I Believe

On September 10th, a gunman killed Charlie Kirk in Utah. The event reminds us that no one should die over speech, and that we must wrestle with big questions calmly. You don’t have to love him or hate him. At times, his message resonated with many across America. At times, it divided us. If we say we disagree with his points, we should be able to make the case. If we can’t, his spears carry weight.One of his sharpest questions was this: Does the Civil Rights Act of 1964 violate the Constitution?Let’s sit with that for a moment. If your first thought is, “That law ended Jim Crow. How could it be wrong?” you’re not alone. We wrote the law to strike down a national disgrace. To end segregation. To stop the humiliation of being turned away from a lunch counter, of being told you couldn’t buy a home in a certain neighborhood, of being trapped in second-class status.We intended the Civil Rights Act to end those humiliations. To tear down the walls of segregation. To give every American a fair shot.In that moment, justice demanded action.But justice isn’t just a word. It’s a goal that shapes real lives. It’s the chance for a kid who grows up in a leaky trailer or in project housing to work, to save, and to buy a house in a neighborhood where their children have a good school and a fair shot. From a word on a page to life on the ground. According to the Constitution’s chief authors, justice may be the most important of the six national goals that bind our Republic. But justice isn’t a handout program. Justice is the chance to earn your place. It’s not a promise of results. Because the goals in our preamble, meaning union, liberty, welfare, defence, order, and justice, sometimes compete or clash, we must hold them in balance.In the end, our goal isn’t to win an argument. It’s to get better, together, at pursuing the ideals that bind us.So here’s the question: in the balance between Union, Liberty, and Justice, does the Civil Rights Act of 1964 violate the Constitution?Act One. A Plate of SegregationIn the mid-1960s, Maurice Bessinger’s Piggie Park barbecue ran popular drive-ins and a sit-down sandwich shop around Columbia, South Carolina. The chain routinely denied Black customers full and equal service. Those who were served had to take food at kitchen windows and were not allowed to eat on the premises. After Congress approved the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title II barred restaurants and other public accommodations from excluding people by race. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it on July 2, 1964, in a nationally televised ceremony attended by lawmakers and civil-rights leaders, among them Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.Had equality arrived?Not everywhere. Piggie Park didn’t change. On July 3, Anne Newman, a mother and minister’s wife, wanted a sandwich. Instead, she got a full plate of rejection. She and her friends went to Piggie Park for lunch. The waitress came out, saw she and her friends were Black, and turned back inside without taking the order. They went back a month later and were again refused service. The moment sparked a fight for justice. Newman, Sharon Neal, and John Mungin filed a class action suit seeking an injunction to stop the discrimination at the restaurants. This wasn’t a casual “we can agree to disagree” dispute. Bessinger stocked his restaurants with booklets defending racial separation. You could pick up this reading with your barbecue. It drew on the Genesis 11 story of the Tower of Babel to argue that God scattered the nations and meant them to remain separate. Integration, he preached, defied divine order. Some pamphlets even claimed biblical warrant for slavery.At first, the courts split. They wrestled with how far the law reached. The district court agreed that there had been discrimination. They also ruled that drive-ins, where most food was takeout, didn’t have to follow the law. The Fourth Circuit disagreed, saying all Piggie Park locations were public accommodations. Newman v. Piggie Park went to the Supreme Court in 1968. The high court sided with Newman and made it plain: religion is no excuse for segregation in a public restaurant. The justices called Piggie Park’s claim “patently frivolous.”Piggie Park wasn’t about handouts or special favors. It was about human dignity. The right to walk into a public restaurant and be served like anyone else. Believe what you want. But if you open your doors to the public, you serve the public.So…did the Civil Rights Act of 1964 violate the Constitution in Columbia, South Carolina? Did the decision rob Maurice Bessinger of his religious liberty? He was still free to believe, worship, preach, and pass out booklets. What he couldn’t do after choosing to run a public restaurant was use those beliefs to keep people out.And he didn’t stop speaking his mind. Before he died, he deeded a tiny patch of ground under the flagpole to the Sons of Confederate Veterans for five dollars so that future owners couldn’t take the Confederate flag down.But the issue isn’t cut and dry. The stories don’t stop in South Carolina.Act Two. A Seat With ConditionsIn the late 1960s, the University of California, Davis School of Medicine faced a stark reality: its classes had almost no Black, Latino, or Native American students. Justice is the opportunity to earn a place, but what does opportunity mean when the doorway to a profession has been locked for decades? UC Davis tried a fix: Out of 100 seats each year, they reserved 16 for “disadvantaged” applicants. UC Davis judged those applications by a separate committee, with different standards, and the underrepresented minority applicants competed only for those 16 seats.Enter Allan Bakke. A Marine Corps veteran and engineer in his early 30s, Bakke had set his sights on medicine. He’d spent years preparing, earning strong grades and MCAT scores. He applied to UC Davis in 1973 and 1974, along with a dozen other medical schools, and he was rejected by all of them. Later, he discovered that some minority applicants admitted through the special program had lower scores. He believed the school had shut him out because he was white. In reality, records later showed that competition was stiff; as many as 67 applicants had higher scores than his. Nonetheless, Bakke sued. He argued that a publicly-funded state school couldn’t deny him a seat and still honor the commitment to prohibit race discrimination in federally funded programs. Regents of the University of California v. Bakke reached the Supreme Court in 1978. The ruling was messy. Quotas, like the 16 reserved seats, were unconstitutional. They could not exclude Bakke based on race. The court ordered him admitted. But the Court, led by Justice Lewis Powell, also said diversity in education is a compelling goal. Race could be one factor in a holistic review, as long as every applicant competes in the same pool, with no guaranteed quotas.So…Did the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act violate the Constitution? Did it violate Bakke’s right to justice?UC Davis had its opinion of justice. It argued that set-aside wasn’t favoritism. It was a correction for a pipeline bent by decades of exclusion. A diverse medical class would better serve California’s diverse communities.If you were Bakke, would you see justice denied? If you were a minority applicant, would you see the set-aside necessary to level a field tilted by history? The Court decided justice meant the opportunity to compete equally, but not a scripted outcome. There could be no reserved seats, no separate tracks. But a school could consider race as one thread in a larger fabric, if every candidate competed equally.Bakke went on to have a successful career as a doctor in Minnesota.But the issue still isn’t settled. Let’s move on to Louisiana.Act Three. From the Classroom to the Shop Floor In 1965, President Johnson signed Executive Order 11246. In it, Johnson outlined that if a business wanted to compete for federal contracts, it had to follow the rules. If you wanted to do business with the federal government, you had to take “affirmative action” to ensure equal opportunity. This meant companies had to create goals and timetables to hire underrepresented groups. The government insisted these were not quotas. They were temporary tools, intended to pry open doors rusted shut for generations.At the time, Kaiser Aluminum in Gramercy, Louisiana, filled skilled jobs almost entirely with white workers, and it intended to change. They made a goal that their workforce would represent the local labor force. The company and the union built a training pipeline and reserved half of the slots for Black workers to correct the imbalance. A white worker named Brian Weber was passed over for promotion in favor of workers with less seniority. He saw a new door being closed in the name of opening another, so he sued. The local court and the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit agreed that Weber was a target of discrimination, but the matter was not settled. Kaiser appealed.In 1979, the Supreme Court decided United Steelworkers v. Weber. Kaiser Aluminum’s plan survived. The high court said a business could give preferential treatment to minority groups, as long as the company intended the effort to be a temporary fix to balance workforce diversity.In 1987, Johnson v. Transportation Agency approved a similar approach for gender. A business could choose to hire a woman in a male-dominated job if she and a man were comparably qualified for a promotion, if the plan was modest and temporary.The tension between the classroom and the shop floor became plain. The high court killed fixed quotas in college. But numbers could steer workplace decisions if businesses called them goals, kept them temporary, and technically kept the door to all applicants open. On the ground, these goals felt like quotas. If a business chose a woman or minority applicant for a job or a promotion, some believed they were a token hire, not the top choice. If eve

Joel Douglas (00:03) My guest today is Shaka Mitchell, a senior fellow for the American Federation for Children, a Nashville-based attorney, a Belmont adjunct teaching constitutional law, and a leader dedicated to transforming education for underserved families. He’s a featured guest on TEDx Nashville and podcasts like The Learning Curve and Charterfolk. The charter schools Shaka has worked with drive real growth for Nashville’s underserved kids, often doubling district test scores in math and reading. While high-poverty public schools rank in Tennessee’s bottom 30%, Shaka’s schools rank in the top 20% to 25% serving the same communities. Shaka, thanks for being here. Your work with high-performing charters raises big questions about how we fund and deliver education. So, I feel like we have to ask a basic question to get started.Shaka Mitchell (00:49) Hey, thanks for having me.Joel Douglas (01:02) Should we fund education at all?Shaka Mitchell (01:05) Yeah, good question. Well, thanks for having me, Joel, and you’re starting out with a big swing right out of the gate. Should we fund education? I would say yes. I would say yes.And I want to also give the early disclaimer that I am not a big-government guy. I tend to be pretty skeptical of government. I used to work at one point at a constitutional law firm that came from a libertarian perspective. I really believe in individual liberty, individual rights, and also just an individual’s work ethic. So I am not a big-government guy. That being said, when we’re talking about education, it’s something that I think has a community impact. It’s also something that, from a rule of law perspective, is provided for by every state constitution in the country.Right? So all 50 states have a constitution that says something about education—that education is valued, that it is highly prized, and that the state is going to do something to fund some system of education for the public. Now, whether or not the government has to provide the actual services, I think we can differ about. That’s where I would say no. But in terms of funding, I would say yes because, listen, if we don’t do it, you can’t just fund your own children. I don’t believe that. I think that looking out for one another’s kids in that regard is a societal benefit.Joel Douglas (02:47) And really, that’s why I feel like we have to answer this question first. It’s what you just alluded to: you have to fund your kids and everybody else’s kids. If you look at it from a constitutional perspective, I would think about it as, well, we have six national goals, and if one of those is justice, one is liberty, and one is defense, then education fits into a lot of those buckets.If you think about it from a justice perspective, it kind of gets to an individual—like we need to fund education to help individuals who grew up in a less prosperous or less advantaged background succeed. If you think about it from a defense standpoint, you might think, like the school lunch program was started from a defense requirement standpoint. So if we think about education from a defense standpoint, then that’s kind of a collective; we need to have an infrastructure of training-ready Americans who can go and join the military and serve in defense industries to protect the people of the United States.But it’s both, right? You can’t just do it from a justice standpoint—that’s not the only reason you do it—but you also don’t only do it for the collective benefit. It goes back to exactly what you said about how we have to pay for each other’s kids, too, because some of them might join the military and also because constitutionally, we have a commitment to the justice of those kids that grow up in a less prosperous environment.Shaka Mitchell (04:25) Yeah, I think that’s right. And, you know, education is one of these things that, as opposed to, maybe other, say, commodities—things that we buy from the store. The education that I get for myself, yes, it’s important to me personally and individually, but if I’m better educated, that’s going to benefit the community that I’m a part of. It’s going to benefit the private company that I might work for or the nonprofit. It’s gonna benefit the military if I’m a part of the service, right? It’s gonna benefit my neighbors.So education is not one of these things that’s like going to the grocery store and you buy the kind of breakfast cereal that only you like. You’re the only one in your house that likes it and you say, “Forget about everybody else, I’m eating whatever, Fruity Pebbles. I don’t care if nobody else likes it.” No, education is not that kind of good. It’s the sort of thing that actually has so much benefit.And I mean, you highlight something really important, too, that I took a look at a little bit this summer and might just write about later. And that is that the armed forces right now are going through the lowest recruitment cycle in history, right? Our military is having such a hard time finding academically and physically ready young men and women, and that becomes a defense problem. So that speaks a little bit to this “education as a national defense” and national security issue as well. There’s a lot of overlap there.Joel Douglas (06:06) Absolutely, and I don’t want to take too much time on it, but just from a physical education standpoint, PE. When I was a kid, and I grew up in a small town in northern Missouri, the high school football coach was the PE teacher. He used it as the football training program so that we essentially had an extra hour to do stuff. So, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, we'd lift weights. Tuesday, Thursday, we played some sort of sport, so we were running, chasing each other, doing field hockey, or whatever that was.But my kids today, because I have two teenagers, they don’t do the same kind of stuff in PE. For half of the year, they sit in a health class. And rather than go run for 45 minutes and then have 45 minutes of health class—I don’t want to digress too much—but if they ran for an hour every day, would the military benefit from them being more fit and having a higher pool of candidates who could join after they graduate? Absolutely.Shaka Mitchell (07:14) Yeah. I’m a big believer in physical education and just the benefits of physical activity in general. I really think that it’s something that, frankly, kind of links together with education in this sort of virtuous cycle. Right? I mean, I think for a lot of kids, and even personally, when I feel better physically because I’ve exercised, I think I’m more mentally sharp and focused and ready for the workday. And I think that’s the same for elementary, middle, and high school kids, too.Joel Douglas (07:52) Yeah, that’s right. But I’ll get back on track. You said something about how the government doesn’t necessarily outline how to achieve education. So it says what to do. Well, it doesn’t even say that. It says the goals are justice, liberty, defense, and the other three. So you alluded to there being different ways to achieve those. And I know you work with a lot of those, and that’s the work that you do. So, can you talk about that?Shaka Mitchell (08:24) Yeah, so, you know, a lot of state constitutions—most state constitutions—are really broad, even vague, when they talk about education. They’ll say something like, "The state of [fill in the blank] will provide for an equitable education system." You go, okay, what does that mean exactly? Right? Does that mean we're talking about dollars? Equitable that way? Are we talking about kids who are gonna exit the system with the exact same amount of coursework? It’s so vague nobody really knows. It’s just kind of one of these adjectives that they threw in there, and it sounded good. And then you fast forward just a few years, and you don’t really know what it means.So one of the problems, of course, in any state is that on the one hand, it’s really efficient, or it seems like it’s going to be efficient, to have one system that you have in place for all the kids to participate in. That seems like it would work on paper; it seems efficient. But then what happens is, as soon as you meet more than one child, you realize that they are different, and you realize that the same system isn’t likely to work for a whole range of students. And that’s within one school, let alone a whole district, state, or country, right?I live in Nashville, Tennessee, and we’ve got about a hundred thousand school-aged kids. There’s no way one system with one school board of nine people is going to be able to figure out a system that works for every single child because they have different interests. Even in my own house—and I bet this is the same for you and your kids—same parents, but my kids are interested in different things. One is better at math. One is much more interested in the arts. One is much more interested in reading, nose in a book, right? They’re just interested in different things. They’re going to learn in different ways. And that’s in one family. You multiply that out across the whole city, and you've got to do something different. And so that’s really, I think, why I believe so much in school choice.The idea is that, yes, we’re going to fund education from a central pot. Because again, let’s collect the money that way, easy peasy. But let’s not assume that those nine people on the school board can come up with one system that works for everybody. Let’s let different models work. So if it’s a charter school that’s got a focus on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), cool. Do that. In my city, there’s another charter school that’s really focused on students for whom English is not their first language. Okay, great. Let’s do that because that was something that the district was really struggling with. Or maybe it’s a values-based decision that a family wants to make. You really want your kids to go to a faith-based school. Okay, cool. I think that that’s your right t

