying homicide. Call it that.

I can accept that a woman should not have to bring a child to term if the child is the product of rape or incest. I can accept that women may have a right to an abortion if her life is in danger. I can accept that there are severe fetal deformities that a mother should not be forced to bring to term.

I cannot accept that abortion is a human right. It is nothing of the sort.

I cannot accept that a mother has the right to kill a baby that is partially crowned. I cannot accept that an unborn child is functionally different five minutes before it is partially crowned.

I cannot accept that it is justifiable to kill a fetus if it must be cut apart and removed in pieces.

I cannot accept that a fetus is just a clump of cells, and I would hope everyone would agree that if a pregnant woman wants an abortion, she should seek it before the unborn child has developed enough that it can feel pain and suffer.

The mainstream position is that meaningful pain perception likely does not occur until roughly 24–28 weeks, as the cortical neural pathways believed necessary for conscious pain perception are not fully connected before that, but some researchers argue that nociceptors begin developing around 7–10 weeks, spinal reflex responses appear earlier, thalamic and subcortical structures develop before full cortical maturation, and premature infants at very early gestational ages exhibit pain responses and are treated for pain clinically.

I’m not a doctor. I don’t even know what nociceptors are. I do know that it is generally immoral to intentionally cause another human being pain, so in my opinion the bar for having an abortion should be much higher after that point - wherever it is - than before.

My old framework used to be that there were three competing rights involved, between the mother, the developing baby, and the father. The father has equal rights to the mother once the baby is born, but not before. Before birth, however, as the fetus develops its right to survive grows. At some point, the baby’s right to survive supersedes the rights of the mother to kill it.

That’s still a viable framework, but now the central question is not one of whose rights are most important, but when and where the killing of an unborn child should be justifiable, based upon those rights. This framework correctly portrays the killing as homicide, and homicide requires justification.

Pro-abortion activists like to portray pro-life activists as anti-woman, or as seeking to control women. I reject the notion that it is anti-woman to be pro-child. Pro-abortion activists also like to suggest that someone cannot be pro-life without also wanting the government to pay to support all children, but this argument conflates the moral question of whether or not abortion is ever justifiable, with the separate question of who bears the economic responsibility for raising them, to create the ridiculous claim that you cannot be pro-life without also being pro-socialism.

If your argument is to change the subject, that is a pretty good indication that your argument is weak.

One can argue against my framework by saying that a fetus does not have personhood and thus killing it is not homicide, but the legal definition of personhood is secondary to the biological definition, and even beyond that, denying a fetus the definition of ‘person’ is just an attempt to justify killing it, returning us once again to the question of justifiable homicide.

Pro-abortion activists like to argue that bodily autonomy supersedes any claim a fetus might have, or that dependency changes the relative moral statuses of the mother and the unborn child, but these arguments too are justifications for killing fetuses, returning us to the question of justifiable homicide.

If there is an argument for abortions that cannot be boxed into a framework of justifiable homicide, I have yet to hear it, and my experience is that arguing in favor of abortion when framed as justifiable homicide is just as fruitless as defending Apartheid would have been.

Just as I had to use a tremendous amount of nuance to write a counter-argument to Toni’s anti-Apartheid piece, so too the pro-abortion crowd has to use nuance to write viable counter-arguments to this framework. They may try to reject this framework altogether, but the framework is too honest and too clean for rejecting it outright to stick.

And forcing them into nuance also forces them into retreat, framing abortion as an immoral act that may only sometimes be justifiable.

The Law of Moses might be the most misunderstood set of laws in all creation, as it combines moral law with civil and ceremonial law, without always specifying which is which.

The civil law in the Law of Moses governed the ancient nation of Israel. The ceremonial laws were designed to separate the Israelites as God’s Chosen People. There are Jewish people today who abide by the ceremonial laws, but the ancient state of Israel no longer exists and the civil portion of the Law of Moses is no longer applicable as a result.

Many of the criticisms people use against the Judeo-Christian moral order stem, not from moral law, but from civil or ceremonial law.

Dietary restrictions are a common example. Critics point to prohibitions on pork or shellfish in Leviticus 11 as evidence that Biblical morality is arbitrary and outdated, ignoring that these were ceremonial boundary markers meant to set Israel apart, not universal moral commands. The New Testament explicitly sets these aside (Mark 7:18-19 and Acts 10:9-16).

The same mistake appears as mockery of rules against mixed fabrics in Leviticus 19:19, which functioned as symbolic purity laws rather than as anything related to morality.

A more serious error occurs when critics cite the civil penalties of ancient Israel as though they represent moral law. Passages such as Leviticus 20:13 (death for homosexuality), Deuteronomy 22:20-21 (death for a woman losing her virginity before marriage), or Exodus 21:17 (death for cursing parents) are invoked to portray Biblical morality as inherently brutal, without acknowledging that these were civil statutes governing a specific theocratic nation, and were not designed to be universal. Things that may have made practical sense in societies several thousand years ago may not make sense in the modern world, and it is impossible for us to understand how societies functioned when we are thousands of years removed from them.

Even within ancient Israel the application of civil penalties changed, as seen in John 8:3-11, where Jesus refused to carry out a stoning. The same pattern holds with Sabbath enforcement in Numbers 15:32-36 and with ritual purity laws in Leviticus 15 and Leviticus 12, which are frequently read as moral judgments when they are in fact symbolic or civil in nature. In each case, the criticism lands not on the enduring moral law, but on categories of law that the tradition treats as contextual.

For Christians and non-orthodox Jews, only the moral law remains, and the moral law really is designed to be permanent and enduring.

Jesus summarized the moral law with what has been called the Golden Rule, in Matthew 22:37-40: love God above all things, and love others as much as you love yourself. Note however that Jesus was applying God’s moral law only to people and not to nations.

Applying individual morality to nations causes problems, and these problems are not abstract. As we shall see, this is a lesson Pope Leo would do well to learn.

The distinction between personal morality and public authority is built into the structure of Scripture and preserved in the Christian tradition. The commands given to individuals, such as mercy, forgiveness, and turning the other cheek, govern personal conduct in the face of personal wrongs. They are voluntary acts of virtue.

A man may choose to absorb an injury rather than retaliate, and in doing so he reflects a higher moral calling, but that cannot be applied to a nation without consequences, as a nation is a governing authority charged with protecting others. The government of the United States protects 340 million people within the United States, and is also the backbone of NATO and the primary partner in a host of other defense treaties, with friends and allies around the world. When deciding whether or not to ‘turn the other cheek,’ the President of the United States has to think not just about his own personal beliefs, but also about the well being of everyone his decisions will impact, both today and into the future.

The difference between personal morality and national governance relates to obligations that individuals do not bear. A private citizen may forgive a thief; a government that refuses to punish theft abandons its duty to maintain order. A person may choose not to defend himself; a state that refuses to defend its citizens is negligent, and inviting attack.

Romans 13 describes governing authority as bearing the sword to restrain evil and protect the innocent. That is not a concession to sin, but part of the moral structure of justice in a fallen world, and this is why Christian tradition developed a doctrine of just war rather than one of abolishing war outright.

Based upon the things Pope Leo has said, he does not seem to see any war as moral.

War is not treated as good in the Bible, but nor is it treated as inherently bad. It is treated as conditional, permitted under strict criteria such as legitimate authority, just cause, and proportionality. That framework understands that the aggressor and the defender are not morally equivalent. Moral responsibility remains with the one who initiates harm.

Nor is the aggressor always the first to strike. The Bible is full of stories where the just side started an inevitable war before an enemy was ready to strike. Whether looking at Joshua 6:1-21 covering Jericho during the conquest of Canaan, 1 Samuel 15:1-3 covering Saul’s attack at Amalek, David’s campaigns in 2 Samuel 8:1-6 and 10:6-19 against the Philistines, Moabites, and Arameans, or in Numbers 25:16-18 followed by Numbers 31, where Israel is instructed to attack Midian, the action is offensive, but justified to remove imminent threats.

If a nation is told to apply the ethics of personal forgiveness to acts of aggression, deterrence weakens and crime explodes. What appears as moral enlightenment becomes a form of moral confusion, with the state no longer judging between right and wrong in the defense of its people, but being asked to ignore judgment completely.

Mercy is a wonderful trait for individuals to have, but when practiced by the state, mercy needs to be tempered with justice, as mercy detached from justice becomes framed, by the criminal, as permission.

All individuals should welcome foreigners, but when a nation becomes overly welcoming, its culture fractures, and particularly if the immigrants have standards of morality that are incompatible with that of the host nation.

If a nation brings in immigrants faster than it can increase the supply of housing and other necessities, more people end up competing for the same resources, causing prices to explode. This is particularly true if the people immigrating are doing so not for economic opportunity so much as for generous welfare benefits, for which the host nation must then tax its populace.

Zohran Mamdani claims that New York City is in a more dire economic crisis than during the 2008 fiscal crisis, or during Covid-19. This is not because we have less food or fewer houses, but because under President Biden, we allowed millions upon millions of people to enter our nation illegally. These people compete with those already here for places to live and food to eat, and that pressure is greatest in places like New York City that declared themselves ‘Sanctuary Cities’ and promised to provide migrants with the necessities of life, paid for through tax dollars.

Of course New York City is broke. They cannot afford the promises they’ve made.

If an individual is called to give generously, he or she gives from their own pocket, but when the state attempts to enforce generosity through compulsion, the recipient sees it, not as charity, but as an entitlement that they have a right to receive. Also, as people begin to see charity as a state function, they cease being charitable as individuals, which is why charitable giving is much higher in the United States than in Europe, and much higher among Republicans than among Democrats.

The difference is not that Republicans, or Americans are better people, but that they have not outsourced their generosity to others. Also, people who donate are being generous with their own money instead of only with other people’s money. There is nothing more generous than a progressive promising money they do not have, and as Mamdani is finding out, promises are far easier to make than to keep.

Tim Walz and Ilhan Omar did not care about the fraud in Minneapolis welfare programs as those receiving fraudulent funds supported their campaigns, and neither Walz nor Omar bore any personal cost. The same is true of Gavin Newsom in California, where the ‘solution’ to independent journalism exposing fraud was to ban such journalism from taking place.

This is not just a Democrat problem, either. The Congressional Budget Office tells us that there are hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud, waste, and abuse, every year. If we include improper payments, some studies go as high as a half a trillion dollars in Medicare alone, and yet before DOGE nobody lifted a finger to stop it. Even after DOGE, it does not appear many people care.

The mistake of applying personal morality to the governance of nations is becoming more and more common, as well as more and more costly, and as mentioned, this is a lesson Pope Leo has yet to learn.

When the Pope says, “In our time, we still experience too much discord, too many wounds caused by hatred, violence, prejudice, fear of others, and by an economic model that exploits the Earth’s resources and marginalizes the poorest,” he is suggesting that free markets cause harm. The truth is that free markets have been the biggest boom to living and working conditions in human history, reducing extreme poverty from about 45% of the world population in 1980, to about 8% today.

If we follow Pope Leo, we will reverse that trend and subject billions of people who no longer face starvation with the same kind of extreme poverty their families only recently escaped. Pope Leo may be a true believer of socialism, but that does not prevent the policies he supports from causing tremendous harm.

When the Pope said, “Jesus does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war,” it was a direct rebuke of Trump for bombing Iran. This came after Iran killed tens of thousands of its own citizens, and though the Pope eventually also condemned Iran for killing protestors, apparently the Pope believes that killing your own people should carry no consequences.

The Pope also ignores that the Iranian regime has a 47 year history of promising to wipe Israel from the face of the Earth, of making “Death to America” its national chant, and of calling nuclear weapons “The Sword of Allah” from within a religion that insists on spreading itself by the sword (Qur’an 9:5 and 9:29). The Mullahs of Iran hate Christendom, and have missiles that can hit the Vatican. Perhaps the Pope should think about that.

When the Pope offers his “deepest sympathy to the Palestinian people in Gaza, who continue to live in fear and to survive in unacceptable conditions, forced, once again, from their lands,” he ignores that Hamas rules over the Gaza Strip and uses it not to build a nation, but as a base of operations for killing Jews. Children in the Gaza Strip are taught as children that killing Jews is a moral imperative. The Pope says nothing about changing that and without changing the culture in the Gaza Strip, his calls for peace ring hollow.

Israel would love to live in peace. The people in Gaza, according to polls, do not.

The Pope treats Islam and Christianity as sibling religions, but in doing so he ignores that the central tenets of the two faiths have inverted moralities, as I discussed in detail on White Rose Magazine.

Christianity and Judaism both base their morality on the moral laws within the Law of Moses, summarized as loving God above all things, and loving other people as much as you love yourself. Islam’s moral base is that of submission to Allah’s law (Sharia), and of forcing others to submit, even against their will (Jihad). One could not make two moral systems more different if they sat down and tried.

Christianity is personal from the ground up, with no rules for the running of the state, and Jesus made this explicit (John 18:36, Matthew 22:21, Luke 17:20-21), whereas the Qur’an specifies that Sharia is for all mankind, and that only Allah can make laws (Qur’an 12:40, 6:57, 5:44, 42:10, 34:28, 7:158,21:107).

In Islam, any laws made by man are null and void.

Individual Muslims can of course live in ways that are compatible with a secular society, but to do so they have to ignore some of the central tenets of their own faith, including the tenet that anyone not practicing Islam ‘correctly’ has been taught the truth and rejected it, the only remedy for which is death (Qur’an 3:85, 4:115, Sahih al-Bukhari 6922, Sahih Muslim 1676).

There is no Constitution under Sharia, and no civil rights (Qur’an 5:44, Qur’an 33:36 ). Women are considered half as valuable, half as smart, and half as honest as men (Qur’an 2:282, Sahih al-Bukhari 2658). If a woman is raped, she has to prove that she did nothing to invite it or the rape is considered her fault, and the stain of her shame can only be erased from her family through an honor killing. This is not directly written into the Qur’an, but is a side-effect in most Muslim countries, based on women needing four witnesses to counteract the allegations of the man who raped her (Qur’an 24:4).

Rape of anyone captured in Jihad, or in the furtherance of Jihad, is explicitly allowed under Islam (Qur’an 4:24, 23:5-6, 33:50, 70:29-30), which is why Grooming Gangs were allowed to gang-rape thousands of underage girls across England for several decades, and why in parts of Germany and Sweden, the rape of native girls is referred to as ‘misunderstandings.’

Not enforcing rape laws is how Europe decided to square Islam with secularism, and if that sounds horrific, it is. Islamophobia is apparently a greater sin than rape.

I can understand atheists looking at all religions as false, and then blowing off all tenets of all religions as silly perversions of truth. I disagree with that contention, but I can at least logically understand it. The problem is that believers tend to follow the tenets of their religion, whether silly or not, and the more fervently one holds their belief, the more closely they are apt to follow those tenets.

I expect the Pope, of all people, to know that.

Jews and Christians are apt to try to love their fellow man more, as they deepen their faith. Muslims are apt to become more radicalized into Jihad as they deepen their faith, and this is not driven by Muslims being bad people so much as by their religion being incompatible with other ways of life.

Qur’an 3:54 celebrates Allah’s willingness to lie: “And they deceived, and Allah deceived, and Allah is the best of deceivers.” Pair this with Revelation 12:9: “And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world…”

Is Allah Satan? Morally speaking, to the Judeo-Christian world he is. And in Islam, the Judeo-Christian God is. The moral systems are inversions of one another, so of course they find one another evil, and while individuals should always strive to live in peace and tolerance, nations have to be honest about incompatibility between faiths.

When the Pope applies individual morality to nation-states, he commits a very serious error, but when he equates Islam to Christianity as morally equal, he commits something much closer to blasphemy, and ironically, it is blasphemy under Islam as well.

The Pope is not alone in making such critical errors. Europe is providing a master-class in civilizational suicide, and there are plenty of Americans who want to follow along. The Pope is unique only because he is supposed to be the torch-bearer of the Judeo-Christian moral order.

The Law of Moses is misunderstood because it contains different kinds of law, applied to different kinds of people, in different kinds of contexts. When those distinctions are ignored, the result is confusion. Ceremonial law is mistaken for moral law and civil law is mistaken for universal truth.

That same mistake is now being made at a much larger scale.

The Bible did not confuse the morality of the individual with the responsibilities of the state, and it did not pretend that mercy could replace justice, or that peace could exist without the willingness to defend it. It understood that nations have obligations that individuals do not, and that failing to meet those obligations is negligence.

When modern leaders collapse those distinctions, they are not elevating morality. They are destroying it.

That is the error at the heart of the Pope’s statements. By applying individual moral commands to nation-states, he strips governments of the tools required to protect their people. By treating fundamentally incompatible moral systems as though they are variations of the same truth, he obscures the reality that not all moral frameworks are the same.

Misunderstanding the Law of Moses leads to bad theology. Misapplying moral law to the governance of nations leads to something far worse. It leads to policies that reward aggression, punish restraint, and place entire populations at risk. As we see in Europe, the result is civilizational collapse.

If the United States follows Europe’s lead, there will be no coming back.

Jamie stands in line at the county welfare office once every month. She knows the routine. She takes a number, waits, answers the same questions with the same answers as she has always done before, and signs the same forms. It’s the same thing every time.

The woman ahead of her last time was arguing about benefits she’d just lost. The man behind her was talking about how his cousin gets more by not working than he gets working. Everyone in the room always knows the system is broken.

Jamie knows it’s broken too. She’s seen benefits spent on things they shouldn’t cover, and she’s watched people game the rules. She’s had caseworkers tell her one thing one week and the opposite the next, and she gets lots of benefits she probably doesn’t really qualify for. The system is slow, inconsistent, and full of waste. Nobody cares. Sometimes, if you give a good enough sob story, the caseworkers even help you get benefits you don’t qualify for.

When Jamie’s number is called, she always steps forward. The check always clears, and the benefits always show up. Without the money, she’s not sure how she’d make it through each month.

Jamie doesn’t defend the system. She complains about it as much as everyone else. But she also doesn’t lose sleep over what it costs. Capitalism hasn’t done much for her or her children anyway, so if taking welfare breaks the economy, maybe the next economy will do more for people like her.

When people talk about government waste or deficit spending, Jamie shrugs. Of course it’s wasteful. She’s got kids to feed, and no job skills. So what if she gets more than she should?

There are only about a million people in the United States like Jamie, getting welfare money, but there are over ninety million getting some kind of federal assistance, which is about a third of our population, and all of these programs are awash in waste, fraud, and abuse. The Congressional Budget Office claims there is about a half a trillion dollars a year in fraudulent Medicare spending alone every year, and before DOGE nobody was doing anything about it.

Milton Friedman broke down a big part of the problem into how government systems work, in terms of who is paying for things vs. who is getting them, and another big part of the problem is that some of the people writing these programs are actively seeking to destroy our nation so that they can ‘radically transform’ it into something else.

Ilhan Omar, as one example, wrote one of the bills that created one of the primary programs Somali residents of Minneapolis used to commit fraud, and saw her net worth rise to $25 million while that fraud was taking place, after her husband opened a fake winery that she has not been able to show sells any wine.

As another example, the FBI has released text messages and emails from Ukrainian officials, discussing how over a hundred million dollars of the aid sent to Ukraine during the Biden years, was then sent back to the United States and smuggled into Joe Biden’s reelection campaign coffers.

These kinds of things don’t even make the news and nobody is held accountable. Nobody really seems to care. The public seems to have accepted that the primary role of government is to fleece the people and to bankrupt the country. The public won’t care until it impacts us personally, and by then it will be too late.

Let’s start by looking at spending.

Milton Friedman broke spending into four types based on who it is that pays, and who it is that benefits.

The first type of spending is when you spend your own money on yourself. You bear the cost and receive the benefit, so you watch both the price of what the money is spent on, as well as the quality of whatever is purchased, closely.

That doesn’t mean that everything is expensive and high quality. Sometimes it means the opposite. I collect vinyl records, so I have a very high-end turntable, amp, and speakers. When my CD player broke, I got one at the Salvation Army. Why? Because it was a name brand vintage unit that was high quality when it was built, and I got it for fifteen bucks.

The second type is when you spend your own money on someone else. You still bear the cost, but you don’t receive the benefit, so while the cost of whatever the money is spent on remains important, the quality of what is purchased is less of a concern.

The third type is when someone else’s money is spent on you. You receive the benefit but don’t bear the cost, so you care a great deal about how good the purchase is, but you don’t really care how much it costs. Most people in this position would choose a Ferrari when a Ford would do.

I knew a guy in High School who got a new car for his sixteenth birthday. I don’t remember what kind of car it was, but it was something pretty cool. My friend however was from a very wealthy family and wanted a Porsche. He was not happy with the car his dad bought him.

This is the kind of spending socialism promises…

The fourth is when someone else’s money is spent on someone else. You bear neither the cost nor receive the benefit, so you have no vested interest in either the quality of whatever is purchased, or the cost.

Politicians promise the third kind of spending but we get the fourth, and voters will support all kinds of programs, whether they work or not, as long as they believe someone else will foot the bill.

We see this in polls. When Americans are asked if they support universal healthcare without discussing cost, support is high. When Americans are asked about universal healthcare paid for by ‘taxing the rich,’ support grows even further. When the same question is tied to specific taxes the poor and middle classes pay, whether payroll taxes, income taxes, a Value Added Tax, or some other kind, support drops quickly.

The Kaiser Family Foundation has repeatedly shown that “Medicare for All” polls well until the funding mechanism is specified, at which point approval collapses. Politicians know this, so they promise the spending only, leaving how we would pay for it up to someone else.

The truth is that while many Americans want universal healthcare, very few Americans want it badly enough to pay for it. They want the benefit, but they want someone else to take care of the costs. Nor is this kind of thinking limited to healthcare. Virtually all socialist propaganda promises the third kind of spending to the masses, even though if we are honest, socialist promises are not possible unless the poor and middle classes foot the bill.

The math behind “tax the rich” proves this point. The total wealth of U.S. billionaires is mostly illiquid and already tied up in productive assets, like farms and factories, that the public needs to survive. The truth is that if we took every penny every billionaire has, along with all of the money every billionaire makes, we could fund Medicare for All for roughly three months. After that we’d be out of billionaires and would need to tax someone else.

Even if we tax all of ‘the rich’ as much as we possibly can, the Tax Foundation and Penn Wharton Budget Model have both analyzed wealth-tax-style approaches, and found that they generate revenue far below the cost of large entitlement programs, even before accounting for behavioral changes, capital flight, and valuation issues. ‘The rich’ is just too small a base to cover the costs for all of these programs, and the rich already pay what by any rational measurement is their ‘fair share.’

In the United States, the top 1 percent of earners pay roughly 40 percent of all federal income tax revenue, while the top 10 percent of earners pay about 70 percent. The bottom half of earners, in contrast, contribute only two to three percent of all federal income taxes, and after credits are thrown in, many receive refunds that exceed their total tax payments, making their tax burden negative. The top 1 percent earn roughly one-fifth of total income, and the top 10 percent earn about 45–50 percent, so their share of the tax burden is a lot higher than their share of the income.

When people like Bernie Sanders talk about making the rich pay their ‘fair share,’ he doesn’t really mean that. He just means ‘tax them more,’ and more is not a number, but a direction.

People claim that tax cuts only help the rich, but the truth is that the federal income tax has become more progressive over time as rates have been cut, and not less. After Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, for example, the share of income taxes paid by the top 10% went up, as did total tax revenues.

Independent analysis reinforces this conclusion. The Congressional Budget Office consistently finds that federal taxes have become more progressive over time when measured across income groups, even before accounting for those who get paid more in tax refunds than they paid in.

The Tax Foundation says the same thing.

If we think only in terms of what one person is paid and what they then pay in taxes, it looks pretty obvious that higher rates will lead to higher revenues, but as John F. Kennedy, and later Ronald Reagan showed, dollars are taxed each time they change hands. Just as a retail store might make higher revenues with lower prices and more sales, so too a nation might get more tax revenue with lower rates but a stronger economy, where money changes hands more frequently. In retail, we call this concept ‘turns,’ but in politics the same concept tends to get ignored.

And of course it does. There are two messages that sell politically. One is the rational “the system is broken in the following ways, and here is what I will do to fix it,” and the other is, “your lot in life is not your fault. I know whose fault it is, and I will make them pay.” Which is the easier sell is difficult to tell, but those who vote for the second message do everything they can to block any action from taking place on the first message.

Look at voter ID. The vast majority of the public wants that made law, including almost 80% of democrats, and yet Democrats in power block it at every turn. Why would they ever want to fix a system when they benefit from it being broken? It’s even worse in the EU. The EU has a lot more people who think like Jamie, from our introduction, than we do.

For the rich, rates above a certain level encourage tax shelters and off-shore accounts. Money then gets parked where it cannot be taxed, waiting for lower rates. When you lower the rates below that threshold, suddenly the same people decide to declare that wealth, and it gets taxed.

Rich people don’t just want money. They also want access to it, and with rates up to a certain point they are happy to pay taxes on their money. The trick to raising revenues is to keep the top rate just below that level.

We see the same economic behavior with criminals. If the cost of laundering money is below a certain threshold, criminals launder a lot of money. If the cost goes above that level, the same criminals bury money in the ground and wait for better laundering opportunities.

In both cases, people are willing to give up a certain percentage of their money for unfettered access to the rest of it, and while the mechanisms are different, the incentives are the same.

If we were smart, we would use tax rates designed to maximize government revenues over the long term. I’ve never seen a study of what the top marginal rate should be to maximize revenues, but the Laffer Curve suggests that tax revenues are highest when the government taxes neither too much, nor too little, and historically that has about 18% of GDP in the United States. When the government spends 40% (as it does today), the rest is eventually made up for through inflation.

18% is not a magic number. Really, it represents a government that is doing roughly what a government should, and not much else. I would suggest that our government is doing a great deal too many of the wrong things, and nowhere near enough of the right things, and that the spending side of the equation is probably just as important as the taxing side.

The point is that the “rich” are not a bottomless well. Much of their wealth is tied up in businesses, equity, and long-term capital investments. Aggressive attempts to take more, especially through wealth taxes or higher marginal rates, run into behavior changes: ‘the rich’ move capital elsewhere, they defer or reclassify income, and take other steps to avoid those higher rates.

Europe has found that there are only two groups whose behaviors do not change, and those groups are the poor and middle classes. As such, effective tax rates in Europe tend to be regressive, with the poor and middle classes bearing the burden. Effective rates actually go down in much of Europe (including the Scandinavian countries) as incomes rise, once all forms of taxation are taken into account.

In other words, the percentage of income a poor or middle class person is taxed will be higher in Sweden than the percentage of income a rich person pays, which is exactly the opposite of how it works in America. The United States, in fact, has the most progressive tax system in the world, today.

Barack Obama understood that his tax rate increases would lead to less - not more - tax revenue. He acknowledged that, but he said his rate increases were about ‘fairness’ rather than revenues.

People care about fairness but arithmetic does not, and if spending continues to grow, the burden has to expand downward onto lower-earning workers. That is why every high-spending country eventually taxes its lower and middle classes the hardest.

If we don’t tax the poor and middle classes directly for government largesse, we tax them through inflation, which is the most regressive tax of all.

Politicians pretend that they are taking from ‘the rich’ to support the poor and middle classes, but the truth is that the government supports the poor and middle classes with their own money, and since the government does this using only Milton Friedman’s fourth form of spending, this kind of ‘support’ costs a great deal more than would just letting the poor and middle classes keep their money in the first place.

The original Medicare program is a great example. Its costs flew through estimates within just a few years. In 1965, the CBO estimated Medicare would cost $9 billion a year by 1990, but when 1990 hit the cost was $67 billion.

Spending was not driven by estimates, but by usage, and once the people receiving the benefit did not pay the costs, usage exploded. Medicare is now both the most expensive item on the Federal ledger, and the fastest-growing. The only item on the budget that might catch Medicare is the interest on the national debt.

Some of the public will continue to vote against Medicare for All based on the economic reality of providing it, but most people do not know the economic reality and are happy to remain ignorant. For them, slogans suffice, and “Tax the rich,” and “Healthcare is a Human Right” make for great bumper stickers.

This is how people like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani get elected.

Friedman’s point is correct: the third type of spending is politically attractive because it disconnects choice from consequence, and we will never solve our budget problem unless we connect those things together again.

And as said before, though we are promised the third type of spending, what we get is the fourth.

Unfortunately there is a sizable percentage of Americans who hate everything America stands for, and who want to see the ‘radical transformation’ Barack Obama promised in his 2008 inauguration. These people believe that freedom leads to oppression, and that equality can only exist, in any form, if it is enforced by the state. For such people, bankrupting the United States so that we can ‘radically transform’ it into something else is the goal, which brings us to our second problem.

Such people see the world through a lens, not of freedom and opportunity, but of haves and have-nots. Those who have wealth, a home, a nice car, or something else others don’t have, are looked on with at best suspicion, and at worst with open hostility.

Of course, they don’t give up their own stuff. Bernie thinks he earned HIS millions. It is only everyone else who is greedy.

Such people don’t necessarily know much about economics, or how complicated systems work, but they have absolute confidence in their own moral superiority and in the morality of the world they envision, which is one in which the supposed oppressors are brought to their knees and the supposed oppressed are elevated to whatever standard utopia demands.

It is hard to say that such people are evil. I suspect some of them are. I’ve read some of Karl Marx’ poetry, which is about praising Satan and burning down the world, so I don’t doubt that some who promise utopian visions know that utopia is impossible and that attempts to achieve utopia cause tremendous harm, but the masses who buy into utopian visions don’t necessarily understand that.

We all think from both logic and emotion, but most of us primarily use one or the other. I am very much more of a logical thinker, which is likely what drew me to IT and to lean manufacturing / systems thinking as a career.

Emotional thinkers CAN of course think logically, but they are easily swayed by perceived moral failings and can be resistant to logical claims that ‘imperfect but good’ may be the best we can achieve. They are also easily tempted by dishonest players to place, as AOC put it, being ‘morally correct’ ahead of being ‘factually correct.’

It is, of course, impossible to put being ‘morally correct’ ahead of being ‘factually correct,’ as without facts there is no way to determine what is moral, but if we ground ourselves only in assumptions and slogans, and not in reality, we can view systems, people, countries, etc., based only on their faults, comparing them not to other systems, people, countries, etc., but to some version of perfection in which ANY system, person, country, or whatever will fall short.

It is incredibly dangerous to compare things to perfection instead of to other things that actually exist, but much of the public does exactly that, and in their desire to see perfection, all they do is destroy.

It is also impossible to say anyone or anything is truly ‘good’ when comparing everything to perfection, as everything will always fall short, making anyone who is not listed as ‘oppressed’ INHERENTLY evil, and by extension excusing anyone labeled as ‘oppressed’ from whatever they may do, no matter how horrific it may be.

In this view, if I give a homeless man $100, I am evil for not giving more. If he punches me and takes my wallet though, he is simply acting out against his oppression.

Why would anyone with such a world view care about fraud, waste, and abuse? Aren’t the people stealing from us just taking what they would have if the system worked, according to this world view? They don’t want Jamie arrested for knowingly taking welfare payments she does not qualify for. To them, Jamie is a victim and a hero.

Jamie will be back in a welfare line next month. She’ll take a number, wait her turn, and step forward when she’s called. She’ll complain about the system, talk about how broken it is, and still rely on it, because for her, it works better than any other system she has tried.

And from where she stands, her behavior makes perfect sense.

She is not paying the cost, but she is receiving the benefit. The system rewards her for continuing exactly as she is, and it asks nothing of her beyond showing up and signing the forms. There is no reason for her to think about sustainability, and no reason for her to care who ultimately pays.

That is not a failure of character, or at least not entirely. It is the predictable result of a system built on separating cost from consequence.

Milton Friedman described that system decades ago. When someone else’s money is spent on someone else, discipline disappears. That’s not because people are stupid, and not because they are evil, but because the incentives make it the most likely result.

Scale Jamie up from one person to tens of millions, and you don’t just get waste. You get a political system built around promising benefits while hiding costs, and a voting population that responds by asking for more. The problem is not that people like Jamie exist. The problem is that the system is designed so that millions of people can think exactly as she does, and feel like they are the righteous ones for doing so.

Until costs and benefits are tied back together, nothing will change. The lines will get longer, and spending will continue to grow. Eventually the bill will be so large that not only won’t Jamie be able to pay, but nor will anyone else. Next comes default and ruin.

Sadly, a sizable percent of the public are cheering for that day to come.

We are told masculinity is toxic.

Tell that to Chesty Puller.

Lewis Burwell ‘Chesty’ Puller was the most decorated Marine in the history of the Corps. He was born in 1898 in West Point, Virginia, and joined the Marines at the end of the First World War. He earned his reputation in the jungles of Central America during the Banana Wars, where Marines hunted insurgents through thick countryside, fighting in close combat, often with little support.

The Pacific War hardened his reputation into that of legend. Puller commanded Marines at Guadalcanal, Cape Gloucester, and Peleliu, holding ground through repeated assaults and steadying his men whenever the line started to bend.

Combat neither excited nor frightened Chesty Puller. It was simply a responsibility he carried for the Marines under his command, and he carried it with discipline, honor, and courage.

At the Chosin Reservoir, during the Korean War, eight Chinese divisions poured down from the mountains and surrounded the First Marine Division. Puller pushed his regiment forward, into the enemy, to keep the division intact. When the Division Commander, General Oliver Smith, was apprised of Puller’s movements, he replied, “Retreat? Hell - we’re just attacking in a different direction.” Puller’s regiment then helped the division fight over seventy miles to the coast.

Temperatures dropped as low as -30 F in what Marines still call ‘The Frozen Chosin.’

The Navy Cross is the second-highest award for valor in the United States, after only the Congressional Medal of Honor. The Navy Cross Puller earned at the Chosin Reservoir was his fifth, and he retired from the Marine Corps in 1955 as a lieutenant general.

Away from the battlefield, Puller was quiet and reserved. Marines saw the hard commander who expected discipline and courage, but when he came home, he was not the most famous Marine in the history of the Corps. He was either Lewis or Dad, spending evenings with his wife, talking with his children, and showing the same loyalty to his family that he demanded from Marines in the field.

Marines trusted Chesty because he shared their danger. His family trusted him because he shared their love.

Puller never chased fame and never tried to polish his reputation. The Marines who served under him remembered that when the fighting started and the ground shook, Chesty moved toward the sound of the guns, carrying his men with him.

I chose Chesty Puller for the intro to this essay, but I could have chosen Thomas Sowell, who was also a Marine during the Korean War before becoming America’s greatest living economist.

I could have chosen Jimmy Stewart, who climbed into a B-24 and flew twenty combat missions over Nazi Germany, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross twice before returning home and becoming one of the most beloved actors in history.

I could have chosen any number of great men.

Audie Murphy became the most decorated American soldier of the Second World War before later appearing on movie screens across the country. Clark Gable was already a major film star when he joined the Army Air Forces and flew combat missions over Europe in B-17 bombers. Charlton Heston served as a radio operator and gunner on B-25 bombers in the Pacific, long before he stood in front of cameras as Moses or Ben-Hur.

George H. W. Bush climbed into a torpedo bomber at nineteen years of age, flew combat in the Pacific, and climbed aboard a burning torpedo bomber on an aircraft carrier’s main deck, risking his life to pull a fellow pilot out of the cockpit while the deck crew pushed the plane overboard. He later, of course, became President of the United States.

When danger came, these men stepped forward to defend our nation and the American way of life. They accepted risk as part of their duty and carried that sense of responsibility with them for the rest of their lives. Were these men masculine? Absolutely. But they were the opposite of toxic.

We are told that men start wars, but power brings war, and women in power have historically wielded it the same way men do.

Catherine II of Russia pushed the Russian Empire south in multiple wars with the Ottoman Turks. She tore Poland apart, splitting it with Austria and Prussia. Elizabeth I of England fought Spain and crushed rebellions in Ireland, while English ships and soldiers spread her empire across the seas. Maria Theresa spent years fighting across Europe in the War of the Austrian Succession and then plunged back into conflict with Prussia during the Seven Years’ War.

Isabella I of Castile finished the Reconquista by conquering Granada and ending Muslim rule in Spain. Empress Wu Zetian expanded Chinese power through campaigns into Korea and Central Asia. Queen Ranavalona I fought European powers to hold Madagascar under her rule.

Armies march no matter what gender is in charge.

By extension, there have been a large number of weak men in power.

James Buchanan watched the Union fracture and treated it as a problem to be managed rather than a crisis to confront. He insisted he lacked the authority to act while states prepared to leave. By the time stronger leadership arrived, the lines had hardened and war was unavoidable. His restraint did not preserve peace. It allowed the situation to deteriorate beyond recovery.

Tsar Nicholas II held absolute power and exercised it poorly. He wavered between repression and concession, satisfying no one and stabilizing nothing. As Russia collapsed under the strain of war, he drifted further from reality. Authority without resolve does not hold a state together. It accelerates its collapse, leading to a disastrous experiment with communism in the Soviet Union.

Jimmy Carter failed to support the Shah of Iran, leading to the rise of the Islamic Republic of Iran. When students, led by the Ayatollah Khomeini, captured the American embassy, the Iranian hostage crisis dragged on for 444 days. The failed rescue attempt reinforced the image of American weakness that had been forged in Vietnam.

Carter should have kept the Shah in power, while ensuring that the Shah understood that he needed to provide his people more political freedom by starting to transition to a Constitutional monarchy.

Adversaries do not need overwhelming strength. They need to believe there will be no response. Once that belief takes hold, pressure follows. Boundaries are tested, then crossed. Only when they meet resistance do they stop.

Masculinity is blamed for violence, but it is disciplined strength that prevents it, and disciplined strength prevents war regardless of the gender wielding it.

The same traits that make men capable of war are the traits that deter it. Remove those traits, or teach men to distrust them, and you do not get peace. You get instability waiting for someone stronger to exploit it.

Toxic Masculinity

I usually start contentious pieces with definitions, but in this case if I define ‘masculinity’ precisely, I invite debate over the definition, and this is about more than semantics.

Masculinity includes strength and aggression, and of course those things can be toxic, but this is precisely why these traits need to be controlled rather than suppressed. Masculinity becomes toxic when it is mixed with isolation, meaninglessness, breakdown of family structure, or loss of responsibility. Toxic masculinity is masculinity when immature.

‘Toxic’ means ‘poisonous or contaminated.’ Something toxic is dangerous by nature, and when we say the natural tendencies inherent to masculinity are ‘toxic,’ we do a great deal of harm to adolescent boys. This recasts the traits that build soldiers, sailors, explorers, and fathers, into social hazards to eliminate.

For proof that masculinity is toxic, we are told that the vast majority of violent criminals are male, as are the vast majority of mass shooters.

That’s actually true. Men commit the vast majority of violent crime, but what does that fact really tell us?

There are differences between genders in a number of traits.

Men measure higher on aggression whereas women measure higher on agreeableness. The differences are trivial in the middle of the bell curve, but violent criminals are outliers, and because men score higher on aggression, most of the outliers are, of course, men.

So are most of the heroes, and for the same reason.

There are other differences. Men and women have the same average intelligence levels, but the bell curve for men is wider than for women such that most of the world’s geniuses, and idiots, are men.

Until very recently, we lived in a world ripe with ways to kill us. Life was frequently dangerous, and short. The notion that men oppressed women was simply not true; men and women worked together to protect their families and to survive.

Men built the cities, worked the fields, and fought the wars. Women faced different dangers. Pregnancy slowed movement and drained strength, and dying during childbirth was not uncommon. A mother with an infant could not run for miles, swing an axe all day, or march into a fight.

The simple truth is that one man can impregnate multiple women but can bear no children. Societies need children to survive, so biology made men expendable, and we evolved around that fact. This affected not only biology, but culture, such that on the Titanic it was women and children first.

The modern world is different. We live in climate-controlled houses. Power tools, hydraulics, robotics, and other forms of automation have replaced most back-breaking labor. Women today are just as capable as men in most fields, and, perhaps more importantly, women have every right to pursue whatever careers they want.

Women have been in the workforce in large numbers for over 50 years.

Perhaps over time, men and women will evolve to be more alike, but you cannot erase millions of years of evolution in a single lifetime. Nor is masculinity toxic. Aggression, for example, is fuel.

Aggression sits in the body the same way heat sits in a furnace. Power waits for an outlet and then explodes. Suppressing aggression does not make it go away - it either finds a positive outlet, or it finds a negative one.

For most of human history, men understood this, and they built structures to discipline their natural aggression.

Warrior codes demanded restraint, honor systems punished both cowardice and cruelty. Brotherhoods bound men to one another so that strength served the group instead of the ego, and fathers handed discipline down to sons.

Competitive sports also channel aggression into something positive. Sports took male volatility and forced it through discipline. The wild edge stayed sharp, but it did not cut everything around it. Competitive sports used to be considered so important in guiding boys into men that military academies used to require students to participate in at least one.

That discipline shows up both on and off the field. Men who learn to control aggression become reliable under pressure. When something breaks, controlled aggression turns chaos into action.

A man who has learned to master himself can focus, endure, and finish what he starts. He can carry weight without complaint, solve problems without panic, and keep going when others quit.

People don’t follow the loudest man in the room or the most emotional, but the one who does not lose control when things get tough. Discipline makes strength predictable, and predictable strength is something others can rely on. The same traits that can cause harm when left unchecked become the traits that protect others.

People follow strength, whether it comes from someone like Chesty Puller, Bob Dole, or Margaret Thatcher. It’s not about gender. It’s about leadership, and women should want men who are competent.

A controlled man does not look for fights, but he does not run from them either. He stands between danger and the people who cannot stand for themselves. A weak man retreats and becomes a coward when a strong man challenges him. Men being physically stronger than women, this makes weak men poor partners.

Discipline builds restraint. A man who knows he can act chooses when to do so and when not to. Discipline also builds brotherhood. Men who are tested together form bonds that endure. When Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks made a miniseries about paratroopers in WWII, they did not call it ‘Men Who Fight.’ They called it ‘Band of Brothers.’

When I was in the 82nd Engineer Battalion, in Bamberg Germany, I felt the same thing. My platoon mates were not just coworkers. We lived and suffered together, and being overseas in a nation that spoke another language, we really were like brothers. Was I a man before I joined the military? I don’t know, but I certainly was eight years later, when I got out.

To this day I believe in chivalry. I open the door for my wife and carry things for her, not out of dominance, but out of respect. I would not only die for my wife, but would, if necessary, kill for her.

Her life is more important than mine.

No one marked the moment masculinity became ‘toxic,’ but as the idea of ‘toxic masculinity’ grew, the ideals that had previously guided and shaped men started to disappear.

Boys spent more time in classrooms and less time in garages, on job sites, or in fields. They still had energy and the urge to compete, and they still wanted to test themselves, but they were told that their natural instincts were a fault they needed to learn to suppress.

Evolution and Control

I was a divorced father living in a small apartment when I got a German Shorthaired Pointer named Cody. GSPs are loyal, affectionate dogs. They are often called ‘velcro dogs,’ but they are also hyper, and if they do not get enough exercise they can become destructive.

Cody chewed up a couch, a lazyboy, a number of blankets, and about a half dozen shoes. He would try to sneak out whenever someone opened a door, and would run (usually chasing deer) for hours before trotting home.

I once had a friend babysit Cody. She watched him for a week. Afterwards she told me she wanted to get a dog, but was going to research breeds to make sure the dog she got would be nothing like Cody. She loved his intelligence and affection, but she could not handle the energy.

Cody calmed down quite a bit once I remarried and bought a house with a big enough yard for him to run in. My wife and I now have a GSP named Sherlock. Sherlock is bigger and faster than Cody was, but Sherlock is a gentleman who gets all the exercise he needs.

What we don’t have is grass in our backyard. Sherlock runs so much it’s almost all dirt.

When I suppressed Cody’s natural instincts by confining him to a small apartment, he spent his energy in destructive ways. The same is true of people. Suppress natural instincts and they do not go away. They become destructive. Young men suppressing their masculinity still have the strength and aggression of other boys. What they lack is control.

Competence must come before authority. A man given authority without earning it does not understand its weight, and he will use it poorly. Boys who are never given responsibility do not become men who seek it. They learn to delay, defer, and avoid. When responsibility finally arrives, it crushes them. A lack of responsibility leads to a lack of meaning, and people who lack meaning are not emotionally stable. This does not just impact the individual. Individual problems will always exist. Some people have mental health issues, and some are just broken. When a lack or responsibility scales upward, though, it impacts the entire civilization it is a part of.

Status must be earned. Hand it out and it means nothing. Earn it, and it creates standards men rise to. Failure must have consequences. Without consequences, there is no feedback, and without feedback, there is no growth.

A man who never pays for his mistakes never learns from them.

Back in my day, boys did not hit girls, and on the rare occasions when a boy did hit a girl, another, generally bigger boy, beat the hell out of him. And it wasn’t just women - the vulnerable were often protected by the strong. That has always been one of the defining responsibilities of men. Strength exists, in part, to stand up for those who cannot defend themselves.

I was a bit of a wimp when I was young, and it was another boy standing up for me (thank you Lloyd!) that embarrassed me enough to get me to toughen myself up. For a decade or so I went the other way and started fights whenever someone tried to intimidate me. Strength with wisdom is somewhere in the middle, but even without wisdom, it is better to fight a bully than to back down.

None of this is new. These are the same principles that have shaped men for millennia. What is new is the idea that those principles are somehow harmful.

They are not.

You do not reduce danger by attacking masculinity. You reduce danger by maturing it. Calling masculinity toxic does not solve the problem. It only makes it worse.

Masculinity is the mechanism through which male traits are shaped and directed. When you label that mechanism as harmful, you do not eliminate the traits. You remove the structure that gives them purpose. Boys must not only be allowed to become men - they must actually become men. A world full of adult boys would not be a very pleasant place to live.

Lewis Burwell “Chesty” Puller did not lack aggression or strength. He mastered and directed them. The same was true of Jimmy Stewart, Audie Murphy, Bob Dole, and millions upon millions of other men.

Slavery did not end in this world because women decided it should, but because men killed other men to force the practice to end. Every evil ended through war is ended by men.

The same traits that produce the most dangerous men also produce the men a society depends on to survive. The difference is not the traits, but how they are used.

And we don’t call it ‘masculine’ when it is weak. We call it that only when those traits are used with discipline and honor. We call it ‘masculine’ when we act like Chesty Puller and move toward danger rather than away from it.

Our society does not struggle because it has too much masculinity.

It struggles because it has too little.

Iran calls the nuclear bomb the ‘Sword of Allah.’

That phrase is not a metaphor. It comes from Qur’anic verses that call to spread Islam by the sword when other means fail. When Iranian leaders use that language they are not speaking about deterrence. They are describing a weapon that advances the faith and punishes its enemies.

Iran does not just want to have nuclear weapons. Their government has been clear for decades that they want to use nuclear weapons.

We like to think that Iran cannot hit the United States, but a jihadist with a minivan would prove a very accurate delivery system, and we should all agree that the Islamic Republic of Iran can never have nuclear weapons.

During negotiations before the war, Iranian officials told our negotiating team that Iran possessed enough enriched uranium to build roughly ten nuclear weapons within about a week. Iran thought that telling us how close they were strengthened their negotiating position. What it actually did was to end the negotiations and force us to act.

War is destructive. It destroys cities, economies, and lives. Any serious nation prefers peace, and anyone who has experienced war understands that. Sometimes, however, the choice is not between war and peace so much as between war and surrender, or between a small war now or a much larger one later.

The United States could have avoided World War II by surrendering after Pearl Harbor. Japan would have taken what it wanted in the Pacific, Germany would have ruled Europe, and America would have lived under the shadow of regimes that hated us.

Peace was not really an option.

Peace survives only when a nation’s enemies know that the nation is willing and able to fight. Once enemies decide that the threat of war is empty, they begin testing until either they conquer, or push too far.

Whenever there is conflict, all parties have to agree to have peace. Any one party can cause war, and there are certain conditions that make war the best option.

The first condition is a real threat. That threat might be to our country directly, or it might be to an ally, but whatever the threat is it must be something serious enough to justify a military reaction, should it occur.

The second condition is time favoring the enemy such that waiting makes the threat either stronger, more likely, or both.

Condition three is that negotiation isn’t viable. Diplomacy only works when both sides are actually seeking peace. When one side negotiates in bad faith, or negotiates to buy time while preparing for war, diplomacy becomes a weapon rather than a solution.

The fourth condition is a strategic moment that favors action. This could be a situation that makes immediate attack strategically favorable, or it could be a situation that makes pre-emptive action necessary.

When all four conditions are met, inaction does not preserve peace. At best, it delays, creating a larger and more dangerous war in the future.

In 1938 Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich waving a piece of paper and declaring that he had secured “peace for our time.” What he had actually done was to give Hitler the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. Hitler took not only the Sudetenland, but the entire country, and the following year, Hitler invaded Poland.

Germany in 1938 was not yet ready for a major war. Hitler’s generals understood that. Several of them were prepared to remove him from power if he provoked a conflict Germany could not win. Czechoslovakia possessed a strong army and formidable border fortifications, and had France invaded Germany from the west while Germany attacked the Czechs, Hitler could not have fought both fronts at the same time.

When Hitler moved on Czechoslovakia, he did not leave enough troops facing France to do much more than provide directions. Had France invaded, they’d have had an open door to Berlin.

Instead of confronting the threat while Germany was still relatively weak, the Western powers forced Czechoslovakia to surrender the Sudetenland. That decision stripped the Czechs of their defenses and handed Germany the industrial base that would soon fuel the German war machine. The war Chamberlain believed he had avoided arrived anyway, and when it came Germany was far stronger, and France was far weaker.

Iran has followed a pattern that should feel familiar to anyone who remembers the leadup to WWII. For forty-five years the regime in Tehran has funded militias, armed terrorist groups, and attacked Western interests across the Middle East. Hezbollah in Lebanon operates as an Iranian forward arm on Israel’s northern border, and Shiite militias in Iraq have attacked American soldiers and Iraqi rivals alike.

I was not yet a Marine in 1983, when 241 American servicemembers, including 220 Marines, were killed by an Iranian-backed Hezbollah truck bomb while conducting peacekeeping operations in Lebanon.

Hezbollah was created inside Lebanon’s Shiite population and armed, trained, and financed by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. We should have responded by sending in far more troops, and destroying Hezbollah. Instead we withdrew and Iran’s proxy grew stronger.

The Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen have launched missiles and drones toward shipping lanes and cities throughout the region.

The regime rarely confronts its enemies directly. Instead it fights through proxies, allowing others to bleed while it denies responsibility. The result has been a long war conducted in fragments, a campaign meant to wear down opponents without provoking a decisive response.

Nor does Iran really hide its involvement. These proxy forces operate under the guidance of the Quds Force, the foreign operations arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which trains, arms, and directs militias across the region.

While waging this proxy war, Iran quietly built a nuclear program.

Western governments tried to stop it through sanctions and negotiation. Through all of it the centrifuges continued spinning. Iran agreed to restrictions while steadily building the technical base required to produce weapons-grade uranium. At each stage diplomats celebrated temporary progress while Iran continued edging closer to a bomb.

The Obama administration’s Iran Deal imposed limits on enrichment and centrifuges for a number of years, but those limits came with expiration dates. Once the sunset clauses arrived, Iran would have been free to expand its nuclear program with international legitimacy.

We should all agree that the Islamic Republic of Iran should never be allowed a nuclear weapon.

The agreement was never ratified by the Senate and therefore was not a treaty, which allowed Donald Trump to withdraw the United States from it.

The Iran Deal did not eliminate Iran’s nuclear program. It was only designed to push Iran’s breakout time from a few months to about a year, and to keep them roughly a year away from a bomb for a decade, after which the restrictions would expire, and Iran could build nuclear bombs to its heart’s content.

Even had Iran not cheated under the deal, an Israeli child born on the day the deal took effect could have seen a Nuclear Iran before starting High School. And Iran wanted the bomb.

Iran has never hidden its intentions. When leaders of the regime openly state the intent of using nuclear weapons, they are not talking about strategic deterrence. They are invoking a religious narrative in which violence advances faith while killing the infidel. That rhetoric might be dismissed as theater if it were not paired with decades of militant action across the region, and Iran has always been clear that they want not only to have nuclear weapons, but to use them.

When Iranian officials opened negotiations by stating that they could produce enough weapons-grade material for roughly ten bombs within about a week, the reality became impossible to ignore, and waiting longer would not reduce the threat.

When Iran announced that it could have ten nukes in a week, conditions one and two were met. It became clear during the negotiations that Iran was only negotiating to stall, which satisfied condition three.

Then something unusual happened. Iran’s senior leadership gathered with the Ayatollah in one place. It was an obvious target.

That satisfied condition four.

Israel struck and killed roughly forty senior leaders in one blow.

Much of the conversation about Iran assumes that the country is a formidable military power. In reality Iran’s conventional military is aging, poorly equipped, and unevenly led.

Much of its equipment is from before the 1979 revolution. The air force flies aircraft that modern militaries retired decades ago, and their navy relies heavily on small boats and harassment tactics rather than traditional naval power.

Iran’s strength lies in asymmetric warfare and proxy forces rather than in conventional battlefield dominance. The regime survives not because its army is powerful, but because its enemies have avoided decisive action. The real difficulty in confronting Iran has never been its army. It is its geography.

The Zagros Mountains run across the country like a natural fortress wall protecting the Iranian plateau. Mountains slow armies and multiply the cost of attack.

Geography has protected Iran more effectively than its military ever could, yet not all of Iran lies behind those mountains. The oil fields of Khuzestan sit west of the Zagros range, near the border with Iraq. The city of Ahwaz lies at the center of that region.

Khuzestan represents Iran’s Achilles Heel. Much of Iran’s oil production flows from those fields, and that oil finances the regime’s ambitions at home and abroad. Control that region and the regime loses most of its revenue. Reclaiming it would require Iran to cross the same mountains that protect the rest of the country, turning geography from shield into obstacle.

We should take and hold Khuzestan until the Ayatollah regime falls.

The Strait of Hormuz presents another vulnerability. Iran threatens global shipping from small islands scattered across that narrow waterway. Radar systems, missile batteries, and mines positioned on those islands allow Iran to menace one of the most important energy routes in the world.

Remove that foothold and the threat to global oil shipments collapses.

Trump should take Iran’s islands in the Strait of Hormuz, and particularly Qeshm. Really, he should have done that within the first few days of the operation (after we radically reduced Iran’s ability to launch missiles and drones). We could put anti-drone and anti-missile resources on those islands and take away Iran’s ability to threaten shipping through the strait.

We might as well take Kharg Island too. It is not in the Strait of Hormuz, but Iran’s entire economy goes through it. Nearly all of the regime’s oil exports leave from that small strip of land.

Success in a conflict with Iran, incidentally, does not require the immediate collapse of the regime. A regime that suddenly finds itself weak and exposed turns inward. Leaders begin worrying less about projecting power abroad and more about surviving the turmoil at home.

Even if the regime remains in place, a weakened Iran would spend years dealing with its own internal fractures rather than funding militias abroad. That would represent a major strategic victory, even if the regime never fell, and if we took and held Qeshm and Khuzestan, the regime would be bankrupt.

Note too that the Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, whom nobody has seen or heard from since a cardboard cutout of him was sworn in as Supreme Leader, was selected by the Mullahs of Iran at gunpoint by IRGC leadership. Eventually the 15% of Iranians who support the theocracy will figure out they no longer live in one, but are ruled purely by a military/terrorist junta with no legitimacy under Iranian law, and when that happens, even the fanatics will reject the cardboard cutout.

Iran has proven very adept at creating and disseminating fake videos and other AI resources throughout social media to present an image of strength, but the truth is that the USS Abraham Lincoln was not hit by anything, and Iran’s missile and drone capabilities are down more than 90% while the United States and Israel have complete air supremacy over Iran, as we continue to bomb at will.

Iran stands as the central engine driving much of the region’s conflict. Remove that engine and the political landscape of the Middle East changes.

Many Arab governments now quietly accept Israel’s existence. Trade relationships between Israel and other states in the Middle East have formed and expanded. Security cooperation is growing as well.

A free Iran would transform the region in ways that are difficult to overstate. The Persian people possess one of the oldest civilizations in the world, and many of them hold deep resentment toward the clerical regime that rules them. A government in Tehran that pursued normal relations rather than revolutionary struggle would alter the strategic balance overnight.

This would also isolate Qatar, as without Iran, the propaganda networks and diplomatic maneuvering that flow through Doha would lose a critical source of both deflection and support. Regional politics would begin reorganizing around a different set of incentives.

War remains tragic. It always will be. But refusing to confront certain threats carries its own price, and the four conditions that make war necessary do not go away.

Iran has declared ideological intent, approached nuclear capability, used negotiation as a stalling tactic, and suffered a rare blow to its leadership. All four conditions have been met.

War is not free for either side, either. Iran has killed several US and Israeli servicemembers, has hit a number of military and civilian targets across the region, has struck shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, has made cyberattacks against the United States (most notably at this point, against Stryker in my home town of Kalamazoo, MI.), and has threatened to unleash Iranian-allied terrorists smuggled over the years into the United States and across Europe.

We could do like Chamberlain, and back down, but Chamberlain did not provide peace for his time.

When a regime calls nuclear weapons the Sword of Allah and announces it can build them in a week, delay does not preserve peace. Delay invites a larger war, fought under a mushroom cloud.

Young people in America today believe the economy has failed them. They look at the entry point for new homes and realize they will never be able to afford one. They look at the cost of college and either find higher education unattainable, or they pursue it anyway and find themselves saddled with crippling debt. They share apartments with roommates, only to discover they can barely afford the rising costs of rent and food.

They are not wrong, and they are not alone. My wife and I feel the pinch too. The difference is that I have been working since I was sixteen, and after nearly forty years in the workforce I already own a home, I have worked my way up in the corporate world, I carry manageable college debt, and I feel a far more muted impact from inflation than they do.

Inflation only impacts some of my budget. I’ve owned my home long enough that my mortgage payment is much lower than what an apartment would cost.

Nor is this the first time inflation has left generations behind. Today’s youth are simply too young to remember the ‘70s.

That brings up a question: why did women begin entering the workforce in large numbers in the 1970s? The popular story says liberation, but the real story begins with something today’s youth would find familiar.

Households across the country discovered in the early 1970s that a single paycheck no longer carried the weight it once did. Rent, food, energy, and other basic expenses began rising far faster than wages. Families responded the way families always respond when money gets too tight, and added labor.

The United States did not suddenly decide that one income was unfair. One income stopped being enough, and women suddenly felt forced to enter the workforce.

The women who wanted to work could do so before the ‘70s. My parents both taught high school, and when I was very young nobody else I knew had a mother who even wanted to work, but ten years later it seemed like everyone’s mother worked.