Should Public Money for Schools Guarantee More Than Learning?This week, the National School Lunch Program, born out of national defense, and the rise of homeschooling vouchers, where freedom meets responsibility.And next week, we’ll dig even deeper with our guest, Shaka Mitchell! But for now … the lights are dimming. Look! There's the curtain!Scene One. Frontier America, 1809 Education, even without public funds, can serve national goals like Union and Liberty.A father and mother have their second child! A boy named Abraham, born in a one-room log cabin in Kentucky. The father, a cold and stern man, had built the structure by hand. Dirt floor. No windows. A fireplace for heat and little else. The boy’s father couldn’t read. His mother knew her letters, but not much more. When she died, the boy was nine years old. He was left in the care of his 11-year-old sister.His father soon arranged a marriage of convenience with a widow who had three children of her own. When she arrived at the farm, she found his two children so filthy that the first thing she did was draw a bath for them.She was a godsend for the boy, loving him like her own children. Neighbors called him lazy because he wasn’t much for farm work, and the boy and his father had heated arguments. But his new mother saw something different. He was hungry. Yes, for food. But also for words.There was no school, so she taught him how to teach himself. She got him books, like the family Bible, but also “Aesop’s Fables,” “Robinson Crusoe,” and “Pilgrim’s Progress.” She taught him “how” to learn, to study, to chase every scrap of knowledge he could find. At night, by firelight, he copied passages onto wooden shingles with charcoal. He had no paper, no ink. He’d rub out the words, write again, and memorize them line by line. Neighbors remembered seeing him walking with a book in one hand, axe in the other, reading between swings.He left home in his young twenties to seek his fortune, but he always came back to see her every year or two. He bought some property for her to live on after his father died. The last time he saw her was in 1861, when he stopped to bid her farewell before leaving for Washington and his inauguration as the 16th President of the United States. She mourned his death in 1865, and she passed in 1869.With Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln’s backing, the boy who copied Bible verses onto wooden shingles with charcoal grew into the man who wrote the Gettysburg Address, President Abraham Lincoln. Would we say today that Abraham Lincoln was homeschooled? Uneducated? Self-taught? However we label it, no one could argue that his lack of formal schooling limited his potential.Lincoln, self-taught in a Kentucky cabin, became a president who preserved the Union. His education, guided by a caring stepmother, shows how learning builds national strength, even without public funds. But when public money enters the picture, what ensures the child’s welfare?Scene Two. Perris, California; January 2018 — Justice and WelfareBefore dawn, a 17-year-old girl climbed out of a basement window with an old phone and dialed 911. She planned her escape for two years, practicing how to use a phone because she’d never been outside alone. Her voice shook as she tried to explain what the house looked like inside. At one point, she said, “My two little sisters right now are chained up.” Riverside County Sheriff's Deputies walked into darkness and the sour smell of waste. They found 13 siblings, ages 2 to 29. Some were shackled. Most were so thin the deputies thought the older ones were still children. Food was rationed; they only ate once a day. Showers, once a year. Teeth never seen by a dentist. Beatings and strangling as punishment. The district attorney later said the house was “foul-smelling,” and the children showed signs of long starvation and nerve damage. Seven of the captives were adults, but their bodies looked like they had been kept small. One victim, 29 years old, weighed about 82 pounds. On paper, this was a school. The adoptive father had filed a private-school affidavit with the state. He listed himself as principal of “Sandcastle Day School.” In California, that filing exempted children from compulsory public attendance, and there was no routine state inspection of such “schools.” No one looked inside for years.The girl who called 911 gave them an opening. Deputies cut chains. Paramedics carried out brothers and sisters who could barely stand. Prosecutors charged the parents with torture, false imprisonment, willful child cruelty, and abuse of dependent adults. They later added perjury against the father for lying on the school affidavits. In 2019, both parents pleaded guilty. The court sentenced them to 25 years to life in prison as part of the plea agreement. The rescue did not end the harm. Some of the younger children were later placed with foster parents who also abused them, and those foster parents were convicted and sentenced. Five years after the rescue, county officials acknowledged that the state failed to get basic services to the siblings.This case is a sinister mirror of President Lincoln’s homeschool experience. A “homeschool” on paper can become a blessing or a cage in practice. In 2018, a California homeschool hid torture behind a private-school affidavit. Public funds for homeschooling, like those for school lunches, must ensure kids are safe and fed, not starved and chained.The Test of Legitimacy — Welfare and TranquilityNow the scene is set, and we can ask our question. As states expand vouchers and tax credits for homeschooling, what obligations follow?Does accepting the American people’s money for schooling create an obligation beyond academics?Liberty in private is one thing. Liberty with the people’s money is another. Public funds carry obligations of legitimacy. These are the same assurances schools already provide: food, safety, health, and visibility.Religious liberty and government overreach are real concerns. So are child welfare checks, meals, vaccinations, and sports. We need a standard that defends liberty and protects children.We think we care about the freedom to choose how a child learns. We think we care about waste of public funds. We think we care about officials telling our children what they should know.Take a couple of examples. Some parents want physical education to mean kids running for an hour, not sitting for “health.” Others say there is no such thing as an average child, and any system built for the average will fail the real ones in front of us.These are legitimate concerns for individuals. I say again—Individuals. Parents should exercise their liberty in how they educate their children. That right stands whether or not public money is involved. And while critics point to abuse in homeschooling, most homeschoolers are not abusive. Abuse exists everywhere. Public and private schools are not automatically safer.But that is not the decisive concern. The issue is not good parents versus bad parents. It is the obligations that come with public money.The government owns nothing. Every dollar it spends is the people’s money. We pool those dollars to build what no family can build alone: roads, bridges, water systems, and schools. Because there is more to school than classes.That collective pool comes with obligations. Every day, in public or private schools, an adult lays eyes on a child. Every day, a child who needs a meal can get one.So yes, we can support individual choice with the American people’s money. But if we choose to take that money, we also choose an obligation to legitimacy.The test is simple. Education is a public function, bound by federal rights. Parents have broad freedom to educate their children, but when public money follows the child, they are spending the people’s money.No one gives you money with no strings attached. The people may ask for basic assurances: that a child is seen, safe, nourished, and protected from disease.Food as Defense — Provide for the Common DefenceLet’s think about the school lunch program.Almost every presidential administration fights over school lunches. But the political theater hides the real purpose of the program.One of the nation’s six goals is to Provide for the Common Defence. That doesn’t stop at buying tanks or building fighter jets. It also means building the human infrastructure to fly those jets and stand watch. A healthy, fit young America is part of national defense.That’s where food comes in. The men and women who step forward to serve often come from the country’s poorest households. They are America’s finest, but not our wealthiest. For many, school lunch is the one reliable meal of the day in childhood.The modern program itself grew out of war. During World War II, the Army discovered too many young men were unfit for service, with a nontrivial share failing for nutrition-related reasons, about one in nine by some estimates. That was not just a battlefield problem. It was a factory-line problem, too.Congress answered with the National School Lunch Act of 1946. The law says its purpose, “as a measure of national security,” is to “safeguard the health and well-being of the Nation’s children” and to soak up US farm output. President Truman signed it on June 4, 1946. He praised it as “strengthening the Nation through better nutrition for our school children.” Those two concepts, national security and better nutrition, are the program’s DNA. Today, the program serves around 30 million kids on a typical school day. This is infrastructure, not charity. It is a national system that keeps children fed so they can learn now and serve and work later. In short, the American people pool our money to pay for school lunches so those kids can grow up and, in return, protect the Republic.The lunches build “human infrastructure” by ensuring future generations, often from poor households, are physically fit to serve in the military, work in defense industries, or contrib

Act 1: The Insurmountable ChallengeIn 1817, New York voted to dig a ditch. And not just any ditch. A grand canal! Dug by hand, 363 miles long, across forests, swamps, and rock. Most experts scoffed. George Washington had dismissed similar ideas decades earlier. Thomas Jefferson called it “a little short of madness.”At the time, farmers and manufacturers in the West faced a brutal choice. To reach markets, they had to send their goods down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, the country’s greatest seaport. From there, shipments went out through the Gulf, around Florida, up the Atlantic, and finally to cities like New York or Philadelphia. It was slow. It was costly. And it made western settlers dependent on a southern trade route they couldn’t control.The Erie Canal wasn’t dreamed up by powerful men in Albany. The idea came from a flour merchant named Jesse Hawley. He had a strong customer base, but to move his flour to market, he had to ship it by wagon over the Appalachian trails or float it on rivers that ran the wrong way. He went broke, ended up in debtors’ prison, and there picked up a pen. In a series of essays in 1807 and 1808, he sketched a bold plan: a canal from Lake Erie to the Hudson River. He mapped the route, described the locks, and argued the benefits. He didn’t have all the details, but he had vision, and he put it on paper.New York City mayor and later Governor DeWitt Clinton picked up that vision and ran with it. He wasn’t an engineer or a canal man. He was a politician with a sense of scale. Clinton saw what Hawley’s prison essays meant: an inland waterway would break dependence on the Mississippi, open the interior, and turn New York into the nation’s gateway.As Governor, Clinton pushed the legislature to back the canal in 1817. The cost was staggering. Seven million dollars, one state spending roughly a third of the entire federal government’s annual budget. Critics mocked it as “Clinton’s Ditch.” They predicted it would bankrupt New York. Some said it would never be finished.But Clinton pressed forward. He didn’t sell the canal as an engineering marvel. He sold it as a doorway. At the time, moving freight from Buffalo to New York City cost one hundred dollars a ton and took weeks. Clinton promised the canal would cut that to under ten dollars, and in just a few days.The Erie Canal wasn’t just a ditch. It was America’s first true megaproject, built long before steam shovels, bulldozers, or dynamite. It was the biggest engineering challenge of the 19th century.How did they dig it? By hand. Tens of thousands of laborers, mostly Irish immigrants and local farmers hired in the off-season, used picks, shovels, wheelbarrows, and horse-drawn carts. There were no roads. When they hit swamps, they laid down logs to make floating roads so carts wouldn’t sink. When they hit limestone cliffs, they drilled holes by hand, packed them with black powder, and blasted inch by inch.The canal had to climb about 571 feet from the Hudson up to Lake Erie. To solve that, engineers built 83 locks; locks are stone elevators for boats. No one had done this on such a scale in America before. They were inventing the craft as they went.But they finished it in just eight years.When water first flowed in 1825, it wasn’t just an engineering triumph. It was an economic revolution. Shipping costs dropped from $100 a ton to under $10. A journey that took weeks now took days. It made bread cheaper. It put tools in the hands of farmers. It made New York City the nation’s port. It opened the Midwest to settlement. Within a generation, roughly three-fifths of the nation’s trade moved through New York’s harbor, powered by the canal. Today, we face another insurmountable challenge: a housing crisis.Instead of a wilderness of rivers, swamps, and mountains, we face a wilderness of bureaucracy. A maze of zoning codes, permit boards, and fragmented governance. Each with its own tolls and delays. Builders spend months fighting hearings and paperwork before they ever turn a shovel, driving up costs and denying millions the chance to build equity through homeownership.Then, as now, we face skepticism from critics who believe working-class Americans aren’t worthy of bold projects. Washington dismissed it. Jefferson called it madness. The rich, who owned the existing shipping lanes, mocked the project as “Clinton’s Ditch.” Today, skeptics argue that small, affordable homes aren’t profitable or that zoning reforms are too radical. Politicians treat it as impossible.But every bold fix begins as madness.Housing is our canal. It’s not a matter of skill or resources. We have both. It’s a matter of clarity, incentives, and purpose. Just as Clinton used a bold state project to open opportunity, we could use a Small Business Innovation Research program to open the housing market.As of mid-2025, the US median home price sits at around $410,800, while median household income is estimated at $84,000. This makes homes over 4.8 times income, compared to just twice in the 1960s. A record 22 million renter households are cost-burdened, spending over 30% of income on housing, and affordability is at an all-time low. Programs like USDA’s SBIR for rural development and HUD’s $20 million innovation grants (with recent deadlines in July 2025) show the tools exist. We just need to earmark them for starter homes under $150,000, tied to zoning reforms that cut red tape.This isn’t about handouts; it’s about competition driving innovation, much like Hawley’s essays sparked a revolution. Instead of a canal, let’s build a pathway to the American Dream for the working class.Act 2: The Crisis Today – Voices from the Ground(Voice: Young Homebuyer; mid-20s female, fiery with a mix of grit, sarcasm, and unshakable hope. Think a teacher who’s had it but won’t quit. Background: Gritty urban soundscape. Honking cabs, slamming apartment doors, distant subway rumble, fading in and out.)Picture me: 25, a teacher in a mid-sized city, grading papers by day, tutoring by night, slinging coffee on weekends. I’m hustling like my life depends on it...because it does. But the American Dream? It’s slipping through my fingers like sand in a busted hourglass.I’m not asking for a penthouse. I just want a home. A small one! 600, maybe 1,000 square feet. A bedroom, a bathroom, a kitchen where I can burn my first attempt at dinner. But in 2025, that’s a fantasy. I looked it up... the median income is something like 84 grand a year. Median home price? Try 420 thousand. That’s nearly five times what I make. It’s crazy! Back in 1960, homes cost twice the income: twelve thousand on fifty-six hundred. Since then, prices ran past wages and never looked back.And I hear the pushback: “Homeownership rates are fine.” Sure, overall. But at my age, it used to be higher. By thirty, nearly 6 in 10 Americans from the Silent Generation owned a home, 1 in 2 Boomers, just under half of Gen X, and about four in ten Millennials. Today, 25–34-year-olds sit in the high 30s, recently near 36%. The overall rate didn’t crash. The doorway for us did.Builders don’t touch starter homes anymore. Why would they? Land’s a fortune, materials are through the roof, and zoning boards pile on fees like they’re playing Monopoly with my future. So they churn out McMansions, the sprawling status symbols for the rich. Me? I’m left scrounging for scraps, priced out of the game before I even roll the dice.This isn’t just my story. It’s a crisis crushing millions. Over 22 million renter households are drowning, spending more than 30% of their income on rent. Twelve million are barely breathing, forking over half their paycheck. Since 2019, home prices have spiked 60%. If you’re pulling $50 grand a year, good luck! Only one in ten listings is even close to affordable.It’s like rowing upstream in a boat made of tissue paper. You paddle; work overtime, skip vacations, eat instant noodles, but the leaks keep coming. Rent. Student loans. Fees. They drain you dry before you can save a dime for a down payment.So we wait. We put off kids. We put off dreams. Some of us are still crashing in Mom’s basement, not because we’re lazy, but because the system’s rigged. We don’t need marble countertops or three-car garages. We need homes under $150,000! Twice today’s median income, like our grandparents had. Without that, the American Dream isn’t just delayed. It’s sinking, drifting downstream, out of reach for my entire generation.But I’m not giving up. There’s a way to fight back. We need to drain this bureaucratic swamp and build a bridge to ownership. We just need the right tools, the right vision, and a whole lot of grit.Act 3: Innovation – SBIR for Housing(Voice: Policy Expert – Confident male, mid-40s, professor-like with a spark of enthusiasm, like a TED Talk speaker rallying for change. Background: Subtle office sounds: typing, flipping blueprint pages, faint construction hum, fading in and out.)So, how do we pull the American Dream back from the brink? We need homes under $150,000! You've heard the grim math from our teacher in Act 2. That five-times-income ratio is a trap. But it's a trap we can engineer our way out of. It’s our Erie Canal moment, and the tool to dig it is competition.Picture this: builders racing to craft small, affordable homes. 600 to 1,000 square feet, sturdy and smart, not some cookie-cutter McMansion. The spark? A Small Business Innovation Research program, an SBIR for housing. SBIRs are America’s secret sauce, fueling breakthroughs in tech, defense, and agriculture with competitive grants for small businesses. Phase I: dream up designs, like modular units, shipping-container conversions, energy-efficient builds. Phase II: build prototypes that hit $150,000 or less. Phase III: scale the winners with private capital, flooding the market with homes for first-time buyers, not hedge-fund vultures. Really promising defense proposals go direct to Phase II to get started quicker.This isn’t a pipe dream! It’s already hal

Our neighbors say they love their EVs. We take a test drive. They’re quick. They’re quiet. They’re fun!Then the facts elbow in. EVs were sold as being cheaper, but in America, they aren’t. Many lose value fast. Some models shed close to half their value in a year. Sales have flattened. They’ll likely spike before the federal credit expires September 30, then sag after.Some of us want to love EVs, but something isn’t quite right.Is it the range, shorter in winter, the waits at chargers, or that stations aren’t where we need them?Maybe none of those. Maybe the cars are designed to be replaced, not to last.So our question:Is this new tech built for my life, or for the next sale?Curtain. Scene One. The 1,000-Hour Lightbulb.Close your eyes and step onto a city street in the late 1920s. Windows glow like jewels. Streetcars hum. Night is no longer darkness. By 1930, nearly nine in ten urban and nonfarm rural homes had electricity. About one in ten farms did. Light is not a luxury. It is the texture of modern life.Enter stage left.At first, bulbs lasted a long time. Early tungsten lamps often burned well past fifteen hundred hours, many to two thousand and beyond. Families loved that. Companies that had built factories did not. In Germany, Osram’s sales fell from sixty three million bulbs in fiscal year 1922 to 1923 to twenty eight million the next year.On December 23, 1924, the leading manufacturers met in Geneva to form what we now call the Phoebus cartel. Osram, Philips, Compagnie des Lampes, and General Electric’s overseas network joined. Its global reach was unusual for the time. By early 1925, they set a benchmark of a one thousand hour life for household bulbs, down from the fifteen hundred to two thousand hours common before. Shorter than families expected, and exactly what manufacturers needed.This was not sloppy work. It was engineering with a new purpose. Each factory shipped samples to a central laboratory in Switzerland. Technicians tested life spans against the benchmark. A company paid a fine if a bulb lasted too short or too long for its class. Reliability became real, but a different kind of real. It was no longer ‘this bulb will endure.’It was equipment that reliably failed on schedule.Consumers adjusted fast. Every brand converged near one thousand hours. Burnout stopped feeling like a defect and started feeling like life. A 1927 Tokyo Electric memo to the cartel reported a fivefold jump in sales. More failures meant more purchases. The cartel redesigned the market not with a breakthrough that gave people more, but with a standard that made sure they would buy again soon.At the same time, the manufacturers claimed progress. They said shorter life meant brighter light and better efficiency. At a higher cost. The new standard raised turnover and margins and punished any member tempted to make a bulb that lasted too long.Companies got paid for replacements. They were not just selling a lightbulb. They were selling this lightbulb and all your next lightbulbs on a schedule.The world has limits. The cartel did not last. Patents expired. Members fought. World War II shattered coordination. In the United States, courts scrutinized General Electric and its partners for collusive control of the lamp business. In 1949, a federal district court found that General Electric monopolized the incandescent lamp industry in violation of section 2 of the Sherman Act.A tool’s death isn’t a breakdown. It’s the quiet moment it stops serving your life. The market plans what you will buy next. Some call that progress.We, the People, need governance to stop failure by design.When we set standards, we should ask: Is this new tech built for my life, or for the next sale?Humanity, Existence, and TimeWe miss what being is because we forget time.Life is not a thing on a shelf. It moves. Picture a clearing in a green mountain forest. We step in already involved, tools in hand, neighbors around, choices pressing in. Our kind of life is being-there. We show up to a world that already matters.Meaning comes through time. Past, present, and future braid every moment. We carry what has been, deal with what is, and anticipate what could be. A rancher does not just cut hay; they remember last year’s rain, read today’s moisture, and watch the three-day forecast. Time makes the work make sense because time sets the limits.The hard edge of time is death. Not only ours. Tools die too. Death frames our choices. Faced clearly, it does not make life grim; it makes it ours. It calls us to live with purpose.In that clearing, a tool “lives” when it disappears into the work. It “dies” when it fails our project and forces itself into attention. Philosophy calls the first ready-to-hand; the second is an object in the way.A tool is alive for us only while it supports our next possibilities. It may not die in a crash. It dies when it stops supporting our lives. Some would schedule that death and call it progress. That is why we need rules that resist quiet, coordinated failure.In tech, death is not when the device stops working; it is when it stops working for you. So, what does this philosophical lens reveal about our devices today?Curtain. Scene Two. Apple and Failing BatteriesWinter 2017. Your phone feels slower. Not creek-dropped slow, just sticky. Screens load like they are pulling a sled. Benchmarks confirm what our thumbs already know. Older iPhones with worn batteries run below design speed and perk up after a battery swap. A developer posts the charts. The story catches fire.Enter stage right.Earlier that year, Apple pushed a software update that changed how the phone handled power. When a battery aged, or when cold or a low charge cut peak power, the system quietly managed performance to prevent sudden shutoffs. No pop-up. No heads-up. A rule under the hood to smooth over an old battery’s limits. Later, Apple explained the machinery and added a setting so the user could see it and choose to turn it off or replace the battery.One version of the story called this protection. Better a slower phone than a dead one in your pocket. Another said it felt like a schedule, set without consent, that made aging devices feel obsolete. Apple apologized, cut the out-of-warranty battery price from 79 dollars to 29 for 2018, and promised more transparency. They added battery-health readouts and a switch to disable the slowdown.Regulators and courts weighed in. In France, consumer authorities fined Apple 25 million euros for failing to inform users that a software update could reduce performance. In the United States, 34 states reached a 113 million dollar settlement over alleged misrepresentations about batteries and slowdowns (without admitting wrongdoing). A federal class action settled for up to 500 million dollars on related claims (again, without admitting wrongdoing).This is not an attack on Apple. Here is what matters for our piece.A battery is mortal chemistry. In the cold, it cannot deliver the same peak power. With age, it cannot hold the same charge. The software’s job was to stretch usefulness. Keep the tool “alive” for your day by preventing blackouts.But the choice was hidden. People felt like their tools were dying because they no longer supported the day’s work. Only after the controversy did Apple present the controls and the explanation. Starting in 2018, Apple and its customers quietly renegotiated the tool’s life.A tool dies when it stops serving you. We need governance to stop failure by design. When choices are hidden, tools die for us. Is this new tech built for my life, or for the next sale?Curtain. Scene Three. The Electric Vehicle. Combustion vehicles age as a negotiation.Yes, parts wear. But you can rebuild, swap, and refresh. Engines come out. New rings go in. Transmissions get replaced. That is why Americans keep vehicles so long. The average age is nearly thirteen years, and many go far beyond that with routine upkeep. With maintenance, a truck that is twenty years old can still deliver the same range and near original power. The fuel tank did not shrink. Compression and fueling are serviceable systems. Keep the machine fit and it keeps carrying your life.Electric vehicles age as a countdown.EVs run on two clocks. First, the seasonal clock. In real cold, range drops because the cabin needs heat and the chemistry slows. Controlled tests around twenty degrees Fahrenheit found some EVs lost roughly forty percent of their range with the heater on. Reporting from recent cold snaps shows a 10 to 36 percent hit depending on model and use. Preheating and heat pumps help, but they don’t erase the penalty. When spring returns, most of that loss is temporary.Second, the chemical clock. Lithium ion packs fade slowly. Large fleet datasets put average loss near two percent per year, and many packs are usable for twelve to fifteen years in moderate climates. Most makers back this with eight year, 100,000 to 150,000 mile battery warranties that guarantee about seventy percent capacity within the term.Many owners, especially those who live in warm climates, will never hit a hard stop. Average degradation is slow and largely predictable, and mild winter penalties are manageable with preheating and heat pumps.A combustion engine is an open ended project. Repairs may stop penciling out at some point, but the owner has the choice.An EV is a timed performance. One day the battery will no longer support a trip across the state in the cold. You might be able to replace the pack, but depending on model and supply, it can take weeks or months. Unlike the secret cartel of the 1920s, today’s EV countdown isn’t an illegal conspiracy. It’s a design trade-off. But the choices nonetheless steer consumers toward the next sale.Some argue that mandating longevity and a ‘right to repair’ for a nascent technology like EVs would be a catastrophic mistake. It would saddle innovators with the burden of supporting old models, lock in today’s inferior battery chemistry,