I don’t doubt that for a lot of women, and particularly younger ones, more women moving into the workforce seemed like liberation, but that is not what drove the cultural change. The actual reason sits at the center of modern economics, though economists rarely say it plainly: the dollar stopped being honest money.

Here is the simplest economic lesson you will ever receive. Imagine an economy with two apples and two dollars. The totality of dollars in circulation and the totality of goods and services produced always work toward one another, so in this very simple economy each apple will cost one dollar.

Now imagine the number of apples stays the same but the number of dollars doubles. Four dollars suddenly chase two apples and each apple will now cost two dollars.

That is inflation, and it really is that simple.

Inflation is not complicated. Inflation happens when the supply of money grows faster than the supply of goods and services. Prices rise because the money chasing those goods has been diluted, and the number of dollars in circulation, and the value of the goods and services those dollars pursue, always pull toward one another.

Economists often try to make inflation sound complicated, but it is not. What is complicated is the economy inflation moves through.

Inflation reaches gold almost immediately, then other precious metals, then non-consumable commodities, then consumable commodities, and finally labor.

Gold is the leading indicator of inflation. Labor is the trailing indicator. That means inflation has little immediate impact on those with the wealth to invest, but it hits those living hand-to-mouth hard, and especially young people just entering the workforce. Eventually inflation hits labor, and then it comes through in waves, each increase in the cost of labor causing the costs of everything with labor in it to rise until the cost of labor roughly catches up with the cost of commodities.

The United States once prevented inflation with gold.

Gold cannot be printed or voted into existence. It must be mined and refined. The forces that govern gold production are the same forces that govern capital formation in the broader economy such that over time, the price of gold tracks closely with the price point of the overall economy, and when money is tied to gold, governments cannot create unlimited debt without causing a run on the currency and bankrupting the country.

For most of American history the dollar was anchored to gold. In 1933 Franklin Roosevelt broke the domestic gold standard. Americans could no longer redeem dollars for gold through their banks. The government confiscated the metal and replaced it with paper. Roosevelt also roughly halved the amount of gold a dollar was tied to.

The international link to gold remained through what later became known as the Bretton Woods Agreement. Foreign governments tied their currencies to the dollar and could still exchange dollars for gold. That final restraint disappeared in 1971 when Richard Nixon closed the gold window and ended the Bretton Woods system.

This was not entirely Nixon’s fault. Lyndon Johnson financed the Vietnam War and his Great Society through credit, expanding the supply of dollars in circulation so rapidly that other nations began rapidly exchanging their dollar reserves for gold. The United States no longer held enough gold to cover those claims. Nixon ended the gold standard to prevent a run on the currency.

The consequences appeared almost immediately.

The Crisis We Keep Repeating

Every few years the same sequence recurs.

Markets climb and headlines celebrate prosperity. Politicians congratulate themselves. Credit expands and asset prices surge, and then something breaks. Banks fail and we go into recession.

Here are some examples:

• 1920–21 tightening after wartime inflation

• 1929 credit collapse

• 1970s inflation → Volcker tightening → recession

• 2000 dot-com bubble

• 2008 housing bubble

• 2022–23 rate shock

Since the creation of the Federal Reserve, here are the recessions not listed above:

• 1918–1920 demobilization after WWI

• 1945 post-war contraction

• 2020 pandemic shutdown

Even with those three, the same sequence amplified the damage. Those recessions were just triggered differently. Between the two lists, that is every recession since the Federal Reserve became operational at the end of 1914.

Each time it happens experts will appear on television explaining that the crisis could not have been predicted. Emergency actions become necessary and liquidity floods the system. Interest rates fall as the government attempts to spend its way out of the crisis and federal debt explodes.

Cheap money causes low interest rates for a time, but keeping the rates low is inflationary so eventually the Federal Reserve raises rates to bring inflation down, and the cycle begins again.

This pattern has repeated so often that people now treat it as the natural rhythm of modern capitalism, but it is not.

The crashes are not accidents. Cheap credit encourages risk that would never exist under honest interest rates. Businesses expand based on artificial signals, and investors borrow against rising assets.

When the distortion becomes too large to sustain, reality asserts itself. Prices fall, projects collapse, and banks discover that the assets on their books were never worth what they claimed when they borrowed against them to “invest” in whatever the bubble of the day happened to be.

The same officials who created the distortion then intervene to rescue the system - again. The cycle repeats because the cause is never addressed.

This is not capitalism failing. This is Keynesian policy operating exactly as it always has. Every recession since the Federal Reserve was founded fits this pattern.

Every single one - as listed above. And it can’t be any other way.

A large economy contains countless moving parts. Industries constantly rise and fall, but not all at the same time. Those shifts occur within individual industries. They do not collapse an entire national economy.

It takes a system-wide disruption to throw the entire economy into recession.

A geographically small country might collapse after a natural disaster, and a nation with little economic diversity might crash when the industry that dominates its economy collapses.

The United States is not structured that way. Our country is physically enormous and economically diverse. A natural disaster, like a hurricane, can produce a local recession but cannot crash the national economy. A single industry can collapse and devastate a region, as the auto industry once did in Detroit, but it cannot bring down the entire country.

In a healthy economy some industries are booming while others are contracting. Churn is normal. Pushing all industries into contraction at the same time requires something that hits every industry simultaneously.

Historically that force has been money.

When the United States operated on the gold standard, recessions and depressions followed rapid changes in the value of gold, and though Austrian Economists might not want to admit it, returning to a gold standard would return us to that pattern.

We had some very deep depressions while on the gold standard.

Earlier I explained that over long periods gold tends to move in value at almost the exact same pace as the broader economy. That’s true, but in the short term gold can move dramatically relative to everything else.

A major new deposit of gold can increase supply suddenly, and a major mine running dry can restrict supply just as quickly. Before the creation of the Federal Reserve, American recessions closely tracked these gold booms and busts, and when the value of the dollar is tied to gold, that causes the entire economy to go into price discovery all at once, leading to a recession.

To understand the casual link, it helps to remember that money does not have value so much as it stores value.

I work for my employer, and every couple of weeks they deposit money into my account. I use that money to pay my mortgage, buy food, pay my Internet provider, and cover the rest of my bills. Occasionally I may even take my wife out to dinner.

This works because the money is worth the same amount when I spend it as it was worth when I got it.

When gold changed rapidly in value, whether up or down, suddenly nobody knew what money backed with gold was worth, and if you don’t know what the money is worth you don’t know what anything valued in money is worth either. Of course that causes a recession.

The Federal Reserve was originally created to smooth-over short term fluctuations in the value of gold such that those fluctuations would no longer cause recessions, but this did not end recessions. It only changed the cause - now Federal Reserve mistakes cause recessions.

In a healthy economy wages grow slightly faster than inflation over the course of a person’s career, as people gain experience and their productivity rises. This allows their living standards to gradually improve, and is one of the primary reasons older people generally make more than younger people.

I had to support myself while I was still in high school. I worked at McDonald’s for $3.35 an hour and lived with five other people in a three-bedroom apartment. For many young adults today, that probably sounds very familiar. Each generation goes through that. It does improve as long as you can get started - believe me.

Gold Is Money

Getting back to our initial question about why women entered the workforce in large numbers during the 1970s, there were several reasons. The biggest one was that after the United States left the gold standard the value of the dollar began deteriorating much faster than wages rose.

We can see this clearly by looking at the value of gold.

I’m going to use Austrian School theory in this section and maintain that gold is money. That theory is imperfect in the short term, so while this section is correct in principle, understand that some of the specific swings may be exaggerated by short-term fluctuations in the value of gold. Keep that in mind as you read the rest of this section.

Gold rose from $35.96 per ounce in 1970, when the United States was still on the gold standard, to $614.75 per ounce in 1980.

Gold is money, so the value of gold did not change. What changed was the value of the dollar.

The spending power of the dollar fell 17.1 times between 1970 and 1980.

The median household income in 1970 was $9,870. By 1980 it had risen to $21,020. Household income therefore rose only 2.13 times during the decade, and that figure includes the influx of women into the workforce such that many households had twice as many workers.

In other words, throughout the 1970s the buying power of the dollar fell to roughly one-seventeenth of its previous value while household income, even with far more households adding a second worker, only doubled.

In real terms, then, the average household earned roughly one-eighth as much in 1980 as it had earned just ten years earlier.

Americans noticed their deteriorating spending power during the 1970s, but much of the decline was masked by the behavior of labor costs. The raw materials used to produce goods rose rapidly in price, but the cost of labor used to produce those goods rose far more slowly.

When Americans compared their wages to the wages of other workers, the loss of purchasing power appeared smaller than it actually was. Only when measured against the rising cost of the materials used to produce goods did the full collapse in purchasing power become visible.

Ronald Reagan then brought Paul Volcker into the Federal Reserve in 1979 and inflation stopped.

By 1990 gold sold for between $350 and $400 an ounce, which was a lot less than it had sold for in 1980. Household wages rose during the same period from $17,710 to $30,070.

In other words, gold roughly halved in value during the 1980s while wages roughly doubled.

Gold is money, so the value of gold did not change. The value of the dollar did, and by 1990 the American household had roughly four times the buying power it had possessed in 1980, in real terms.

No wonder Reagan was so popular.

George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush preserved the basic economic framework that Reagan and Volcker had restored such that by the year 2000 gold was down to between $250 and $320 an ounce while median household income had grown to $41,990. That period produced the longest sustained economic expansion in American history as American families became more and more wealthy in real terms.

Then came 2008. The housing market crashed and the government bailed out the banks by printing money, causing inflation.

Gold reached $1,420 per ounce by 2010 while median household income had risen only to $49,445. By that point the American household was roughly one-quarter as wealthy as it had been in 2000.

The Obama administration then kept the floodgates of monetary expansion open.

By 2020 gold cost roughly $2,000 per ounce, and it was up to $2,400 by 2024, which is 60% higher than in 2010. Household incomes were $83,730 in 2024, which is the last year household income data is currently available. That is roughly 60% higher as well. Real wages fell under Obama and rebounded under Trump’s first term, until Covid-19 hit and the flood gates opened again.

As I type this, the spot-price for an ounce of gold is $5,092 - more than two and a half times what it was in 2020 and more than twice what it was in 2024.

Frankly, I think gold is in a bubble. I think most of the changes discussed up to 2024 are real, but I do not think gold should currently cost over $5,000 per ounce. I think it’s about twice what it should be. Still, times are tough and we feel it every time we walk into a grocery store.

Inflation has eroded American buying power for more than half a century.

Looking further back makes the contrast even clearer: In 1936 gold cost $35.96 per ounce and it still cost $35.96 in 1970. Median household income in 1936 was $1,600 per year. By 1970 it had risen to $9,870. Because gold remained constant during that period, the purchasing power of the American household increased roughly 6.17 times between 1936 and 1970. That’s a tremendous rate of growth.

Leaving the gold standard did not merely weaken the currency. It weakened the wealth of our nation.

It is possible to maintain a stable currency without a gold standard, as Paul Volcker demonstrated, but the federal government has shown little discipline in doing so as of late. Nor was the gold standard perfect. We had plenty of recessions and depressions under the gold standard.

The solution is not to go back to the gold standard unless it is a soft standard such as existed until 1971, with the Federal Reserve smoothing over short-term fluctuations.

With or without a gold standard, we need to end the dual mandate and have the Federal Reserve focus solely on maintaining a stable dollar. The labor market can take care of itself.

The Illusion of Prosperity

John Maynard Keynes believed governments could manage economies through spending. He viewed economic downturns not as the result of distorted prices, but as failures of demand that could be corrected if governments injected enough money into the system. In his view the state could step in during downturns to replace missing private spending, to restore growth through deliberate intervention.

Keynes, however, was not an economist. He described himself as an “aesthetician.” He ignored the work of every economist who came before him and promised to rewrite the entire field from the ground up, relying only on his personal brilliance.

As a result, modern economists measure prosperity by counting spending.

Gross Domestic Product adds together every transaction in the economy without asking whether the spending created wealth or merely moved money from one place to another. Borrowed money and earned money enter the ledger the same way, so this masquerades debt as growth.

When the government borrows a trillion dollars and spends it, the economy is said to have expanded by a trillion dollars even if nobody wants what that money was spent on. By this metric, even fraud is growth. Keith Ellison, in fact, argued that fraud gets spent into the economy and is thus growth, as Attorney General of Minnesota, to justify ignoring Somali welfare fraud. “All of Minnesota benefitted,” he said.

When consumers finance purchases with credit cards or borrow against rising home values, those purchases appear as economic growth. When corporations borrow money to buy their own shares, the rising stock price reinforces the illusion that new wealth has been created. The numbers climb upward, but though aggregate demand has grown the debt has to be repaid, reducing future spending.

Every borrowed dollar is a claim against future wages, representing work that has not yet been done and goods that have not yet been created. For a time the illusion holds as the spending is real even if the wealth behind it is not.

Then the bill arrives.

That is what young adults are feeling today. Since 2008 we have been expanding the supply of dollars in circulation faster than we have been expanding the real economy, and everything has grown more expensive as a result, while wages have lagged behind.

Young people entering the workforce have less buying power than did previous generations. It’s as simple as that.

My parents paid the price for Keynes’ folly in the 1970s. We are paying for it today, and the burden always falls hardest on those with the fewest assets, which is why America’s young adults feel it first.

Had Keynes studied economics, he would have found that an economy is not a machine that can be tuned by adjusting a few controls. It is, rather, a living system built from millions of individual decisions made by all of the people within the economy.

We, collectively, are the economy.

Ironically, John Maynard Keynes was a close friend of Austrian Economist Fredreich Hayek, and Hayek spent a good portion of his life trying to convince Keynes that Keynes was wrong.

There is a really fun series of YouTube videos on this subject in which actors pretending to be Keynes and Hayek have rap-battles. You can watch the first one here.

What Hayek understood is that the economy is the aggregate of everything everyone in the economy does. Prices coordinate our collective decisions by transmitting signals about scarcity, risk, and opportunity. When governments manipulate money, those signals become unreliable and actual growth slows.

The distortion always begins with the belief that governments can replace production with spending. It is “Field of Dreams” in reverse: spend it and they will come.

Bubbles, Debt, and the Coming Reckoning

The pattern has repeated often enough that it should no longer surprise anyone.

In 2000 the technology bubble collapsed. Internet companies that had never produced profits suddenly discovered that stock prices cannot rise just on hype. Capital fled the sector, markets fell, and policymakers feared a recession that might expose deeper weaknesses in the economy.

I knew the Internet was in a bubble when I saw an Internet company CEO on TV and a reporter asked him what his company does. He talked about capital accumulation and web-based tech, but when the reporter pressed him on what his Internet startup actually did, he did not have an answer.

This was the first bubble I really paid attention to, but whether I look forward from that point or back, the same pattern emerges: whenever the Federal Reserve makes money artificially cheap, much of the money ends up in bubbles.

The response to the 2000 recession was both immediate and familiar. Interest rates fell sharply as the Federal Reserve pushed the cost of borrowing down, and credit expanded. Paul Krugman called for a housing bubble, and the Federal Reserve changed the rules to allow banks to package loans together and to sell the risk to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Mortgage lending exploded. Cheap money poured into housing and prices began to rise.

Developers responded. Fields turned into subdivisions almost overnight as borrowed money financed construction built on the assumption that demand would never slow.

The boom looked like prosperity. The spending was real even if the wealth behind it was not, and it got so bad that people could buy houses they could not afford and then borrow against their homes to pay their mortgages.

Then reality returned.

Housing prices stopped rising. Borrowers began to default. Mortgage-backed securities that had been sold as safe investments revealed themselves as insoluble debt, and banks suddenly discovered that the assets on their balance sheets were worth far less than they had claimed.

The housing market collapsed in 2008 and instead of shielding the American people from the fallout, we printed money to bail out the people who caused the crash. The result was one of the largest transfers of wealth in American history, from the poor and working classes to the rich.

Just to be clear, we could have allowed the banks to go bankrupt. The Federal Reserve could have managed the banks through bankruptcy, and provided the overnight lending some industries, like automotive, depended on, until the banks could resume those operations. We’d still have seen a recession, and it might have been deeper, but we would have gotten out of it sooner and the people who caused the recession would have been the ones it primarily hurt.

Instead, we bailed out the guilty and then the cure for the housing bubble became the seed for the next bubble.

The national debt now approaches forty trillion dollars, which is a number so large it has lost any connection to ordinary experience. The interest on the national debt is now the single largest item on the Federal budget, choking out actual spending and forcing us to borrow to pay for other things.

Universities charge tuition that would have been unimaginable two generations ago because government loans guarantee payment regardless of the value of the education received. Students borrow money that will follow them for decades, while institutions expand programs and facilities on the assumption that federal lending will continue.

Someone with a degree in Feminist Studies, or some other DEI-based degree, is qualified to either make coffee at Starbucks, or to go all the way through to a Doctorate such that they can then propagandize the next generation of Feminist Studies students. Most of these people will never pay their degrees off, meaning that the taxpayer will have to.

Healthcare costs rise under a dense web of mandates, insurance structures, and subsidies that separate the person receiving treatment from the person paying the bill. Prices climb because the normal discipline of consumer choice has been buried beneath regulation and third-party payment. This bubble will eventually force us to socialize the system, pushing the costs onto the taxpayer. This will be a particularly painful bubble when it bursts, as the quality of our medical care will collapse.

Public pension systems promise retirement benefits that tax revenues cannot realistically support. Politicians made the initial promises decades ago, assuming investment returns and future growth would make the obligations manageable, but public unions donate to the campaigns of the same people they negotiate with. Public pensions get more and more generous over time as a result, independent of the state’s ability to meet those promises.

Each of these bubbles survive only because the broader monetary system continues to supply cheap credit, until it no longer can.

Power, Production, and the Way Back

Keynesian policy offers politicians something earlier generations of leaders never had: immediate spending with deferred cost.

With a gold standard, governments would show restraint as the money required to fund promises would have to come from somewhere real, to prevent a run on the currency. Taxes would have to rise and voters would see the cost of policy decisions as they were made.

Even without a gold standard, if the Federal Reserve refused to inflate the supply of money by buying government debt, the government would have to show restraint.

We used to have such a system, but we no longer do.

When governments control the creation of money, they gain the ability to distribute benefits before the bills arrive. The cost can be financed with debt. Debt causes inflation and the people become more poor over time. Voters receive the benefits in the present while the costs spread quietly into the future.

Those entering the workforce today cannot afford to buy homes because we effectively bought our homes with their money, and now they are paying our bills. Anyone who doubts that needs to re-read the ‘Gold Is Money’ section as it makes the mechanism clear.

Politicians can promise spending without asking voters to sacrifice. They announce new programs, expand old ones, and respond to every downturn with another round of stimulus. If the economy slows, they claim the cure is more spending. If markets fall, they promise rescue. If debt grows too large, they rely on the quiet erosion of the currency to reduce its real value.

No politician ever lost an election by promising prosperity without pain. Keynesian economics provides the intellectual cover that allows those promises to be made. It tells governments that spending can replace savings, that borrowing can replace production, and that every downturn can be solved with more money.

But wealth does not appear just because governments spend money. Wealth appears when people produce things people actually want.

Real growth begins with production, not policy.

Factories build machines that allow fewer workers to produce more goods. Farmers cultivate crops that feed millions of people who will never see the fields where the food was grown. Engineers design tools that multiply the power of human labor and make tasks possible that once required thousands of hands. This is supposed to make the worker better off, but the productivity gains only make it to the worker when we don’t squander it through inflationary spending.

Entrepreneurs take capital and labor and combine them in ways that create products people actually want to buy. They take risks, organize resources, and constantly search for better methods of production. When they succeed, the economy produces more goods with fewer resources and society becomes richer - but only if entrepreneurs are building things people actually want. When entrepreneurs build for government programs to grow aggregate demand, it’s a bubble.

Prices tell producers what consumers value. Profits reveal where resources are being used effectively, while losses signal that capital should move elsewhere. Interest rates tell businesses whether real savings exist to support long-term investment.

When the value of the currency remains steady, entrepreneurs can plan years into the future, knowing they can trust that the prices guiding their decisions reflect real scarcity and real demand. Savers can accumulate capital because they know the purchasing power of their work will not quietly disappear.

The modern system replaced that stability with manipulation. Prices move under political pressure instead of reflecting real conditions, and interest rates change after policy meetings instead of emerging from the balance between savings and borrowing. Growth appears in official statistics even as households feel their purchasing power slipping away.

The path back does not require complicated theories or new institutions. The principles are older than our current monetary system and simpler than the policies that replaced them.

• Governments must spend within the limits of their revenue.

• Interest rates must reflect real risk and real savings rather than the preferences of central bankers.

• Money must be stable in value.

These principles governed the era that built the modern industrial world. They allowed capital to accumulate, entrepreneurs to plan, and workers to trust that the value of their labor would remain intact.

Under those conditions the United States experienced the greatest expansion of wealth in human history, and not only for the rich. We had the fastest growth in the living and working conditions of the common worker as well.

The country now faces a choice that cannot be postponed forever. It can continue the cycle of stimulus, debt, and currency dilution, hoping the next expansion lasts longer than the last, or it can restore the discipline that once governed money and production.

One path leads to endless intervention and recurring collapse. The other leads to reality.

Making the economy work again for America’s youth is not complicated. It is no more difficult than the explanation of inflation earlier in this essay.

Wages simply need to rise relative to gold again.

My first presidential election was in 1992. My friends and I, young idealists who thought George H. W. Bush was too much of a Washington insider and too little like Ronald Reagan, voted for H. Ross Perot. We siphoned off 12 percent of the vote and helped put William Jefferson Clinton in the White House.

Bill Clinton turned out to be conservative, for a Democrat.

Clinton embraced market economics, free trade, and fiscal restraint. He pushed NAFTA through despite fierce opposition from organized labor and signed welfare reform imposing work requirements and time limits, declaring he would “end welfare as we know it.”

Clinton expanded policing and strengthened sentencing standards. He supported financial deregulation, including the repeal of Glass-Steagall, and presided over balanced budgets and deficit reduction.

In 1996, Clinton stated that “the era of big government is over.”

Even on immigration, the Clinton administration emphasized enforcement and the rule of law, expanding deportations and strengthening border controls.

Contrast that with the man who made me a conservative: Ronald Reagan.

Reagan was conservative in temperament and rhetoric, but his conservatism rested on classical liberalism. He championed free trade and global market integration, signed immigration reform that included amnesty, upheld multilateral alliances such as NATO, and spoke of American exceptionalism in civic terms.

His economic program reduced tax rates and regulation, but it did not pursue state-directed industrial policy or protectionist tariffs. Even at the height of the Cold War, Reagan articulated a vision of liberty grounded in individual rights and constitutional order. Though he remains a conservative icon, he operated within a liberal-democratic framework that treated globalization, civic nationalism, and procedural neutrality as givens.

Today, segments of the Republican Party question free markets, retreat from multilateralism, accept state-directed economic coordination, and lean into grievance-based politics.

For most of the late twentieth century, both parties accepted the same premises: market capitalism, civic nationalism, constitutional liberalism, global engagement, and equality under the law. They offered different routes but moved in the same direction.

The parties remain institutionally intact, but neither resembles what it was when I began voting. What appears to be chaos, however, is not collapse so much as recomposition.

The organs of the body politic still function, but they are pulling apart, carrying the country with them.

My first vote was for Ross Perot, but the first election I remember was Carter and Ford. I was five, sitting in my parents’ bedroom while they watched the news. I looked at the two men and said, “I like Ford.” My dad asked why. “Because he has hair,” I answered. My mom corrected me. Carter had hair. I switched immediately. “Oh. Well I like Carter then.”

My father launched into a rant about how people vote based on appearance and how that helped put John F. Kennedy in office.

I voted for Jimmy Carter in an elementary school mock election. Carter won the school but lost the country to Reagan. From Reagan through the 2008 campaign, both parties operated within a liberal-democratic consensus.

Obama ran as a moderate in 2008, but in his inaugural address he promised “radical transformation.” Though he did not fully deliver on that promise, he did change the nature of both parties.

Earlier Democrats combined organized labor, industrial workers, civil rights constituencies, and institutional moderates. Earlier Republicans unified neoconservative foreign policy leadership, Christian conservatives, free-market globalists, and constitutional or libertarian thinkers.

They fought over regulation levels, tax rates, welfare policy, and cultural norms. They did not fight over whether the economy should rest on market capitalism. Nationalism was not labeled “fascist,” and Enlightenment assumptions about truth and law still carried public authority.

Even Clinton’s 1992 campaign, often remembered as progressive, ran on fiscal restraint, trade expansion, welfare reform, and global integration. One of his slogans was “Make America Great Again.” Both parties treated globalization as an engine of prosperity while recognizing the nation-state as the primary political unit.

That shared direction no longer holds. As the parties pulled apart, attacks turned personal. They no longer simply disagree. They increasingly hate one another.

The country has known division before, but such division has never strengthened us.

Three forces unsettled the late twentieth century equilibrium.

The first was an economic realignment. Globalization hollowed out industrial regions, wages stagnated for non-college workers, and the managerial class in large cities expanded.

Second came institutional consolidation. Media ownership concentrated, the administrative state expanded. Universities and NGOs gained cultural authority and corporations and regulators overlapped, blurring public and private power.

Third came shifts in sovereignty and integration. Multilateral institutions rose in prominence, and policy increasingly coordinated through transnational frameworks.

The Democratic Transformation

The Democratic Party is no longer the labor-populist machine of the late twentieth century. It still speaks the language of unions and still takes union money, but its center of gravity has shifted. The working class is no longer its organizing core.

Its base is now disproportionately college educated. Influence concentrates among professionals in academia, media, the permanent bureaucracy, nonprofit leadership, regulatory agencies, and corporate management. The party increasingly reflects the worldview of a technocratic moral and intellectual elite that believes only it possesses the knowledge required to govern. Those who disagree are increasingly dismissed outright.

That mindset surfaced during Covid, when talk of a “Great Reset” moved from fringe slogan to open aspiration, with pandemic controls discussed as foundations for permanent redesign, be it for a climate emergency or another declared crisis.

The Great Reset was never formal party doctrine, but it did not need to be. Its assumptions filtered into policy conversations that many Democrats endorsed. Much of the media echoed them.

Legislative compromise yields to executive rulemaking when Democrats govern. Regulatory coordination expands. Policy flows through administrative channels rather than Congress, and authority consolidates inside credentialed networks that prize expertise, procedural control, and institutional alignment.

Out of power, Democrats increasingly treat the other side as illegitimate, not merely wrong.

At the same time, the party has drifted from civic nationalism toward globalism. It frames immigration expansion as a moral duty and an economic necessity. Under the Biden administration, as much as $195 billion per year, according to Elon Musk’s DOGE disclosures, moved through USAID into NGOs that facilitated large-scale migration into the United States.

The party has embraced collectivism, though it is divided over which version to pursue. One faction leans toward Marxism. Another follows what I call ‘economic fascism.’

“Fascism” is often used as a slur. Here I use it as a structural term rooted in the philosophy of Giovanni Gentile, who coined it, just as Marxism traces to Karl Marx.

Fascism, like communism, contains political and economic components. Politically, it is hyper-nationalist and totalitarian, casting a dictator as the “living embodiment of the people” and subordinating the individual to the state.

Democrats reject that political structure. Fascism, however, also includes an economic system.

When Democrats call themselves “Democratic Socialists,” they detach Marxism’s economic model from its authoritarian political form and overlay it with a different political system. The same structural separation applies to fascism. One can adopt Gentile’s economic structure under a different political shell. That is what I mean by economic fascism.

Fascism permits private enterprise so long as it advances the state’s central plan. Ownership remains nominally private but operates under state control. Pay and profit reward compliance with national objectives. The firm exists, but does not rule. The state does. Firms comply or lose control, as when President Obama removed the CEO of General Motors.

China offers a modern hybrid. Corporations operate in markets but, in the Chinese model, they remain instruments of the state, with the government holding ownership stakes and decisive control over major firms. Many on the Western left, including Mark Carney, have spoken favorably of this model, despite China’s openly authoritarian political structure.

These systems share a core. They centralize economic direction and subordinate production to state priorities. Because labor is a big part of the means of production, this subordinates the individual to the collective, even when the collective expands beyond the nation-state.

Technocratic elitism depends on institutional stability. It seeks cohesion and managed continuity. The activist wing, however, thrives on disruption and moral confrontation.

Together, activists destabilize opposition institutions while technocrats consolidate authority whenever power is secured. Though the party’s most energetic voices speak in Marxist terms, durable authority rests with the technocrats.

The modern Democratic Party is technocratic, globalist, and collectivist. It no longer defends the classical liberalism on which the nation was built, and grows increasingly intolerant.

The Republican Transformation

The Republican Party did not stand still while Democrats changed. It too reorganized.

For decades, it ran on a trifecta. Neoconservative interventionists set foreign policy. Christian conservatives shaped moral language. Free-market globalists wrote economic doctrine. These groups had little direct overlap, so they formed a durable coalition that shaped party leadership. As a result, trade liberalization, deregulation, Christian morality, and an assertive posture abroad formed the base.

The Trump era did not create dissatisfaction inside the party. The Tea Party did - directed first toward Obama and the Affordable Care Act, and later toward what the Tea Party called ‘RINOs,’ which stands for Republicans In Name Only.

Trump gathered that dissatisfaction, named it, and weaponized it.

Non-college voters, especially in declining industrial states and rural regions, had already felt the ground shifting beneath them. They moved into the new Republican base.