Belief vs. Biology: Is a Sustainable Environment a Human Right?This week, the world’s highest court spoke. The United Nations’ top judges issued a sweeping opinion: nations might violate international law if they fail to act on climate change (Associated Press, July 23, 2025, Molly Quell and Mike Corder reported). The International Court of Justice (ICJ) opinion posited that a sustainable environment is a human right. And that nations harmed by climate change might be entitled to reparations. The ruling came in response to a campaign by Vanuatu, a small island nation slowly sinking beneath rising seas. The court’s word carries no binding weight. No country must follow. No law compels it. No court can enforce it. It levies no sanctions, no penalties, and no compliance demands. Though not binding, ICJ opinions shape international norms and give weight to future legal and diplomatic efforts.The ICJ argued that inaction threatening human health, safety, or survival could violate international law. It cements the idea that environmental protection is a human rights issue. Court President Yuji Iwasawa called climate change ‘an existential problem of planetary proportions.’The big idea is simple: if clean air, a livable climate, and ecological stability keep us alive and dignified, then they are human rights.…This ruling feels detached from reality. We need to dig deeper.So this week’s question: Is a sustainable environment a human right?We Have to Start at the Beginning. What is it to be “Human”?Before we decide whether a “sustainable environment” is a human right, we need to ask a deeper question.What is it to be human? A courtroom will tell you a human is a natural person, Homo sapiens, endowed with dignity and moral status. That’s just a shallow definition. Strip it away, and the reality is older and harder.A human isn’t a symbol or a legal category. A human is a biological creature. We arrive slick with blood. We hunt, dig, plant, and tear up what we need to live. We kill both plants and animals to survive. When our crops fail, we raid new ground. When danger comes, we fight or we flee. That instinct carried us through ice ages, famines, and wars. It still drives the hand that guides the harvester combine or closes a factory gate against cheaper imports. Biology never rests.No matter how much philosophy or law we try to layer on top, we can’t escape that fact.But we’re also unlike any other animal. We believe. We invent things no other animal can imagine: laws, borders, rights, money, marriage. Those beliefs let strangers cooperate by the millions. We write constitutions, build courts, and carve order out of chaos. But belief is fragile. When enough people stop believing, currencies collapse, treaties shatter, and thrones fall.These two forces share the same skull. Biology pushes us to survive at any cost. Belief tells us to restrain that push for the greater good. Sometimes they align. Often they clash. The International Court of Justice calls a “sustainable environment” a human right. That is a statement of belief, not a law of nature. It says humans must throttle back the internal engines that feed, warm, and defend us. On paper, the duty sounds noble. But in the flesh, it hits every nerve wired for survival. Humans haven’t been here long in Earth’s timeline. Yet we survived ice ages, famines, and wars by adapting and producing. By overwhelming problems with force. Not by scaling back.If the obligation demands we shrink the engines that power modern life, the conflict isn’t legal. It’s primal. We are watching belief walk into the ring with biology. The court asks us to trade proven tools of survival for a moral blueprint still waiting on bricks and rebar. That trade is not impossible, but it will not be easy, and biology will keep the score.So let’s test this idea against history, starting with the Marshall Plan.The Marshall PlanThe United States launched the Marshall Plan in 1948. After World War II, Europe lay in ruins. Factories were silent, currencies worthless, and cities hollowed out. Communist parties gained ground, and Washington saw the danger. We poured more than $13 billion, over $130 billion in today’s dollars, into Western Europe. The program remains a rare case study of large‑scale aid that actually worked: it restored stability, jump‑started shattered economies, and lowered the risk of renewed violence. But the motive was not ideology alone. The United States also needed solvent trading partners to buy American goods and help anchor a fledgling rules‑based order.Europe needed security; we needed industrial muscle. America cranked up production of steel, food, fuel, and machinery at a pace that could hold the continent together. The emissions were massive, but the overriding question was survival, not cleanliness. We had to build fast enough to keep Europe from falling apart.Look at the Netherlands. German fortifications and Allied bombing leveled whole districts of a city named The Hague and displaced more than 130,000 residents. After the war, America churned out the steel and cement that rebuilt the city, and the smokestacks poured emissions into the sky. Today, The Hague is the home of the same International Court of Justice that ruled a sustainable environment is a human right. Marshall Plan funds of about $1.1 billion, the highest per‑capita aid in Western Europe, paid for coal, cement, and specialized equipment to the Netherlands. We rebuilt ports, factories, and housing stock. Within a decade, the city had gone from “largest building site in Europe” to a functioning capital again.Would we generate more industrial and manufacturing capability to rebuild The Hague today, if necessary? Absolutely, yes. Even though the court that sits there ruled that the resulting emissions might violate international law. The Marshall Plan demonstrated what happens when biology takes precedence over belief.But of course, nothing is black and white. The ICJ opinion looks forward, not back. It doesn’t punish the Marshall Plan or any past policy. Let’s look at another story.The Right to Clean Air: Delhi, India, 2019In 2019, the air in Delhi turned poisonous. Schools shut down. Authorities grounded flights. Visibility dropped to near zero. Emergency rooms filled with children who couldn’t stop coughing. Construction halted. People wore masks long before COVID made it normal. The Indian government called it a public health emergency.This event was the predictable result of crop burning, unchecked industrial pollution, vehicle emissions, and seasonal weather patterns that trapped smog like a lid over the city. It happened every year, and every year, people died.Then, inside India, in one of the most polluted cities on Earth, belief overruled biology in court.Biology said: Adapt or suffer. People were coughing blood. Kids were developing lifelong respiratory damage. Entire populations were living in a toxic cloud, and from a purely biological standpoint, they should have either fled the region or accepted the toll as the cost of living.But they didn’t. Citizens sued.In 2021, the Indian Supreme Court ruled that the right to life included the right to clean air as a binding constitutional right. The court ordered governments to coordinate, enforce pollution controls, and protect public health. For India, this point wasn’t woke ideology. It was survival. No emissions cuts would fix it overnight, and Delhi still struggles with pollution, but the ruling forced governments to act. Environmental collapse became a human dignity violation, not a policy failure.Follow-up data show that the ruling was more than symbolic. Since the court’s directives and India’s National Clean Air Programme kicked in, Delhi’s air is about fifteen percent cleaner today. Still triple the safe limit, yes. But every fraction means fewer asthma attacks, fewer cardiac emergencies, and thousands of school days reclaimed each winter. Belief did not cleanse the air overnight. But it forced measurable gains. It’s proof that a legal idea tied to enforcement and money can bend biology in the right direction.But Now, the Brutal TruthEven if America reduced its emissions today, would climate change stop? No. Even if we cut all emissions to zero tomorrow, the planet wouldn’t stop warming. Not right away. Not for decades.Carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. What we’ve already emitted, along with China, India, Europe, and the rest, is already baked in. That legacy carbon keeps trapping heat, melting ice, and driving storms, no matter what we do now.And we aren’t the only emitter. We are currently responsible for about 13–15% of global emissions, depending on how you count. China emits more than double that. India’s emissions are rising fast. Developing nations, in total, now emit more than developed ones. And we are improving. We’ve cut emissions from electricity production by 35% since 2007.But even if the United States went to zero, the warming would continue. Sea levels would keep rising. Places like Vanuatu would still drown, just more slowly.That’s not an excuse for doing nothing. But we need to be honest.Cutting emissions isn’t a rescue plan. It’s a brake. It slows the damage. It might help future generations, but it doesn’t undo the past. And it doesn’t save the people standing in the water right now.If we’re serious about survival, emissions cuts aren’t enough. We need adaptation. We need infrastructure. And we need to stop pretending courtroom declarations can replace concrete, steel, and hard physical work.We survive by adapting, producing, and overwhelming problems with force, not by scaling back. Countries like Vanuatu need our help, not promises made in cities we rebuilt with industrial might that pumped emissions into the air.What’s It Going to Be?We began with a court opinion and a question of rights. We trekked through biology, belief, wartime industry, and Delhi’s burning air to see how those rights collide with

State Government Funding Is a ParadoxState governments do important work, but too often, they’re boxed in. If we want better roads, stronger schools, and healthier communities, we don’t need to cut federal support. We need to change how it works.Fragmented control kills leadership and accountability. Federal and state officials often share authority with different priorities. That overlap creates seams: delays, miscommunication, and gaps where problems fall through. Even an imperfect decision-maker, if clearly responsible, can move faster than a tangle of agencies working at cross purposes. Clarity beats complexity.Effective leadership means guidance, resourcing, results, and accountability. To orient in the right direction, there’s one mission, one leader, one line of authority. State power hasn’t been lost in a courtroom or an election. It’s been hollowed out by how the money works. Federal grants now pay for most of what states do, including roads, education, agriculture, healthcare, and law enforcement.That might sound like help. But if we look closer, we see that money comes with strings, and those strings are a leash. Voters elect one set of leaders. Then a second, unelected set inside federal agencies writes the rules through grant conditions, deadlines, and compliance forms. The people don’t know who to hold accountable.So this week we ask: What would it take to make state government matter again?After all, We the People was never meant to describe a bureaucracy. It was a declaration of self-government. Government of, by, and for the people. Not federal control, but local judgment. Not compliance. Purpose.The Problem: Compliance Masquerading as GovernanceEvery year, taxpayers send vast sums to Washington. That money returns to the states, but not freely. It comes with instructions: mandates, formulas, eligibility rules, and layers of accounting. States must apply for federal grants, and they don’t always win. In theory, it’s a partnership. In practice, it’s a transaction with terms that limit what states can do.State leaders don’t really govern under this model. They implement. Legislators may pass budgets, but terms are set in federal agencies. Local needs or voter demands don’t shape priorities. Instead, federal guidance, often years in advance, sets the conditions.This isn’t always malicious. The intent is to standardize, promote fairness, and ensure funds are spent wisely. But good intentions don’t guarantee good outcomes. Over time, this system rewards compliance over creativity, and risk avoidance over responsiveness. Innovation dies in the red tape.Federal power expands under the banner of help; state autonomy shrinks under the burden of compliance. What looks like governance is just administration. What looks like support is control.The Slow Death of Local JudgmentState governments must be able to set their own priorities, shaped by the needs of their communities. For a long time, they did. As examples, education, transportation, and agriculture were handled almost entirely at the state level. States had less money, but more authority.Before the 1960s, states ran their own public schools with minimal interference. That changed with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which expanded the federal role. The funding helped rural areas, but it came with strings. Testing mandates and performance targets now shape classroom policy, but national academic outcomes haven’t meaningfully improved, especially in reading and math.Transportation followed the same pattern. After the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, federal funding brought federal design standards, environmental review processes, and route constraints. Local projects came to depend on federal approval. States could no longer freely set priorities.Agriculture shifted, too. Local extension offices once worked directly with farmers to adapt to local conditions. That changed with the rise of USDA-administered programs. Now, farmers make decisions based on eligibility for crop insurance, conservation compliance, and commodity subsidies.One of the clearest effects? Instead of a variety of food crops, the Midwest now grows mostly two: corn and soybeans. Neither is meant for direct human consumption, but they’re the safest bet under federal policy. The heartland used to grow more vegetables; food for people, not for fuel or feed.To sum up: kids don’t run in PE because they’re prepping for federally required benchmarks, but math scores didn’t go up.Most roads got safer, but Wyoming got the Snow Chi Minh Trail. It’s I-80’s scenic southern route, built against local advice, now one of the windiest, snowiest, most shutdown-prone highways in America.And all our food now contains federally subsidized corn sugar. A 2016 study in JAMA Internal Medicine found that Americans whose diets were highest in subsidized calories had significantly higher rates of obesity, high blood sugar, and inflammation.None of this is inherently malicious. Some of it works. Some doesn’t. But the pattern is clear: as federal dollars expand standardization, local authority shrinks.The First Stand for States’ RightsThis tension isn’t new.June and July, 1798. The Fifth Congress of the United States, under President John Adams, passed a series of four laws that became known as the Alien and Sedition Acts. Congress claimed the laws were meant to restrict the activities of foreign residents and silence dangerous speech.In reality, they made it a crime to criticize the federal government. If an American wrote something unflattering about the president or Congress, they could be fined or jailed. This wasn’t a fringe proposal. They passed and became law. And people were actually arrested, including congressmen, newspaper editors, and publishers.Now imagine you’re a state leader: a governor, a legislator. You’ve just joined this new American experiment. The Constitution is still fresh. The idea of a federal government this powerful is still new. Suddenly, it starts to look a little too much like the old one you just fought a war to escape. The kind of federal control that reminds you why we added a Second Amendment in the first place. Even Thomas Jefferson, the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence, and James Madison, the principal author of the Constitution, started to worry. And they didn’t just stand by.Jefferson drafted the Kentucky Resolutions in October 1798 and quietly passed them to political allies George Nicholas and Wilson Cary Nicholas in Kentucky. The legislature adopted them on November 16.A few weeks later, Madison followed suit. He drafted the Virginia Resolutions in secret and worked behind the scenes to move them through the legislature. They passed on December 24, just in time for Christmas.Both men kept their involvement quiet. Jefferson was Vice President. Madison was still in Congress. They knew that open authorship could trigger political backlash, or even charges under the laws they were challenging.Their resolutions argued that the states had created the federal government, not the other way around, and therefore retained powers not explicitly given away. They claimed the states had both a right and a duty to declare federal laws unconstitutional if those laws went too far.The resolutions didn’t carry legal weight, but they planted a seed that grew into later doctrines of nullification and state sovereignty.They weren’t perfect. The resolutions were later cited by those pushing secession at the onset of the Civil War. But in the moment, they were a clear stand for state autonomy against federal overreach.Most states rejected the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions. But the ideas stuck, and they helped carry the next Democratic-Republican candidate, Thomas Jefferson, into the presidency. When Jefferson took office, he let the Alien and Sedition Acts expire and pardoned those who had been convicted under them. He even returned some of the fines. He erased the laws and made sure their damage didn’t linger.Today, federal control looks different. It doesn’t come through dramatic laws. It comes through funding and the rules that come with it.Some of that funding does real good: roads, hospitals, schools. But the more Washington funds, the more it dictates. And the more it dictates, the less space state leaders have to lead.Federal agencies don’t see day-to-day realities clearly. They’re too distant to make the right call, but they still write the rules.Maybe there’s a better way.A Better Way: Fund Goals, Not ControlWe need a better way to structure federal support. One that honors constitutional balance, improves real-world outcomes, and respects state autonomy. A model built on four principles: guidance, resourcing, results, and accountability.Guidance doesn’t mean silence. Congress should set national priorities through laws and budgets. But those broad directions often get buried in red tape, splintered into grant conditions, reporting mandates, and timelines divorced from local realities.Instead of prescribing how to act, guidance should focus on what we aim to achieve. That means setting shared outcomes, not universal methods, and trusting states, with their varied geographies, cultures, and capacities, to chart their own course. Federal oversight still matters, especially to protect civil rights and prevent abuse, but oversight is not the same as control.Federal agencies don’t need to vanish. They need to collaborate. Agencies and state leaders should jointly define goals and align their work to meet them. A federal office doesn’t have to report to the state, but it should recognize the state’s voice as legitimate within its borders.Missouri and Illinois might pursue different agricultural policies. California and Nevada may diverge on environmental rules. Different is okay. A joint state and federal agency team making progress and achieving the goals matters more than methods. The goals are the decisive element.…ResourcingGoals without resources

We Don’t Build a Country on Things We Can TouchNot really.We build it on belief.We believe a piece of paper can be worth a dollar. We believe strangers can govern us. We believe that if we follow the rules, justice and liberty will protect us. None of that is real, not like gravity or fire.But it works because enough of us believe. That’s what holds a nation together. Not armies. Not buildings. Not slogans. Belief. We think institutions hold society together. But it’s the other way around. We hold them together with belief. When nothing is real, belief gives institutions value. Today, we ask, if justice isn’t real, what is its market price?And I don’t mean metaphorically. I mean literally. What do Americans pay out of pocket to achieve the justice our Constitution promises?Money Isn’t RealMoney isn’t real. Not like gravity. Not like death. You can’t drop it on your foot. You can’t breathe it. It has no weight, no heat, no life.Its value depends on whether others believe in it.Even the bills in our wallets mean nothing. They’re just cotton paper and ink. And most money isn’t even physical. It’s digital, just zeroes and ones on a computer somewhere. If no one believes those numbers are worth anything, they aren’t.But when enough of us believe in them, they become real. When we go to the store to buy eggs and butter for breakfast, we might use a debit card for our purchase. We give the store some of our digital zeroes and ones for real eggs that we can eat. In this way, money facilitates society. It’s a fiction that organizes everything from breakfast to war. Again, money isn’t real. Even if we think it matters, that’s not enough. It only matters if others think it does. If we stop believing, our money is worthless.But because enough of us believe in it, belief itself creates the value. The belief makes a dollar worth a dollar, and not just what the cotton paper would suggest.This principle is society’s basis.In the same way that money only has value because other people believe it has value, our institutions only have value when enough of us believe in them.Our institutions aren’t real outside of our shared beliefs. They become real only because we act like they are. Religion, law, the stock market, America, and the Constitution exist only in the human mind, but once enough of us believe, we begin to shape the world.Our churches can only bring relief to the needy in our communities if enough of us believe not in the rituals, but in the responsibility to care for the needy. It’s not a physical reality. It’s a collective commitment. Shared belief only matters if it produces real outcomes. We measure the value of our churches in meals for the needy, addiction recovery programs, volunteer hours, and youth mentoring. If those disappear, the steeple means nothing.Our law can only bring order to society if enough of us believe it applies to all of us. If we don’t believe the law applies to all of us, order dissolves. We measure the effectiveness of law by disputes resolved without violence, access to and fair treatment in court, and access to counsel no matter your income. Belief is the foundation of our institutions. When enough of us share these beliefs, our institutions gain value.The Day George Washington Gave the Army BackWe think institutions hold society together. But it’s the other way around. We hold them together with belief.Scene: December 23, 1783. Annapolis, Maryland. The war is over. The Constitution doesn’t exist yet. George Washington entered Congress to resign his military commission.Everyone held their breath. Washington had led the Continental Army through eight brutal years of war. He was a war hero: beloved, feared, and trusted. If he wanted to become king, no one could stop him. Rumors of Washington’s intentions to give up power had already crossed the Atlantic. King George III reportedly told the American-born artist Benjamin West that if Washington gave up power, he would be the greatest man in the world.The American people loved him. He was a star. He didn’t have to give up power. He could be king. The night before the ceremony, they threw him a party. Washington “danced in every set, so that the ladies might have the pleasure of dancing with him, or as it has since been handsomely expressed, get a touch of him.”But instead of claiming fame and power, he gave it back to the people. America would owe allegiance to no king, and George Washington believed in America. He would not become king. The next day, he stood before the Confederation Congress, a weak, fragile institution barely holding the states together, and gave up command. To complete his tear-filled address, he said … “Having now finished the work assigned me, I retire from the great theatre of action... and take my leave of all the employments of public life….”He didn’t have to. He could have stayed in command.Washington’s single act gave birth to civilian rule. A weak Congress became legitimate, not because it inherently had power, but because one man believed it should. And once Washington believed, others followed. Washington relinquishing command transferred his belief to his fellow Americans.His belief in rule by the people gave value to the institution that became the Constitution. When James Madison and the other authors wrote the Constitution, they opened with an idea that didn’t exist in governance: ‘We the People of the United States.’ People stopped believing that the Almighty ordained rulers at birth because they came from a ruling family. They started believing people consent to governance for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The idea didn’t stop at the Potomac. It crossed the Atlantic. Less than ten years later, the French violently overthrew their monarchy. The streets of Paris ran red with blood. The Bastille fell. The people executed their king and queen. They refused to be subjects any longer. And it didn’t end in France. Across Europe, the old order trembled. Monarchies began to fall or reform. The divine right of kings gave way to constitutions, parliaments, and citizens.The transfer of Washington’s belief in rule by the people to the Constitution is sharply evident. Where a king might believe primarily in order, people believe in justice. A king might believe in rules and obedience. People believe in liberty, protest, and the right to bear arms against their rulers.His belief in rule by the people made the people believe in themselves. Washington’s act powerfully illustrates how shared belief underpins our institutions. When we believe in an idea, we build institutions. When enough of us share that belief, those institutions gain value.Of course, like money, we need to be able to measure this value. To measure justice, we need to pick something concrete and clear. We need measures that reflect real opportunity.Measuring Ideas Like Liberty and JusticeSome think tanks say they can measure the payoff of our belief in the Constitution’s promises. They call their metrics “market quotes” on the value we assign to liberty, justice, and other national ideals.Organizations like Freedom House publish global reports with titles like Freedom in the World. They attempt to track civil liberties and political rights across 195 countries. These reports have been cited for over 50 years. But we should reject every proposed measure that comes from outside sources instead of the people. The people are the governed, and only the governed can say whether they are free. An external judge of internal values falls short.Others suggest questionnaires, letting people rate their own experience. But surveys are subjective. If belief is real, it must leave a measurable trail. We must be able to measure our values like we measure the dollar.So, how would we measure ideas like liberty and justice? Let’s consider justice. Justice has a dual meaning. It is equal treatment under the law, and it is access to fair opportunity, no matter where you were born. Let’s consider two critical areas in society: housing and education. Why these two? Because where you live and what you learn directly determine the opportunities you have. Housing and education aren’t luxuries. They’re the foundation of fairness.Genius hides in poverty. A child born in a trailer or housing project must succeed by structure, not by luck. We need empirical data to measure whether we achieve our national goal of justice. If they are willing to work for it, a kid born in a trailer or project housing needs to be able to buy a house in a safe neighborhood with a good school for their children. To measure our ability to achieve this goal, we need a test. To pass it, America needs a healthy supply of homes for first-time homebuyers that cost only double the household median income. The median cost for a house in 1960 was $11,900, when the median income was $5,600. The median household income in 2023 was $80,610. So a fair entry point today would be a home under $160,000.Next, education. Any loan a low-income student must take to attend a public college is a measurable price of fairness. That price tells us how far short we fall of our national ideal.We need to track three numbers; each for first-time, full-time undergraduates from the bottom income quartile at in-state public colleges:First, the average net price after grants: tuition, fees, living costs, minus all aid. If that price rises faster than family income, the system is failing.Second, the average federal loan balance at graduation. If the poorest students graduate with the biggest debts, we have not achieved equal opportunity.Third, the three-year default rate on those loans. If defaults are rising, the ladder of opportunity is breaking.We BelieveWhen we believe in an idea, we build institutions. When enough of us share our beliefs, our institutions gain value.If money isn’t real…If liberty and justice aren’t real…If even America isn’t real...Then our common belief is everything.Led by George Washington, ‘We the P

The One Big Beautiful Bill: A PoemOur lives pass like shadows, despair takes root within us. We convince ourselves property is our natural right; that we can own the land here before us, remaining when we are gone. We guard it jealously, believing what we earn must remain ours alone. We charge our leaders with duty: to defend our lives, our liberty, our property. Yet to do so, we bury the unborn beneath our debt. One generation fades, another rises. The earth endures; we are dust, mere travelers through a brief season. We tax our days with worry and grief over troubles we might never see. We borrow endlessly, debts stretching beyond bearing; chains placed silently upon shoulders yet unborn. They never chose, never consented. The dead hold no rights over the living, yet we, the living, pledge away a future’s harvest, earnings of lives not yet begun. Theft, delayed. When we pass, soon enough, what do we gain from our toil if all we leave behind is burden? …We say we protect property by cutting taxes. So our question: Can we protect what we own today by stealing from the unborn?Debt Versus PropertyOur lives pass like shadows, and despair grows in us. We tax our days and wring our hands with worry and grief over what may never come. No matter how hard we labor, what we own eventually passes to others. We arrive with nothing, leave with nothing, and gain nothing from our labor that we will take with us.And it makes us worry.Our humanity creates this problem. Aware of our smallness and short time on earth, we gather what we can and hold tight. We want to keep it. Even when our children die, we carry the feed bucket anyway. The desire to keep what we’ve earned is as old as the first harvest, the first hands that grasped their work with pride.Out of this hope came the idea of property as a right; that no ruler, mob, or distant power could unjustly take what we’ve earned. This belief is freedom itself. If our labor belongs to us, we are free. If it can be seized, we are servants, whether our master is king, neighbor, or voting majority.We established laws to protect what we earn, rules that say no one’s wages, harvest, or home can be taken without true cause. Protecting property safeguards liberty.When we are free to keep what we work for, we can express our being. We can choose. We can grow from the effects of those choices. That is liberty.But liberty has a cost. To protect our property today, we’ve embraced a dangerous shortcut: borrowing from tomorrow. We say cutting taxes preserves our property, that government should take only what it must. But instead of paying the cost with our own labor, we mortgage the lives of our unborn children. We pass the bill forward to generations who have no voice.This is our tension. Our contradiction.We protect the property of the living by indebting those not yet born. We say no one should steal from us, but we steal from those who will follow, who have no vote, no voice, no choice.PromiseWe made a promise in property, and a promise in liberty. We believe a person is entitled to the fruits of their own labor. That what they build, they may keep. That no power, however great, may seize it without just cause. If this is not so, then no man is free.But this promise carries another. If a person is entitled to the fruits of their labor, then we cannot buy our comfort with another’s sweat. We cannot, by our actions, burden those who had no voice.Yet today we break both promises at once. We declare no one may take what’s ours, that no ruler or future vote may steal it. But in the same breath, we pledge the labor of unborn generations to pay our debts.This contradiction cannot stand. A nation cannot uphold a principle and violate it simultaneously. We cannot protect today’s harvest while mortgaging tomorrow’s.Seed corn is the harvest reserved for planting next year’s crop. Eat it today, and we survive, but guarantee starvation tomorrow.We must not consume our children’s seed corn or warm ourselves by burning their future fuel. Liberty isn’t free. It cannot be bought with debt or paid with the wages of those yet to be born and who cannot speak, vote, or stand for themselves.If we believe in keeping what we earn, we must guard it ourselves, paying our cost today. Spending our children’s money means standing for a principle even as we betray it.An America built on contradiction will not survive.Broken promises bleed forward, generation to generation, until only the dead remain to answer.The Dead’s Silent ClaimThe dead hold no claim over the living. The next generation owes nothing to the bones beneath the grass.Every age must choose for itself. Every generation must decide which burdens it will bear, which debts it will pay, and which work it will complete.We have erred. We claim to protect our property, to keep what is ours, to stand free. But we build our freedom on promises made with labor not our own. We insist future generations pay debts we refuse to shoulder today.This cannot stand. Freedom and bondage cannot coexist. We cannot guard our harvest by mortgaging someone else’s future. A nation cannot love liberty while chaining children who never chose their burden.We call ourselves defenders of property, but we steal from tomorrow. With one hand we raise our fists and shout ‘freedom!’ With the other, we tighten our chains.If reason has a law, it must be this:A generation cannot call itself free while binding the next.The dead have no rights over the living. Neither do we have any right to seize from those not yet born, to pile debt on backs that have yet to draw breath.We claim to guard what is ours, but we have promised away what was never ours to promise.Back to our question: Can we protect what we own today by stealing from the unborn?May God bless the United States of America, and grant us the courage to pay our debts today before we ask our children to pay what they do not owe.Music from #Uppbeat https://uppbeat.io/t/roo-walker/courage License code: DCL6TJYRATU8RIUS Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

When the Cure Doesn’t Serve the People, the System Fails the Constitutional TestPublic money, on its face, should yield public benefit. But every year, the federal government sends almost sixty billion dollars to universities like Harvard for research and development, most of it through the Department of Health and Human Services. A university takes federal funding, makes a breakthrough, and licenses it to a drug company. Nothing stops that company from setting a high price, because while the research was public, the product isn’t.Taxpayers fund the research, then get stuck paying again at the pharmacy. For many, the cost of needed treatment puts the remedy out of reach.…We drift because we forget our purpose. The Constitution names six national goals: Union, Justice, Domestic tranquility, Liberty, the common defense, and the general welfare. Every law and every dollar must serve at least one. When a policy misses the mark, it serves power, not people.The point of American governance is to serve the people. That philosophy is the reason we were born at war. Why we owe allegiance to no king. Why we have our uniquely structured Constitution.We lose sight of aligning our effort with these national goals. We need to get back on track. So today, we’re asking whether public funding for private research still serves the general welfare. Does it help all of us, or just a few? To answer that, we go back to the beginning, with a boy named Jimmy, a Boston hospital, and a small act of hope that changed cancer research.Jimmy’s Radio MiracleIn May 1948, a boy named Einar Gustafson wanted to watch his favorite baseball team, the Boston Braves. Einar had a problem: he didn’t have a television. But he had a bigger problem. He was in the Children’s Hospital ward in Boston, dying of leukemia.At the time, leukemia was effectively a death sentence. It had been first identified a hundred years earlier, but there was still no treatment, just blood transfusions and comfort care. Then came Dr. Sidney Farber.…Farber was a pathologist at Children’s Hospital. He’d grown tired of trying to learn why a patient didn’t respond to treatment after they had died and decided to try something new. He devised an experimental blood treatment he thought would block the food cancer cells needed to grow. His small study of just 16 children showed that 10 of them improved. The remissions didn’t last, but the fact that they happened at all was groundbreaking. It was the first time a chemical agent had ever worked against a non-solid tumor. Farber had introduced the world to chemotherapy, or now the more common term, just “chemo” treatment for cancer.That same year, Farber and a member of the Variety Children’s Charity were looking for a way to raise money for research. They needed a face for the cause. They found it in Einar, but to protect his identity, they called him “Jimmy.”…So they told his story on a national radio broadcast. They said Jimmy wanted a television to watch his Braves. They said cancer research needed support. The country responded. In just eight minutes of airtime, Americans sent in $231,000, more than three million in today’s dollars. The Jimmy Fund was born.That money launched the Children’s Cancer Research Foundation, which later became the Sidney Farber Cancer Center, and eventually the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, now Harvard University’s principal cancer research center.But Farber didn’t stop at the lab. He kept pressing Congress, explaining that major breakthroughs would take national funding and sustained effort. And Congress listened. Between 1957 and 1967, the National Cancer Institute’s budget more than tripled.…Then, in 1971, President Richard Nixon called on Congress for an extra $100 million, nearly $700 million today, to launch an intensive campaign to find a cure for cancer. Later that year, he signed the National Cancer Act, declared a formal War on Cancer, and pumped billions into cancer research nationwide. The act expanded the National Cancer Institute’s power, created new research centers, and marked the first time the federal government treated cancer as a coordinated national challenge.Since the increased 1971 national commitment, the American people have sent more than $1 trillion to universities for medical research. Progress slowly advances. This year, Harvard Medical tested an anti-tumor vaccine with promising results. …We could look at this story as either a success or a failure. A success in that private contributions provided seed money that helped create a medical breakthrough. We have made great advancements. A failure that significant public obligations showed diminishing returns. We have not cured cancer, and American life expectancies have not increased in the last 20 years. But that is too short-sighted. It’s not that we should rely only on private funding commitments, or that public funding for private institutions is irresponsible.Likewise, the crux of the matter is not that public funding is essential to make progress in research and development.The decisive point is: does our effort advance our progress towards achieving one or more of our national goals? Let's ask the hard questions clearly.Justice and the General WelfareCan we definitively say that giving universities money for research and development improves the general welfare? Can we say the effort advances justice?Certainly, national infrastructure benefits the whole country. Medical research depends on nationwide clinical trials, standardized data sharing, drug-approval pipelines, and outreach to rural and underserved areas. Only the federal government has the mandate and capacity to serve everyone. We don’t serve the general welfare if cures stay bottled up in Boston.But if we pay for research and development, and private companies turn the patents into private property and set prices that most families can’t afford, then the investment the American people made to advance justice and general welfare falls short.The prostate-cancer drug Xtandi is a classic example. Our money helped discover it, but the company that holds the license lists the therapy at more than one hundred twenty-nine thousand dollars a year. More than ten thousand dollars a month! Far beyond the reach of most American families.Patient advocates have multiple times asked the government to use its lawful authority to force wider access. NIH refused both times. In total, this authority has never been used in the forty-plus years it has existed. Let me say that again.In more than four decades, the federal government has never once stepped in to come to the aid of the American people to lower the price of a publicly funded drug.When a publicly funded drug ends up on the market at a price well beyond what the average American family can afford, the spending fails the general welfare test. It also fails the justice test, because wealth divides the rich and poor, urban and rural, insured and uninsured.Yes, inequality exists everywhere. But America was built to be different, on purpose.Part of the reason America exists is justice. Every state in the union agreed that if the people fund medical research, then a poor man and a rich man should have equal access to the benefit.So… it seems the way we structure public funding for cancer research at Harvard and other universities doesn’t align with our national goals.How Would We Change That?Right now, universities take our money in the form of federal research grants, but only part of that money goes to the actual research. The rest, sometimes nearly half, goes toward overhead. This includes administrative costs, building maintenance, and salaries for university staff who never touch the lab. At Harvard, that indirect rate is nearly 70 percent for research conducted on campus. The indirect rate for research conducted at other Harvard facilities is still high, 26 percent. So when the American people send a million dollars to find treatments for cancer, four hundred thousand might go toward the effort. The rest feeds the institution.Second, we have a problem with private ownership of public money. Since 1980, universities have been allowed to patent inventions made with public money. They can then license those patents, often exclusively, to drug companies. There’s no requirement that the final product be affordable or widely available. The government has the power to step in when the public is denied the benefit, but in over forty years, it has never once used it.Third, we admit where trials fall short. There are rules encouraging inclusion across race, gender, and geography, but enforcement is weak. Most trials still happen at elite hospitals. Rural Americans, tribal communities, and low-income patients are left out.Again, the structure of public funding for cancer research doesn’t align with our national goals. It doesn’t reflect justice or promote general welfare. A better system would start with a simple rule: 100 percent of public money goes to the research. If a university believes in the work, it can cover its own administrative costs. The taxpayer’s role is to fund discovery, not to subsidize building cafeterias and paying deans.Next, any treatment developed with public dollars must be subject to a universal access guarantee. That means open licenses for nonprofit hospitals and VA clinics, and a price ceiling for commercial sale. If a private company uses public research to build a profitable product, the benefit must reach the people who paid for it.Finally, we demand equity in clinical trials. That means conducting research across the country and proving that results apply to everyone. If we measure every dollar spent by whether it serves the people, across race, income, and geography, then we align with the Constitution.The effort isn’t intended to punish universities or end research. The effort intends to ensure that the commitment the American people make to justice and their general welfare serves the nation in ret