Economic displacement collided with cultural marginalization. Both filtered through deep distrust of elites. Trade skepticism replaced free trade as an article of faith. Economic nationalism displaced global markets. Globalization began to sound like a sermon preached to people who had already lost their jobs, and Republican economic policy now reflects that shift.

On key economic questions, much of today’s Republican coalition now sits to the left of Bill Clinton’s 1992 platform. Tariffs are no longer taboo. Industrial policy is no longer a dirty phrase. Supply chains are treated as national security assets. State coordination is discussed openly. In the 1990s, none of this would have survived a Republican primary. Today it draws applause.

The cultural register shifted as well. The Christian conservative movement has taken a back seat. Grievance-based rhetoric has grown sharper. Identity language, once confined to the left, now appears in conservative circles, framed not around minority status but cultural displacement.

The right and the alt-right are often conflated, but they are distinct.

Classical conservatism rests on civic universalism. It treats the American project as constitutional and cultural and rejects identity politics. Historically, conservatives focused on negative rights and general principles rather than targeted policies for specific groups.

The alt-right rejects that foundation. It grounds political identity in race and hierarchy. It treats demographic composition as destiny and argues that culture flows from blood.

The alt-right embodies the caricature the left long projected onto conservatism.

There is rhetorical overlap between alt-right voices and Republican populists around demographic anxiety and civilizational decline. The language can sound similar. The foundation is not.

The alt-right began on the fringe, but figures such as Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson have echoed elements of its rhetoric and given it oxygen. That carries risk. If the Republican Party becomes the Democratic Party inverted on race, no major party will defend classical liberalism, and the American experiment will fail.

As populism rises, the party’s center weakens. Neoconservative foreign policy recedes. Free markets no longer dominate. Libertarian voices remain, but they compete with nationalist ones, and the old guard no longer commands; it bargains.

The move away from blind faith in global free markets makes sense when adversaries and trading partners weaponize those markets against us, but abandoning markets altogether would be a mistake. The party must defend free enterprise, particularly within its borders, and must use free markets globally, at least with the trading partners we trust. Republicans must uphold Judeo-Christian moral norms as the cultural engine of our country, while defending equality under the law and individual liberty.

Today’s Republican Party includes old-school Democrats alienated by the modern left, along with traditional conservatives, constitutional conservatives, and libertarians. It remains deeply patriotic but less focused on limited government and free markets.

The right has become a large tent of competing interests. It spends more time attacking the left than articulating a coherent vision of America’s future. This is not because Republicans lack ideas, but because this coalition, that once spanned both parties, lacks broad agreement.

The political right must reject the alt-right outright. If Republicans chase those votes, the country loses.

The Hollowing of the Middle

There was a time when the parties still spoke a common language. They argued over tax rates and spending levels. They fought over the size of government and the pace of reform, and clashed over welfare policy, defense budgets, and cultural norms. They did not fight over the meaning or purpose of the country.

Both parties operated inside a liberal-democratic framework that assumed the legitimacy of the Constitution, the primacy of the nation-state, the value of markets, and the equality of citizens under the law. Elections decided policy direction, not the identity of the regime. Courts interpreted law; they were not treated as partisan actors. The press criticized power but was not broadly viewed as an enemy of the state, and though disputes were sharp, the architecture was shared.

That common ground is gone.

The Democratic Party now pushes managed global integration and rule by credentialed elites. It treats borders as negotiable, speech as regulable, and equality as something to be engineered rather than protected. Institutions are not neutral referees but mechanisms for producing approved social outcomes. Expertise is elevated above consent, and administrative authority expands as legislative compromise recedes.

The Republican Party now pushes national sovereignty and economic intervention on behalf of our citizenry, and wants to deport masses of illegal immigrants. It questions trade deals, foreign entanglements, central banking authority, and the moral legitimacy of the press, the academy, and large segments of the federal bureaucracy. It once defined itself by limited government. Much of it still claims that inheritance, yet it now embraces intervention when it believes that markets or institutions have weakened the country’s industrial base, cultural cohesion, or border security.

On the left, neutrality is treated as complicity. Equity replaces equality as the governing principle and outcomes override rules. Disparate results are presumed evidence of injustice, and institutions are expected to correct them.

On the right, those same institutions are no longer trusted to apply rules honestly. Courts are viewed through partisan lenses and federal agencies are suspected of ideological enforcement. Media outlets are assumed to curate narratives rather than report events. The language of “weaponization” has entered mainstream political speech.

The right still believes in the rule of law. The problem is not rules. The problem is trust. Many conservatives no longer trust the individuals and institutions empowered to interpret and enforce those rules.

Elections are no longer routine contests between competing policy visions. They are framed as existential struggles. Republicans suspect ballot manipulation, administrative bias, and procedural asymmetry. Democrats suspect voter suppression, structural obstruction, and anti-democratic intent. Each side assumes bad faith in the other. That assumption reshapes behavior.

Primary systems reward the loudest voice and the sharpest attack. Candidates fear their base more than their opposition, and moderation is treated as weakness.

Cable panels and social-media feeds amplify outrage as outrage spreads faster than nuance. District maps insulate incumbents from cross-party accountability, making ideological purity more valuable than coalition-building. The middle shrinks because there is no political reward for standing in it.

Political rhetoric follows incentives. When compromise carries risk and confrontation carries reward, confrontation becomes strategy. Language hardens, motives are impugned, and disagreement becomes accusation.

When a country loses shared assumptions about law, legitimacy, purpose, and national identity, it becomes unstable. Every major vote becomes a test of survival, and every loss is interpreted as permanent damage. Victory is treated as temporary and reversible while defeat is treated as catastrophic.

In that climate, politics ceases to be a contest over policy. It becomes a contest over control. Institutions are no longer arenas for debate but battlegrounds for dominance.

That is not ordinary partisan rivalry.

It is structural decay.

A System Under Tension

The American system works best when Democrats identify problems and force Republicans to confront them, and when Republicans force Democrats to negotiate solutions within established constitutional limits. Pressure moves in both directions, but that balance no longer holds.

Power on the left concentrates in agencies, courts, universities, foundations, and global forums. It trusts credentials and follows those who promise fairness through regulation and control. The state is treated as an instrument for shaping outcomes rather than protecting rights. Climate, equity, and global responsibility are framed as settled truths, not open debates, and the question is no longer whether government should expand, but how quickly and how comprehensively.

Power on the right gathers around flags, factories, sheriffs, and churches. It speaks of sovereignty, border walls, industrial revival, and cultural cohesion. It questions trade agreements, central banks, intelligence agencies, and federal departments insulated from electoral accountability, and it is willing to use tariffs, subsidies, and state leverage to defend domestic industry. It no longer defers automatically to free-market doctrine when that doctrine appears to empty towns and erode the middle class, and it no longer trusts those in government to act as neutral stewards.

One side believes authority should flow outward from expertise, even when it crosses borders and bypasses national consent. The other believes authority must flow inward from the nation, even when that choice imposes economic cost or international friction. One leans toward global governance and harmonized standards. The other leans toward national control backed by economic muscle and cultural assertion.

A country cannot steer in both directions at once.

On the left, neutrality is rejected when it obstructs preferred outcomes. On the right, institutions are rejected when they produce unwanted results. Each side claims to defend democracy while questioning the legitimacy of the other side and trust drains from the center.

When trust erodes, politics changes character. It stops functioning as a debate over policy details and becomes a struggle over control. Administrative authority expands to bypass legislative stalemate, executive orders replace negotiation, courts become arenas for political objectives, and elections are framed not as routine transfers of power but as existential battles for survival.

In that environment, compromise feels like surrender.

I was five years old when I switched my vote from Ford to Carter because I thought the wrong man had hair. My father lectured me about how easily voters are swayed by image. He believed he was teaching me about superficial judgment. What he was teaching me, though, was that politics rests as much on perception as on principle.

For decades, the principles beneath the perception were shared. Candidates like Reagan, and later Clinton fought fiercely, but they fought inside the same constitutional and economic frame. The dispute was over emphasis, scale, and implementation, not over the underlying architecture.

That frame no longer governs our politics.

The organs of the body politic still function. Elections occur and courts issue rulings. But the shared assumptions that once stabilized those institutions have fractured. Legitimacy appears conditional to both sides. Where authority is contested, good faith is presumed absent.

If a common foundation of truth and constitutional loyalty is not recovered, the tension will escalate. Polarization will not plateau. It will intensify, forcing institutional conflicts to harden. Street conflict will follow.

Lincoln warned that a house divided against itself cannot stand. He did not mean it would wobble. He meant it would fall.

Division is not new in American history. What is new is the erosion of a shared framework within which division could be managed.

If that framework is not rebuilt, the choice will not be between left and right. It will be between order and fracture. Fracture leads to conflict.

And conflict can lead to war.

My first wife had a cousin who died of a heroin overdose at eighteen.

I met her a few times. She was a beautiful but troubled girl who fell in with the wrong crowd, and found herself in a world she could not control. I do not know when she started using heroin, but I know she overdosed once, nearly died, got clean, and then just over a year later, overdosed again.

The first time, she was rushed to Bronson Hospital in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She received the very best treatment available, and her life was saved in what should have been a life-altering moment.

Instead, it only bought her a year. She got clean for a time, but drifted back to the same crowd and with the second overdose, help did not arrive in time.

She will always be remembered as a beautiful girl with a tragic end.

My father-in-law grew up in Communist Poland. He was exposed to asbestos as a student, and later worked in a coal mine. He was a smoker for most of his life.

At sixty-nine he was diagnosed with lung cancer. His doctors told him he was fortunate he was not yet 70, as under Poland’s universal healthcare system, treatment options were still available at sixty-nine. Had he been seventy he would have qualified only for end-of-life care, no matter how healthy he might otherwise have been.

Poland was not known at the time for having the most modern cancer treatments, so my second wife and I married quickly and flew to Poland to meet her parents. Her father already looked frail, and a few months later doctors found another cancerous lesion in his brain. He died shortly thereafter.

When the OECD evaluates countries on healthcare outcomes, neither the United States nor Poland rank particularly high. The metric that receives the most attention is life expectancy at birth: roughly 78.6 years in Poland and 78.4 in the United States. Neither nation sits in the top tier globally despite the fact that the United States spends far more per capita on medical care than does any other country on Earth. Poland measures slightly better than the United States in life expectancy, while the United States spends six times as much, per capita, on medical care.

Life expectancy, however, does not tell the whole story.

Polish society is less car-dependent. Obesity rates are lower. Processed food consumption is lower. Americans are more likely to be overweight, less likely to exercise regularly, and more likely to adopt lifestyles that accumulate long-term metabolic strain. Those choices shape health outcomes long before a physician becomes involved.

The American healthcare system receives constant criticism, but if the question is not obesity rates or life expectancy so much as the quality of medical care when it is delivered, the United States is one of the best in the world. The only countries that compete are much smaller and oil-rich.

A disproportionate share of global pharmaceutical innovation, medical device development, and advanced surgical technique originates in the United States. The world’s leading academic medical centers are concentrated here, operating at the intersection of research, capital, and clinical practice. Breakthrough cancer therapies, transplant techniques, trauma systems, and complex cardiac treatments are often pioneered and refined in American hospitals before spreading elsewhere.

When a patient gets a rare tumor, a complex neurological condition, or a catastrophic injury, the technical ecosystem available in the United States is unmatched in depth.

Advanced imaging, interventional radiology, robotic surgery, biologics, and experimental therapies are not theoretical capabilities, but routine components of high-end practice. Clinical trials are extensive. Research funding is immense. Global talent trains and frequently remains in American institutions.

Whatever one thinks about cost, distribution, or coverage, the ceiling of American medical care is extraordinarily high. The technological depth and clinical sophistication available in the United States is as advanced as anything in the world, and in many domains, we are better.

The OECD measures health outcomes such as life expectancy. It does not measure the technical ceiling of medical care, and health and medical care are not the same thing, no matter how politically useful it is to pretend that they are.

Health is largely behavioral and cultural. It reflects diet, exercise, sleep, substance use, stress, and long-term habits that accumulate over decades. Health is upstream. It is shaped in kitchens, schools, workplaces, and homes.

Medical care is something else entirely. It is an intervention system for when health fails: the emergency room, the oncology ward, the operating suite, or the intensive care unit. When we collapse those categories into a single political slogan, we design policy around sentiment instead of structure.

The American health crisis is cultural. The American medical pricing crisis is structural. Confusing the two leads us to diagnose the wrong disease, and to prescribe the wrong cure.

America does have a chronic disease problem. Obesity, sedentary living, metabolic dysfunction, addiction, and preventable cardiovascular disease are widespread. No payment reform can undo the arithmetic of decades of accumulated lifestyle strain in a country that is statistically the second most obese in the world.

A nation that is metabolically unhealthy will consume large amounts of medical care regardless of how that care is financed, and keeping unhealthy people alive costs a lot more than does keeping healthy people healthy.

This essay separates health from medical care and then examines the structural architecture of medical pricing. The goal is not to diminish access or deny need, but to diagnose the system, and to use lean methodology to redesign the American system to keep the world-leading quality we have come to expect, but at costs we can afford.

The Cost-Shift Engine

Some argue that Medicare for All would save money by forcing providers to negotiate with a single payor. That is largely correct. The issue is not whether payments would fall, but how and why.

Markets control pricing through multiple buyers and sellers, all negotiating with one another. When there is just one single buyer, that buyer does not participate so much as set terms. A single payor becomes a monopoly, giving it the power to set reimbursement rates below the full cost of delivery.

Lean reduces cost by removing waste. It does not rely on force.

Critics argue that hospital “cost” can be inflated by accounting models, but the truth is that any company that provides any kind of good or service has both variable costs, like direct labor, that go up or down as more goods and services are produced, as well as fixed costs, like property taxes, that stay the same no matter how many goods or services are produced.

Accounting models allocate fixed costs across services, and though the allocation method can be debated (I advocate Activity Based Costing), the underlying expenses cannot. The relevant figure is the full cost required to maintain a given clinical standard, not whether service A is measured too high while service B is measured too low.

Measured against that standard, Medicare and Medicaid reimburse below market rates. Payments are set administratively, and Medicare participation is effectively mandatory for institutions serving a large population.

Medicaid often reimburses even less.

When reimbursement falls below cost and participation is mandatory, someone has to make up the difference. Providers, then, are forced by economic necessity to pass those costs on to those with private insurance. Employer premiums and individual market premiums then rise. Cash patients face inflated pricing as well.

What many mistakenly label ‘excessive profit’ is often actually making up for public shortfalls.

Affordable Care Act subsidies follow the same logic. Insurers increase premiums for those who can pay in order to offset reduced payments for those who cannot.

When I left IBM, I joined a smaller competitor in Muskegon, Michigan. The company covered employees, but not families. IBM allowed me to keep my health insurance for a year, but when I priced insurance for my wife and son on the Affordable Care Act, I did not qualify for subsidies and the lowest-cost options were more than $800 per person, per month.

I did what I had to do for my family, and returned to the corporate world.

From a Lean perspective, this is a flawed system. Transparent subsidies permit evaluation and democratic choice, whereas embedded, hidden cross-subsidies conceal the true costs and distort price signals.

Emergency care intensifies the cost problem, with millions of Americans using the emergency room for all care, where it is illegal to turn patients away without first stabilizing them. The urgent nature of emergency care makes it the most expensive type of care, so pushing people to the emergency room for non-urgent care, when they cannot afford to pay, forces hospitals to charge private insurance more to cover the losses.

Crisis care should not depend on credit. Emergency departments, however, are designed for emergencies. They are the most expensive entry point we have. They also only stabilize patients, making someone with a chronic problem come back again and again.

If price feedback is removed from consumption, utilization rises, and when the highest-cost setting becomes the default access point for non-emergent care, system-wide inflation explodes.

A Lean system would not eliminate emergency care or public coverage, but it would align reimbursement with cost. It would separate crisis intervention from regular care, and it would make subsidies explicit rather than passing them on to others as hidden transfer payments.

Lean Solutions for the Uninsured

Access must be preserved while providing true cost transparency.

One practical step is expanding Direct Primary Care networks. Under a DPC model, patients pay a fixed monthly fee for defined primary care access. For the uninsured poor, states or municipalities can subsidize those memberships. Competitive local contracting would allow multiple providers to participate.

Community-based lean clinics provide another option. Nurse practitioner led centers, operating under simplified regulatory requirements, can manage routine conditions at far lower cost than hospitals.

These clinics do not require tertiary-care infrastructure. They require examination space, basic diagnostics, and clear pricing. When designed around function instead of institutional hierarchy, they absorb routine demand and relieve emergency departments.

A tiered model preserves emergency stabilization while adding short-stay observation capacity, structured referral into primary care networks, and defined discharge pathways.

Many urgent care centers today function as little more than triage points to redirect patients toward emergency rooms. We need centers that actually provide care.

Hidden cross-subsidies should be replaced with direct transfers. Rather than forcing providers to hide unpaid or underpaid care by passing costs on to private plans, governments can issue primary care vouchers for the poor, or pay the full costs directly and report it to the taxpayer. Preventative care pools and capped chronic disease management support should similarly be funded transparently.

Entry barriers must also be reduced. Certificate-of-Need laws, restrictions on ambulatory surgery centers, retail clinic limitations, and unnecessary telemedicine restrictions protect incumbents and artificially increase pricing.

Incumbent providers have incentives to limit new entrants and preserve scarcity. Standards are necessary, but governance bodies should maintain clinical standards without functioning as gatekeepers that protect market share.

Employer-Based Insurance: The Structural Accident

During World War II, federal wage controls limited salary increases, so employers competed for labor by adding more and more benefits. Health insurance was exempt from wage caps and later reinforced by favorable tax law. It became a hiring tool and then a default structure.

We now treat employer-based insurance as the standard.

Tying insurance to employment creates structural distortion. Workers hesitate to move when it puts coverage at risk.

Employers become intermediaries between patient and insurer. Human resource departments negotiate plans and benefit managers evaluate options. Employees select from predefined menus with limited visibility into actual pricing.

Premiums are embedded within compensation packages, and rising medical costs lead to slower wage growth. Businesses may absorb the increases themselves, but salary increases compensate, passing the costs on to employees indirectly. Salaries stagnate even when employers don’t pass costs on directly.

This obscures trade-offs. Individuals rarely see the full cost of coverage, so meaningful comparison is impossible. Employers negotiate for large groups, encouraging standardized plans rather than individualized risk assessments. In Lean terms, purchaser and consumer are misaligned. The person experiencing the service is not the one negotiating the price.

This system grew through tax preference, regulation, and employer adaptation until it became entrenched, and a system born from wartime labor caps became permanent, but that does not make it good.

Lean begins by examining architecture. Insurance tied to payroll solved a temporary problem and became a permanent framework, but in a modern and mobile economy, we need to reconsider.

When purchaser and consumer align, feedback improves. When coverage attaches to the individual, mobility improves. When insurance functions as risk management rather than disguised compensation, price signals return.

Tax policy currently reinforces the existing structure. Employer-sponsored plans receive favorable treatment that individually purchased plans do not. That imbalance directs behavior. Tax neutrality would remove the distortion and allow individuals to purchase and retain coverage without penalty.

When insurance is continuous and independent of employment, labor can move. The true cost of coverage becomes visible, and insurance resumes its role of managing risk.

Insurance should be for catastrophic events, such as cancer, traumatic injury, stroke,or major surgery. These risks are unpredictable, financially destabilizing, and urgent.

Routine and predictable care is different. Annual physicals, maintenance medications, minor infections, and chronic disease do not require an insurance layer. When insurance processes predictable expenditure, administrative costs rise and prices grow.

Health Savings Accounts could be expanded to make subsidies transparent by having the government deposit them directly into the accounts of those who qualify for support.

Regulatory mandates further distort the system. Federal and state rules dictate coverages regardless of individual risk profile. Baseline protections may be justified, but excessive standardization eliminates lower-cost options and enforces uniformity where variation would reduce costs across the board.

A Lean framework permits tiered insurance products. Basic plans, catastrophic plans, expanded plans, and premium plans can all coexist. Consumers select coverage consistent with age, health status, and risk tolerance.

Decoupling coverage from employment, limiting insurance to catastrophic protection, expanding savings mechanisms, and reducing mandates will not eliminate medical need, but it will restore clarity. When individuals see what they purchase, what it costs, and what risks it covers, price signals strengthen and distortion is reduced.

Lean reform does not claim perfection, but it restores alignment between risk, responsibility, and consumption.

Regulatory Inflation and Facility Mandates

Medical inflation is often blamed on physicians, insurers, and pharmaceutical companies. Less attention is given to the regulations that reshape hospital costs.

Facility mandates have increased in scope and expectation. Multi-bed wards have largely been replaced by private rooms. Square footage per bed has grown. Staffing ratios are more tightly regulated, and building codes and accreditation standards require ongoing upgrades. Infection control rules, safety protocols, and reporting requirements grow every year.

Each requirement may be individually defensible. The issue is the cumulative effect.

When comfort and infrastructure preferences become regulatory baselines rather than competitive options, costs rise across the board, and those overhead increases occur before clinical care even begins. Whenever costs grow, so too must payments.

Facility design is one layer of cost growth. Administrative structure is another.

Hospitals now employ substantial nonclinical staff dedicated to navigating regulations. Coding specialists, utilization review teams, documentation auditors, accreditation managers, legal counsel, and reporting personnel all exist to navigate unnecessary complexity.

Administrative growth does not generally add clinical value. It frequently reflects the burden of reimbursement rules, liability exposure, and reporting mandates. In Lean terms, this is overprocessing. When a system requires multiple handoffs, redundant documentation, and compliance layers to sustain itself, resources are directed toward maintaining structure rather than delivering care.

This does mean eliminating safety standards or oversight. It does require evaluation of cumulative mandates. Intent alone is insufficient. Structural consequences must also be measured, and rational trade-offs made.

Lean systems examine whether each step adds value to the patient. When non-value steps are unavoidable, they are optimized to minimize the waste.

Third-Party Payment and Price Opacity

In most industries, the buyer sees the price before purchase, and transactions only occur if the consumer believes the product is worth the cost. Multiple sellers compete at different price and quality levels, and sellers adjust or go out of business.

Medical care operates differently.

The consumer rarely sees the true clinical cost of procedures. A hospital stay can generate a number of separate bills. Some arrive months after care was performed. Insurers negotiate rates privately, and discounts are applied out of view, while explanation-of-benefits forms obscure more than they inform.

I’ve paid for medical care only to be billed again with no idea whether I am being charged for something else, or double-charged for something I’ve already paid for.

Cross-subsidies are hidden, so a privately insured patient does not see how much of a premium reflects Medicare underpayment, uncompensated emergency care, regulatory overhead, or administrative growth. These are all blended together into a single number.

Facility overhead follows the same pattern. Capital costs for private rooms, expanded square footage mandates, compliance departments, electronic record systems, risk infrastructure, and accreditation layers are spread out across procedures. The patient sees one charge, but not the justification behind it.

The payment chain diffuses accountability. Employers negotiate plans. Insurers negotiate contracts. Government programs set administrative rates. Providers submit coded claims. The individual patient stands at the end of the chain, insulated from the full economic cost. When costs increase, responsibility is unclear and each party deflects blame.

Lean systems depend on visible feedback loops. When cost and value are transparent, inefficiency is exposed. When consumers experience marginal cost, utilization adjusts, and providers compete on measurable performance. Price clarity and operational improvements follow.

Emergency care is an exception. In a true crisis, treatment comes first, but most medical spending is not trauma care. Scheduled procedures, diagnostics, chronic disease management, and elective procedures dominate total costs, and in those contexts, open pricing does not undermine care.

Lean reform restores the feedback loop. Clinical cost and facility overhead costs should be visible. Cross-subsidies should be explicit, and consumers should be able to select providers based on the options they are willing to pay for.

Systems improve when information flows cleanly. Medical care is not exempt from that.

Tort Law and Defensive Medicine

No examination of medical cost is complete without addressing liability. Malpractice is often framed politically, but really, it is an incentive problem.

Medical outcomes vary, reflecting biology, timing, patient compliance, and other variables that are outside of physician control. Identical treatment can produce different results, and an adverse outcome is not proof of negligence.

Negligence is a departure from accepted standards of care that a reasonably competent provider would not make under similar conditions. Error can occur without negligence and adverse outcomes can occur without error. When those categories collapse, doctors resort to what I call in other industries ‘defensive work,’ the difference being that ‘defensive work’ in a manufacturing company is done to try to avoid getting laid off, whereas defensive medicine is done to avoid getting sued, or to help win a lawsuit should one occur.

Liability should require negligence. When every undesirable result carries potential legal exposure, behavior adjusts and defensive medicine follows. This issue has grown so bad that doctors now often get sued for positive outcomes that fall short of optimal, with lawyers promising that they won’t get paid unless you do.

Defensive medicine is predictable and litigation is costly even when claims fail. Physicians respond by increasing documentation, and ordering unnecessary tests and procedures, to create legal protection.

Imaging may serve both clinical and legal purposes, and documentation expands beyond clinical needs. Legal risk becomes an implicit participant in clinical decision making.

Cost shifting compounds the issue. Uninsured patients or for those covered by programs that reimburse below cost can also sue, and those lawsuit costs are transferred to whomever can pay the costs.

Plaintiffs’ attorneys operate within their own set of incentives, caring far more about a doctor’s willingness to pay than about actual liability. Weak claims are often settled. Malpractice insurance aggregates these risks, with private premiums reflecting aggregate costs ultimately passed on to patients.

Reform must preserve accountability, though. Patients harmed by negligence deserve legal recourse,and trust depends on enforceable standards. That said, accountability must correspond to incompetence, and not to statistical variation.

Safe harbor protection for adherence to accepted clinical guidelines would narrow exposure when evidence-based protocols are followed, and pre-suit expert certification can screen weak claims before litigation. Independent medical review panels can quickly evaluate disputes.

Specialized medical courts staffed by judges trained in clinical reasoning could replace juries untrained in probabilistic evidence. Alternatively, juries could be drawn from medically qualified pools. Lawyer penalties for objectively groundless claims would adjust incentives. Escalating consequences for repeated frivolous filings would rebalance risk between plaintiffs’ attorneys and practitioners.

A liability framework should protect patients from incompetence and protect physicians from punishment for inherent uncertainty. When negligence is separated from error and from outcome variation, incentives stabilize.

Accountability must remain, but incentives need to be calibrated. Without balance, defensive medicine becomes another embedded cost within an already bloated price system.

Physician Compensation

Becoming a physician requires exceptional ability, sustained discipline, and delayed income. The training includes undergraduate study, medical school, residency, and often fellowship, taking well over a decade in total. The profession also carries liability exposure, regulatory burden, and emotional strain.

If a society wants its best and brightest to become doctors, it must allow that profession to pay well. Finance, technology, engineering, and law compete for the same talent, and compensation levels influence the fields people select.

When medicine offers growing responsibility with diminishing reward, the applicant pool adjusts. Over time, there are fewer qualified people entering the field. Subspecialty shortages in particular intensify, and people burn out. This may happen over time rather than all at once, but the results are predictable.

Lean systems distinguish value from waste. Waste includes overprocessing, distortion, and misalignment. Competence represents value.

A highly skilled surgeon earning high compensation is not waste. A pricing system that hides cost signals is.

Incentives shape behavior across systems. If reform reduces the attractiveness of medical practice while leaving structural distortion intact, performance will decline. The same principle applies to production lines and professional pipelines.

A sustainable system must correct distortion without degrading excellence. Visible cost reduction that produces invisible capability loss is a net failure.

Equality of Treatment vs. Equality of Comfort

In debates over medical reform, equality is often treated as a single category. It is not. Safe air travel does not require everyone having the same seats. The same aircraft, pilots, and safety standards serve every passenger, no matter where they sit. The difference lies in space and service, not in structural integrity. Medical systems can apply the same logic.

There is equality of treatment and equality of comfort. Collapsing them into one metric raises costs.

The standard of care for a procedure, diagnosis, or emergency intervention should not vary by income. If two patients require the same appendectomy, cancer protocol, or trauma stabilization, the medical standard must be the same.

Comfort is separate.

Regulation and expectation have expanded from clinical standards into environmental and amenity mandates. Private recovery rooms become default requirements. Facility design and hospitality features move from preference to baseline. Food service, square footage, and aesthetic upgrades become embedded cost drivers.

When every bed operates inside the same high-cost infrastructure, the price floor rises. That overhead attaches to every procedure delivered within the facility, regardless of medical complexity.

Variation in comfort does not violate justice if treatment remains equal.

Lean preserves universal clinical standards while permitting accommodation tiers. Shared recovery rooms and private suites can coexist. Optional upgrades can be funded directly rather than embedded across all patients.

When comfort is regulated as a universal entitlement, particularly in settings where the patient does not bear marginal costs, costs for everyone explode. If accommodation tiers are allowed while clinical standards remain constant, costs come back down. Lean evaluation asks which elements create clinical value and which create environmental preference. Both may have merit, but they do not justify identical financing structures.

Lean Medical Policy and Cultural Reality

A Lean medical policy begins with transparent cost accounting. Hospitals and payers should publish cost per case, complication rates, infection rates, and outcome metrics in comparable forms that consumers can read. Cross-subsidies should be visible such that if subsidies are required, they appear in public budgets rather than being hidden inside private premiums.

Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement must be addressed. If public programs pay below cost, that gap should be acknowledged and debated openly. The public deserves to know that they pay a special tax every time they see a doctor.