Misunderstanding Iran’s Ideological Nature Invites Endless ConflictAmerican B-2 bombers struck Iran’s uranium-enrichment sites at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. President Trump called the raid successful. Tehran vowed retaliation.Washington insists the raids sought to halt Iran’s march toward a nuclear weapon. No one in America supports a nuclear-armed Iran. Iran’s nuclear march is a real threat, but unilateral bombing rarely brings lasting stability; it breeds resentment and invites retaliation. We look at Iran and see a country, but that simplified lens is short-sighted. Iran acts like a cause as much as a state, and when we fight a cause, we forfeit the momentum every strategist tries to preserve. Because Iran sees itself both as a sovereign state and as a sacred mission, every rash strike feeds its cause; only disciplined patience denies its advantage.Iran cannot defeat us militarily, but it doesn’t need to. It only needs to provoke us into endless conflict. It conducted limited strikes in response, but Tehran’s answer may come months or years from now; Iran has a long memory. When they do respond, we must act with disciplined patience. If they close the Strait of Hormuz, how do we respond? If a proxy kills US troops? If a cyber-strike paralyzes East Coast shipping overnight?Disciplined.Patience.It’s not to say that we can’t act with appropriate force. But we won’t achieve national objectives by force alone.To grasp why Iran acts like a cause, not just a country, we must start long before the revolution. Before the Shah. Before the CIA. We start with Persia; not a place on the map, but an idea of moral kingship and enduring memory. We start with the ruler who first fused power and reverence: Cyrus the Great.Cyrus the Great and the Authority to BelieveAround 700 BC, a Hebrew prophet named Isaiah wrote a decree the Almighty spoke through him. He claimed that a foreign ruler, at the time unborn and unknown, would one day subdue nations and harness kings. He would free a captive people and rebuild their ruined city. The text named him directly: Cyrus. It was remarkable. No other foreigner is singled out like that in the Hebrew texts. And certainly not someone who wouldn’t be born for another 150 years.We don’t know exactly how the name made it into the scrolls. But we do know what happened next.In 539 BC, Cyrus the Great of Persia conquered Babylon, in what is now southern Iraq. At the time, Babylon was the most powerful city in the world. Its walls were legendary. Its temples massive. Its armies feared.But Cyrus didn’t need to lay siege to the city. The priests of Babylon opened the gates. Cyrus walked in without bloodshed, declared himself king, and set the captives free, including the Jewish people, who had been exiled there for 70 years.Rather than erase Babylonian culture, Cyrus did something rare: he preserved it. He didn’t burn the temples. He rebuilt them. He didn’t force anyone to worship his gods. Instead, he issued a decree, now carved into clay and housed in the British Museum. He declared that all people under his rule could worship freely, in their own languages, in their own lands. Some scholars call it the first human rights charter in recorded history. In 1971, the Shah of Iran presented a replica of the Cyrus Cylinder to the United Nations. The artifact is still on display at UN headquarters in New York, a 2,500-year-old document that helped shape modern human rights in governance.Cyrus wielded political power through a moral framework. He legitimized his rule through divine-sanctioned tolerance, not fear.Cyrus wasn’t just a conqueror. He was a strategist. He believed the Almighty gave him authority over the known world. He ruled through force when necessary, but through legitimacy whenever possible. His empire didn’t just stretch across continents. It was stitched together through tolerance, diplomacy, and something resembling vision.Iran, once Persia, still draws from that heritage. Iran sees itself as a nation, but also an idea. One that mixes governance with belief.Today’s Iran is built on an entirely different religion, but its political structure echoes the same fusion of moral authority and statecraft. Its constitution invokes divine authority. The Supreme Leader governs people both inside and outside the borders of Iran through law and their proclamation of truth.So when we in America look at Iran and see only a hostile government, we miss the deeper architecture. Iran doesn’t see itself as just a state. It’s a symbol backed by thousands of years of belief that statehood and faith are separate but the same.That fusion between divine purpose and political authority continues to shape revolution in Iran. Including the one we started. The Day Democracy Died in TehranIn 1953, Mohammad Mossadegh was the Prime Minister of Iran. He was elected by parliament, immensely popular, and bold. Mossadegh nationalized Iran’s oil, kicked out the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP), and demanded that Iranians control their own resources.London and Washington panicked. Together, MI6 and the CIA launched a covert operation, code-named Operation Ajax, to remove Mossadegh from power.The plan was old-school regime change. We bribed newspapers and paid thugs to stage fake riots. They worked with military officers loyal to the Shah, who had fled the country during the unrest. After just a few chaotic days, Mossadegh was arrested. The Shah returned in triumph, flown back like a king in exile.To the West, the coup restored order, but many Iranians strongly objected.They watched as Britain and America overthrew their democratically elected leader with foreign cash and royal approval. They saw that the Shah didn’t stand for Iran; he stood for Britain and America. And even though the oil kept flowing, anger simmered.…Fast forward 10 years.In 1963, Iran’s Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, launched what he called the White Revolution. This initiative included land reform, women’s voting rights, and Western-style law. On paper, it looked modern. In practice, to many, it looked like Western intrusion dressed as reform.A man named Ruhollah Khomeini objected to the Western influence. Before he was the face of a revolution, Khomeini was just a cleric with a sharp tongue and a sharper pen. In Khomeini’s eyes, the White Revolution looked like surrender.He saw the reforms as a betrayal, not just of Islam, but of Iran itself. The Shah wasn’t acting alone. American advisors were everywhere. Foreign capital was reshaping Tehran. And then came the final insult: a law granting US military personnel full legal immunity inside Iran. If an American soldier shot an Iranian in the street, Khomeini warned, no court in the country could touch him.He stood in the pulpit and thundered:“They have reduced the Iranian people to a level lower than that of an American dog.”The Shah’s government didn’t take long to respond. In 1964, they kicked Khomeini out. First to Turkey. Then to Iraq. Eventually, to a small village outside Paris. But exile didn’t silence him. …From abroad, Khomeini recorded sermons and manifestos onto cassette tapes. Those tapes were smuggled into Iran by the thousands, hidden in books, tucked into luggage, passed hand-to-hand in marketplaces and mosques. Khomeini didn’t need a militia. He had a message.That message was simple: the Shah wasn’t just corrupt. He was illegitimate. Real authority, Khomeini argued, didn’t come from votes or tanks. It came from God and from those trained to interpret His law. This wasn’t just theology. In Shia Islam, suffering for truth isn’t failure. In exile, Khomeini turned his theology into a blueprint. Velayat-e Faqih: Guardianship by the Islamic jurist. In other words, rule by the clergy over the state. Not just spiritual guidance. Political rule, or an Islamic government backed by divine logic and revolutionary will. The state was built to absorb punishment and convert it into legitimacy.Iran’s people are not all the same. They hold a wide range of political, cultural, and religious beliefs, many of which differ sharply from the views of their government.But by the time Khomeini returned to Iran in 1979, millions were ready to receive him not as a man but as a symbol. The monarchy collapsed. The revolution didn’t just change the regime; it changed the idea of Iran itself.Persia became Iran. Cyrus became Khomeini. But the idea stayed the same. Iran sees itself as a country of borders, and as a religion inside and outside of them. None of this excuses Iran’s actions. The regime sponsors terror, represses its people, and destabilizes the region. But that’s exactly why misunderstanding it is so dangerous. The more crudely we respond, the more clearly we play the part they have written for us.So we return to our question:Is it possible to fight Iran without fighting Islam? The Cart Before the HorseIran’s current political structure directly inherits the ancient Persian fusion of divine authority with state governance embodied by Cyrus the Great. Cyrus legitimized his rule by weaving morality, tolerance, and religious sanction. These qualities solidified Persian power for centuries. Modern Iran mirrors this model: its leaders invoke spiritual legitimacy to justify actions inside and outside their borders. This isn’t politics; it is an expression of their identity. So…maybe we’re still asking the wrong question. Instead of asking whether we can fight Iran without fighting Islam, the real question is whether we NEED to.We are not under siege. Iran is not landing troops on our shores or circling bombers over our cities. Economically, militarily, and geographically, we hold every advantage. No clock is running out. On Saturday, we chose urgency over patient discipline; now we must step back and reclaim that discipline.We are committed to Israel, but Israel is not defenseless. They are not blameless in choosing to escalate. We don’t have to choose to let Israel drag us into a shooting war.

The SparkThis week, outrage erupted after law enforcement used force against protesters opposing ICE raids in Los Angeles and other cities. We shouldn’t be surprised by any of it. For anyone paying attention, there’s already a blueprint. The administration intends to restore their version of order.Then came the political theater. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez condemned the violence. Governor Gavin Newsom echoed her. Senator Alex Padilla got thrown out of a meeting. Senator Bernie Sanders warned that violent protest, no matter how passionate, won’t achieve its goals.Let’s be clear. The right to PEACEFUL protest is a core feature of American identity. Most of these protests were exactly that: peaceful. But not all. Alongside them, we saw looting and destruction of public and private property. We don’t argue whether Americans have the right to protest. We argue over what kind of protest is justified, and when. Just as we have a right to liberty and free expression, we have a right to domestic tranquility and order.On one hand, government exists, in part, to protect our property. That’s one of its most basic roles. It’s part of why we consent to be governed in the first place. When government fails to protect what’s ours, we’re left with two choices. We can choose to surrender that property to someone else, or defend it ourselves, with the right to bear arms secured by the Second Amendment.And on the other hand, Americans also have the right to protest their government. Even undocumented immigrants are guaranteed due process under the Fifth Amendment. When Americans believe that right is being denied, they protest. That impulse isn’t lawless. It’s constitutional.Now here’s the harder truth. Whether we admit it or not, and even if it didn’t turn out the way we thought, the American people voted for this. The plan wasn’t hidden. It was published, promoted, and ultimately activated by the ballot box.The TinderThe protests and response to them were the spark. But the fuel for the fire was already stacked.Project 2025, also called Mandate for Leadership, The Conservative Promise, wasn’t just a 900-page policy recommendation. It was a blueprint. A deliberate, detailed plan to realign American policy with parts of the Constitution that some favor over others.In order to achieve its goals, Project 2025 recommended concentrating power in the executive branch, dismantling major federal agencies, and purging the civil service of those labeled “disloyal.” Gaining consensus and working through Congress was too slow a process. It relies too much on compromise. Because of this approach, some say Project 2025 was a plan to bring a king to America.As a couple of examples from the document, page 142 recommended US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, specifically Enforcement and Removal Operations, be designated the lead agency for civil immigration enforcement. Not just at the border, but anywhere in the country. On the same page, Project 2025 further recommended that ICE officers act both with and without a warrant to arrest immigrants.What’s more, page 137 called on the Federal Emergency Management Agency to withhold funding from any state, city, or private organization that isn’t fully aligned with federal immigration enforcement. In other words, access to disaster aid depends on loyalty.Project 2025 isn’t law, but it’s not fiction either. It attempted to derive some legitimacy by using constitutional language as an outline. Unfortunately, it cherry-picks pieces of the language. Specifically, the plan aligns itself with only two of our six national goals: to provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare.The others, including union, justice, order (or domestic tranquility), and liberty, are notably missing from the plan.Perhaps the authors of Project 2025 don’t believe conservatives have a constitutional duty to pursue justice and liberty. But they do. That duty isn’t partisan. It’s foundational to America.Even if we find the goals of Project 2025 too narrow, we shouldn’t all waste all of our precious time and effort shouting at a fire that’s already burning. Our effort is too limited, too valuable. Project 2025 recognized that there are small windows, only fleeting moments, when we have both the political consensus and the public will to achieve progress. Moments of consensus don’t last. And when they come, we have to be ready. Instead of only raging against the machine, we should be working to build something better.So…if we are dissatisfied with Project 2025, is political theater going to fix it? While cars and dumpsters are burning in protests in Los Angeles and other cities across America, who’s writing Project 2029?The LogsEvery fire needs more than a spark and tinder. If we want it to last, we need logs that hold the heat and maintain the flame.Project 2025 won’t last. Not because it’s poorly organized, but because it’s incomplete. It’s shallow and empty. It aligns itself with only two of the six national goals. We will not achieve defense or general welfare without liberty. And there can be no lasting order without justice.We don’t need a plan that burns fast and fades. We need purpose with endurance. It doesn’t matter whether we call it Project 2029 or something else entirely. What matters is our decisive effort and a focus, or framework, to guide it.Every part of that framework must tie back to the Constitution’s six national goals. Union. Justice. Domestic tranquility, or order. Liberty. The common defense. The general welfare.Every government action, to include every law, every dollar spent, every policy, should be traceable to at least one of those six. If we can’t do that, the action doesn’t belong.Let’s take two examples: climate change spending and first-time homebuyer housing, and ask what it looks like to govern with that kind of clarity.Climate Change SpendingWe can debate the causes and consequences of climate change, but we can’t debate the fact that it’s happening. Some argue that human activity, especially the burning of fossil fuels, is the primary driver. They point to rising greenhouse gas concentrations. Others believe that natural forces, like volcanic eruptions and wildfires, play a larger role.The 2022 National Security Strategy claimed that of all our challenges, “climate change is the greatest and potentially existential for all nations.” As of that year, three laws obligated the American people to spend more than $500 billion on climate technology and clean energy. An issue of that magnitude should pass our constitutional check with ease. Let’s give it a test.…First, does climate change spending directly tie to union?We could argue that it brings Americans together around shared infrastructure, energy resilience, or the protection of common resources. But even if we fail to stop climate change, no state is going to secede from the union because of rising temperatures. So while the effort may involve shared concerns, it doesn’t directly tie to the preservation of union in the constitutional sense.…Second, does climate change spending directly affect justice?Justice is both equal protection under law and access to opportunity, especially for the needy, for rural families, for children growing up in communities with no escape from hardship. If climate policy helps kids who grow up in trailers or in the projects, it can serve justice.But climate spending doesn’t do that. It funds industry, infrastructure, and research, much of which is concentrated in business interests, urban centers, or corporate contracts. If justice is the goal, the spending should begin with those who have the least power to adapt, the fewest resources to rebuild, and the most to lose. So while the effort may possibly benefit the needy in the long run, it doesn’t directly tie to justice for Americans.…Third, does climate change spending directly affect domestic tranquility, or what we might call order?Climate change drives rising utility costs, unpredictable harvests, and the slow loss of reliable seasons. These all create strain beneath the surface. But does that reach the level of threatening national order?Most Americans aren’t protesting in the streets over the weather. They’re protesting over wages, housing, policing, and rights. Climate instability may be a stress multiplier, but it isn’t the source of disorder. And climate spending, as it exists today, doesn’t restore trust in the system or bring peace to our communities.So while climate change may contribute to unrest in subtle ways, the spending itself does not directly preserve domestic tranquility.…Fourth, does climate change spending directly support liberty?Liberty is the freedom to make choices about how we live and work. It also means limiting the reach of government into the private lives of citizens. When climate spending leads to regulation, such as banning gas appliances, restricting travel, or mandating energy sources, it can start to feel less like liberty and more like control.Even when well-intentioned, we must scrutinize any policy that narrows individual freedom in the name of collective benefit. If liberty is the goal, climate policy should expand options, not limit them. It should make clean energy cheaper, not mandate it. It should protect the individual, not penalize the outlier.So while some climate investments might indirectly support liberty through innovation or energy independence, the broader trend moves toward restriction. And restriction is not liberty.…Fifth, does climate change spending directly support the common defense?Climate change has been framed as a national security threat, and in a sense, that is true. Rising sea levels can threaten naval bases. Drought and food shortages can destabilize foreign regions, creating migration pressures and conflict. Natural disasters can strain military logistics at home.But does climate change spending actually strengthen our ability to defend the nation?The funds could

We Say We Believe in Justice. But We’ve Stopped Asking What That Actually Means.Some say it means equality. Others, freedom. Some try to manage it with policy. Others trust the market to sort it out. We argue. We legislate. We campaign.But half of working American families still need government help just to survive.That’s not justice. That’s a national failure. We’ve normalized, excused, and even celebrated this failure in partisan terms. We’ve hidden the truth. We don’t lack resources. We lack clarity and intent. We don’t lack compassion. We lack consensus.This isn’t about left or right. It’s about whether we still pursue the goal that founded America: justice, not for the powerful, not for the loudest voices, but for the people.Justice for the kid in the trailer or the projects. Justice for the single mom clocking in before sunrise. Justice not through handouts, but through wages. Through dignity. Through the freedom to work and build a life.This piece asks a hard question: If none of our political tribes is delivering justice, how do we intend to?And we’ll offer a real answer. Not another slogan. Not another tax. Not another mandate. A real answer, starting from a truth too many have forgotten: we will only achieve justice by building consensus.It’s a Truth as Old as Humanity Itself We take the advantages we’re given instead of giving them away. We don’t do it out of malice. We do it for survival. Over time, that instinct shapes the systems we build. They bend toward imbalance, not because someone planned it, but because some people find the edges faster than others. And once they do, it’s not in our nature to let them go.This is why kids born in mansions go to better schools than kids born in trailers or projects. They get better doctors, better nutrition, safer neighborhoods, and more chances. A parent in Atherton, California, zip code 94027, median home about $7.9 million, can hire a private SAT tutor at two-hundred dollars an hour.Their kids earn top scores and reach elite schools.A kid in a single-wide works full-time while going to school full-time, if they go to school at all. And this isn’t just one zip code in California. It’s true across America. Books written three thousand years ago ask: Should we race horses in fields of rocks? We’d cripple the horses. Should we plow the sea with a tractor? We’d flood the engine and ruin the machine.The questions sound absurd. Yet the same book then asks why we build systems that claim to offer opportunity while stacking the odds against those who need it most.It’s an ancient question: How do we achieve justice?The question is even more urgent today in America. Most nations were not founded to achieve justice. Nations rose to consolidate power, defend land, unify faiths, or escape colonial rule.But America, born at war, is different. We are unique in putting justice at the heart of our identity. Our Constitution says it plainly: “We the People… in order to establish justice… do ordain and establish this Constitution (as the foundation) for the United States of America.”Simply put, America was founded on the idea that a kid in a trailer should have the same chance as a kid in a mansion. That idea is justice.America set out six national goals. The first, and most important, is justice. Justice is the end of government, the reason it exists.We can’t claim to be conservatives, progressives, or even Americans if we ignore this truth. Justice isn’t a side goal. It’s the point.Will Capitalism Achieve Justice?America’s financial system is capitalist. It isn’t good or bad. It’s a tool. Capitalism drives growth, sparks innovation, and lifts our standard of living. It meets consumer demand better than any system we’ve tried.The problems we saw earlier aren’t capitalism’s fault. They happen when markets run without enough guidance to meet society’s needs. Markets respond to incentives, not morality. People act in their self-interest. Government exists to protect people’s rights and property, and to ensure the rules serve everyone.Because markets do not guarantee justice, government must work within markets to set conditions that create justice. When the system ignores the worker, the worker gains nothing from the system.We work for our bread. If the financial system forgets those who sweat for that bread, we end up with no bread at all.Or, more accurately than no bread, we end up with half of American families with parents who go to work and still need handouts from their fellow American taxpayers, according to a US Department of Health and Human Services analysis from 2023. That is the reality of America today. Some tout the programs as federal programs that slash poverty. That’s a lie.If half of working American families need government support to survive, that isn’t success. It’s proof we’ve failed to achieve our nation’s primary goal. But some celebrate this failure and keep the handouts coming.It’s not the fault of those families. They are working families. But because we have failed to set conditions that allow American families to earn their bread, they cannot earn enough without government assistance.So… America was founded to establish justice, and on the freedom to pursue self-interest and protect property. Bring those two ideas together, and a simple truth follows:Every American, whether they grow up in a mansion or a trailer, must have a real chance to work, earn, and shape a life of their choosing. That is the promise of a just society.If It Were Easy to Achieve Justice, We Would Already Have Done SoRepublicans call for relying on the markets. But we will not achieve justice by relying only on the free market. Markets are great at many things: allocating resources, driving innovation, rewarding efficiency. But markets chase profit, not fairness. Justice requires intention and design. We must look beyond what markets reward, and instead focus on what an American family needs: food on the table and heat in the house through wages: real wages, not handouts.Some think they’re kings, but we will not achieve justice through Executive Orders. They’re fleeting. They don’t last. They don’t demonstrate leadership. One president signs them in; the next one signs them out. Back and forth, election after election, no stability. We can’t build justice on paperwork that disappears with the next election.Those who believe in government call for more rules. But we will not achieve justice through unfunded mandates. Mandates like raising the federal minimum wage sound righteous on paper. They promise higher wages, safer workplaces, better benefits. But government mandates arrive without resources to make them work. Small businesses run on tight margins. If we demand higher wages without helping businesses raise revenue, we ask them to defy economic gravity. When they can’t, they fail. We must give small businesses tools to succeed, even as we lift workers.Socialists call to tax the wealthy. But we will not achieve justice through taxes. Taxes are necessary. They pay for roads, schools, defense, and the core functions of government. But if our strategy for justice starts and ends with taxing the wealthy, we’ll wait forever. Even if we taxed billionaires out of existence, most of that money would vanish into bureaucracy long before reaching a struggling family. Government-funded bureaucracy spends money managing poverty, not ending it.Democrats call for social equality. But we will not achieve justice by dying on the hill of democracy. Justice does not mean equality. Some people will always earn more. Some will work longer hours, take greater risks, build businesses, invent tools, or manage others. And some will simply be luckier. That’s liberty. Not something to erase, but something to extend. We can’t reduce the advantages of the successful. Instead, we must expand the conditions that created their success, so others can follow the same path.So… how will we achieve justice?Focus on the GoalWe will only achieve justice through consensus. We are a nation of competing interests. Inside one state, many might agree. But across coastal states, the Great Plains, the mountains, and the Mississippi River basin, needs differ.A policy that works in San Francisco might break a family business in rural Nebraska. A rule written for Wall Street might choke a rancher in Montana. One size does not fit fifty states.Justice isn’t about uniformity; it’s about legitimacy. That means people across regions, backgrounds, and ideologies must see themselves in the outcome. We don’t need to erase differences. We need to build common ground.And the place to begin is with agreement. Agreement on a goal. A simple, measurable idea most Americans still believe in: if you work, you should be able to provide for yourself and your family without government help.It’s not a partisan idea. It’s a promise of justice. It’s the primary goal of America.To fulfill it, we need a system that rewards employers for paying livable wages, not one that punishes workers with dependency when the market fails them.So, how do we build that consensus? Business Taxes in America are Low. But They’re Not Low EnoughDemocrats say the answer to poverty is raising taxes to fund the government. They rage against cutting business taxes.Here’s the truth: business taxes in America are low. But they’re not low enough. Not low enough for businesses that actually help us achieve our national goals.We need real prosperity for working Americans. Not temporary patches, not programs that hide failure with handouts, and not policies that pile debt onto our children. If that’s the goal, then we must build a system that rewards the right behavior.Consider the champion of Democratic leadership: President Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR’s success didn’t come from control. He aligned incentives for businesses and individuals alike. He showed how the right incentives could rally a nation. And in doing so, he set a persuasive precedent for incentivized wage pol