Insurance should be owned by individuals and portable across employers. Tax neutrality between employer plans and individually purchased plans would help return insurance to risk protection, rather than it being a part of a compensation package.

Routine and predictable care does not require an insurance layer. Direct primary care and expanded health savings accounts can manage those costs.

We need to treat the uninsured outside emergency departments, unless there really is an emergency. Subsidized direct primary care networks, community-based clinics, and chronic care centers can preserve access while reducing waste, so that emergency care can remain universal without exploding costs.

Tort reform must rebalance incentives while preserving accountability. Liability should require negligence, not just outcome variation. Safe harbors for adherence to accepted protocols, expert certification requirements, medical review panels, and specialized courts can narrow defensive behavior while preserving accountability.

Facility mandates should allow accommodation tiers while maintaining universal clinical standards. Equal treatment at the operating table does not require identical surroundings. Flexible infrastructure lowers capital burden without diminishing competence.

Lean operational benchmarking should emerge from transparency and competition rather than centralized process mandates. Standardize outcomes, but not methods.

Architecture, however, is only part of the equation as medical care treats what culture produces.

An effective medical policy must hold two truths: structural reform reduces distortion and restores price feedback, but cultural reform creates better overall health. Confusing healthcare and medical care prolongs debate while preventing actual, workable solutions.

Poland, incidentally, now operates two systems. One remains socialized while the other is entirely private.

We have a friend who practices as an OBGYN in a Polish town. She works two days a week in a public hospital, and the rest of the week in private care. She makes almost all of her income privately, treating her public work as a duty without which her town would have no OBGYNs outside of private care at all.

If Gosia’s father were diagnosed today, we would not rely on the socialist system. We would send him to private care.

My first wife’s cousin demonstrates the other side of the equation. She did not die because America lacked competent medical care. She died because though medicine can reverse an overdose, it cannot make someone stop using.

A sane system should preserve quality while removing the distortions that make routine care expensive. It should also tell the truth: the nation’s health is upstream, and though we can change government incentives, no financing model can substitute for the choices we freely make.

Many Americans want to have Medicare for All, but we may find, as Canadians have, that while saving a life may bankrupt it, we can all die for free.

Over the past two decades, Dos Equis has run a series of commercials about “The Most Interesting Man in the World,” which is a character defined almost entirely by implication. We are told many remarkable things about him, including that he drinks Dos Equis, but we are never told his name.

The Most Interesting Man in the World is fictional, but the Most Trusted Man in the World was real.

His name was Walter Cronkite.

Cronkite was born in 1916. He began his career in print journalism and radio before joining CBS, where he covered many of the 20th century’s pivotal events, including World War II, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., the Vietnam War, the Apollo moon landings, and the Watergate scandal. His calm delivery and editorial restraint helped establish the modern news anchor as a neutral steward of information rather than a political actor, and most Americans believe news anchors are still that today.

Cronkite anchored the CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1981. For nineteen years, he was widely regarded as the most trusted man in American media.

On his final broadcast, Cronkite closed by thanking the audience for their trust and support. “Old anchormen,” he said, “don’t fade away. They just keep coming back for more.” After a brief pause, he ended with the familiar line that had closed countless broadcasts before it: “And that’s the way it is.”

In retrospect, Cronkite probably should have said, “And that’s the way it was.” CNN had gone on the air a scant nine months earlier, and though Cronkite could not have known it, the nature of the news, and of media in general, had already begun to change.

We tend to think of media as the content we watch or listen to. In reality, media refers to the channels, platforms, and institutions that mediate between events and the public. From a systems perspective, media is not content, but the infrastructure that determines what information reaches whom, in what form, and under what constraints.

We also tend to think of ourselves as the customers of the media. A television show is, after all, made for us to watch. But when we watch a television show, the show itself is not the product.

We are.

Media companies do not primarily make money by charging audiences. Even when they do, that revenue is secondary. The overwhelming majority of their revenue comes from advertising. Those who advertise are the customers.

The audience is the product the media sells.

In Walter Cronkite’s era, the nightly news occupied a single hour of the broadcast day. Whether one watched ABC, NBC, or CBS, the format was the same. In that environment, credibility was an asset and the system rewarded trust, and though there was undoubtedly bias in the news even in Cronkite’s era - something nostalgia tends to forget - the incentives still bent away from it.

Twenty-four-hour news changed things. Once news became continuous programming, it began operating under the same incentive structures as entertainment. The goal was no longer to inform the public for an hour, but to segment, hold, and monetize audiences across the entire day.

In that environment, the system no longer rewards the World’s Most Trusted Man. It rewards the World’s Most Interesting One.

And though he does not always drink beer, when he does, he prefers Dos Equis.

The Core Assumptions Behind a Functional Media Market

For most of our nation’s history, Americans lived inside a media ecosystem that, while imperfect, was fundamentally functional. That system relied on a set of underlying assumptions that had to remain true for the market to discipline itself, and for media institutions to serve the public rather than manipulating it. These assumptions were rarely stated, but they governed behavior nonetheless, and once they broke the entire system began to behave very differently.

The first assumption was that the audience was the customer, and back when our nation was young and printed media was all that existed, this was true.

People who consumed media paid for it through subscriptions and purchases, even as newspapers also sought advertising revenue. Revenue flowed from credibility. If an outlet misled its audience too often, that audience would leave, taking its money with it. In this environment, truth had economic value. Accuracy was not just a moral aspiration, but a business necessity.

Media organizations survived by being believed.

That’s not to say all early media said the same things. Early American newspapers were split between federalists and anti-federalists, between whigs and tories, or between whatever the parties of the day were, and they could be absolutely brutal in how they portrayed the other side, but both sides disagreed within the same sets of facts, interpreting them differently but agreeing on what the basic facts were.

The second assumption was that participants shared basic liberal norms. Speech was understood to be a means of persuasion rather than saturation. Arguments were made with the expectation that listeners had agency and could be convinced. Truth carried reputational value, even when it was inconvenient, and while bias certainly existed outright bad faith carried real social and professional costs.

Journalists who were caught fabricating or knowingly misleading did not weather the storm and move on. They lost credibility, and often their careers. The system assumed that most participants were constrained by a shared commitment to honesty, even when they disagreed.

The third assumption was that media markets were local, or at most national in scope.

Capital was predominantly domestic. Advertisers were embedded in the same culture as their audiences and shared at least a minimal civic alignment with the societies in which they operated. Media institutions existed within national boundaries and were shaped by local norms, laws, and expectations.

This created a degree of accountability. A newspaper that undermined social cohesion or public trust was harming the same society on which it depended to survive. There was no meaningful separation between the cultural health of the nation and the long-term health of its media institutions.

The fourth assumption was that no actor could absorb unlimited losses.

Competition imposed discipline. Sensationalism might produce short-term gains, but it carried long-term reputational costs.

Falsehoods could attract attention briefly, but sustaining a business on lies was difficult, as credibility erosion eventually translated into financial loss. Even powerful media organizations were subject to economic gravity. Market forces constrained excess and rewarded restraint, at least over time.

The fifth assumption was that free expression acted as a filter against propaganda, allowing bad ideas to be challenged openly.

Exposure weakened manipulation rather than strengthening it. Competing viewpoints created friction, and that friction generated correction. The assumption was not that truth would win immediately, but that falsehood would struggle to survive sustained scrutiny in an open marketplace of ideas.

Taken together, these assumptions created a media environment that, while flawed and sometimes biased, was self-correcting. Trust aligned with revenue, norms restrained behavior, and markets imposed discipline. Free expression provided resistance to manipulation.

Every major development that follows breaks at least one of these assumptions.

Once the audience ceased to be the customer, once capital became global and detached from civic responsibility, once losses could be absorbed indefinitely, once bad faith carried no penalty, and once speech became a weapon rather than a means of persuasion, the system stopped functioning as a market and began operating as something else.

1789 and the Original Alignment

At the founding of the United States, the media environment aligned almost perfectly with the assumptions required for a functional market. In 1789, and for many decades afterward, every major structural incentive pointed in the same direction.

Early American media was funded primarily through subscriptions, cover prices, and local patronage. Newspapers and pamphlets were paid for directly by the people who read them. Even when advertisers appeared, they were local businesses whose survival depended on the same communities the publications served. The reader was not an abstract “user” or a data point. The reader was both the consumer and the customer. In many cases, the publisher knew their readers by name.

Because revenue flowed directly from readership, trust and credibility were central economic drivers. A publisher who misled his audience risked losing subscribers immediately.

Printing presses were expensive and distribution was limited. Reputation traveled fast in small, interconnected communities, and a paper that became known for exaggeration or fabrication did not simply lose prestige; it lost its ability to operate, particularly if there were other papers in the same community.

Just as importantly, national interest and audience interest overlapped, with early American media existing within a clearly bounded national market.

Capital was domestic. Readers, writers, printers, and advertisers all lived under the same laws and were affected by the same political outcomes. When newspapers argued fiercely, as they often did, they were still arguing about the shared fate of a single nation. Even deeply partisan outlets assumed a common civic framework and a shared stake in the survival of the republic.

These conditions meant that the core assumptions of a functional media market held.

None of this guaranteed objectivity or neutrality. Early American media was often sharp, polemical, and openly partisan. But it was constrained by reality in a way that later systems would not be. The economic structure rewarded credibility, punished sustained dishonesty, and tied the fate of media institutions to the trust of the citizens they served.

This original alignment did not make the system virtuous, but it at least made it stable.

Radio and Television: The First Assumption Cracks

With the rise of radio and later television, the first cracks appeared, changing not just how information was distributed but how it was consumed.

Where print media required deliberate purchase, radio and television turned media into something ambient. With a newspaper, consumers not only decided what editions to buy, but what articles within each edition to read. Reading is an active cognitive process that requires sustained attention, internal construction of meaning, and continuous evaluation of new information.

With radio and television, by contrast, content flows continuously into homes and public spaces, whether the audience actively seeks it or not. This shift made media consumption more passive. Passive content is processed differently and questioned less, particularly when exposure is repetitive. Repetition is more effective in passive media environments as such content places fewer demands on executive and critical-evaluation systems, allowing familiarity and emotional resonance to substitute for scrutiny.

Payment shifted things further. Instead of readers directly funding media through subscriptions or cover prices, revenue increasingly arrived indirectly through advertisers.

Attention began to replace money as the primary currency. What mattered was no longer whether the audience trusted the content enough to pay for it, but whether they stayed tuned in long enough to be sold to someone else.

Advertisers were not the only ones who noticed that repetition works in passive content. So too did politicians, who began to focus more on slogans than arguments, and who began to spend a lot more money advertising.

Advertising moved from being supplemental revenue to becoming the primary source of funding. This marked a core inversion in the media model in that media institutions were no longer selling information to an audience so much as selling audiences to advertisers.

I saw this first-hand in high school when I took a journalism class. We initially sold papers to students, and made enough to cover production costs. Advertising revenue was pure profit, but we only sold a few hundred copies a week and found few companies willing to advertise.

I suggested that we give the paper away for free so we could tell advertisers we had a readership of 1,600 students. Our teacher was skeptical, but he agreed to try giving the paper away for a few weeks, and though we lost the money we used to get selling the paper, the increase in advertising revenue more than made up the difference.

What changed our high-school paper in miniature reshaped national media at scale. Editorial survival began to depend less on credibility and more on predictability and scale.

That was probably true for our high school paper as well, even though we did not act on it. When the local McDonalds took out an ad, they were doing it to reach 1,600 students, but McDonalds was not reading the paper and we were giving out the same number of papers no matter how many students actually read it.

Advertisers did not want thoughtful dissent or intellectual uncertainty. They wanted stable demographics, reliable emotional responses, and environments that kept viewers engaged. Content increasingly optimized for retention rather than persuasion.

At that point, the most important assumption underlying a functional media market failed: the audience was no longer the customer. Once that happened, every other assumption became vulnerable.

Luckily, national alignment still helped mask the structural failure, with advertisers who were still largely domestic. Media institutions remained nationally rooted such that culture and political interest continued to overlap.

Bad faith still carried a reputational cost, and free expression still functioned, if imperfectly, as a corrective force.

Audience Segmentation as a Commercial Necessity

As advertising became the dominant revenue source, audience segmentation shifted from a marketing tactic into a commercial necessity.

What mattered was not whether an argument was persuasive, or even true, but whether it reliably reached a specific demographic with a predictable psychological profile. The goal of media was no longer to inform a broad public, but to deliver stable, well-defined audience segments that could be monetized through advertising.

To do this, media institutions had to segment audiences cleanly into ideological lanes. Advertisers needed confidence that their messaging would not appear alongside material that might unsettle or confuse their target market, making cross-contamination between audiences a financial risk.

This shift quietly degraded two additional assumptions that had previously disciplined the system. The belief that markets self-correct through competition weakened as differentiation gave way to siloing, and free speech lost its filtering function once exposure no longer led to debate.

If you watch the same news story on CNN and Fox News, it often seems like completely separate stories, not because either network necessarily lies, but because they focus on completely separate sets of facts, each ‘side’ ignoring whatever facts don’t fit whatever narrative will keep that segment of the population watching.

CNN loves to have panel discussions with a bunch of people who identify as on the left, and one conservative. The conservative’s job is to give conservative viewpoints so that the more liberal panel members can shoot them down. Fox does the same thing but with one liberal among a panel of conservatives.

Over time, both sides find themselves further and further separated by fractured realities. Hosts function as demographic signals rather than as tellers of truth. Their role was to reassure the audience that they were in the correct lane while either appeasing them, or making them angry toward the ‘other side.’

Guests were selected for role clarity. The question was no longer whether a guest had something new to say, but whether they would perform predictably within the established format. Under these conditions, competition stopped disciplining distortion and began to reinforce it.

This also limited the ability of media houses operating under an advertising model to exercise editorial integrity in hiring, the penalty for hosts being interesting-but-unclassifiable being higher than the penalty for hosts being wrong.

Ideological segmentation is not inherently dishonest; it becomes corrosive only when revenue incentives reward narrative maintenance over truth-seeking and when platforms punish deviation more than error.

As long as there were only three networks, media houses were still somewhat limited by how effectively they could segment society, but once cable television emerged, the number of channels exploded, and over time producers became experts at building and feeding specific market segments for specific kinds of advertisers.

What once functioned as an information ecosystem has transformed into a system of managed perception, optimized for predictable jolts of dopamine and anger, designed to keep people watching rather than to keep them informed.

Humans are rational players when looked at in the aggregate, but we are pattern seeking emotional creatures as individuals, and this is easy for dishonest actors to exploit.

Some people also want to be exploited. As I’ve written about in Political Gnosticism: The Psychology of Secret Truth, we all have a desire for ‘secret knowledge,’ and that desire is easily weaponized, particularly by those who do not share our underlying Judeo-Christian morality.

Shareholders and the Ceiling on Truth

As media institutions grew larger and increasingly consolidated, another hard limit emerged, one that no amount of professional ethics could overcome: ownership structure.

Publicly traded media companies do not exist to serve audiences. They exist to serve shareholders. Executive leadership in such firms carries a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value. This duty is not abstract, and it is not optional. It is a legal obligation that governs executive decision-making, compensation, and job security.

That obligation places an unavoidable ceiling on truth.

Advertisers remain the primary source of revenue, and advertisers are sensitive to controversy that threatens brand alignment, regulatory exposure, or consumer backlash. When advertisers resist, revenue falls. When revenue falls, earnings suffer, stock prices decline, boards intervene, and leadership changes soon follow.

Under these conditions, executives cannot routinely privilege truth over revenue, even if they personally wish to do so. They may tolerate isolated dissent, or controlled controversy, but they cannot allow sustained challenges to the segments and narratives that underpin their revenue streams. To do so would be to knowingly endanger the financial stability of the company they are legally obligated to protect.

Audience size is not even the most important metric, as an audience of vastly different people is more difficult to advertise successfully to than a somewhat smaller audience of like-minded people. The audience’s trust too, while important, is secondary to advertiser confidence.

Truth, in this environment, becomes conditional. It is tolerated when it aligns with commercial interests and quietly suppressed when it does not. Stories are shaped not by what is true, but by what is safe within whatever market segment a particular station, show, or host serves.

None of this requires coordination or malice. It is the natural outcome of combining mass media, advertising dependency, and shareholder governance. The system does exactly what it was designed to do.

At this point, truth does not necessarily disappear, but it no longer leads.

Vietnam: Individual Liberty Becomes a Vulnerability

For much of American history, individual liberty acted as a genuine constraint on propaganda. Propaganda existed, but those who recognized it denounced it as such.

Free expression diffused narrative power. No single institution or ideology could fully control public discourse when claims were easily exposed to open challenge, and bad arguments could be interrogated publicly. The absence of centralized control made domestic propaganda unstable and short-lived.

Cultural alignment imposed real reputational costs. To be exposed as dishonest, manipulative, or acting in bad faith carried consequences. Even powerful actors were constrained by the expectation that speech was meant to persuade rather than overwhelm.

Under these conditions, two critical assumptions held: participants largely shared basic liberal norms, including a commitment to truth as something worth defending; and free speech functioned as a filtering mechanism. Exposure weakened manipulation instead of amplifying it.

But this system depended on conditions that were rarely articulated and often taken for granted.

Free expression quietly assumed good-faith participation. It assumed reciprocal restraint among participants who valued being understood more than just being heard, where agreement was earned by merit rather than through repetition.

Most critically, it assumed cultural loyalty to the host society. The system worked because those participating in the public square saw themselves as members of a shared community with a collective stake in its survival. Disagreement occurred within a framework of mutual recognition.

Once those underlying assumptions began to erode, liberty became a vulnerability.

The Vietnam War marked the first true exploitation of the modern media system.

The Tet Offensive was a military failure for North Vietnam, but an informational success. Its impact did not come from battlefield outcomes, but from how it was framed and amplified. For the first time, sustained external propaganda intersected with a media environment already drifting away from audience funding and toward attention-based incentives.

Soviet-aligned actors understood something Western institutions did not yet fully grasp: narrative saturation could outweigh factual accuracy. By amplifying selective imagery, casualty counts, and moral framing, they pressured coverage in ways that exploited emerging weaknesses, and the public quickly turned against the war in spite of the country having effectively won.

The Soviets never achieved full dominance over Western media for several reasons: national identity remained strong, broadcast channels were limited, institutional gatekeeping still functioned, and publishers acted as choke points capable of rejecting or contextualizing narratives before mass dissemination.

But these conditions were misread. When the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union collapsed, Western elites drew the wrong lesson. They concluded that the threat had been ideological rather than structural. Communism had failed, therefore the danger was gone.

Nothing about the media system’s economic incentives changed.

Advertising remained the primary revenue source. Audience-as-product remained the dominant model. Attention continued to drive survival. The structural assumptions that once protected liberal discourse were no longer supported, yet they were still implicitly relied upon.

What had once resisted exploitation through friction and cohesion would soon face actors unconstrained by either.

The Internet Age: Assumptions Collapse

The rise of the internet did not just accelerate information flow. It also shattered the foundational assumptions that allowed a liberal media system to function.

For the first time in history, distribution was global. Content was no longer bounded by geography, language barriers, or national institutions. A message written in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, or a suburban basement could reach an American audience instantly, at scale, and at negligible cost. The idea of a national media market ceased to exist, even as institutions continued to behave as though it did.

As distribution globalized, audiences lost national coherence.

The public was no longer a shared civic body consuming common information, but a set of algorithmically sorted micro-populations defined by grievance, identity, or psychological profile. People no longer encountered opposing views by accident. Exposure became optional, curated, and often adversarial. The shared informational commons that had once enforced accountability evaporated.

This was not just true of mainstream sources, either. Any media house, no matter how small, that operated on advertising income needed to learn how to maximize its advertising dollars, and the answer was always to create audiences advertisers knew exactly how to market toward.

Internet-based media personalities need to have clearly defined lanes. One personality might give rapid-fire analysis and conservative political critique, while another might focus on forthright masculine commentary on contentious cultural topics. Another might combine political and cultural commentary with a more satirical approach, while yet another might focus on politics and culture through a purely Catholic conservative lens.

Whatever host advertisers support, they know exactly what to expect and thus what products to sell.

Advertisers want everyone to stay firmly in their lane.

Political pundits, historians, economists, scientists, and other guests all stay within their lanes as well, not because they don’t know anything outside their particular area of expertise, but because the producers need to know where the show is going to go so that they can segment properly for advertising.

Advertisers globalized. Capital became untethered from national interest, cultural alignment, or civic responsibility. Media institutions no longer needed the trust of a nation so much as they needed engagement from segments that were increasingly global.

Revenue flowed toward whatever content maximized attention, regardless of truth or social cohesion, and discipline vanished.

At this point, multiple assumptions collapsed simultaneously.

Markets were no longer national. There was no shared civic boundary enforcing accountability.

Competition no longer disciplined excess. At scale, misinformation could be indefinitely profitable, insulated from correction by algorithmic amplification and audience capture.

Free expression no longer filtered propaganda. Open platforms optimized for reach, not truth, allowing hostile actors to flood discourse faster than any corrective mechanism could respond.

The system did not fail gradually. It failed structurally, and it failed completely.

What had once required intent now required only exploitation. No conspiracy was necessary. The incentives guaranteed the outcome.

The liberal assumption that more speech would defeat bad ideas depended on conditions that no longer existed. In a global, attention-driven, lossless environment, speech no longer competed on merit. It competed on volume, velocity, and emotional intensity.

Worse yet, the Internet put a handful of specific platforms in gatekeeper positions, such as Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter (now X). In this environment, either internal regulators or foreign players could shut down discourse it did not like by either withdrawing advertising dollars or exerting regulatory pressures on those gatekeepers. Adversaries have noted this, and so too has the EU.

In that environment, truth is optional.

Incentives Without Citizenship

As media markets globalized, advertising followed. Capital no longer flowed from businesses embedded within a national culture, or accountable to a domestic audience, but from multinational corporations whose primary concern was access and scale across dozens of jurisdictions.

These advertisers do not share civic loyalty with any particular public. They have no stake in national cohesion, cultural continuity, or democratic health. Their obligation is not to citizens, but to shareholders. As long as a platform delivers predictable audience segments at scale, the surrounding social consequences are irrelevant to the balance sheet.

This marks a decisive break from the historical model. In earlier eras, advertisers were local or national actors. Their brands existed within the same cultural and reputational ecosystem as their customers. Media outlets that destroyed public trust risked not only reader defection, but advertiser withdrawal driven by shared social norms. Capital and culture overlapped.

Global advertisers severed that link.

Revenue became detached from national interest. Media institutions could undermine social trust, inflame division, or amplify destructive narratives without directly threatening their income streams. As long as engagement remained high and access was preserved, advertising dollars continued to flow.

In this environment, alignment with national values is no longer rewarded. It is at best irrelevant and at worst a liability. Content that destabilizes, polarizes, or erodes institutional confidence may reduce civic trust, but it often increases engagement, and engagement is what global advertisers buy.

The result is a system in which media survival no longer depends on serving a nation, but on attracting attention within a borderless marketplace. Civic responsibility becomes optional and cultural loyalty disappears entirely.

This dynamic helps explain why it can sometimes appear as though the Democratic Party is aligned with adversarial foreign actors, even when no such coordination exists. A political coalition organized around identity-based grievance produces narratives that are emotionally intense and resistant to falsification. Those characteristics make such narratives especially easy to amplify, distort, and weaponize in a global media environment optimized for attention rather than truth.

Foreign adversaries do not need shared ideology or cooperation to exploit this vulnerability. They need only access. The exploitation is structural, not conspiratorial, and it follows predictably from incentives.

This definitively breaks the assumption that capital aligns with national interest, and once that assumption fails, media institutions no longer act as participants in a democratic culture. They become intermediaries in a global attention economy, structurally indifferent to the societies they influence.

When incentives lose citizenship, accountability vanishes.

Case Study: The NBA and China

In 2019, Daryl Morey, then the General Manager for the Houston Rockets, tweeted, “Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong.” The backlash from China was immediate, representing a clear and well documented illustration of how global economic incentives override shared norms.

The NBA is an American cultural institution rooted in U.S. cities, marketed to American audiences, and often vocal about domestic social issues, yet a substantial portion of its revenue growth depends on access to the Chinese market. That access is conditional. It requires adherence to speech boundaries set by a foreign authoritarian government.

When league executives, players, or affiliated voices cross verbal boundaries China does not like, broadcast contracts are threatened and merchandising in China disappears.

The corrective pressure does not come through force, but through market exclusion. Speech discipline emerges organically, enforced by revenue dependency independently of law.

What makes this case instructive is not China’s behavior. Authoritarian regimes predictably condition access on compliance. What matters is how quickly and thoroughly the NBA adapted its speech to preserve market access, even when those constraints directly contradicted the values the league otherwise claims to hold.

Players who take a knee to protest perceived oppression in the United States will not speak out against genocide when committed by China.

In doing so, the NBA collapsed two assumptions. First, shared norms no longer governed participation. The league did not operate as a moral actor within a common liberal framework. And second, capital no longer aligned with national interest. Revenue tied the institution’s incentives to a foreign state whose values are openly hostile to American principles of free expression.

This is not a unique case. It is just a visible one.

The same pressures apply even more forcefully to media institutions. Media companies are more dependent on continuous access than are sports leagues.

Where the NBA faced episodic pressure, media faces structural pressure. The incentive is not just to avoid offending one market, but to maintain a posture of ideological predictability across all markets simultaneously. Revenue gravity replaces civic loyalty. Alignment with national culture becomes secondary to global revenue streams.

Once that shift occurs, media institutions no longer function as national actors operating within a shared civic framework. They become transnational revenue platforms, optimizing for access rather than truth, stability rather than persuasion, and predictability rather than judgment.

To make matters worse, it is illegal in liberal democracies to shut down media access. Free speech protections don’t allow this. As such, all of the power rests with authoritarian regimes, even when those regimes use that power to undermine those liberal democracies.

The Soviets tried to supplant our media with theirs. China has used the profit incentive to turn our own media against us.

Qatar and the Hybrid Model

A more advanced and far more destabilizing version of this incentive distortion can be seen in the case of Qatar.

Unlike China, which applies pressure from the outside, Qatar operates from within Western systems. It participates in global finance, hosts Western universities, invests heavily in Western real estate and corporations, and maintains formal diplomatic ties with liberal democracies. It does not need to coerce Western institutions directly, because it embeds itself inside their existing structures, and then uses those structures to drive narratives.

Its principal instrument is Al Jazeera.

Al Jazeera does not operate as a conventional media organization. It is state-funded, strategically motivated, and structurally insulated from the market forces that discipline normal media actors. It does not rely on subscribers for survival. It does not depend on advertiser confidence either, and it does not need to maintain trust with a domestic audience that can withdraw financial support.

Most critically, as an arm of Qatar, it has virtually unlimited loss tolerance.

Where Western media institutions must balance credibility against revenue, Al Jazeera does not face that constraint. It can operate indefinitely at a financial loss if doing so advances state objectives. Market feedback is irrelevant. There is no mechanism by which poor performance or reputational damage forces correction.

The assumption that no actor can absorb unlimited losses is what makes competition meaningful, ensuring that distortion carries a cost and that persistent falsehoods eventually become unsustainable.

Al Jazeera operates entirely outside that logic.

Compounding the problem is the absence of reciprocal openness. Al Jazeera enjoys broad access to Western audiences, platforms, and institutions. Western journalists, by contrast, do not enjoy equivalent freedom to operate inside Qatar or to challenge its internal power structures. The exchange is asymmetric; influence flows in one direction.

This model is especially corrosive because it exploits liberal systems without participating in their underlying norms. It uses free expression without honoring reciprocity, using open markets without accepting market discipline, and operating as a state actor while presenting itself as an independent media outlet.

Once an actor like this enters the ecosystem, the market model breaks down entirely. Traditional media organizations cannot compete on equal terms with an entity that does not need to make money, does not fear reputational loss, and does not answer to its audience.

At that point, distortion is no longer a bug in the system. It becomes a feature introduced from the outside, operating indefinitely, immune to the corrective mechanisms liberal societies assumed would always exist.

I wrote a piece specifically on how Qatar propagandizes the Western World in White Rose Magazine. I invite you to look over that article if you are sceptical about Qatar’s influence. Qatar’s influence runs deep.

Liberty as the Vector

Western speech protections confer two powerful things at once: access and legitimacy. Open societies allow ideas to circulate freely, grant platforms to outsiders, and presume good faith participation as the default behavior. These features are strengths when participants share reciprocal norms, but they become vulnerabilities when they do not.

Adversarial actors exploit these freedoms without extending them in return. They speak into Western systems while restricting speech at home. They benefit from openness without accepting exposure, and they leverage liberal norms as instruments rather than honoring them as constraints.

At that point, the final assumption collapses: that free expression filters bad faith. The marketplace of ideas only functions when ideas are offered honestly, debated openly, and corrected through counterargument. It fails when speech is used not to persuade but to saturate and destabilize, especially when the speaker bears no reputational or financial cost.

Capital flows globally, detached from national or civic alignment. Speech norms are asymmetric, with liberal societies extending openness to actors who do not reciprocate.

Our adversaries use our own media to weaken us. We have no defense against that.

None of these developments require secret coordination. Each element follows logically from incentives once the original assumptions are violated. The media market did not fail because people became evil, incompetent, or dishonest. It failed because it continued to rely on assumptions that were no longer true.

Free markets did not fail. They were deployed in an environment where market discipline no longer functioned.

Free speech did not fail. It was extended asymmetrically to actors who had no intention of engaging honestly, who had no exposure to correction, and who had no vulnerability to reputational or financial cost.

Walter Cronkite was not great because he was neutral. He was great because neutrality was rewarded. His restraint created value in a system where credibility and trust were monetizable.

He was the product of an environment that made seriousness profitable, and when that environment disappeared, so did the conditions that produced him.

Today’s media does not reward the most trusted voice. It rewards the most engaging one. That’s not because audiences demand manipulation, but because the underlying infrastructure does. The system stopped selecting for trust and began selecting for attention.

Cronkite’s sign-off captures the difference perfectly. “And that’s the way it is” was credible in a system that aligned truth with survival, whereas if someone said the same thing today it would sound like branding.

A system designed for good faith does not collapse loudly when good faith erodes. It collapses quietly, doing exactly what it was built to do long after the conditions that made it safe are gone, and though we may not have a viable media anymore, at least we still have Dos Equis.

Stay thirsty, my friends.

When I was 18, I joined the Marine Corps Reserves. After four years, I decided to go full-time.

It turns out one does not just go from the Marine Corps Reserves to active duty. Recruiters told me I could do a year of recruiter duty, but after that I’d be right back in my reserve unit.

I really wanted to go full time.

A buddy of mine was transitioning from the Army National Guard to active duty in the Army, and he mentioned to his recruiter that I was getting the runaround from the Marines. This recruiter contacted me, and I decided that instead of reenlisting in the Marine Corps Reserves, I’d switch branches and go into the Army.

Shortly thereafter, I got orders to go to the 82nd Engineers in Bamberg, Germany, where I lived from 1994 to 1997.

Bamberg is a beautiful city in Northern Bavaria, between Nuremberg, Schweinfurt, and Wurzburg, and before long I started attending a German/American men’s group that met monthly in Nuremberg.

My father was a history teacher who collected history books, particularly about Europe between World Wars and the European theatre of World War Two. I grew up reading them, and eventually inherited them.

My father’s biggest question regarding Nazi Germany was how a powerful, industrial country like Germany could have followed Hitler. I don’t know if my dad ever found an answer he was satisfied with, but I had opportunities to ask not only Germany/American Men’s Group members who remembered the war, or had even fought in it, but also some of their family members who had fought in the war.

Of course, this all occurred twenty years before Donald Trump first became President.

By my father’s estimation, Trump was the worst President in American history, and that was true even before Trump was sworn into office.

My father honestly believed that the election of Donald Trump was the single most calamitous event in American history, beating out 9/11, Pearl Harbor, the Great Depression, or you name it. Dad believed America could survive one Trump term, but not two. Trump, by my father’s estimation, wanted to make himself King of what would become a Russian vassal-state.

My father was a little miffed when I voted for Trump. To my father, the son who had read all of the same history books he’d read, and had grown up asking the same kinds of questions he’d asked - with the added insight of having talked to actual former members of the Nazi party (and even some former SS officers) - was suddenly voting for the American equivalent of Hitler.

Let me be clear with my definitions: ‘Fascism‘ is an economic system in which the means of production are centrally planned and controlled - just like in socialism - but left nominally in private hands. Fascism uses profit and pay, under tight state control, to incentivize people to work and to incentivize those who manage companies (technically who ‘own’ them, but what is ‘ownership’ without control?) to manage them competently.

Fascism is Marx-style socialism with an incentive system added in.

Nazism is a form of fascism in which the concept of ‘nation’ was defined in ethnic, rather than geographic, terms.

Had my dad followed my writing, he might have noticed that I too was watching everything going on in our country, and I even agreed with my father that the United States was drifting toward a fascist autocracy. I’ve been writing about this going back to the late 1990s (right after rotating back from Germany), when my first blog won the Rush Limbaugh Conservative Website of the Week award.

I was pulled aside by my First Sergeant a couple of weeks after Rush’s recognition, and told to take my site down before someone ‘much higher up in the chain of command’ poured through it, looking to find anything that could be construed as a ‘disloyal statement.’ Nobody wanted to punish me, but someone up in my chain of command (how far up I do not know) did not want my website to exist.

Making a ‘disloyal statement’ is a felony under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. I’d written a couple of articles on the Clinton Whitewater scandal, and since Bill Clinton was Commander in Chief, any criticism of him could have been used to put me in prison. I took the site down, but I’ve always regretted doing so.

Years later, when out of the Army, I began writing again.

I wrote about our modern fascism directly in an essay titled, “Fascism was Socialism 2.0 - Now we’re living in 3.0.” This version of fascism wasn’t brought on by Donald Trump though. My father was wrong about that. Trump, in fact, is hated because he comes from outside our fascist system and is working to take it down.

Seeing that our country did go fascist does not tell us exactly how it happened. I answer that partially in an article titled, The Quiet Coup: How the Intelligence State Took Over America, and partially in They Broke the Market—Now They’re Selling You the Cage.

I’ve actually written about this topic quite a bit. I have articles discussing how modern censorship works, how modern indoctrination works, how the connotations of words have been weaponized to help program the public, how ‘social justice’ is the opposite of actual justice, and a bunch of other relevant essays. At least half of my Substack touches on various aspects of this exact topic.

My dad has not read any of my Substack. Of course, he was dead before I wrote on Substack, but I’ve been writing about the same topics (albeit not in the long-form essay format) for almost 30 years.

I did write one piece my dad read. It wasn’t an article though. It was a paper I wrote about the Pharmaceutical Industry for a class, as a part of my MBA. My dad liked it so much he printed out copies and distributed them to his friends. But since my father and I differed on all things religion and politics, my broader writing never appealed to him and had he read it, it would only have upset him.

My most profound historic insight did not come from a history book, either. It came from The Road to Serfdom, by economist Friedrich Hayek, who claimed that President Franklin Deleno Roosevelt’s New Deal, and particularly his National Recovery Act and the National Industrial Recovery Administration, were modeled directly on Mussolini’s Italy.

This hit me like a lightning strike, providing a tremendous amount of explanatory power covering the rise of the American Bureaucratic Administrative State.

My father did not like populism and believed that we should defer to experts for decision making. He learned his history from historians, and as a history teacher he stayed in his lane. It would never have occurred to him that a central historical insight that answered his deepest historic question might come from an economics book rather than a history book.

Anti-populism errs not because ‘elites’ don’t have tremendous knowledge within specific intellectual circles, but because in many cases the critical insights are scattered across multiple circles, and none of the elite can see all of them.

Mussolini - not Hitler - was the original fascist leader, and as I examined the historical record more closely, I found that Franklin Roosevelt openly admired Mussolini’s methods of governance. Roosevelt referred to Mussolini as “that admirable Italian gentleman” and directed Ambassador Breckenridge Long to consult with Mussolini on how Italy organized its economy and state institutions. Multiple New Deal intellectuals and administrators openly described fascist Italy as a successful laboratory for modern governance. While they avoided the word “fascism” in public discourse, the Roosevelt Administration continued, even after Hitler’s invasion of Poland, to praise Mussolini’s economic and administrative outcomes.

We pretend that World War Two ended fascism, but Francisco Franco continued to rule Spain as a fascist, well into the 1970s. Democrats did not like Franco’s autocratic rule but they openly admired the control he had over Spain’s economy right up until Franco died in 1975.

This distinction matters now that generations of Americans who have no emotional connection to World War Two have reached adulthood. Such people are not instinctively repulsed by the same labels we are, and if they study history (as some do), they see the hypocrisy between using the word ‘fascist’ as a bludgeon, while admiring what are clearly fascist regimes.

When young adults see the word ‘fascism’ used in ways that are clearly dishonest, they don’t just question the application of the word, but also the historical judgments shown toward the people the term is used against.

When we ‘teach’ our youth things they can see are not true, we invite them to also reject things that are. This is dangerous.

Fascism as a word fell out of favor in both parties, but as an economic system it did not. Only the word fell out of favor. The Democrats spun that word off as ‘far right’ on the grounds that it came from Germany’s right, ignoring that Otto Von Bismarck created the German state as a socialist country such that their right was socialist. Suddenly we began ‘teaching’ that libertarianism is a ‘gateway drug’ that leads to fascism, when in fact libertarianism rejects all forms of totalitarianism in both politics and economics.

Without economic freedom a person cannot decide where to work, what to buy, what to wear, what to eat, or anything else of any real significance. As such, any system that centrally plans the economy, by definition also centrally plans the people, and will become authoritarian by necessity even if not by design.

The current model is far more threatened by freedom than by communism, tolerating the ‘far left’ while working to make anything even moderately on the right look extreme. Like my father, it blames the political right, and particularly Donald Trump, for everything, but that’s deflection.

I did not just inherit my father’s history books. I also inherited a framed copy of ‘The Unfinished Portrait of FDR,’ officially licensed by the artist Elizabeth Shoumatoff. This painting was one of my father’s prized possessions. I gave it away to a young friend who, like my dad, teaches history, and who, also like my father, is unknowingly a fascist.

Giovanni Gentile’s political portion of fascism recognized that socialism must occur within a state (thus it was national rather than global in scope), and recognized that central planning required a level of authoritarianism that is not compatible with democracy. Fredrich Hayek made the same observation: central planning is not compatible with democracy.

Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zohran Mamdani, and other ‘democratic socialists’ show us how silly the concept of ‘democratic socialism’ is whenever they run for office. They say, ‘tax the rich,’ and then they promise that they will ensure everyone who is not rich has free food, free healthcare, free housing, free bus rides, free child care, free college, etc. etc. etc..

If we took every penny every billionaire in the country has - not just their incomes, but also their wealth - it would pay for ‘Medicare for All’ for less than three months. Add in the millionaires and you’ll get another six. After that, there would be no billionaires or millionaires left to pick up the tab, and we would have no way to pay for ‘Medicare for All.’ That is the economic reality of ‘free.’

Democratic Socialists ignore this fact. They also ignore that bankrupting the nation to get nine months of free healthcare would do nothing to feed or house anyone.

Democratic socialist point to countries that have free healthcare as proof that free healthcare is possible, but they ignore that these countries do not just tax the rich.

Democratic Socialists ignore that according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy’s research, the poorest American workers pay only 7% of their income in total, combined taxes, while the richest Americans (the top 0.01%) pay about 46% on average, and in some states pay more than half. The Middle Class pays about 25%.

That’s not just federal taxes. That’s all taxes at all levels of government. State and local taxes are based on national averages and will vary from place to place.

In the Nordic countries, the poorest workers pay around 40% of their income in total, combined taxes, while the Middle Class pays around 50%, and the richest earners pay about 55%.

Not only do Nordic workers pay much more in taxes than do workers in the United States, but their incomes are lower as well.

Nordic countries have high minimum wages, but professional workers, such as nurses and engineers, earn roughly 30 to 70 percent less, depending on the profession, than their counterparts in the United States.

There is zero appetite in the United States to tax the poor and middle classes at the rates it would take to pay for Medicare for All, whereas without doing so we simply cannot pay for it.

‘Tax the rich’ is a marketing ploy. We already do that.

Giovanni Gentile saw, as did Friedrich Hayek, that the populace would never vote for a viable central plan. Nobody wants to accept rational tradeoffs, and so people vote for, not the person offering the best set of tradeoffs for a functional central plan, but the guy from Vermont with crazy hair who promises more of everything, paid for by someone else, under the slogan, ‘Feel the Bern.’

People do that irrespective of whether or not the promises made are possible to deliver, and then in order to try and keep those promises, such people are forced into authoritarianism whether they like it or not.

The European Union is a bureaucratic administrative state in which officials are not elected. People within the EU have the right to vote in national elections (as long as the EU approves of the people running - ask Marine LePen what happens when they do not), but there are no EU elections.

The EU is not a democratic body, and it does not govern like one.

Whatever member states consider themselves, the EU is fascist, and if we look at how our government actually runs rather than at the window dressing we call ‘elected officials,’ we’ll see that other than our Bill of Rights, we operate largely in the same way.

And of course we do. Giovanni Gentile’s political model for fascism was created in support of the economic model rather than the other way around, and any nation using the economic model of fascism will be forced to create the authoritarianism central planning requires. Whether that authoritarianism is done in the open, as in the European Union, or surreptitiously through an administrative bureaucracy that runs the country independently of those we elect, it’s authoritarianism either way.

Fascists and communists hate one another not because they are opposites, but because fascists see communists as ideological fools whose hatred of profit blinds them from economic reality, whereas communists see fascists as ideological sellouts who put the desire for a functional model ahead of ideological purity. They are not dissimilar models so much as brother ideologies fighting over inheritance. The original fascists all came from Marxism.

Both systems are collectivist, and both require authoritarianism to survive. Central plans must be enforced, and as such, any system that uses central planning requires authoritarianism to survive.

That is the lesson my father failed to learn, and though it is too late for my father, there is still time for the rest of us.

Fascism and socialism are both totalitarian in nature. We should reject both.

In my book, The Way Forward: Lean Leadership and Systems Thinking for Large and Small Businesses, I set out to equip business leaders, managers, and workers with tools to make their organizations leaner, faster, and more value-driven. Underneath the tactical guidance was a deeper conviction: that value must be real, not manufactured by regulation or propped up by political favors. A business should thrive by serving the customer, not by manipulating the system.

That conviction, that the only sustainable profit is earned through honest exchange, now forms the backbone of this essay: Systemic Free-Market Realism.

The first chapter of The Way Forward exposed the dirty mechanics of the modern “mixed economy,” where profits often stem not from value creation, but from regulatory capture, manufactured demand, and political favoritism. It showed how companies now thrive by replacing the consumer with the bureaucrat, and how market incentives have been hijacked to reward influence over excellence.

This essay gives that insight its full philosophical expression.

But there’s another danger that runs deeper still: assumptions. The greatest failures of our age are not the result of malice, but of faulty assumptions about equality, power, morality, and economics that don’t withstand contact with reality.

Karl Marx assumed production would remain unchanged if output was redistributed independently of any incentive structure. Xi Jinping assumed consumption was permanent, even while actively working to undermine the nations consuming Chinese products. Modern Western leaders assume that progress is inevitable, and that unintended consequences are optional.

Those who wish to tear down free markets to replace them with some form of collectivism have an easy time selling their idealism. They can simply claim to want to help people while complaining about rent being too high, food being too expensive, or life being too hard.

It’s easy to complain about reality while promising utopia, and then when utopia fails to arrive, it’s easy to complain about whatever dark forces prevented it. The common refrain about Venezuela is that socialism failed because of economic pressure from the United States. Somehow nobody notices that this is a version of ‘socialism would work fine if capitalism would only feed it.’

Socialism is supposed to be an alternate economic system. If it worked, it would not need capitalism to feed it. Yet the argument remains popular.

Even Elon Musk is on the bandwagon, telling WEF that the future will be one where robots and AI create abundance faster than demand can anticipate such that the future of mankind will be one of endless wealth and prosperity, without any need for personal effort.

Many modern Western leaders have bought into Xi Jinping’s propaganda and are actively working to undermine their own economies, in the quest for some semblance of a green new deal, or of a world where everyone’s needs are taken care of without the need for personal responsibility, and telling people this is impossible is a much harder sell than is Zohran Mamdani standing behind a podium and saying something like, “I am a New Yorker and there is nothing we cannot accomplish if we work together.”

The 20th century is full of people who worked together to bring collectivist visions into reality, such as in Mao’s China. Nobody knows how many Chinese peasants starved to death under Mao, but estimates run as high as 100 million.

There are some lessons each generation seems to need to learn themselves, no matter how many previous generations have already learned the same lessons. Collectivism is one such lesson, with each generation of idealistic youth believing that they are the ones with the intelligence, or the technology, to make it work.

Each generation is wrong, but the siren-song of collectivism continues to sound nice no matter how many nations crash upon its shores.

Systemic Free-Market Realism rejects utopian assumptions. It recognizes that power always seeks to centralize, that markets are delicate ecosystems rather than machines to be programmed, and that morality, not ideology, must be the constraint on liberty. It accepts that freedom is fragile, that prosperity is earned, and that resilience is more important than efficiency.

This is not just an economic philosophy. It is a worldview rooted in economics, systems thinking, moral clarity, and lived experience. This work grew from the trenches of business, the failures of top-down policy, and the enduring truth that real value comes from serving others.

This is not just a call for better markets. It’s a call for better systems, better assumptions, and better stewardship of the freedom we claim to defend.

This is the way forward.

The Specter That Haunts Free Markets

Across the Western world, economies no longer operate to serve the consumer. They serve governments and the corporations that purchase their favor. We are told this is “capitalism,” or a “mixed economy,” but it is neither. It is a system in which consumer choice has been replaced by bureaucratic decree, and in which production is directed by regulatory privilege. In such a system, success is no longer measured by value delivered, but by influence wielded.

What we face is not a contest between capitalism and socialism, nor between freedom and control. It is a system built on collusion between those who regulate and those who lobby. It is a world in which major corporations do not fear regulation; they design it. Compliance becomes a moat to protect incumbents, innovation is buried under paperwork, and access to capital becomes contingent on one’s proximity to political power.

Small businesses, the heartbeat of any real market, are smothered before they scale. Entrepreneurs are choked in red tape. Whole industries become cartels, their fortunes dependent on subsidy, protection, or favoritism, and yet we continue to call this system “free enterprise,” as if naming a thing ‘free’ makes it so.

The truth is simpler and more damning: what we have today is an economy in which profits are privatized and losses are socialized; an economy where the rules are written by the very interests they are supposed to restrain.

I, for one, reject this. We can do better.

I still believe in the original promise of free markets: that individuals, left to trade freely in pursuit of mutual benefit, create value through voluntary exchange. The price system conveys real information; competition drives real innovation; and the consumer, not the bureaucrat, the banker, or the activist, should be sovereign.

I also recognize that such freedom is fragile. It cannot exist in a moral vacuum. It requires boundaries that emerge from virtue: truthfulness in pricing, honesty in advertising, fairness in competition, and responsibility in risk.

Freedom also requires transparency through real feedback loops, and not propaganda. Data should reflect reality. Regulation should punish fraud and not reward failure. Institutions should serve the public interest, not private arrangements masked as public goods.

Without these, markets become tools of control. They enrich the elite, entrench the powerful, and give the illusion of liberty while stripping away its substance.

I do not seek to return to some past golden age. If we are smart, we will seek to build something stronger: a market grounded in moral reality, informed by systemic insight, and protected by institutions that exist to safeguard liberty rather than to sell it.

This is the foundation of Systemic Free-Market Realism.

The Market Is a Living System

To understand markets as machines is to believe they can be engineered, assembled from above, optimized through centralized input, and tweaked to perfection by experts who presume to know what billions of individuals want. This is the fatal conceit of both Karl Marx and the modern corporatist. It is the illusion that economies are mechanisms to be programmed rather than systems to be understood.

Markets are living ecosystems. Markets emerge spontaneously when people are free. Free people trade, take risks, fail, and learn.

We don’t think of markets as living ecosystems only because we think of them as somehow separate from ourselves, but markets are nothing more than free people interacting freely, and where markets are not free, the people are not either. People ask why socialism seems to always lead to tyranny, but the answer is simple: if people are not allowed to interact how they want, work where they want, buy what they want, and do what they want, they are not free.

Socialism does not lead to tyranny so much as it is built on it.

Markets evolve through millions of voluntary exchanges, each shaped by cultural norms, trust, incentives, and feedback. The moment we try to engineer markets through central planning, managed competition, or ideological mandates, we begin to kill them.

Too many of our leaders measure our economy based on aggregate demand, but while aggregate demand is a measure of the size of an economy, it tells us nothing about the economy’s health.

The health of an economy is driven by how well aggregate demand reflects the buying decisions of the people living within the economy, rather than what some supposed ‘elite’ thinks people should want.

In a living market, profit signals value creation. In a corrupted one, profit becomes a reward for obedience. The public, unaware of the complexity beneath the surface, continues to operate as if the economy is stable when really it is a set of bubbles, each waiting to pop.

Healthcare and secondary education are not expensive ‘just because’. They are expensive because our leaders have tried to drive economic growth around them, inflating them into bubbles. Our leaders don’t really want to deflate those bubbles either, as it would, in the short term, hurt aggregate demand.

Those are two of the most obvious bubbles, but we have bubbles everywhere.

This is why so many modern economies appear functional while suffering from internal collapse. Corporations grow larger, but their business models depend more on compliance than creativity. Governments tout low unemployment even as millions check out of the workforce. GDP climbs, but household savings vanish.

These contradictions are not bugs. They are symptoms.

A machine does not care about culture and has no need for moral input. A machine can be reset or rebuilt, but a living system cannot. Once a living system’s balance is lost, it decays, and the damage is not easily reversed.

One need only look at the personal wealth of our elected officials to see who the machine they built truly feeds, and once we see this truth, the notion that we can make the machine better by giving the same people more power - by eliminating the few free market dynamics left - suddenly looks absurd.

This is why Systemic Free-Market Realism treats the economy not as an object to be shaped, but as a system to be stewarded. It understands that no policy, however elegant, can outperform the wisdom of free individuals responding to real incentives. Systemic Free-Market Realism sees every distortion, every regulation designed by lobbyists, every subsidy shielding failure, and every data point massaged to serve a narrative, not as a benign intervention, but as a pollutant that slowly suffocates the public.

To revive the economy, we must stop engineering it and start restoring it. We need to allow the economy to breathe again such that it responds honestly to prices, and rewards actual value while punishing waste. Accountability, transparency, and risk are engines of growth, and bad ideas must fail to make room for good ones to succeed.

In short, we must stop treating the market like a machine and start respecting it as a living system of free people living their lives.

Freedom is an easy sell, but responsibility is not, and yet one cannot exist without the other. The so-called elite know this, and they take your freedom, little by little, by promising to shield you from responsibility.

The State as Parasite and Predator

In theory, the state exists to protect rights and enforce the rule of law. It is meant to provide the legal and institutional infrastructure that allows a free society to flourish, and is supposed to be neutral in its judgments, and accountable to the people it serves.

In practice, the modern state no longer acts as the referee of economic activity, but as an active participant. The modern state no longer protects markets so much as it distorts them, selling advantage to the highest bidder.

Simply put, power is a commodity that can be bought and sold just like any other, and when governments get the kinds of power others want, those in government predictably sell it to the highest bidder.

The state has become both parasite and predator, feeding on the value created by private enterprise through taxes and regulation, while simultaneously redirecting resources away from value and toward politically favored interests. This is a system in which government actors broker influence, and where the concept of economic merit is replaced by strategic lobbying.

Under this model, the consumer is no longer the final judge of value. The politician is.

This inversion breaks everything.

In the modern state, a company that cannot profit by serving the public can thrive so long as it serves the political class. Companies today need not offer a product anyone wants, but can create the appearance of value by going to the right regulatory committee, by funding the right campaign, or by checking the right ideological box.

And the deeper tragedy is that most citizens don’t recognize this for what it is. They see the familiar forms of a market economy, with brands, prices, advertising, and choice, but they do not realize the market mechanisms underneath have been hollowed out and replaced.

The price system no longer reflects demand. It reflects mandates. The cost of failure is not borne by the firm, but by the taxpayer.

The state, once conceived as the guardian of liberty, has become the gatekeeper of access, deciding who may enter the marketplace, and who must be restrained. The state’s tools were subtle at first, but over time these tools have become levers of dominance, and as the levers grew, so too did the parasite’s appetite.

Worse, the state cannot perform this function without help. It needs companies willing to sell their autonomy for privilege, and so a public-private hybrid emerges with all the coercive power of the state, and all the unaccountable scale of megacorporations. The result is not socialism in the Marxist sense, nor capitalism in the classical sense, but a managerial oligarchy with democratic window dressing.

And the bureaucrats actually running the system are not elected.

Systemic Free-Market Realism calls this what it is: an economic cartel with political enforcement.

It is not enough to trim bureaucracy. We must dismantle the mechanisms by which the state becomes both competitor and referee. We must sever the links between political power and market outcomes. That means no more subsidies for failure and no more contracts for cronies.

The state must be restored to its proper role, not as buyer or seller, not as manager or planner, but as neutral protector of rights and enforcer of honest rules.

Consumer Sovereignty is the Only Honest Regulator

In a truly free market, the consumer is not just a passive buyer or a unit of demand, but the final arbiter of value. Consumers are the ones who ultimately determine which companies succeed, which products endure, and which innovations shape the future. Consumer choice, exercised freely and frequently, is the most powerful regulatory mechanism ever devised, requiring no bureaucracy.

Consumer choice does not rely on ideology, but on freedom. It requires only, as Milton Friedman put it, “the freedom to choose.”

No corporate board or government agency has more power than three hundred and thirty million wallets making individual decisions. When people are free to choose what they value and what they reject, the market becomes self-correcting, and bad ideas fail.

Dollars also don’t care about race, religion, or gender. In a truly free market, we may not all have the same amount of money, but there are no artificial barriers to success so we all have the same right to go as far as our time and talent can take us.

Creating artificial barriers does not make people more equal. It only makes them more poor.

When the government intervenes, choosing winners and losers, mandating products, subsidizing services, or protecting favored industries, it severs the consumer feedback loop, breaking the invisible but essential link between performance and reward such that companies no longer have to please the public, but only have to please the regulators. Value in such a system becomes irrelevant, and compliance becomes everything.

In such a system, a company can produce goods no one wants at prices no one can afford, and still survive so long as the government props it up. Consumers are stripped of their power, entrepreneurs are discouraged, risk-takers are punished, and the market begins to resemble a theater where the outcomes are predetermined.

This process is often cloaked in noble intentions. We are told that regulations exist to protect the public, and that subsidies exist to promote fairness, but in practice, these tools are used not to defend consumers, but to marginalize them, replacing real demand with engineered demand, and replacing real accountability with political rot.

Consumer sovereignty is the only form of regulation that is both democratic and dynamic, reflecting not only what people say they want, but what they are willing to sacrifice to obtain it. That is a deeper form of truth than polling or planning can ever capture.

Systemic Free-Market Realism does not call for a market without rules. It calls for rules that defend the sovereignty of the consumer rather than overriding the consumer. It supports regulation that protects life, liberty, and property, but not regulation that dictates outcomes, favors special interests, or enforces ideological compliance.

In this worldview, the role of government is not to direct the market, but to ensure that no force, fraud, or coercion corrupts the ability of consumers to make informed, voluntary choices.

The government only has two roles in the economy:

1. To promote and protect market efficiencies, and

2. To provide those legitimate societal needs that run counter to market efficiencies.

The first role is the primary one, and even when performing the second role (which reflects societal needs - not individual or group needs), the government should always act in ways that keep the markets as efficient as possible.

The second role includes things such as police and fire protection, national defense, and building roads. Ensuring that the environment is not polluted would also qualify, although again, the goal is to minimize market intrusions and not to take over industries.

The exact scope of government will not be covered in this essay, but I will cover it in the future, in detail, when I write a book on lean government (of which this essay will be a part).

One thing I will say now is that the government is most responsive when it is local, so what the government does, it should do as locally as practical.

Let’s briefly talk about recessions, as many people envision a need for the government to actively manage the economy to prevent them.

In a geographically small country, natural disasters can cause recessions. In an economy overly dependent upon a small number of industries, market failures can cause recessions. The United States is too physically large and too economically diverse for either of these factors to throw our entire economy into one.

It is normal in a market economy for some industries to be in recessions and others to be in periods of growth, but each industry has its own market cycle and in a diverse economy, it is not normal to see all industries in a boom or a bust at the same time.

Only a systemic shock, such as Federal Reserve policy failure causing a rapid and unexpected change in the value of the dollar, can do that, and in fact this is precisely what causes recessions in the United States.

The amount of money in circulation (called the ‘M2 Money Supply’) and the totality of goods and services produced always move toward one another, such that if the amount of money in circulation suddenly changes by a significant amount relative to the totality of goods and services produced, it can throw the entire economy into a period of price discovery and cause a recession.

It was the government’s actions from 2000-2008 in creating a housing bubble, propped up by artificially low interest rates, that caused the recession in 2008, and it was government mandated shutdowns that caused the recession at the start of Covid-19. One of those was an aggressive expansion in the supply of money, followed by a crash in both house values and in the amount of money in circulation, that caused the 2008 recession, and it was a crash in totality of goods and services produced mixed with massive government stimulus spending that caused the Covid-19 recession.

Even the Great Depression was caused by the Federal Reserve, first keeping monetary policy too loose in the 1920s, leading to a debt-fueled stock market bubble (where people and banks borrowed ‘cheap money’ to invest in the stock market), and then causing a harsh retraction in the money supply as banks closed when the bubble burst and the market crashed.

The Federal Reserve had the power to prevent the Great Depression. It failed, and it is amazing how the Federal Reserve boasts about how well it manages our economy when times are good, only to bemoan its lack of power over the economy, whenever it makes a mistake.

Before the Federal Reserve was created, supposedly to smooth over short term fluctuations in the value of gold, gold booms and busts caused recessions. Any time the entire economy goes into price discovery, all at the same time, there is a recession.

The Federal Reserve really could prevent recessions if it focused solely on maintaining a stable amount of money in circulation, but it has a dual mandate to also maintain full employment.

John Maynard Keynes believed that inflation and employment were linked such that the Federal Reserve could boost employment through inflation, giving the Federal Reserve a dual mandate to maintain a target of 2% inflation while also maintaining full employment. We learned under Jimmy Carter’s stagflation that we could have high unemployment and high inflation at the same time though.

The Federal Reserve should eliminate its dual mandate and focus solely on a stable monetary base.