Americans Struggle Today with how Openly our Leaders Should Express Their FaithI had a buddy growing up. His name was Emmett.He wasn’t a classmate. He was much older than I was. One of those men from the Greatest Generation who made time for a kid who asked too many questions.Few of us really know the stories of most of the people in our lives. And until I interviewed him for a Junior High grammar class assignment for Mrs. Adams, all I knew about Emmett was that he greeted me every Sunday in my small country church with a smile on his face.I knew some details before the interview. Emmett Donovan. Born in Monroe County, Missouri. Carpenter by trade. Long-time deacon at the First Baptist Church. He had a second refrigerator in his garage where his lifelong bride, Hazel, let him keep his fishing worms. I learned a lot about Emmett in that interview. He was the only kid from Monroe County to board a boat in England on June 4th, 1944, bound for Normandy to fight Nazi Germany. The weather across the channel was dicey. The operation delayed a day because of it, but there were too many soldiers to unload the boats. It would have taken too long. They had to stay an extra day on the boats, waiting. They played cards. Wrote letters. Tried to keep their spirits high. Emmett had married Hazel in 1937. She was on his mind, and he on hers.The weather cleared up enough to try the assault on June 6. At 2300 hours on June 5, paratroopers started taking off from their bases in England. At midnight, June 6, the Allied Fleet pushed off. Five hours later, dawn bled into gray.In the darkness just before dawn, the men had spent almost a full two days aboard the ships. The rough English Channel tossed the vessels to and fro. Many men were ill from seasickness and nerves. They knew they would not all survive and return home to America.Sunrise in Normandy, France, came at 5:46 AM local time that day. From the boats, the men could see a faint outline of where they were going, but no clear view of what awaited them. Landing craft carrying the first wave launched from the larger vessels about seven to 12 miles offshore. From aboard these landing craft, the faint outline of the coast was visible in the near dawn light. But by 0530, the Germans absolutely knew something big was happening. Just after midnight, over 13,000 US and British paratroopers had dropped behind enemy lines. German units in Normandy were engaging paratroopers. German radios reported landings and firefights throughout the night.Allied bombers, fighters, and gliders filled the night sky, lit by the flicker of explosions below.Now, in the early morning, German radar and lookouts tracked an armada of ships. German defenses saw glimpses of the landing craft through the rough sea chop and the fog. Not every landing craft made it to shore.The sea was violent that morning. The swells were high. Beach obstacles and mines sank some boats. Artillery hit others before they ever touched sand. Engines failed. Men jumped into water over their heads and drowned under the weight of their packs. All under heavy German fire.The obstacles and fires damaged, misguided, or destroyed hundreds of landing craft before they could reach their designated beaches. Omaha was the worst of the five landing zones. Nearly half the tanks sank before firing a shot. Some landing craft circled for too long, disoriented in smoke and chaos, and ran aground.Emmett’s boat made it. But that didn’t mean it went well.He jumped into the water, rifle held high, and slowly waded in heavy water toward the beach. On his way toward his objective, Emmett stopped to provide first aid to a fallen soldier on the beach. It was bad. He told me he tried to help the soldier put himself back together. But with bullets cracking around him, there wasn’t much he could do. Allied forces paid a high price. Two-thirds of some initial landing units suffered casualties. Company A of the 116th Infantry Regiment, part of the 29th Division, hit Omaha Beach first. In just the first hour, 96% became casualties, a grim testament to the brutality of that morning.Emmett would achieve his objective. Behind him, wave after wave of Allied troops poured onto the beaches, clawing out a foothold, marking the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany.As a reward, Emmett had the pleasure of going on to fight at the Battle of the Bulge. To the credit of many, America would help defeat fascism and liberate Europe from Nazi Germany. After the war, Emmett returned home to his small country town. He and Hazel would stay married for 61 years. They had two sons and three grandchildren. She passed away when he was 85. He would survive her for 12 more years.Many years later, as a young boy, I only saw him act with grace and dignity. He was always quick with a smile and a handshake.He didn’t talk about politics or pride. Had you not known and asked about his experience, he would not have told you. You would have assumed he had lived his entire life in a little Missouri town.He had a quiet faith. He was a proud member of his congregation, but he didn’t talk much about it.I’ve never forgotten that interview. I was just a Junior High student. And like most kids, I didn’t ask enough of the right questions. He remembered the beach vividly. The chaos. The noise. The man he tried to help.But if I could sit with Emmett again today, I’d ask about the hours before that.What was he thinking about on the boat? Did he write a letter to Hazel? Did he stare out at the gray horizon, wondering if he would see her again? I’ll never know. But knowing him later in life, I believe he carried something more than fear. Duty, maybe. The quiet strength of his generation.I believe a strong component of his grace and dignity came from his faith. Emmett and Hazel weren’t the only Americans praying that day.President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s June 6th Address1944 was a time of hand-wringing across the country. We worried about our nation’s sons and daughters fighting in Europe and the Pacific. When people worry, they turn to the Almighty. When they turn to the Almighty, they pray. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s calendar on June 6, 1944, detailed only one appointment. Invasion Day. The FDR Library says that “During the tense early hours of the invasion, FDR monitored reports from the front. That evening, he delivered a statement to the American people. It took the form of a prayer, which he read on national radio.”FDR sought to offer the nation strength with a heartfelt address.“My fellow Americans: Last night, when I spoke with you about the fall of Rome, I knew at that moment that troops of the United States and our allies were crossing the Channel in another and greater operation. It has come to pass with success thus far.And so, in this poignant hour, I ask you to join with me in prayer:Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.They will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.They will be sore tried, by night and by day, without rest-until the victory is won. The darkness will be rent by noise and flame. Men's souls will be shaken with the violences of war.For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and good will among all Thy people. They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home.Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.And for us at home -- fathers, mothers, children, wives, sisters, and brothers of brave men overseas -- whose thoughts and prayers are ever with them--help us, Almighty God, to rededicate ourselves in renewed faith in Thee in this hour of great sacrifice.Many people have urged that I call the Nation into a single day of special prayer. But because the road is long and the desire is great, I ask that our people devote themselves in a continuance of prayer. As we rise to each new day, and again when each day is spent, let words of prayer be on our lips, invoking Thy help to our efforts.Give us strength, too -- strength in our daily tasks, to redouble the contributions we make in the physical and the material support of our armed forces.And let our hearts be stout, to wait out the long travail, to bear sorrows that may come, to impart our courage unto our sons wheresoever they may be.And, O Lord, give us Faith. Give us Faith in Thee; Faith in our sons; Faith in each other; Faith in our united crusade. Let not the keenness of our spirit ever be dulled. Let not the impacts of temporary events, of temporal matters of but fleeting moment let not these deter us in our unconquerable purpose.With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogancies. Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister Nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men. And a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil.Thy will be done, Almighty God.Amen.”Now we are ready for our question. If a national leader leads a prayer event, is that a violation of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause? Specifically, the part that says the government can’t establish a religion?Thomas Jefferson: A Case Study in the Tension Between Personal Faith and Public OfficeThomas Jefferson wa

June 21, 1788. New Hampshire becomes the ninth state to ratify the Constitution, activating the new government and binding America to a single compact.Our Republic is dedicated to the premise that we are created equal. We fought a war to escape a king. We ratified a Constitution to rule ourselves. The Constitution is a contract between states. We can sum up the foundational basis of that contract in one word…Trust.Each sovereign state pledges to certify its vote and accept the certifications of every other. If that handshake fails, the Union fails.Trust demands proof. How do we make every voter, every state official, and every member of Congress accept the tally as fact?January 6, 2021Tear gas. Pepper spray. Flashbang grenades. The cameras didn’t miss a moment. Two thousand protesters from nearly every state turned into rioters. The floor of the House emptied. Staff members grabbed the mahogany boxes that, since 1877, have held the certified electoral votes of each state. They ran.The count stopped.Photojournalist and Marine veteran Chris Jones at the Capitol Building that day observed that “The looks in people’s eyes seemed religious to me, not political. So it was important for me to use that iconography in my pictures, to talk about how people do things for their faith that they wouldn’t do for their politics.”For most Americans, the counting of votes had always been a formality. It wasn’t exciting. It wasn’t dramatic. It was supposed to be boring. That’s the point of a stable system.But not on January 6.The nation watched in horror as the institution of the American democratic Republic lost trust in itself. That day, the count became the crisis. Some stormed the Capitol because they believed the tally was rigged. Others defended the building because they believed the tally was sacred. While the crisis was unfolding, a precious few, but enough, stood firm and did their duty to preserve the Republic. We owe them a debt of gratitude.No matter our opinion of the facts of the legitimacy of the vote or the cause for the distrust. Either way, something broke. The numbers no longer spoke with authority. Many Americans believed they no longer trusted the count.And the problem persists. In 2024, the FBI warned that foreign actors continue trying to undermine Americans’ trust in elections through disinformation. The fracture isn’t healing. It’s spreading.Somewhere along the way, the foundation of the institution cracked. January 6 wasn’t just an isolated moment of chaos. It revealed something deeper. Something dangerous. Trust in the vote itself fractured. That fracture didn’t heal when the building cleared. It’s a live threat today. Without trust, our elections lose their meaning. Without trust, our Republic crumbles from the inside.Trust demands proof.We Are One Nation Because We Are a Union of StatesThe Constitution isn’t a rulebook. It’s a contract between states that each state agreed to sign. As a part of the contract, New York agreed it would accept a certified count from Alabama. Wyoming agreed to trust the vote in California. Ohio agreed they can’t override Georgia’s tally just because it doesn’t like the outcome.Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of this Constitutional contract outlines that each state decides how to choose its electors, based on whatever method its legislature sets. Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 identifies that states and not a federal authority govern the times, places, and manner of their elections. In short, states decide their vote. Not the federal government. Congress does retain some authority to intervene and standardize practices to ensure consistency and protect voting rights, but only because the states amended the contract to give Congress this authority. Every state later agreed voting rights could not be denied by race (15th Amendment), sex (19th), failure to pay poll taxes (24th), or age over eighteen (26th).Bottom line. Each state runs its own election. That’s not a flaw. That’s the design. When we ratified the Constitution, we had just fought with everything we had to win a war against a king, and we weren’t about to give the keys to another one.We decided that no one person in Washington, or even a group of people, would manage elections. We gave that power to the states. But inherent in that power is responsibility. States agreed that once a result was certified, the rest of the country would accept it.We didn’t personally sign the Constitution, but every Election Day, we delegate our voice to whoever wins, and we live with their choices. That’s representative governance. Institutions endure because each generation inherits them unless it chooses to dismantle them. Without that carry-forward consent, fifty states would drift apart and the Union would fracture. Trust in the contract, then, is necessary for national survival.When one state casts doubt on another’s election, or when Congress or the President threaten to reject results a state has already decided, the entire structure starts to crack.The states don’t all have to agree. We never could anyway. But we have to trust each other and accept the vote from other states. Without trust, the contract collapses.Trust demands proof. How would we prove the results of elections?The Technology TestWith mass elections, we face two different vulnerabilities. Both are technology-based. There is paper, and there are machines.Some call to rely on paper ballots. But paper ballots, counted by hand or scanned, carry a human burden. Humans make lots of mistakes. We are slow. We scale poorly. We are prone to fatigue, bias, and clerical error. The weakness of paper ballots isn’t in the vote itself; it’s in the count. Large-scale studies show hand counts differ half a percent to two percent from audited totals. Some one-off experiments collapse entirely. Nye County, Nevada’s 2022 “full hand count” logged a discrepancy of nearly twenty-five percent between manual and machine tallies before the state shut it down. Even the low end, half a percent, would swing 25,000 votes in a five-million-ballot state. That gap alone can decide a close race. In the 2020 election, President Biden won the vote in the state of Georgia by 12,000 votes. Arizona, 10,000. Wisconsin, 20,000. Trust demands proof.The more complex the recount, the more faith we have to place in people. Humans perform poorly on repetitive, tedious tasks.So, if we want to maintain trust, a human count isn’t proof.Digital machines offer a different problem. They are fast. They scale beautifully. But their weakness is perception. They aren’t transparent. If they’re connected to the internet even once, they open the door to doubt. A single confirmed breach, or even a plausible story of one, is enough to rupture confidence. If people believe the machines can be tampered with, they no longer trust the count. A machine count where we can’t see behind the curtain isn’t proof.So we have a tradeoff. Paper risks accuracy and timeliness. Machines risk legitimacy.Both fail the test because they can’t answer the central question.Can they prove the result?Maybe there’s another way. Trust demands proof. To fix trust, we need a new standard. One that we already apply when the stakes are life or death.I Am Become Death, the Destroyer of WorldsFew systems achieve the high standard of societal trust. These systems have zero‑failure tolerance because the stakes are civilization‑level.Let’s think about how we certify weapons platforms that carry nuclear warheads. Each platform must achieve nuclear certification before it becomes active.Nuclear certification isn’t a casual process. We subject those systems to a standard of review that assumes one tiny mistake could end civilization. When the cost of failure is existential, that system must meet a no-failure bar. Every bolt, every microchip, every software patch. The standard is a transparent reliability rate of fewer than one error in one billion events. The 1-in-1-billion benchmark is not a metaphor; it comes straight from official federal nuclear safety guidelines. DOE Order 452.1F and DOD guidance require that the probability of an accidental or unauthorized nuclear detonation remain below this threshold.If our election system counted 160 million votes with the same reliability, it would permit fewer than one single miscounted ballot. Practically zero. “Good-enough” paper or opaque machines fall short. That is the cost of keeping legitimacy non-negotiable.The nuclear certification process is slow, rigorous, and unforgiving. Why? Because when the stakes are existential, “good enough” isn’t enough.An election collapse threatens the Republic with equal finality. Once voters stop trusting the count, they stop trusting the system. At that point, we’re not debating the process. Just like we did on January 6, 2021, we watch in horror as some challenge the continuity of the Republic itself.In short, instead of choosing between paper ballots and machines that count behind a curtain, we should hold vote-counting systems to the same standard we use for nuclear weapons platforms. A nuclear weapons-grade election system means air-gapped hardware that’s never connected to the internet. No remote access, ever. Open-source, frozen code base. An immutable paper backup for every ballot. A public, mathematically verifiable audit trail. Continuous independent surveillance and testing. Tamper detection alerts. A public record briefing to each state’s election body detailing every abnormal event. Full transparency.Engineers test, states see the data, and voters can download the report. A continuous loop from opaque process to transparent, verifiable record. No more challenging the legitimacy of elections. No more threatening the legitimacy of the Republic. Results everyone can see and prove. Trust demands proof. If we already use this zero-failure standard to protect lives, shouldn’t we use it to protect our democratic Republic itself?If the Republic lives on trust, shouldn’

We live in an age where the oath of office often feels like a formality. But President George Washington didn’t see it that way.Why not?He was an honorable man. He led decisive action that saved a ragtag set of colonies and their fledgling fighters. He helped forge an America born at war, and then spent his life, with others, shaping it into a lasting union.We asked him to be king. He refused. Instead of seizing power, he handed it back to the people. He is one of only four presidents honored with a monument on the National Mall.Washington saw the presidency not as an achievement, but as a duty. The office wasn’t his. It was the nation’s. He was only a temporary occupant.His first term was a dry run of an experimental system. At his second inauguration, he delivered the shortest speech in presidential history: 135 words. Four sentences. In it, he asked to be judged not by success or failure, but by fidelity to the Constitution.He never saw the oath as ceremony. He saw it as a public binding. An act of submission to law, to philosophy, to something greater than himself. He swore to uphold that ideal above riches, safety, or power. He made himself small beneath the American ideal.The oath directs the president to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. Then it adds a quiet line: to the best of my Ability.That phrase carries humility. In the hands of someone like Washington, it becomes a unifying voice. But not everyone is like Washington.In lesser hands, “to the best of my ability” promises nothing. It demands no wisdom. No courage. No character. The Constitution doesn’t define “Ability.” It sets no standard, offers no test. It doesn’t ask whether a president understands liberty, grasps law, or even knows the six goals of the preamble. It only asks that he act according to his ability.So what happens when a man with no moral compass takes the oath?What if his ability begins and ends with self-interest? What if we choose someone whose ability is shaped not by humility, but by ambition, ignorance, or vanity?He can still raise his hand. He can still say the words. He can still claim he did his best.And the Constitution won’t stop him.It gives the people the power to choose. And once we choose, it assumes we chose well. It assumes we chose someone who understands what it means to defend a republic.Which brings us back to the same words every president has spoken since Washington.A Constitutional Clause Built on Subjectivity Found in Article II, Section 1, Clause 8, the Constitution outlines that before they enter the office, the President shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.The oath is a mirror. It reflects back the character of the person who takes it. Most constitutional clauses set standards. Common verbiage includes “shall,” “must,” and “only with advice and consent.” Not the oath. It doesn’t bind the office to a standard of excellence; it binds it to the standard of the person. It says the president will act to the best of their ability, which turns the focus inward. It’s not a promise of outcome. The oath is filtered through the person’s internal fidelity. It limits the obligation by what the individual president is capable of and not what the Constitution demands. We could ask why the framers didn’t just say the president must uphold the Constitution or shall ensure its defense. Perhaps they feared the tyranny of perfection just as much as the tyranny of incompetence.The framers wrote before modern party systems, before mass media, and before the idea that one person might use the presidency as a personal brand empire. They assumed men of honor, or at least men with a reputation to protect. For the framers, “ability” was a nod to human limits, not human depravity.They assumed, wrongly, that the people would never elect someone without basic ability and a high ethical standard. Of course, there is the law, and the law is measurable. Not all ethical violations break the law. But having a high ethical standard is not a requirement to be president. We have several examples of presidents with an ethical standard many would consider deficient.Let’s look at three moments where the oath bent under pressure.James Buchanan – The Man Who Watched the Union BurnImagine this. It’s 1857. The country is fracturing. A sharp economic downturn, the Panic of 1857, has shaken public confidence and threatens the livelihoods of thousands. Slavery has already turned Congress into a battlefield. The Kansas–Nebraska Act has opened the door to “popular sovereignty,” allowing settlers in new territories to vote on whether to allow slavery.Pro-slavery and anti-slavery protestors flood into Kansas. Violence breaks out; the territory earns a new name: Bleeding Kansas.Then, the Supreme Court delivers the Dred Scott decision. The Court declares that Black Americans can never be citizens. That the federal government has no power to prohibit slavery in the territories. That the Constitution itself offers no protection to the enslaved.In the middle of this firestorm, James Buchanan takes the oath of office. The country needed leadership more than ever.He swears to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. And then he proceeds to do ... almost nothing.Buchanan personally believed slavery was immoral. But he believed even more deeply that the Constitution gave him no power to act. He saw himself not as a leader, but as a caretaker of a document, and the document, he claimed, left no room for federal intervention.He was a staunch states’ rights advocate. When Southern states began seceding, South Carolina first in December 1860, Buchanan declared secession illegal ... but also claimed the federal government had no authority to stop it.His cabinet fell into chaos. Several members were Southern sympathizers. One of them, Secretary of War John Floyd, secretly funneled arms to the South. Buchanan, weak and indecisive, let it happen.So the Union dissolved while the President, bound by his narrow reading of the Constitution, stood aside.He felt he had done his duty. He said, “I feel that my duty has been faithfully, though it may be imperfectly, performed, and, whatever the result may be, I shall carry to my grave the consciousness that I at least meant well for my country.”He also recognized his leadership had failed. In a moment of despair, as the nation cracked beneath his inaction, Buchanan reportedly declared, “I am the last President of the United States!”It’s one of the most devastating examples of a president interpreting “to the best of my Ability” as a command to do nothing at all.And it left Lincoln to inherit a war that may have been prevented if the man before him had seen the oath not just as a legal clause, but as a moral charge.Andrew Johnson – The President Who Fought ReconstructionIn April 1865, the war was ending. The Union had held. And then, at Ford’s Theatre, John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln. Into that moment stepped Andrew Johnson, a Democrat from Tennessee, loyal to the Union but hostile to the idea of racial equality.He took the same oath Lincoln had taken: to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.But Johnson didn’t use that oath to finish Lincoln’s work. He abused his veto power to preserve white supremacy.He vetoed civil rights legislation. He openly opposed the Fourteenth Amendment. He told white Southerners they could regain power quickly and face few consequences. As if the war had changed nothing, as if emancipation had never happened.He said, “It is the province of the Executive to see that the will of the people is carried out in the rehabilitation of the rebellious States, once more under the authority as well as the protection of the Union.”And when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the first law to declare all persons born in the United States as citizens, he vetoed that, too.Congress overrode him. Twice. It was the first time major legislation passed despite a presidential veto.Johnson argued he was defending the Constitution. That federal enforcement of civil rights was an overreach. That states had the right to decide, even if they used that right to deny freedom.He didn’t see Reconstruction as a duty. He saw it as an intrusion.And so, under the cover of “to the best of my ability,” Johnson tried to undo the meaning of Union victory.He became the first president in American history to be impeached. He survived conviction by one vote. But his legacy was clear: he used the oath not to heal the country, but to hold it back.Richard Nixon – The President Who Tried to Redefine the LawRichard Nixon took the oath in 1969. Then again in 1973. He swore to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.What followed was one of the most profound breaches of public trust in American history.Nixon authorized illegal wiretaps. He used the CIA to block FBI investigations. He compiled enemy lists, with the goal to “use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.” He used the IRS to target his political opponents. And then, when the Watergate break-in exposed the rot, he tried to cover it all up.He didn’t deny that he broke ethical norms. He didn’t even deny the facts. What he denied was that he could be held accountable.He told interviewer David Frost in 1977:“When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”President Richard Nixon’s name has an asterisk next to it in history books as the biggest crook to ever hold the office. The man who took an oath to defend the Constitution believed he was functionally above it.He saw the office not as a duty to the people, but as a shield against them. He interpreted “to the best of my ability” not as an internal check, but as a blank check. Nixon wasn’t after money

Tariffs will certainly raise prices at home. That’s their purpose. Tariffs are taxes. When a product crosses the border, a tariff adds a fee. The item is the same, the seller worked no harder, but government tilted the scale to favor domestic goods.So here’s the real question. If the state forces you to pay more than the market demands, and the extra money flows to a private pocket and not to a public good, is that a government theft of your property? It’s not as black and white as saying yes.Trade Walls and the Great Collapse(Background: somber string swell. An overture to a tragedy.)In 1929 America walked to the cliff’s edge. On the day historians now call Black Monday, October 28, the stock market plunged 13 percent. The next day, it fell another 12. And the slide continued.By mid‑November the market had surrendered half its value. But this was no abstract loss for wealthy speculators. Credit froze. Banks failed. Capital vanished.The drop tore through real people’s lives. Factories emptied, foreclosures surged, crime climbed. City tax bases collapsed; boarded windows lined dark streets. In manufacturing-heavy cities like Detroit and Chicago, unemployment reached 40 percent. On the plains, farmers who had expanded acreage during World War I and loaded themselves with debt to feed Allied armies now could not sell grain for the cost of planting it. Some burned corn for heat because coal was more expensive. Families lived in makeshift shacks made from scrap wood and tar paper.The shock ran so deep it took twenty-five years and twenty-five days, an entire generation, to recover. Only on November 23, 1954, did the Dow Jones Industrial Average climb back to its 1929 peak.It took the Second World War, an immense post‑war industrial boom, and the rise of a broad middle class to erase the wounds opened in those brutal weeks of 1929.…But in 1929, the nation was still reeling.Into that chaos stepped two well-meaning legislators: Senator Reed Smoot of Utah and Congressman Willis Hawley of Oregon. Smoot chaired the Senate Finance Committee. Hawley led the House Ways and Means Committee. Both were Republicans. Their fix looked simple on paper. They intended to raise tariffs and shield American jobs, especially in struggling farms and factories.Tariffs were nothing new. All through the nineteenth century they filled the federal treasury and sheltered northern mills before an income tax even existed. But by 1930, the economy was global. Exports mattered. War‑debtor Europe owed the United States billions, and America needed foreign buyers to keep those payments flowing. The system was fragile, stretched by World War I debts and sliding prices.This fragile system was about to get kicked in the teeth.Smoot and Hawley introduced their bill in 1929 as a narrow farm measure. Washington lobbyists smelled opportunity. Amendments poured in. Every senator, every representative, tacked on protection for home‑state industries. The schedule exploded.Tariffs climbed on more than twenty thousand imports, including shoes, lumber, eggs, cement, even musical instruments.[Sound cue: typewriters clacking rapidly, fading into thunder]Over a thousand economists signed a letter urging President Hoover to veto it. They warned it would spark retaliation and crush trade. Hoover, boxed in by party pressure and a panicked electorate, signed the Smoot‑Hawley Tariff Act into law on June 17, 1930.…That’s when the backlash began.Canada struck first, taxing American wheat and produce. Europe followed. Germany, France, Britain. The global economy was already fragile. Retaliation sent it into a spiral. Within a few years world trade fell more than sixty percent. American exports were cut in half. Factories shut their gates. Jobs vanished. Farms that hoped for relief found only isolation.[Background: wind blowing through an empty field]Unemployment soared past 20 percent. Dust storms rolled across the heartland.The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act didn’t cause the Great Depression. But it poured gasoline on the fire. It bruised American credibility and hardened global resentment. The lesson came fast and harsh: Economic nationalism backfires in a global crisis. Economists still cite the Smoot-Hawley Act as proof that fear-driven policy can deepen disaster .Voters felt the pain. In the 1930 midterms, Republicans lost both chambers of Congress by huge margins. Smoot and Hawley were “shown the door.”Even progressive Republicans who had campaigned for Hoover switched sides and backed Democrat Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. By his inauguration on March 4, 1933, banks were closing, unemployment hovered near twenty-five percent, and prices and productivity had fallen to one-third of their 1929 level .We now know FDR would lead the country through the Great Depression and to victory in World War II. He would go on to win four consecutive presidential campaigns. It would take 20 years and a war hero named Dwight Eisenhower for the Republicans to win the presidency again.Decades later, economists point to the Smoot-Hawley Act as the moment protectionism went too far.What are Tariffs?A tariff is a border tax. Each time a shipment enters the United States, from raw materials to cars, the US importer pays the tariff before the goods clear customs. That cost travels through the supply chain until it lands in the shopper’s cart.The Constitution calls such a fee an impost and grants only Congress the power to levy it.In the early Republic, tariffs kept the government running. We only had to pay for a small army, a handful of diplomats, and debt payments. Customs duties and land sales covered it all. No income tax. No redistribution. In that setting, tariffs were neutral revenue.Today, they play a different role. Lawmakers use them to shield selected industries. The higher price never builds a road or pays the debt. It settles in the profit line of the firm that now faces less competition.As a buyer, you pay more, without consent, to subsidize a private interest. The protected company can hold prices high and still move product. That extra margin is private gain created by government design.So the question stands.If the state makes you pay more than the market asks and the surplus flows to a private pocket, are tariffs a government theft of your property?Are Tariffs a Government Theft of Your Property?Let’s look first through the lens of the individual and their natural rights. The decisive purpose of governance is to preserve your life, liberty, and estate. Life is your own being. It includes every decision that keeps you alive and whole. By nature, you own yourself. Liberty is the right to choose a path that leads to fulfillment. When we chart our own course, we observe, plan, and act. Our choices bring results, good or bad, and from those results we develop skill, talent, and personal responsibility. What we do matters, but who we become by doing it matters more. Estate is the concrete result of that pursuit of happiness. It is your paycheck, the land you work, your tools, the food on your table, the heat in your house. It is everything earned by your labor and freely exchanged with others.We consent to governance so our representatives can preserve those rights. When government collects taxes to keep the peace, enforce contracts, and build institutions that enable Americans born in trailers and penthouses alike to be great, it strengthens the pillars. When it shifts wealth from many citizens to a favored few, it weakens them.The Constitution reflects that balance. Article I empowers Congress to collect tariffs to promote the general welfare. But that power has limits. The spending must serve everyone, not private lobbies. When public money settles in private hands, it no longer serves the people. It serves the powerful.America was built to protect the weak, not exalt the well‑connected. We owe allegiance to no king, no oligarch.And there is a second lens: not just citizen, but creator, builder, innovator, entrepreneur; anyone who brings something new into the world through mind and labor.The Creator’s RightsNow let’s switch lenses and see tariffs through the eyes of the creator, the builder, the entrepreneur.Creators share the same trinity of rights every person holds: life to think and act, liberty to choose a path, and estate to keep the value they earn. A competitive market is simply those rights at work.This market sets conditions supporting freedom from coercion, not shelter from stronger rivals. Every creator is an end in themselves. A business must win customers by persuasion, never by force. The moment a company runs to government for a tariff that inflates a rival’s cost, competition ends and confiscation begins, without the buyer’s consent. A tariff used in this way becomes legal plunder. It lifts money from many pockets and drops it into one. Real competition is buyers and sellers meeting on equal terms, each free to walk away. The state’s duty is to protect that freedom, not tilt it.The Constitution backs this logic. The Commerce Clause lets Congress regulate trade “to promote the general welfare.” That mandate directs open, dependable markets. Congress may clear barriers, chase fraud, and keep trade lanes clear. It may not enrich one faction by taxing all others. When tariffs privilege a lobby, they break the spirit of fair play.A competitive market environment rests on three conditions: First, rule of law that protects contracts and property. Second, a neutral government that blocks entry to no one and grants no special favors. Third, open information that lets every buyer and seller judge value for themselves.When we establish and maintain this business environment, the rights of the producer and the rights of the consumer align, because every exchange is voluntary. Businesses have a right to a fair and competitive arena. This means an arena free of special privilege, not free of challenge.Viewed this way, broad tariffs distort consent, misalign incentives, and rewa

From the Kalka River to Lake Peipus: Russia Turns East(Begin with ambient medieval Eastern European music, fading under narration)After the Rus’ catastrophic defeat at the Kalka River in 1223, and especially following the full-scale Mongol conquest in the campaigns of the late 1230s, Mongol dominance reshaped the eastern and western reaches of the Russian world.In the 13th century, Kyiv, now the capital of Ukraine, was still the spiritual and cultural heart of a region known as Kievan Rus. It wasn’t Russian in the modern sense. Its roots were Viking. The Norsemen who arrived in Eastern Europe, mostly of Swedish origin, were Varangians, also referred to as the Rus. They settled among the Slavic tribes, built river trade routes, and founded ruling dynasties. Over the generations, their Norse identity blended into the local Slavic world.Kievan Rus was a loose federation of Slavic principalities spanning what we now know as Ukraine, Belarus, and the western edge of Russia. Rivers made its borders. Trade flowed south along the Dnieper to the Black Sea and north along the Volkhov and Northern Dvina toward the Baltic and the White Sea. The Dnieper linked Kyiv to Byzantium and the wider Mediterranean, while the collective waterways connected the forest to the steppe and bound distant peoples into a shared political and spiritual world.(A quick note: If you’re listening to the audio-only version, the written piece available on Substack includes a detailed map. Kievan Rus stretched from the White Sea, above the Arctic Circle, to the Black Sea, just north of present-day Turkey.) By this point, Kyiv’s political power had faded from its earlier role as the capital of Kievan Rus, but the city still carried immense symbolic weight.That changed in December 1240. Batu Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan, led the Mongol army that laid siege to the city. After a brutal assault, they slaughtered its people and left the city in ruins. Many towns across Rus met the same fate. Some never fully recovered. Others vanished entirely.In the years that followed, the world of Viking Rus, once shaped by Norse leadership and open trade, gave way to something new. In the northeast, Muscovy rose, its name the root of what we now call Moscow. The people were still Slavic, but operated under a different system. Under Mongol rule, governance became centralized, hierarchical, and dominated by Eastern thought.Western thought emphasized law, feudal contracts, and the rights of lords and cities. Eastern philosophy favored absolute authority, obedience, and control. Power flowed from the top, not from mutual obligation. In the West, oaths bound lords and vassals. In the East, obedience flowed downward from an unquestioned ruler.Russia turned its back on the Latin West and aligned itself with systems of power born from the East, imperial and unyielding.That pivotal shift came into sharp focus with Alexander Nevsky’s decisive choice in 1242.…Alexander Nevsky, a prince of Novgorod, faced invasions from two directions. From the West, Catholic crusaders from the Teutonic Order pushed aggressively, determined to impose Western religious and political order. From the East, Mongol overlords watched closely, prepared to assert their brutal authority should Nevsky waver in his allegiance.On April 5, 1242, on the frozen surface of Lake Peipus, Nevsky met the heavily armored Teutonic knights in a legendary clash known as the Battle of the Ice. His lightly equipped Russian troops were agile and intimately familiar with the terrain. They employed tactics blending patience, deception, and carefully calculated retreat. These tactics distinctly reflected Eastern strategic thinking, including principles of manipulation and timing.The heavy crusader knights were ill-equipped for the battle. The ice cracked beneath their weight, plunging many into the freezing water. Nevsky’s victory became symbolic of Russia’s decisive choice to turn away from Western European dominance and instead accept the Eastern yoke of Mongol power. Nevsky’s choice entrenched Russia in Eastern political philosophy, characterized by pragmatism, indirect manipulation, and power calculation.So, the Battle of the Ice wasn’t so much a military victory as a decisive statement that Russia’s future would unfold under the Eastern logic of calculated statecraft. Russia would be shaped by the pragmatic wisdom echoed centuries earlier by Eastern philosopher Kautilya.The Philosopher Kautilya Long before the Mongols or the Rus, one philosopher wrote the handbook for survival in a ruthless world.Kautilya, also known as Chanakya or Vishnugupta, was the chief adviser to Chandragupta Maurya, the founder of India’s Mauryan Empire in the fourth century BC. Educated at the ancient university of Takshashila, he wrote the Arthashastra, a sweeping manual on statecraft, intelligence, and war. It describes how politics works, not how it ought to work. Kautilya was a ruthless realist. Even the philosopher himself was born in legend. Picture a dusty village in fourth-century BC India. A newborn boy arrives to a humble household. His father is Chanin. His mother is Chaneshvari. Both are followers of the Jain faith. Jainism is one of the world’s oldest religions. Jains believe in the existence of souls and strive to minimize harm to all living beings, including plants and animals.In the newborn parent’s tiny courtyard, the village elders gather. They are curious for signs that foretell the child’s fate. The baby startles everyone. He is born with a full set of teeth, a sign in local belief that marks a future king. The boy’s father worries. Kings collect enemies, and enemies bring suffering. To blunt the omen, he breaks one of the infant’s teeth. The monks study the infant again and shake their heads. The prophecy shifts. He will never sit on a throne; he will stand behind it, guiding its power. Kautilya guided Chandragupta Maurya to dismantle the Nanda dynasty, unify the Indian subcontinent, and lay the foundation for the Mauryan Empire, one of the most powerful and administratively sophisticated empires of the ancient world. At its height, it controlled almost the entire Indian subcontinent, from the Himalayas in the north to the Deccan Plateau in the south, and from the Indus Valley in the west to the borders of present-day Bangladesh in the east.The Mauryan Empire ruled about sixty million people, nearly a quarter of humanity at the time. No one matched that scale for more than a thousand years, until the rise of the Mongols.When he wasn’t training an emperor or shaping a dynasty, Kautilya wrote. His words, etched in Sanskrit, became a manual for survival in a ruthless world.In the Arthashastra, survival rests on four tools.First, ‘Sama.’ Sama is persuasion, but not for the sake of harmony. Sama is influence without resistance. It is calm words, flattery, charm, even seduction, if the moment demands it. The aim is not agreement, it is control. Power exercised without force, where the opponent believes it was their own choice.Next, ‘Dana.’ Dana is inducement. A reward, but not a gesture of goodwill. It is a calculated investment. Gold, land, favors, each given not for kindness, but for leverage. In the East, generosity is often strategy in disguise.Third, ‘Bheda.’ Bheda is the use of logic or trickery to influence others. It plants suspicion, quietly unravelling unity from within. The most efficient way to defeat an enemy is to make them defeat themselves.Last, ‘Danda.’ Danda means the open use of force. Not unleashed in anger, but in certainty. When all other tools have served their purpose, Danda completes what the others began.Eastern thought is vast, but Kautilya’s four-tool schema offers its sharpest lesson in political realism. Kautilya serves as a diagnostic lens, not as evidence that medieval Russia consulted the Arthashastra; the parallels emerge from convergent strategic logic. That blueprint echoes through Sun Tzu, the Mongol khans, and the rulers of Muscovy. Eastern philosophy does not ask a ruler to be noble; it asks the ruler to be effective. A wise leader puts self-interest first and moves between persuasion, reward, division, and force when the moment demands.When Muscovy absorbed Mongol methods, it closely echoed Kautilya’s ideas, whether consciously or simply through historical resonance. Two centuries after Nevsky, on the banks of the Ugra River, a grand prince would embody these Eastern lessons. Ivan III and the Great Stand on the UgraPicture Muscovy in 1480. Two centuries have passed since Nevsky. The grand princes of Moscow now rule a realm knit together by tribute, surveillance, and a network of loyal boyars. Over those two centuries, Muscovy gathered taxes for the khan, slowly turning that machinery to its own ends. Ivan III, Grand Prince of Moscow, born in 1440, hidden from murderers as a child, who started leading armies at the age of 12, has stopped sending silver to the steppe. Akhmat Khan of the Great Horde leads his army west to punish Ivan’s defiance.Summer turns to autumn. The two armies meet on opposite banks of the Ugra River, a quiet tributary of the Oka about one hundred fifty miles southwest of Moscow. It is a tense, prolonged standoff. Ivan blocks every ford, posts archers in the reeds, and waits. No arrows fly. No charges thunder. Day after day, the river lies between them like a mirror.Ivan is not idle. He enters negotiations with the khan to delay. He uses persuasion and trickery to buy time. Meanwhile, he sends envoys to Lithuania, urging them to stay neutral. He releases gifts to minor Tatar princes who resent Akhmat. He spreads whispers that Muscovy’s allies had already raided the Horde’s rear camp. Persuasion, reward, and division work together silently while the army shows strength only in reserve.Weeks pass. The Horde’s supplies run low. Winter fog settles over the water. Hidden from Akhmat, Ivan’s allies struck, or seemed to strike, at the Horde’s base. Whether real or whisp