Also note that the government often causes what it purports to solve. Poverty rates were collapsing in the United States until the government created a war against it to supposedly end poverty. The War on Poverty was an attempt to address poverty through government dependency, and while that may be very good politics (creating a dependent class that will always vote for more), it is horrendous economics.

We should never take people permanently out of the workforce, and yet we now have generational poverty caused by the very program the government created to end poverty.

When the consumer is sovereign, the market is honest. When the consumer is displaced, the market becomes a fraud.

The Corruption Playbook

Markets are corrupted not only by ideology, but by design. The modern political economy is no longer about meeting needs or creating value, but about navigating, exploiting, and manipulating power. The rules have been rewritten to entrench the powerful, and this is not a bug in the system so much as it is the system.

Every economy has parasites. What defines a healthy system is how quickly it identifies and removes them. In today’s market, parasites write the rules, and productive participants are forced to pay rent to the state, to favored competitors, and to institutions that no longer serve the public.

Here are the tools of this institutionalized corruption:

1. Regulatory Capture

In a truly free market, regulation exists to protect life, liberty, and property, and to prevent force and fraud. In a captured market, regulation becomes a weapon of control that industry giants use, through influence over legislators and regulatory agencies, to shape rules that appear neutral on paper, but that are lethal to smaller competitors.

Complex licensing schemes, arbitrary safety standards, and mountains of red tape are not crafted for the public good. These things are barriers to entry, sold as security but used as protectionism. The result is an environment where only the largest players can afford to play, and new innovators are crushed.

2. Subsidized Failure

In a functioning market, failure is a feature rather than a flaw. Failure signals that resources are being misallocated and clears out inefficiency. In a corrupted market, failure is rewarded such that companies that can’t produce value but are close to the government, profit anyway.

Cronyists lobby for grants and secure subsidies, invoking moral causes like climate change or equity, to receive endless rounds of taxpayer support. Think Solyndra or DC Solar. Think ethanol mandates and battery factories that never reach scale.

It is easier to survive by pleasing politicians than by serving customers, but this is not capitalism. It is the permanent subsidization of incompetence.

3. Manufactured Demand

The most dangerous form of corruption is not government responses to flawed market signals. It is when the government creates them.

In a free market, demand emerges organically from real needs and preferences, but in the modern state-capitalist model, demand is often manufactured by political fiat. Products become “essential” not because the public demands them, but because bureaucrats declare them necessary.

Whole industries spring up around these political needs. Carbon accounting, DEI consulting, and ESG compliance are three obvious ones. Jobs are created not to serve value but to serve the illusion of value, simulating activity to signal alignment, and to justify their own existence.

These jobs do not produce. All they do is create waste and make the people in the country poor. We have to pay for these political needs with our tax dollars, leaving us with less to spend on the things we actually need or want.

4. Information Distortion

Markets depend on information. Prices, profits, and costs are signals that tell producers and consumers what is scarce, what is valued, and what is needed. When that information is distorted, the market cannot function.

In today’s economy, truth is optional. Advertising detaches from reality and official metrics are gamed. GDP grows while infrastructure collapses, and unemployment drops when millions leave the workforce rather than find jobs.

We call inflation “transitory” when it isn’t.

Worse yet, public perception is shaped by narrative crafted by think tanks, media, and bureaucrats working in tandem to maintain the illusion of health in a fundamentally diseased system.

When the signal is broken (as it is), the system cannot self-correct.

To make matters worse, the government’s nature is to grow. As Milton Friedman noted, “there is nothing more permanent than a temporary government program.” Government growth is more geared toward power than toward solutions, as earlier noted with the War on Poverty, and the more a government program fails, the more it expands.

We are not witnessing isolated incidents or temporary missteps. This is not an occasional abuse of power. This is a playbook, executed by entrenched interests across sectors and political parties.

Every time a startup is strangled by red tape, a failing company is propped up with subsidies, or a ‘need’ is invented to justify funding - every time a statistic is massaged to support a narrative - the system grows more opaque, more inefficient, and more predatory.

Systemic Free-Market Realism calls this what it is: a system built not to reward value, but to protect incumbency.

The only remedy is to expose the game, reject the players, and return to a market where success is earned rather than granted.

The Illusion of Control

The great myth of our time is that we can control what we do not understand as long as we have the right models, the right data, and the right team of credentialed experts. The notion that we can manage economies like we manage software is absurd.

Such perceived control is a seductive lie, and is the root of our decline.

Those who attempt to control markets through political power, be they bureaucrats, or ideologically aligned CEOs, believe they are correcting flaws and accelerating justice, but in reality they are disabling the mechanisms that make markets work. Every time a political actor “manages” the economy, they override a consequence, and sow confusion in a system built on feedback.

Markets are adaptive systems. They work not because anyone is in charge, but because no one is. They function precisely because individual actors, each responding to real incentives and information, adjust their behavior in real time.

This decentralized intelligence, what Friedrich Hayek called the “knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place,” cannot be simulated or programmed, and while aggregating them may help measure them, measuring them does not give meaningful information for how the economy works.

Each manipulation distorts incentives in the direction of compliance. Markets that once rewarded service now reward alignment, and businesses that once had to innovate now simply have to conform.

The damage compounds. When consequences are postponed, they do not disappear, but build. Bubbles inflate and malinvestments pile up with fragile systems expanding under the illusion of stability. Inevitably a shock comes, and the bubbles burst.

In any dynamic system, knowledge is distributed and revealed over time, through trial, error, success, and failure. The more you control the outcomes, the less you learn. The more you insulate institutions from failure, the less responsive they become. Eventually you reach a point where no one, not even those in charge, knows what’s real anymore.

We reached that point a long time ago.

The more we attempt to control the system, the less we understand it, the more we distort incentives, and the more we corrupt results. The more we centralize decisions, the more fragile we become.

Let the market breathe and signal freely. Let it punish failure and reward value. Let it reveal and not conceal. Only when we give up the illusion of control can we regain the wisdom to govern justly.

Real Competition Requires Real Freedom

Real capitalism is not kind to the producer. Free markets do not coddle failure, flatter incumbents, or allow sentiment to replace substance. Free markets are harsh, rewarding those who meet real needs while punishing those who don’t.

Kodak, once a household name and a giant in photography, collapsed after it failed to adapt and was overtaken by innovators, first by digital cameras, then by the smartphone. Meanwhile, a company like Apple, once counted out and nearly bankrupt, rose from bankruptcy to reshape entire industries. That is the brutal brilliance of the free market: it doesn’t care who you were, it only cares what you deliver now.

Free markets benefit consumers, and of course, we are all consumers.

This kind of dynamism requires freedom. It cannot function when markets are rigged, when competitors are kept alive by subsidies, when incumbents write the regulations, or when failure is protected by political favor.

Real competition is the antidote to stagnation and the mechanism by which outdated ideas are replaced and new value is discovered. It is the only force powerful enough to discipline giants and empower garage inventors.

For markets to work, freedom must be real.

That means:

• No government picking winners and losers.
  
  

• No regulatory barriers designed by incumbents.
  
  

• No favoritism in contracts or subsidies.
  
  

• No artificial protections from failure.
  
  

Freedom is what makes competition work, and competition is what makes markets just.

Freedom is uncomfortable. It means some businesses will fail and some jobs will disappear, but at the same time, new companies emerge to create new and better jobs.

It is the discomfort of free markets that produces excellence, driving entrepreneurs to innovate, to lower prices, to improve quality, and to serve customers.

There is this weird notion that businesses somehow cheat or steal from consumers, but businesses cannot force you to buy their products. Only the government can do that. In a free market, businesses only get a consumer’s money if the consumer chooses to give it to them, and consumers only do that if they believe they will get something of more value in return.

Different people in different circumstances value different things differently. A farmer selling sweet corn cannot eat all of the sweet corn he or she produces, and so that farmer will value their sweet corn less than will consumers who want to eat the corn. Because of this, consumers buy corn. The consumers are happy, and so is the farmer.

Nobody is harmed in a free exchange. Both parties are better off. People are only harmed when the exchange is not free.

Some businesses fail. Perhaps the farmer in our example charges too much and consumers buy from someone else. This is normal and productive.

Systemic Free-Market Realism embraces this creative destruction. It does not fear churn, as it understands that without churn, there is no renewal, and without risk, there is no reward.

Value Is Decided by People

What is value?

To the central planner, it is something to be determined by committees and models. Experts, armed with data and guided by benevolence, decide what the public needs, how much of it should be produced, and who should receive it. Efficiency is achieved through centralized coordination, and fairness comes through forced redistribution.

This vision, however sophisticated it may appear, is built on a lie: that a few minds can substitute for millions, and that value can be assigned rather than discovered.

Markets do not require omniscient planners. They already contain billions of individual real-time decisions, all with real consequences. Each buyer and seller brings to the table a unique set of preferences, knowledge, priorities, and trade-offs.

No algorithm can simulate the constantly shifting landscape of human wants and resource constraints. Only a decentralized market, driven by prices, feedback, and voluntary exchange, can adapt fast enough and accurately enough to meet the needs of a dynamic society.

Planners assume that value is static and that what people “should” want can be determined in advance, based on ideology or optimization theory, but real people don’t operate that way. Preferences change and tastes evolve. What is valuable today may be obsolete tomorrow, and the only system that can respond to that reality without tyranny is a free market.

Boris Yeltsin said it best the first time he entered an American grocery store: “In Russia, people wait for food. Here, food waits for people.” Americans of course complain about the price of things, but we don’t complain about what we don’t see that so many others around the world do: empty shelves.

Bureaucrats may mean well, but they cannot see what the customer sees. No team of planners, no matter how credentialed or moral, can match the adaptive intelligence of a population acting in freedom.

Markets are not perfect. They can misprice and overreact, but unlike governments, markets learn and correct.

When markets make mistakes, consumers shift their behavior and businesses respond. When governments make mistakes, they double down and enforce compliance.

To affirm the market is to affirm the individual, trusting people to know their own needs better than a distant expert, and to recognize that liberty is not just a political ideal, but is the foundation of economic discovery.

Systemic Free-Market Realism therefore rejects the paternalism of the planner. We see in each person the right, and the responsibility, to choose, and not just in the voting booth but at the grocery store, at the pharmacy, in the business they build, and the life they live. Every economic decision is an act of dignity and preference.

When people are free to choose, they reveal what truly matters to them, voting with their dollars, their time, and their trust. And those signals, multiplied across a society - that is the economy.

We do not need five-year plans. We need freedom.

A Moral Market, or No Market At All

Freedom is not the absence of constraint so much as it is the presence of virtue.

This simple truth, long forgotten in modern discourse, lies at the heart of Systemic Free-Market Realism. It reminds us that freedom without morality is not liberty, but license. License, when unmoored from virtue, becomes exploitation.

The market, like any powerful tool, reflects the character of the people who participate in it. If those people are dishonest, selfish, and short-sighted, the market will amplify those traits, but if people are honest, disciplined, and service-minded, the market becomes not only a mechanism for exchange, but a force for good.

The irony of socialism is that the more people act like the moral angels a system without incentives requires, the less we need coercion, and the more we have to gain by being left free. In other words, any society where socialism could work, does not need it and should not want it. This statement may be ironic, but it is also true.

Until someone figures out how to distribute goods and services that are not produced, free markets will always be superior to socialism, and though the public may vote for people like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani, the public cannot vote socialism into a workable theory.

Markets are the only workable theory we have.

This is why markets must be morally bounded, not by ever-expanding government oversight, but by a culture that instills mutual respect. Without ethics, any economy suffocates until corruption replaces competition.

An immoral market is not a free market. It is a predatory system masquerading as capitalism.

In such a system, success is no longer about creating value. It becomes about extracting value, through deception, exploitation, or force. The customer becomes a mark. The investor becomes a pawn, and the worker becomes a number to be optimized rather than a person to be respected.

This is not the vision of the market put forward by Adam Smith or the Enlightenment philosophers who laid the groundwork for Western economic freedom. On the contrary, Enlightenment values were designed specifically around the idea that liberty could only endure when paired with virtue. The very concept of individual freedom assumed a society of moral citizens who acted not just in pursuit of their own interests, but in consideration of the interests of others.

Systemic Free-Market Realism reclaims this foundation. It does not confuse greed with growth or champion exploitation under the banner of liberty. Instead, it insists that markets work best when they are held in tension between freedom and accountability.

This philosophy recognizes that to serve oneself in a free market is ultimately to serve others. You cannot prosper long without creating something others voluntarily choose. That is the discipline of the market at its best, channeling self-interest into service and rewarding those who anticipate, adapt, and deliver, over those who coerce, deceive, or manipulate.

A moral market does not require saints. It requires standards, such as honesty in contracts, fairness in treatment, and integrity in leadership.

I do not defend free markets because I expect perfection. I defend them because, when markets are paired with virtue, they correct, allowing people to thrive by improving the lives of others.

If markets lose this moral foundation, they become engines of rot, where corruption hides behind complexity and profit becomes a mask for plunder.

Luckily, free markets tend to make a people more virtuous over time, as free markets, over the long haul, reward virtue.

I would much rather have a nation built on virtue than one built on compliance.

The Way Forward

For decades, economic reform has been framed as a binary choice: more regulation or less, centralized planning or the so-called “invisible hand.” This framing is false, reducing a complex system to slogans and leaving both sides blind.

We do not need more control, nor do we need more chaos. We need principled restraint, a return to the foundational idea that markets only function when grounded in truth, trust, and accountability, and a system that rewards value rather than influence. We need a system that lets freedom operate within a moral framework, and that distributes, not through coercion, but through decentralization.

This is not a call for deregulation. It is a call for targeted, transparent regulation that exists solely to protect life, liberty, and property, rather than to steer outcomes. It is not a license for corporate greed, but a demand for competition that is open, and honest.

We need to end regulatory capture, where unelected bureaucrats and corporate lobbyists collude to draft rules that crush innovation and preserve incumbency. It is a call to return accountability to the people, so that government answers to voters, and businesses answer to customers.

We also need to remove the state from value decisions. No government agency has the wisdom to determine what people should want, what prices should be, or what solutions are best. Only the decentralized choices of free individuals can make those judgments in real time.

Let’s also replace crony subsidies with open competition. End the endless bailouts and politically favored grants. Let businesses rise or fall based on merit. Stop protecting failure.

Then we can restore truth, in pricing and in reporting. The economy cannot function when its vital signs are faked. Things like GDP, inflation, unemployment, and credit ratings must reflect reality.

Finally, we can empower companies to win through value, through products people want, services that solve real problems, and business models built on trust, rather than through lobbying or through legal loopholes.

This is not a partisan agenda, a utopian theory, or misplaced nostalgia for some golden age. It is a hard-nosed recognition of what has actually worked in the past, and of what would work in the future.

Systemic Free-Market Realism is not a return to something old. We could not go back to an earlier age even if we wanted to. It is, rather, the application of timeless principles to the crisis of our age, such that we learn from history to build a better future.

I want to take a step back this week and look at two events nobody wants to compare, to see what we can learn about the state of our country. Those two events are the shootings of Ashli Babbitt, and Renee Good.

I am going to compare and contrast these shootings to see how similar they are, and then I want to go into a five-why analysis (also known as a ‘root cause analysis’) to see why both shootings occurred. It is my belief that doing so will force a societal analysis of some kind, in relation to those root causes and what they tell us about the state of our country.

Nobody wants to admit that the shootings are very similar, but this is a conversation we need to have.

Throughout this essay, I’m going to focus on the actions people have taken and the incentives people face. I cannot assume intent, but I will note both actions and incentives, and will trust the reader to gauge accordingly.

The Shootings

Officer Michael Byrd was positioned behind the barricaded doors of the Speaker’s Lobby with two other officers, when a window was broken and Ashli Babbitt started to climb through. There were dozens of protestors behind her also trying to get in, and whatever other protestors were doing in other parts of the Capitol, Ashli Babbitt and those with her were acting with what appeared to be violent intent.

I don’t know that Officer Byrd shot Ashli Babbitt in self-defense. I’m not sure anyone other than Michael Byrd and the other officers behind the barricade really know the answer to that, but I can see how having a mob of several dozen people storming through a barricade can become self-defense even if none of the people storming through are armed, and I’m willing to concede that this shooting probably did qualify as self-defense.

That does not mean Ashli Babbitt deserved to die. It does, however, mean that she placed herself in a situation she could not possibly have controlled, and placed police officers in a position where they had to make a harrowing decision that ultimately led to her death.

Fast forward five years and you have Renee Good getting shot by a Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Agent, on January 7, 2026.

We have much more information available to us about Renee Good’s shooting. We know for example that she had been blocking traffic for several hours as a member of an activist group called ‘ICE Watch.’ Ms. Good would back up to let civilians down the street, and would then move forward to block ICE vehicles again. She was obstructing justice, and had been doing so for hours.

Eventually two ICE Agents stopped their vehicle and got out to arrest Ms. Good, while a third ICE Agent, Jonathan Ross, used his cell phone to make a video as he walked around Ms. Good’s SUV.

Officer Ross walked all the way around Ms. Good’s car and was not directly in front of it when the other ICE Agents told Ms. Good to get out of her car so they could arrest her. One of those ICE Agents tried to open Ms. Good’s door, at which time she backed up, turning.

I don’t know that Renee Good was trying to put Officer Ross directly in front of her car - my guess is she was not - but that’s what happened. With this ICE agent directly in front of her SUV, Ms. Good hit her gas hard enough to spin one of her wheels.

It looks to me like Ms. Good was trying to flee the scene to avoid arrest. I don’t think she wanted to hit Officer Ross with her car, but as she accelerated forward and turned her wheel, Officer Ross said, “WHOA!!” while pulling out his service weapon. Ms. Good ran into him hard enough to almost knock him down (the Department of Homeland Security reports that he had internal bleeding), and he fired several shots - one through Ms. Good’s windshield and at least two more through the driver’s side window.

I don’t believe Ms. Good was intentionally trying to harm Officer Ross, but like Ashli Babbitt, Renee Good put a police officer in a position where he had every reason to fear serious injury or death, and that is the standard for self-defense.

Some are still claiming that Renee Good did not hit Officer Ross, but while the first video to come out was from an angle that did not show contact, other videos from other angles show that she did, in fact, hit him with her car.

Mayor Frey initially denied that Officer Ross was hit by Renee Good’s car, but now he says that “I’ve seen people hurt more using their hip to close a refrigerator,” and has suggested that Officer Ross should have waited to see how badly he got hurt before defending himself.

By the same logic, if a criminal pulls a gun on a cop, Mayor Frey should demand that the cop wait to defend himself or herself until after the criminal is done firing. Perhaps the criminal will miss entirely, in which case the officer would be unharmed. Perhaps the criminal will only wing the officer, or hit the officer with a non-life-threatening injury to an arm or leg. Perhaps the criminal will hit the officer’s bullet-proof vest, in which case it might hurt but won’t cause serious injury.

If we apply Mayor Frey’s logic to criminals with guns, officers should only return fire if mortally wounded, which is of course absurd. Mayor Frey incidentally knows his position is absurd, but it is his position just the same.

This kind of dangerous rhetoric, coming from Mayor Frey, Governor Walz, Representative Ilhan Omar, and others, is a big part of the problem, inflaming tensions and encouraging more violence.

We saw similar rhetoric on the right five years ago, both before and after Ashli Babbitt’s shooting.

Both women entered escalating enforcement situations believing the moral narrative protected them, and both were catastrophically wrong. The biggest difference between the two cases is that we have far more information in the Renee Good case, thanks to all the videos available, than we had in the Ashli Babbitt case. That’s not because Ms. Good was more at fault. It’s just that we don’t have anywhere near as much photographic or video evidence with the Ashli Babbitt shooting to provide the same level of context.

It is incumbent upon us to look at the root causes that led to the deaths of these women, and to see what those root causes tell us about our society, as it stands today.

Five-why analysis of Renee Good

We have more evidence available on the Renee Good shooting, so let’s start our five-why analysis there. Note that ‘five’ is a guideline and not a rule - we will ask ‘why’ until we find the root cause, no matter how many times it takes.

First off: Why did Renee Good get shot?

Answer: In fleeing to avoid arrest, her SUV struck a police officer.

Most people on the political right would like to stop here, as if the fact that Officer Ross was hit by Ms. Good’s car answers all relevant questions. That’s lazy, so let’s keep going.

Why did she strike the police officer?

Answer: When she backed up to reposition her car so she could flee, she turned her car, pointing it directly at Officer Ross. She was backing up at that point so she was likely not looking at Officer Ross, and my guess is she was not aware she was suddenly pointing straight at him, but the result is that her car was suddenly pointed straight at a federal police officer.

When she fled forward, she did not have enough room to get around Officer Ross and contacted him somewhere between the edge of her driver’s side headlight and the front of her driver’s side front wheel well.

Why did she flee?

Answer: She was being arrested and obstructing justice can be a felony under federal law. Her wife said, “Drive, baby, drive,” just before Ms. Good took off.

Ms. Good had an incentive to flee.

Most of those obstructing justice against ICE see themselves as the good guys, fighting what they see as a fascist, oppressive force, and this view is supported by comments from Mayor Frey, Governor Walz, Ilhan Omar, and many others on the political left. Frey has called the ICE presence an ‘occupying force,’ and ordered ICE to ‘get the F out of Minneapolis.’ Walz has referred to the ICE presence as ‘a war that’s being waged against Minnesota,’ and referred to their enforcement as ‘organized brutality against the people of Minnesota by our own federal government.’

Walz has gone so far as to compare ICE protesters in Minneapolis to the First Minnesota at the Battle of Gettysburg. The First Minnesota was a famed Civil War unit that played a central, costly role in defending Cemetery Ridge on the second day of the battle. The First Minnesota was ordered to charge into a much larger Confederate force as a stalling action to make time for reinforcements to arrive, and while the First Minnesota was successful, they suffered 80% casualties.

Trump has been portrayed as a fascist tyrant with ICE as his Gestapo. It is reasonable to assume that Ms. Good saw ICE in this light, and if so, she saw herself as a force of good fighting fascist oppression in the same way the First Minnesota fought the Confederacy.

According to her wife, Ms. Good and her wife planned to obstruct justice the next day as well, so Ms. Good was not fleeing so much as retreating so that she could fight another day.

Why is ICE compared to Hitler’s Gestapo?

ICE was created in 2002 to separate border inspection from interior immigration law enforcement, with the current framework of law coming from the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which came into law under President Harry S. Truman.

ICE is enforcing laws put in place while the President who presided over the defeat of fascism was still in office. Needless to say, those laws are not fascist. America in fact is the most open nation in the world with regard to immigration, but while our laws make legal immigration possible on a large scale, they also define laws prospective immigrants must follow, with enforcement mechanisms for those who enter the country illegally.

I wrote an essay just last week on how there is a threshold above which immigrants do not assimilate, and up until just a few years ago, the vast majority of Americans wanted immigration levels below that threshold.

ICE deported 3.1 million illegal aliens under President Barack Obama. Obama was widely praised for these efforts, but the political left’s attitude toward immigration enforcement changed dramatically once Donald Trump became President.

President Joe Biden funnelled $195 billion a year through USAID into NGOs that spent the money illegally migrating people into the United States. Biden used ICE as a travel agency to move migrants into the interior of the country, in violation of the immigration laws he swore to uphold. The Biden Administration moved migrants to create safe Congressional seats that would also represent electoral college votes for future Presidential elections.

ICE has every right to enforce immigration laws anywhere in the country it wants to, including Minneapolis. Enforcing immigration laws that have been on the books for 72 years is not fascism, no matter how many protestors say it is.

Those who want to know what fascism actually is can read about it here. I use the definition of ‘fascism’ that Giovanni Gentile used, and since Giovanni Gentile was the philosopher who came up with ‘fascism,’ this is the relevant definition. Any other use is hyperbole.

Nobody knows how many people illegally migrated into the United States during Biden’s four years. Estimates range from 9.3 million (this is the number of documented Customs and Border Protection encounters and known gotaways), to 15 million (based on PEW surveys). Of course some of those people are going to be deported, and particularly those who have committed crimes.

70% of the people ICE is targeting have either been convicted of a crime, or have been charged and are in the process of being prosecuted. ICE is only going after those they have warrants for. These are not random enforcement actions.

In most of the country, state and local police assist ICE in immigration enforcement. Even in Sanctuary Cities where local police do not assist, they at least ensure that ICE is able to carry out its mission safely. Only in a few places, like Minneapolis, do elected officials encourage riots, and these are the people driving comparisons between ICE and Hitler’s Gestapo.

Why was Ms. Good being arrested?

Answer: She’d been obstructing justice for several hours that day, and had obstructed justice in the past. She was known to ICE Agents as someone who regularly obstructed them in doing their jobs. ICE had simply had enough.

Why were she and her wife obstructing justice?

Answer: Most of the protestors were protesting because they did not believe there was any justification for enforcing immigration laws. These people see themselves as agents of good, fighting oppression. It is safe to assume that Ms. Good saw herself in a similar light.

Some of the protestors are paid agitators who enjoy creating anarchy, but there is no evidence to tie Ms. Good to this, so we should assume she was operating out of a sense of moral justification and not for some more nefarious purpose.

Why do protestors believe the laws being enforced are unjust?

Answer: Prominent Democrats in Minnesota and around the country have been arguing that borders are meaningless lines people need not respect, and that anyone who is able to get into our country belongs here just as much as do those born here. ‘Eliminate ICE’ has been a Democratic talking point for almost a decade, and within Minnesota specifically, Representative Ilhan Omar, Governor Tim Walz, and Mayor Jacob Frey have encouraged residents to obstruct ICE.

Also note that the anti-ICE protest is a remnant of the ‘defund the police’ movement. It is likely that should obstructing ICE become normalized, obstructing other federal police will be next, and that should obstructing all federal police become normalized, obstructing state and local police will follow.

The ‘defund the police’ movement is a call for ‘community policing,’ which is one of the mechanisms Mao Zedong used to take power in China. Mao got parts of China to use ‘community policing,’ and the people who took on that role also happened to be members of his Red Army.

The idea actually comes from Trotsky, who believed that the law is not what old men pass in hallowed halls, but is whatever gets enforced on the street. If you control an area, you can enforce whatever laws you want, and those who avoid being killed will figure out what that means.

That does not make the entire protest movement communist, but those funding and leading it are very much anti-policing in a Mao/Trotsky context, and if successful it will not stop with ICE.

Much of the extreme left sees all organized police forces as illegitimate, and within these circles, ICE is considered the worst of the worst.

Why do so many people, including elected officials, see the enforcement of immigration law (and potentially other laws) as unjust?

Answer: There is a growing ‘open borders’ movement that believes all borders are inherently unjust and that people should be able to move wherever they want, irrespective of where they are born. There is also a very strong anti-capitalism movement.

Add to this the ‘oppressor/oppressed’ narrative that has become increasingly popular on the left, that excuses crime when committed by the supposedly oppressed on the grounds that they are acting out against their oppression, and in this narrative the police are not protecting the public, but actively oppressing minorities in support of white supremacy.

These conclusions stem logically from the assumptions the extreme left starts with about the United States being created from the ground up as a white supremacist state. If we are a state built on white supremacy, then our laws - and particularly our immigration laws - are of course designed first and foremost to support white supremacy. This makes the opposition of those laws, and of those who enforce them, morally necessary.

Add in the ‘ICE is Trump’s Gestapo’ argument we discussed earlier, and the potential for conflict explodes.

We on the political right tend to view the left’s arguments here as absurd, but it is once again the assumptions that are false and not the logic. If you accept the extreme left’s assumptions, their conclusions follow logically and should also be accepted. The normalization of these views leads to conflict with police in general, and of immigration enforcement (ICE) in particular.

One need not listen to much of the anti-ICE rhetoric to see that this is exactly what is occurring.

The groups behind the anti-ICE protests have been waiting in the wings for an excuse to start new mass-protests ever since the Hamas encampment on Columbia University, and smaller protests on other universities around the country, ended, and if Renee Good’s death had not kicked them off, something else eventually would have.

Why Minneapolis?

Answer: Most of the Somali migrants in Minnesota are either citizens or legal residents of the United States, so we should ask why Trump used fraud committed by those here legally as an excuse to make an example out of Minneapolis. That’s a fair question, and one the Trump Administration has not adequately answered.

Portland would seem the more obvious location for these kinds of protests, but according to Federal investigators, more than nine billion tax dollars were fraudulently given to Minneapolis residents, primarily to Somali Migrants or those connected to them, currently representing the biggest case of welfare fraud in American history (although investigations in other states, like California, may soon eclipse Minnesota by a wide margin).

One of the primary laws used to commit this fraud was written and sponsored by Ilhan Omar, who is herself a Somali migrant. Governor Walz too has been personally implicated in covering up the Somali welfare fraud, likely because he counts on the Somali vote to stay in office.

Tim Walz, Jacob Frey, Ilhan Omar, and other elected officials were involved in Minnesota’s welfare fraud, and they are likely finding that obstructing ICE is a welcome distraction. Trump’s decision to send thousands of extra ICE agents to Minneapolis fell right into their laps at exactly the right time to save their political careers.

As a reminder, I’m focusing on actions and incentives, both of which can be discussed objectively. I am not assuming intentions.

Why did Somali migrants (primarily) commit so much fraud?

Answer: Somali is a failed state whose economy is primarily driven by fraud, so migrants from Somalia may be naturally disposed, culturally, toward it. The Somali welfare fraud was also organized and systemic. It went on for over a decade and really took off during the Covid-19 years. Ilhan Omar personally writing one of the laws used to commit fraud also seems to point toward systemic organization.