Before we get started, a personal note. Last week, “I Believe” broke into Apple Podcasts’ Top 10 in philosophy.The show would go on out of conviction alone, but your encouragement makes the work lighter. Thank you for listening, thinking, and being here.And in the words of Bill Belichick, “We're on to Cincinnati.”Part 1. The Broken Oath and How the Mongols Deceived the Rus’ Princes(Sound of galloping horses fades slightly into the background, replaced by a more narrative, almost hushed tone)Imagine the vast, open grassland steppe. For centuries, the scattered principalities of Rus’ fought their own small wars. But a new threat was emerging from the East, a storm on horseback: the Mongols.At first, these nomadic warriors were a distant rumor. But in 1223, they arrived in force. The Rus’ princes, for once united by a common enemy, gathered their armies. Among them were Mstislav the Bold and other proud princes with their own ambitions.After initial skirmishes, as the Rus’ and their Cuman allies faced the seemingly relentless Mongol advance, a message arrived. It was from the Mongol generals, a promise of safe passage if the princes would lay down their arms. They swore on their honor that no harm would come to those who surrendered.(A slight pause for dramatic effect)Mstislav the Bold, trusting in this oath, perhaps foolishly, perhaps desperately seeking to avoid further bloodshed, convinced some of the other princes. They agreed. They laid down their swords, believing the conflict was over, that a truce had been secured.But the Mongol word, it turned out, was as brittle as dry steppe grass in winter.(Sound of a sudden, sharp, metallic clang)The moment the Rus’ princes and their men were vulnerable, disarmed and unsuspecting, the Mongols fell upon them. It became a slaughter, not a battle. The ground ran red with the blood of the betrayed. Some princes were brutally executed; legend says the Mongols crushed the remaining princes under a platform where the victors celebrated their gruesome triumph.(Tone becomes slightly lower, more somber)This wasn’t just a military defeat; it was a betrayal that echoed through Rus’ for generations, deepening distrust and revealing the invaders’ ruthlessness. Though Rus’ stayed connected to Europe, Mongol rule pushed trade and politics eastward. Harsh penalties, executions, and torture grew common. Scholars still debate the human cost: estimates run from single‑digit population losses to claims approaching one‑half. Kalka became a stark warning that promises can vanish like steppe wind. This initial, devastating betrayal paved the way for the Mongol Yoke, centuries of subjugation that forever shaped Russian history.…The betrayal at the Kalka River is the first key piece to understand when negotiating with Russians. For Russia, betrayal isn’t theory; it’s memory.Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I of Russia signed the Treaty of Tilsit in 1807, forging an alliance. Napoleon then invaded Russia in 1812.In 1939, Hitler and Stalin signed a non-aggression pact. Two years later, Nazi tanks crossed the Russian border. Russia claims that Western leaders gave informal assurances in the early 1990s that NATO wouldn’t expand eastward. Declassified memcons show James Baker told Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would move ‘not one inch eastward.’ When NATO expanded anyway, Russians logged it as another broken promise.Put plainly, Russians assume promises are conditional and alliances are temporary. America views international relations through the lens of the Rational Actor Model, or the idea that leaders make decisions like rational calculators. We view logical entities as pursuing self-interest. We assume to generally uphold agreements because they serve our long-term interests. As the first key piece to understand, this truth is also the biggest limitation. Russia assumes we will double-cross them. That assumption changes how we should orient ourselves. Negotiation, to Moscow, is zero‑sum. Anything they concede feels like a loss they’ll pay for later.This is a legacy of Kalka, Napoleon, Hitler, and NATO. Should we be Russian apologists? No. But we should treat our adversary with dignity and respect.When negotiating with Russians, understanding this environment of deep-seated suspicion is critical. And it’s important to recognize its self-fulfilling potential. Russia’s expectation of betrayal provokes actions that make trust impossible.This isn’t to say that negotiation is impossible. But it does fundamentally alter the landscape. We need strategies that accept mistrust as the starting point.Next, let’s think about why orienting talks solely from a Western lens falls short. When we think about negotiations, we need to consider how the Russians approach negotiating. We fast-forward to 1962 and a moment when misunderstanding nearly ended civilization, the Cuban Missile Crisis. Part 2. The Cuban Missile Crisis(Sound of a ticking clock begins—steady, deliberate—fades slightly under narration)October 1962. The Cold War reached its most dangerous peak. American U-2 reconnaissance flights over Cuba captured photographic evidence that the Soviets were emplacing medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles just ninety miles from the coast of Florida.An American early warning radar designed to watch for incoming missile strikes became operational in Thule, Greenland, in 1959. Another in Clear, Alaska, came online in 1961. Both looked north, towards the North Pole and the direction of ballistic missiles from the Soviet Union. We were blind to the south.To President John F. Kennedy, the missiles in Cuba were an intolerable threat. With missiles only minutes away, our radars would give no advance notice, leaving the United States no time to respond. For Soviet leadership, particularly Nikita Khrushchev, the move was not sudden. It was strategic and rooted in a long-standing perception: that the United States had already encircled the Soviets.In 1961, the US had Jupiter nuclear missiles in Turkey, a NATO ally and direct neighbor to the Soviet Union. These missiles could strike major Soviet cities with very little warning. To Moscow, they were a daily reminder that the US held a gun to their head. The US refused to remove them. Until Cuba.In early 1962, Khrushchev approved Operation Anadyr, the secret plan to deploy Soviet nuclear missiles, troops, and equipment to Cuba. Officially, this was framed as a defensive act, meant to protect a fellow socialist state from US aggression. Unofficially, it intended to correct a strategic imbalance. If the United States could threaten the USSR from Turkey, the USSR would threaten the United States from Cuba.Simply put, Khrushchev matched threat for threat because he believed it was the only way the US would listen. To negotiate on equal footing, the Soviets needed a threat of equal measure.And so, Soviet missile forces began shipping warheads and launch equipment to Cuba. When the U‑2s spotted them, most sites were nearly ready.What followed was thirteen days of unprecedented tension. The Kennedy administration weighed air strikes, invasion, and ultimately settled on a naval blockade. American military forces were placed on DEFCON 2, meaning war was imminent.Meanwhile, Soviet field commanders in Cuba continued to complete missile deployment, unaware of the full extent of the geopolitical negotiations underway. And both sides knew how close they were to catastrophic escalation.Then, backchannel diplomacy broke the deadlock.On October 26, a Soviet message proposed to remove the missiles from Cuba in exchange for a US guarantee not to invade the island. American intelligence questioned the authenticity of the message. On October 27, a more formal message insisted any deal include removing US Jupiters from Turkey. (Sound of a ticking clock grows slightly louder, then recedes)The Kennedy administration was divided. Publicly agreeing to remove the missiles could make the US appear weak. But ignoring the second message threatened progress in negotiations.So they did both.Publicly, the US accepted the first offer: the Soviets would remove their missiles, and the US would pledge not to invade Cuba.Privately, through Robert Kennedy’s backchannel meeting with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, the US agreed to dismantle the Jupiter missiles in Turkey, and we would do so within a few months, quietly, without any public linkage to the crisis.…Russians win concessions by making America lose something tangible. Understanding Russian logic means recognizing negotiation is zero‑sum. Leverage and pressure, not goodwill, drive results, though Moscow accepts deals when symmetry and verification are airtight.As an interim summary, let’s remember:First, Russia expects betrayal. Second, negotiation is pressure, not compromise. There’s at least a third piece that demonstrates Russia’s approach to negotiation. Russia negotiates to, and beyond, the brink of conflict. Brinkmanship means the US must back diplomacy with credible, non‑symbolic military power.There are many ways to exert military influence. A great example of military influence that potentially averted conflict was the Berlin Airlift.Part 3. The Berlin AirliftJune 24, 1948 to May 12, 1949By the summer of 1948, the postwar alliance between the Soviet Union and the Western powers had unraveled. Germany, divided among the victors, became the front line of a new kind of war. The Soviet Union controlled East Germany and the eastern half of Berlin, while the US, Britain, and France administered the west. West Berlin was 100 miles deep in the Soviet zone of Germany. When the Western allies announced plans to introduce a new currency, the Deutsche Mark, in their zones, including West Berlin, Stalin saw it as a direct threat to Soviet influence. The day after the Western Allies announced the Deutsche Mark, the Soviets cut off all ground access to West Berlin. No roads, no trains, no barges. Nothing and no one could enter the city by la

☘️ Joel (00:00:00):Today, I'm pleased to host Crom Carmichael. Crom is an entrepreneur, investor, and business leader. He has served as the CEO and board member of Nishai Biotech, and if I said that wrong, I apologize, since 2002.🎤 Crom (00:00:16):Nope, that's exactly right.☘️ Joel (00:00:19):He's a native of South Bend, Indiana, graduated from Vanderbilt University in 1971. Crom has extensive leadership experience and a demonstrated strong commitment to innovation and growth, especially in biotech.Key aspects of your career include you're a founding investor in Serif Group, who provides seed and early stage funding to startups.You sit on the board of multiple companies, and those are all going to be in the written version (including Consensus Point, TrackPoint Systems, Confirmation.com, BancVue, 3SAE Technologies, and The Gardner School).You own an audio program that covers history's most influential thinkers called Giants of Political Thought. And the series fascinatingly outlines the philosophy of governance, including thinking of giants such as Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, John Locke, Adam Smith, and others.And you and Mike Hassell now just started to host a podcast From Our Generation To Yours, where you offer lessons on business, politics, and life for the next generation.Crom, it's great to talk to you today.🎤 Crom (00:01:22):Well, Joel, thanks for having me. I appreciate it very much.☘️ Joel (00:01:26):I really appreciate that you focus so much on philosophy in governance because philosophy informs how and why we think about things.We establish goals based on some hopefully philosophical logic. And we need to orient ourself toward those goals because when we take our eyes or focus off of the goal, we get to start doing things that don't really make sense.I bet we can find common ground with the question, well, I bet we would both answer yes to the question of whether individuals have a duty to prepare for an uncertain future so they aren't a burden on others.I'm fascinated to hear your take on: Do we have a mandate for individuals to prepare for an uncertain future?As in, like a government requirement mandate. Essentially, should we have social security?Do we have a mandate for individuals to prepare for their future? And you have to make the assumption that me paying into Social Security is me funding my own Social Security in the future. I know that is not the way the system works.I know that it's not me paying in because I pay in for someone who's older than me and then somebody younger than me would theoretically pay in for me. But if I don't pay into the system, then I don't get the benefit.🎤 Crom (00:03:02):Right.So Social Security, when it was founded, it was promised to be like an insurance program where the money that you put in would go into your own social security account.And every year people get in the, I get, now I'm on social security and I get a piece in the mail that tells me how much I'm going to get. And I believe that even when you're younger, I believe that you can request and find out what the Social Security system, quote, promises, unquote, to pay you.But the Social Security system, as it actually works today, and you hit it right on the head. You're right on target. The Social Security tax is just simply a tax.The Social Security benefit is a promise that the government makes so long as it's able to keep it.But the money that you pay in, it does not go into an account in your name.It just goes into a Social Security fund that then is used to pay for Social Security and any other general expenses that the government might need the money for.And so the right word for it is, unfortunately, it's a Ponzi scheme.☘️ Joel (00:04:29):So I was going to ask, so some people call it a Ponzi scheme instead of an insurance program or, or however you want to describe it. Um, so you and I agree that it is not, that you put money into a bucket that money grows like the stock market or like a bond or whatever. And then at the retirement age of your life, you have access to that money.You don't ever theoretically own that money.And because you don't own it, some people call it a Ponzi scheme.I don't, I think that institutionally, there's a reason that we created the program and that came out of the Great Depression and people not having enough.So if that is still true, if we eliminated the program, then don't we have an obligation to maintain our commitment to it?🎤 Crom (00:05:34):Well, I mean, you know, Social Security from a political standpoint, I mean, people who have worked all their lives and now everybody who is retired today worked their entire life and paid into the Social Security system.So it is an obligation that the government has based on the promise that the government has made to every American citizen.And the government will keep that promise as long as it can. But the point that you make is that somebody's ability to receive or the government's ability to pay the benefit is what will depend on whether or not the benefit always gets paid.And so what age, I'm 76. And so I've been collecting Social Security for about, let's say seven or eight years. I paid into Social Security for about 45 years. And most people who are collecting Social Security feel that they have earned the money that they are receiving.And the reason that they do is that the people who started receiving Social Security in the 40s and 50s and even in the 60s paid very little into the system compared to the benefits that they were receiving.And so therein lies the Ponzi scheme.☘️ Joel (00:07:04):Sure, yeah.🎤 Crom (00:07:05):It's a little bit like, when I was in college many years ago, if I needed, I may be telling on myself here a bit, but if I needed a few bottles of alcohol I would send out a chain letter. Do you know what a chain letter is?☘️ Joel (00:07:21):Yeah.🎤 Crom (00:07:23):And I would put my name at the top. I'd put three of my friends under me and I'd send out the chain letter to about 100 people that I didn't know and tell them to send a bottle of such and such to the top person on the list and then remove that person, move the second person to the top and put their name on the bottom.And I'd send out 100 of those things, and I would inevitably get three or four bottles of whiskey. And so that's how Social Security worked from the beginning.Now, there was a senator named Senator Clark who offered an amendment to make it so that when people put money into Social Security, that it would actually go into an account in their name in the same way that an IRA works today.And that amendment, it was voted down.☘️ Joel (00:08:19):I wrote a previous idea back in, I think, May of last year. Why doesn't the government give every baby born in America a $100,000 loan when they're born?And over the lifetime of that child, and I understand the math doesn't perfectly work out because there's inflation and the reality of things,but...That individual repays their $100,000 to the government over their lifetime.And then the investment of that grows at some government promised kind of low rate, like 3%.And then at their retirement age, then they get, depending on what year they retire, then they get a benefit of that divided into 30 years.And so then if you don't live long enough, which most people won't because if you retired 65 and your benefits are planned to last till you're 95, then most people just statistically don't live to be 95. Then whatever you didn't earn in that, you still don't own. The government seizes it.And then that funds people who through not necessarily any fault of their own were injured or for whatever reason couldn't work.And so then the program always has full funding because of that.But I understand that there's political consensus that would have to take place for Congress to pass that and change Social Security.But to me, that makes sense that FDR could have when he created the Social Security program. He could have created it to benefit retirees at the time, but then somehow morphed it into a self-funded thing.Because we're going to have generations that are smaller than than previous generations. And like Gen X is smaller than the baby boomers. And so we have a problem now that social security is running out of funding because the baby boomers are a bigger generation than those that follow.And so then there are not enough people in the way that FDR set up, there's not enough people paying into the program.🎤 Crom (00:10:26):Well, yeah, and, you know, your ideas make a great deal of sense as a practical matter.I mean, they make a great deal of sense from a mathematical matter, but as a practical matter, getting Congress to agree to do something like that, I think would probably be giving $100,000 to every baby.I'm not quite sure how that $100,000 would be invested on behalf of that person.And then the problem becomes the politicians as that amount of money, if you even could establish it to begin with. Politicians would see that pool of money and want to do something, do something with it.And that's always been the problem because when Social Security was originally passed, I went back and did a little bit of preparation for this conversation.And the original Social Security tax for the individual was 1% on their first $3,000. So it was $30 a year. And the employer matched that. So the employer also put up $30 a year. And Roosevelt promised that those two numbers would never change. And, of course, that was not true. But he said that in order to get the bill passed.And then the media then reported what Roosevelt said, and the bill got – the Social Security bill got passed.And then as politicians started to see, well, gee, there are a lot of people who are now, and by the way, when Roosevelt passed that bill, average life expectancy was 62 and you didn't start collecting Social Security until you were 65.Well, then over the next 25 years, life expectancy increased to approximately 75 and t