This brings us to root-causes.

The Somali migrants are not a root cause, and nor is the fraud that emerged within that community.

The root-cause is a well funded, pro-Communist and anti-capitalist movement that becomes inflamed whenever they see something they consider unjust, and that explodes onto the national scene as soon as someone dies.

Now let’s do a Five-Why Analysis on Ashli Babbitt. I did not pull any punches on Renee Good’s shooting, and I won’t pull any punches here either.

Five-Why Analysis of Ashli Babbitt’s Shooting

Why was Ashli Babbitt shot?

Answer: She broke through a barricade that existed as the last line of defense outside the House chamber, and there were dozens of people with her.

Why were Ashli Babbitt and dozens of other people breaking through a barricade?

Answer: They felt that the 2020 election was fraudulent and that the vote should not have been certified. They were trying to force entry so they could shut down the certification, and perhaps to commit acts of violence in the process against certain members of Congress, and against Mike Pence.

Other protestors had even erected a gallows to supposedly hang Mike Pence.

Most of the protestors were not violent, but the ones breaking through the barricade with Ashli Babbitt were, and there were other protestors who committed acts of violence or vandalism as well.

The rioters were angry, and they were breaking the law.

Why did Ashli Babbitt and others feel the 2020 election was fraudulent?

Answer: Dinesh D’Susza put out a movie indicating that there were fraudulent votes. Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani filed court cases claiming it was fraudulent. Donald Trump claimed it was fraudulent, and so did other prominent Republicans. Those prominent Republicans spent a lot of money trying to prove the election was fraudulent but were shot down consistently in court.

The media was incredibly biased in its reporting leading up to the election, and particularly with regard to the authenticity of the Hunter Biden laptop (and the crimes it implicated). Exit-polling indicated that had the public not been lied to about the Hunter Biden laptop, Trump would have won the election.

A number of battleground states also made illegal election changes due to Covid-19, which were perceived by the same Republicans claiming fraud as having been used to swing the vote toward Joe Biden.

Finally, a Time Magazine article, titled, The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election, explicitly claimed that a ‘well funded cabal’ ‘saved Democracy’ by making said changes to help Joe Biden win, on the grounds that re-electing Trump would have ‘undermined democracy.’

There were some very real problems with the 2020 election that had nothing to do with ballot fraud.

Why did those protesting the January 6, 2021 voter certification feel the need to riot, and illegally enter the Capitol Building?

Answer: There are multiple groups, each with its own reasons.

Several members of the Proud Boys were convicted of crimes as serious as ‘Seditious Conspiracy,’ indicating that they really were trying to spark an insurrection. Enrique Tarrio, the head of the Proud Boys, was sentenced to 22 years in prison, with other Proud Boys sentenced to between 15 and 18 years.

Several groups of protestors committed wanton acts of vandalism and violence. Those who could be identified were charged accordingly.

Other groups appeared to opportunistically enter the Capitol peacefully, in some cases with the police escorting them. These people did not appear to want to break the law at all.

All of this was after Donald Trump gave a speech telling the crowd to ‘peacefully and patriotically’ march to the Capitol. Trump did not tell anyone to break the law, but the timing of this speech certainly deserves scrutiny in light of what happened.

Trump and other prominent Republicans were saying inflammatory things regarding the 2020 election in much the same way Democrats are saying inflammatory things about ICE today.

The root cause of Ashli Babbitt’s shooting seems to be related to hatred of ‘the other side’ and distrust in America’s institutions.

Conclusion

The root causes of both shootings relate to hatred of the ‘other side,’ and to distrust of America’s institutions. The two sides distrust different institutions, but both sides are driven by hate and distrust.

Both shootings have the same root causes.

Both sides want to blame the other. Neither side cares about the truth.

I actually have more sympathy for the political left on this than I do for the political right. On the right, we are supposed to believe in the rule of law and are supposed to look at each case based on the merits of that specific case, AND NOTHING ELSE. With Ashli Babbitt, much of the right violated that belief.

At least on the political left, where people want ‘social justice’ rather than actual justice, I can see some consistency. If you accept their assumptions that America is an oppressive land of white supremacy, then their logic that anyone not white, including undocumented migrants, is an oppressed minority deserving protection against the enforcement arms of this white-supremacist state, is sound.

The problem isn’t in their logic - it is in their assumptions. Their assumptions are not just flawed; they are false. America is not a land of white supremacy. Studies consistently show that America is, in fact, one of the least racist nations on Earth. If America were the place the extreme left pretends it is, people would not be so quick to migrate into our country.

The left considers America an oppressive place because they are thinking emotionally rather than logically, and emotional thinking can be harder than logical thinking to overcome. Emotional thinking is largely immune to logic, as it tends to reject evidence that runs contrary to its underlying emotional beliefs.

Faulty assumptions or not though, the left is at least consistent whereas the political right is becoming less about due process and more about identity, which is also emotional thinking, and dangerously similar to that of the left.

The political left runs on identity politics, and identity politics is inherently tribal. Tribalism leads to injustice, and injustice leads to distrust of other tribes and of the institutions that manage them.

The political right under Trump has become a cult of personality, and in doing so, it too has become increasingly tribal in nature.

If both sides become tribal and both sides distrust our institutions, we won’t have to worry about becoming balkanized as we will already be there.

We see this balkanization today, with Tim Walz and Jonathan Frey using civil war imagery and civil war comparisons to the ICE operations, and the obstruction to it, in Minnesota. Would Walz be taking such a strong line against ICE were he not embroiled in a career-ending fraud scandal? I can’t answer that, but he has every incentive to stand up to Trump as a means to distract from this scandal, and the worse the situation gets the tougher of a stance people like Walz and Frey are incentivized to take.

I’d close by suggesting that we demand better from both sides, but I’m afraid that would be too optimistic. The extreme left is too tied into identity politics and its inherent tribalism to get them back. It is hard to moderate an extremist, so we would have to focus on their children. Moderating the extreme left will be a generational fight.

We may, however, still be able to regain some sense of sanity on the political right, and if the political right can withdraw from its increasingly tribal impulses by shunning those who stir them, we can regain our focus on equality under the law.

Returning to the rule of law is how we win over the political center, including those on the left who are not yet extreme, and while Trump has done a number of things any conservative should agree with, the cult of personality around him is doing a tremendous amount of damage to our party, and to our country.

Trump, too, must restrain himself to the rule of law, and not just in practice. His rhetoric needs to follow.

So far, we’ve primarily seen police killings where civilians went too far and forced the police to defend themselves, but if this current rash of tribalism continues, then eventually guns will replace whistles and the proverbial wheels will come off the bus.

We are closer to this than we think.

We are at a collective crossroads on both sides of the political aisle. If we hit the gas or climb through the barricade, whatever comes next may be outside our control, but it will be entirely our fault, and while we know what the left will do, it is incumbent upon the political right to reject tribalism and regain our insistence on the rule of law.

There is an old saying in Michigan that everyone on the West side of the state thinks everything East of Lansing is Detroit, and that everyone in Detroit thinks everything West of Lansing is Indiana. The Upper Peninsula wants to be its own state, and the Thumb wants to be its own country.

Those of us in the Lower Peninsula call the people in the Upper Peninsula ‘Yoopers,’ and the people in the Upper Peninsula call those of us who live in the Lower Peninsula ‘Trolls’ after the troll who lived under the bridge in the children’s story The Billy Goat’s Gruff.

Outside of tourism, there are not many jobs in the Upper Peninsula, although it is absolutely gorgeous up there, and the Mackinac Bridge, at five miles long, is one of the most underappreciated bridges in the world.

The last time I was in the Upper Peninsula, a Yooper told me they call those who live under the bridge Trolls. I said, “You Yoopers have another nickname for those from the Lower Peninsula.” He asked what it was and I said, “Employed.”

I was born and raised in Kalamazoo, which is on the West side of Michigan, and though I have lived in the Detroit area for about 20 years, I’ll always be a bit of a transplant.

My wife was born and raised in communist Poland, but she has lived in the Detroit area for more than 30 years and knows it better than I do. She originally immigrated to Hamtramck, and eventually moved to one of the nicer suburbs.

My wife spent a lot of money immigrating to the United States. She came over on a student visa and applied to extend it. Eventually she got a green card, and after we married she became a citizen. After fees and everything, citizenship cost her about $10,000 twenty years ago. In today’s money, that’s about $16,000.

My wife, as a legal immigrant, has to pay taxes to cover the living expenses, college costs, and medical care of those who immigrated illegally. That’s in addition to having to pay her own living expenses, college costs, and medical care costs.

If you immigrate illegally, your living expenses, college expenses, and medical expenses are paid for by others, whereas if you do everything legally, you are taxed to pay for those who broke the law.

I wrote about how Social Security forced us to allow illegal immigration several months ago. Suffice it to say, the system was designed for an ever-growing population, and in order to keep it solvent as our birth rates dropped and as people lived longer, we had to import workers to keep the system solvent. During the illegal immigration peak under Joe Biden, the United States taxpayer was paying $195 billion a year, through USAID into various NGOs, to illegally migrate people through South and Central America, into the United States.

That is in addition to the costs of supporting illegal immigrants once they got here.

The European nations call their various versions of Social Security by the correct name: “Pension,” but their systems are designed the same way ours is, where those currently working pay special taxes to cover the obligations to those who have retired. The economic need to pay those pensions with a shrinking workforce and an aging population is one of the reasons Europe (with our help) destabilized the Middle East, to create a massive migration of people from the Islamic world into Europe.

Modern immigration debates almost always begin from a false premise. Immigration is treated as a moral binary in which one is either “pro-immigration” or “anti-immigration,” “compassionate” or “cruel,” or some other such thing. This framing is emotionally satisfying but intellectually useless.

The question is whether or not we can assimilate immigrants at the pace needed to save our insolvent retirement system.

Assimilation is a rate-dependent system, subject to limits in the same way any complex social system is. The moral quality of immigration policy cannot be assessed without reference to the absorptive capacity of the nation being immigrated into. Ignoring the immigration capacity guarantees failure, causing disaster for both the immigrants as well as for the native population.

Assimilation is routinely misunderstood. It is not automatic and does not occur simply because newcomers arrive in a free society. Assimilation is a finite social capacity, dependent on institutions, expectations, incentives, and most importantly, the confidence of the host culture in its own norms. Like any capacity, it can be exceeded.

The critical variable is pace relative to assimilation capacity. Below a certain threshold, assimilation proceeds. Above it, the process breaks down.

This is not a moral judgment, but a structural reality. Societies can ignore these consequences, but we need only to look to Europe to see the costs of doing so.

When immigration exceeds a society’s assimilation threshold, the character of the society changes. Responsibility shifts away from individuals and communities and toward institutions. Informal norms give way to formal rules, and judgment is replaced by procedure. Over time, administration expands in an attempt to manage what culture no longer can.

If that administrative layer fails, as it inevitably does under sustained pressure, the only remaining tool is coercion.

This is the trajectory modern societies enter, not because they are hateful, but because they refuse to think in systems rather than slogans.

The Assimilation Threshold

The most persistent mistake in immigration debates is the belief that good intentions override scale. They do not. Intentions may matter from a purely moral perspective, but they matter very little systemically. Systems respond to pressure - not sentiment.

There is also a difference between something feeling good, and something doing good. Many things that may feel good to the uniformed, can actually do a great deal of harm if implemented. Conversely, some of the things that do a great deal of good may feel counterintuitive to the uninformed.

Good intentions often exist at the level of feeling good, which is why we have the saying, “The path to Hell is paved with good intentions.”

There are also short term, first level effects from any given policy, as well as longer term, second, third, or higher level effects. Often the short term effects of a given policy are the opposite of the long term effects.

It is entirely understandable when individuals who may not know a great deal about a particular topic vote based on what feels good, or vote only based on short term effects. It is however incumbent upon those in elected office, or in unelected government positions, to go beyond feeling good and inform themselves on what actually does good in the long term.

At a minimum, assimilation requires several non-negotiables. The first is that the immigrant must subordinate their own moral framework to that of the host society, at least in the public sphere. This does not mean abandoning private belief or cultural memory, but it does mean accepting that the host nation’s norms govern public life. Without this moral subordination, assimilation cannot begin.

Language acquisition is equally essential. A shared language is not just a tool for communication, but is the mechanism by which cultural norms and expectations are transmitted. Trust depends on being understood, so societies that fracture linguistically fracture socially as well.

Finally, assimilation requires institutional trust. Immigrants must view the host society’s legal, political, and civic institutions as legitimate, even when those institutions act against their immediate interests. If courts, police, schools, and laws are regarded as alien or hostile, parallel systems inevitably emerge.

The assimilation threshold, the point at which absorption gives way to fragmentation, varies significantly based on several factors.

Cultural distance matters. Immigrants from societies with similar social norms, expectations of civic behavior, and conceptions of individual responsibility assimilate more easily and more quickly than those from societies organized around fundamentally different assumptions.

Moral compatibility matters even more. Differences in cuisine, clothing, and custom are trivial compared to differences in how authority, law, individual rights, and moral obligation are understood. Where moral frameworks align, assimilation is smooth. Where they conflict, assimilation becomes difficult at best.

The confidence of the host culture may be the most decisive factor, as a society that asserts its norms unapologetically, and that expects newcomers to conform to them, can absorb far more difference than a society plagued by self-doubt.

Moral confidence raises the assimilation threshold. Moral uncertainty lowers it.

Finally, expectations matter. A culture that expects assimilation will generally get it. A culture that insists on neutrality, treating all norms as morally equivalent; or that fears asserting its own standards upon newcomers, isn’t really looking for assimilation, and what is no longer expected eventually ceases to occur.

The key insight is this: weak moral confidence dramatically lowers the assimilation threshold, and even modest immigration levels can overwhelm a society that no longer believes it has the right to shape those who enter it.

When that threshold is crossed, the problem is not solved by compassion or good intentions. Instead, the society begins to balkanize around different moral norms until the only way to keep the society from tearing itself apart is through totalitarianism.

Yugoslavia is a case study in totalitarianism and balkanization. Tito kept the country together only through totalitarian force, and when he died Yugoslavia split into regions that almost immediately went to war, most notably with Serbia invading and trying to ethnically cleanse Bosnia.

Yugoslavia started with different moral orders, with Eastern Orthodox as the primary religion in the Serbian region, Roman Catholicism in the Croatian region, Islam in Bosnia, and secularism in Slovenia. The greatest conflict came between the Eastern Orthodox and Islamic regions.

Liberal Democracy’s Moral Foundation

One of the most damaging myths in modern political thought is the belief that liberal democracy emerged from moral neutrality. It did not. Neutrality was not the starting condition. It was, at best, a downstream luxury.

Every functioning liberal democracy in modern history emerged from a Christian moral substrate. This is not a theological claim, but an historical one.

Long before constitutions, courts, and parliaments existed, Christian moral assumptions had already shaped how law and responsibility were understood in the societies that later became liberal democracies. The core assumptions that make liberal democracy possible were inherited from Christian ethics and then translated into civic form.

The idea of individual dignity is not self-evident. It rests on the belief that each person possesses intrinsic worth by virtue of being human. That belief did not originate in Enlightenment philosophy. It came from Christianity’s assertion that every person is made in the image of God.

Equality before the law likewise did not emerge from civil discourse. Historically, law reflected caste. Christianity undermined caste by insisting on moral equality before a higher authority that supplanted social hierarchies. Liberal democracies later secularized that moral claim into legal equality.

Finally, liberal democracy depends on the elevation of conscience over coercion. Christianity, uniquely among world religions at the time, renounced forced belief on the assumption that force led to corruption. That theological principle later became the foundation for freedoms of speech and religion.

Coerced belief is by definition not free.

The Enlightenment did not replace Christian morality. It secularized it, stripping away theology while retaining the moral architecture Christianity built. The institutions remained functional only so long as the underlying moral assumptions remained widely shared.

This brings us to what is often cited as an exception: Israel

The Laws of Moses can be broken up into civil law (for the governing of the ancient state of Israel), ceremonial law (separating God’s Chosen People from the other peoples of the Earth), and moral law.

Israel stands as the one modern liberal democracy that did not arise from a Christian culture, yet it functions for the same reason Western liberal democracies historically did: Judaism shares the same moral law.

Judaism and Christianity are morally identical. They agree on the nature of human dignity, the objectivity of moral law, the limits on power, and the illegitimacy of coercive belief. Christianity did not invent a new moral framework; it universalized the Jewish one. Nobody argues that Judaism and Christianity are the same religion, but Christianity was borne out of Judaism, and theological scholars to this day point out that what these religions share in many ways makes them act functionally almost more like separate sects of the same religion, rather than separate religions.

They are not sects as they have fundamentally different beliefs on the nature of the Messiah, and thus the nature of Man’s relationship with God, but the moral foundations are shared.

Because of this shared moral foundation, liberal institutions can function in Israel in ways they cannot where the moral law is contested or subordinate to political or religious authority.

This point matters. Liberal democracy is not merely a set of procedures. It is a moral system that presupposes shared limits.

Courts only function if their authority is recognized as legitimate. Rights only exist if restraint is viewed as virtuous.

Liberal institutions cannot float freely above culture. They are anchored to it. When the culture that sustains them erodes, neutrality does not save them. Administration replaces norms, coercion replaces consent, and the system survives only by force.

Liberal democracy did not begin neutral, and it cannot remain stable once neutrality is elevated above moral inheritance.

That fact explains both its historical success and its present fragility.

Moral Compatibility, Not Mere Tolerance

Modern immigration debates lean heavily on the language of tolerance. The assumption is that if a society is sufficiently open-minded, culturally diverse populations will coexist peacefully and, over time naturally converge. This assumption rests on a fundamental error by treating all differences as equivalent.

They are not.

Some differences are trivial from the standpoint of social cohesion. Differences in food, dress, music, accent, and custom pose no threat to a liberal society. They are cosmetic variations that sit comfortably atop a shared civic framework. Even linguistic differences, while significant, are manageable so long as language acquisition proceeds and a shared public language eventually emerges. These are the differences most people have in mind when they speak about diversity.

But these are not the differences that determine whether a society holds together.

What matters is moral compatibility.

A liberal democracy can tolerate an enormous range of cultural expression, but it cannot function if multiple, competing claims to ultimate moral authority coexist within the same legal and civic space.

Assimilation does not require immigrants to abandon private religious faith. It does, however, require acceptance of the host society’s ultimate authority in the public sphere. At a minimum, assimilation requires acceptance of the supremacy of civil law over religious or customary law. It requires acceptance of free speech, including speech that offends or blasphemes. It requires acceptance of freedom of religion, which necessarily includes the freedom to leave one’s religion.

These are not optional features of liberal democracy. They are foundational, defining the moral boundaries within which pluralism is possible. Any system of belief that rejects these commitments cannot coexist as an equal authority without undermining society at-large.

This leads to a simple but uncomfortable reality: any moral system that claims total jurisdiction over human life must either dissolve, or fail to assimilate, as there is no stable equilibrium in which two sovereign moral authorities peacefully share the same civic space, outside of totalitarianism.

At small numbers, assimilation is the dominant force. Social pressure flows in one direction, from the host culture toward the immigrant. Incentives reward conformity, and nonconformity carries cost.

Daily life immerses newcomers in the expectations and informal rules of the surrounding society. Over time, incompatible beliefs weaken. Intermarriage encourages this, with children absorbing the moral assumptions of their peers more readily than those of distant ancestors.

This is how assimilation has historically worked, but when the numbers of immigrants are too high, the dynamics invert.

As population size increases, immigrants no longer experience the host culture as a surrounding force. Instead, they experience it as one environment among many. Internal institutions emerge: religious authorities, schools, media outlets, advocacy organizations, and informal enforcement mechanisms. What was once cultural memory becomes cultural infrastructure.

At this point, ideology no longer weakens across generations. It self-reinforces. Children are socialized internally before they ever meaningfully encounter the broader society. Norms are taught intentionally rather than absorbed, and deviations are corrected by the immigrant community to prevent assimilation.

Most importantly, internal dissent becomes costly. The pressure to conform no longer comes from the outside. It comes from within, making assimilation an act of defection.

Scale is the pivot point. It determines whether exposure dissolves ideology, or concentration preserves it.

The diagnostic analogy is straightforward. If ten committed ideological extremists are placed into a liberal society, their ideology will dissolve over subsequent generations as social pressure overwhelms their children. Their grandchildren will in most cases barely even remember the original belief system, no matter how extreme.

If ten million are introduced at once and then concentrated geographically, the opposite occurs. They establish institutions, transmit doctrine intentionally, and work to preserve and extend their worldview.

The same thing occurs across the United States, from Little Cuba in Miami to Little China in San Francisco. The difference is that Little Cuba and Little China differ only culturally from the rest of the United States, attracting visitors who want to experience those separate cultures. These people assimilate into American civil society, and the differences are actually healthy. Who, after all, can turn down a good Cuban sandwich, or an authentic bowl of Hot and Sour Soup?

Some immigrant groups, however, differ morally, and that is where problems emerge.

This is not a failure of tolerance, either. It is a failure of category distinction.

Tolerance is appropriate for cultural variation, but insufficient for competing claims of moral sovereignty. A society that refuses to distinguish between negotiable cultural difference and non-negotiable moral authority mistakes openness for stability. In doing so, it ensures that assimilation becomes structurally impossible.

When that point is reached, conflict is no longer a matter of prejudice or misunderstanding. It is the inevitable consequence of allowing scale to convert difference into permanence, and tolerance into abdication.

A liberal society that cannot make this distinction does not remain liberal indefinitely. It becomes administrative, then coercive, as no other tools remain once assimilation fails.

Hamtramck: A Living Case Study

Shortly after I met my wife, she told me she had to go to Hamtramck. Gosia had lived in Hamtramck for years before moving into the suburbs. Her brother, at the time, still lived there.

Having grown up on the West side of Michigan, my mind made no differentiation between Detroit proper and its many suburbs, and I had never heard of Hamtramck, but the name has a kind of phonetically New England vibe to it, so I thought it was in Connecticut.

Gosia asked me if I wanted to go with her. I told her I couldn’t take the time off of work to go to Connecticut. Gosia had no idea what I was talking about - Hamtramck is one of two ‘suburbs’ that are completely surrounded by Detroit, and as we talked, I was shocked to find out that Hamtramck was only about 20 miles away.

Connecticut is a lot further away.

For more than a century, Hamtramck functioned as an entry enclave. New immigrant groups settled there because it was affordable, and close to industrial work. Hamtramck was never the destination though. It was simply the first rung on the ladder.

Germans, Poles, and other European immigrants passed through Hamtramck in successive waves. They clustered initially out of necessity, relying on shared language and community support while they established themselves economically, but as upward mobility came, movement followed.

The direction of that movement matters. It was upward and outward.

As Polish immigrants, their children, and their grandchildren accumulated wealth, they dispersed into surrounding suburbs such as Birmingham, Troy, and Rochester Hills. Ethnic identity softened into heritage. Language was often retained for a generation, but usually not two.

What matters here is that this pattern repeated reliably across immigrant groups for generations. Hamtramck worked as a temporary incubator, not a permanent cultural island.

That pattern has changed.

More recent immigration into Hamtramck does not show the same outward diffusion. Instead of upward mobility leading to dispersion into the surrounding region, growth increasingly takes the form of lateral, contiguous expansion. Population increase spills outward while remaining geographically and culturally connected to the original enclave. The community grows, but it does not dissolve. Hamtramck and Dearborn are both today parts of the same Islamic enclave.

This distinction is critical. Lateral expansion preserves internal authority structures. Cultural norms are reinforced rather than diluted, and exposure to the host culture is reduced. As population density rises, rather than serving as a bridge into American society, the enclave becomes self-sustaining.

As a result, cultural authority remains internal. Norms are taught, enforced, and reproduced within the community, and the expectation that public behavior conforms to American standards dissolves. Assimilation, once the default outcome, becomes optional, and eventually unnecessary.

Hamtramck, then, illustrates the difference between entry enclaves and permanent enclaves. The former dissolve through success. The latter persist through scale. One leads to convergence whereas the other leads to parallelism.

I mentioned that Hamtramck and Dearborn are, today, primarily Islamic. That’s important. As I’ve written in White Rose Magazine, the morality of Islam is largely an inversion of our own. The two are not compatible.

That’s not to say Muslims are not compatible with our society, but it is to say that fundamentalists within Islam are not, and that the more devout toward Islam one gets, the less compatible with Western civilization they become.

This is not a judgment about the character or intentions of the people involved. It is an observation about systems. When immigration remains below the assimilation threshold, enclaves function as gateways. When that threshold is exceeded, enclaves cease to be transitional and instead become destinations. At that point, assimilation does not merely slow. It changes direction.

Hamtramck matters because it shows this shift in real time, at the neighborhood level, where abstractions give way to lived reality.

I pick on Hamtramck because it is close to home, but similar patterns of both assimilation, and its opposite, occur all across the United States.

From Failed Assimilation to Administrative Control

When assimilation fails, societies do not collapse immediately. They attempt to compensate, and the first response of a fragmented society is administration.

As moral consensus erodes, the informal systems that once governed daily life lose their authority. Norms no longer bind because they are no longer shared. What was once enforced socially must now be enforced procedurally.

Norms are replaced by rules.

Where behavior was once shaped by expectation and shame, it is now shaped by policy and compliance. Where communities once mediated conflict directly, institutions step in to referee. The role of government expands not because it seeks power, but because something must manage the differences between moral systems after culture no longer can.

This is the phase often described as “multiculturalism,” but it is more accurately understood as administrative multiculturalism. Diversity is no longer sustained through shared moral limits, but through regulation. Disagreement is not resolved so much as it is suppressed.

This arrangement can persist for a time. In fact, it can feel deceptively stable. Procedures give the impression of fairness.

But this stability is fragile.

As parallel communities solidify, administrative systems are increasingly asked to perform moral arbitration without moral authority. Every rule begins to look partisan. Every enforcement decision is interpreted as favoring one group over another, and this is particularly true once different rules emerge for different groups and the law is selectively enforced.

At this stage, parallel identities harden. People no longer see themselves primarily as participants in a shared civic order, but as members of competing groups within it. Law is no longer perceived as impartial. It is viewed as a weapon or a shield, depending on who wields it.

As trust collapses, politics transforms. It ceases to be a debate about policy and becomes demographic warfare. Votes are counted less as expressions of preference and more as expressions of group power.

This is the point at which administration begins to fail.

Rules can manage differences only so long as all parties accept the authority of the rulemaker. When that authority is no longer recognized as legitimate, enforcement becomes a source of conflict. The state is no longer an umpire. It is a participant.

At this stage, only two outcomes remain.

The first is coercive unity. The state asserts control through surveillance, speech restrictions, politicized law enforcement, and the suppression of dissent. Order is preserved, but only by force. This is not harmony. It is containment.

The second is fragmentation. The shared civic space dissolves. Communities separate formally or informally. Borders harden, whether on maps or in practice. The state shrinks, splits, or disappears.

What does not survive this phase is liberal neutrality. A society cannot simultaneously lack a shared moral foundation and refuse coercion. One must give way to the other.

This is why failed assimilation does not lead to a gentler, more pluralistic society. It leads to a more regulated one, then a more coercive one, and finally, if force cannot hold, a divided one.

Administration is not the opposite of balkanization. It is the last attempt to prevent it.

And when administration fails, what remains is power, exercised openly, or fragmentation, embraced reluctantly.

There is no third path.

What Nations Must Choose

The old Michigan jokes at the beginning of this essay work because they are harmless: west versus east, Yoopers versus Trolls - friendly rivalries, mild resentments, and exaggerated differences that everyone jokes about.

These differences exist inside a shared culture. No one seriously believes Michigan will split into warring states because the Upper Peninsula feels neglected or because Detroit thinks everything west of Lansing is Indiana.

Those divisions matter only because they don’t matter.

That is the distinction this essay is about.

Nations do not face a thousand choices at once. They face a narrowing sequence of them.

First comes the choice between assimilation and administration. A society can expect newcomers to adopt its norms and moral limits, or it can attempt to manage differences indefinitely through policy, regulation, and procedure.

Assimilation requires confidence and clarity. Administration requires neither, but it comes at a cost.

When administration expands far enough, the next choice appears: administration or coercion. Rules only work while they are viewed as legitimate. Once they are seen as partisan or imposed, enforcement becomes necessary. Surveillance grows. Speech narrows. Dissent is reframed as destabilization. The society remains intact, but only because force replaces consent.

And when coercion can no longer hold, the final choice emerges: tyranny or fracture. At that point, unity survives only as containment. Remove the pressure, and the system breaks apart along the moral and cultural seams immigration without assimilation created.

These are not ideological predictions. They are historical patterns.

None of this happens because people are hateful. It happens because societies mistake tolerance for cohesion, neutrality for strength, and good intentions for structural wisdom. People forget that liberal democracy was never morally neutral, and that it cannot survive without defending the moral foundations that made it possible in the first place.

My wife did not move from communist Poland to Hamtramck because she wanted to live inside an enclave. She moved there because it was an entry point. She left because assimilation worked, rewarding participation in a shared civic culture rather than permanent separation from it, and by the time I met her, she had a condo in one of the nicest communities in the country.

That path remains possible. But it is not automatic.

A society unwilling to defend its moral foundations will not remain free. It will become managed, then coerced, and finally divided.

The question nations face is not whether they wish to be compassionate, tolerant, or diverse. The question is whether they believe in themselves strongly enough to remain whole.

Everything else follows.