the american story: a republic if you can keep it

human capital and the systems of flourishing

the american story is the story of human capital. this is not unique, rare, or even avoidable: all human stories are the story of human capital. always has this been so. this is the engine of progress.

this process is never even. in the time some were managing aqueducts, others struggled to master the pointy stick. some thrived, others fell, and those who once thrived sometimes fell in turn. (usually because they forgot the things that brought them to greatness) history has not ended. it continues apace.

this is the nature of civilizations that has come to determine the nature of the human experience.

the world had no fewer resources 3,000 years ago than it has today and yet life has moved from “nasty, brutish and short” to “long, luxurious, and kind” to degrees unimaginable to our far forebears. and that is the story of human capital, of insight and growth, of innovation in technology, in societal development, and of the instantiation of institutions and ideas conducive to human flourishing and to manifesting destinies.

these things do not happen of their own accord, they are the imposition of will and of design upon the world.

and they must be cared for.

the gravest and most suicidal error that a civilization can commit is to become too accustomed to the plenty and safety and progress that results from such cultivations and elevations of human capital and to mistake them for a state of nature, to forget that this is the rare exception and not the base state.

left uncorrected, such a misapprehension is invariably fatal and no humanity, however talented or robust, can reach its potential amidst such foundational undermining.

this is the vigilance of flourishing and here, at the turn of the american 250, this is the lesson we must internalize: the winds beneath our wings are not guaranteed.

our success and thriving are not guaranteed.

they depend upon us and if we take them for granted or vilify and deny their stern realities, we will, like so many once flourishing empires before us, fall. but if we understand them and recommit to them, we will rise and the best american century will be yet to come.

this is the choice.

and so, if we would climb rather than descend and to live up to the potential of ourselves and our creed, as in the time of our founding, it is time to state the self evident truths that shall and must underpin our reality.

there are two aspects to this state of flourishing and neither alone may suffice to bring it about:

1. human capital - no system however cunning or well intentioned can make bad people good or stupid people smart. it cannot make you bring the shopping cart back or pass the marshmallow test or bubble forth with keen insight and innovation if such things are simply beyond or anathema to you. one can legislate and enforce compliance, but not morality. the ability to take what is present and make it into more and to participate in high trust systems without a need for a constant fist held above to ensure it is rare temporally, geographically, and culturally. it is an outlier only functional in the presence of an internalized golden rule ethos that demarcates high value human capital. without high value human capital, high value human systems cannot be constructed nor, even if already in place, can they function.

2. the systems of liberty - liberty is the engine and crucible of flourishing. no human capital however strong and imbued with potential, can thrive in an entrenched and powerful system set in opposition to it. such government and especially that most pernicious and all ecompasaing tyranny, the tyranny of the majority, are the death of human endeavor and enterprise, a subjugation of liberty to unaccountable rule and of individual rights to that most damaging and dishonest of ideals: the top down imposition of some demagogue’s vision of “the collective good.” those words are always and ever must be lies. such a concept is fundamentally broken, an unknowable unmeasurable fable foisted upon the credulous and worse, the shortsightedly greedy.

the confluence of these two forces, high value human capital and high trust, high function human systems is an exceptional state of affairs.

and the time to apologize for demanding that has passed.

our founders and framers understood:

the western conception of social contract is simply not an institution that most of the world can or wants to join or take part in. it is and must be, by its nature, exclusionary to those who cannot or will not participate.

the voluntary agreement to step outside the war of all against all and to respect the (negative) rights of others to life, and liberty, and property, to freedom of speech and association that in return one’s own rights shall be respected is a choice and one that must be made daily, hourly, over and over. the civilization it underpins is nothing more (but nothing less) than the ongoing volitional non-defection in an endless many-sided iterative prisoner’s dilemma, a high equilibrium achievable by (and only by) people of sufficiently low time preference that they may withhold from damaging and stealing from their fellows because they know that no one instance of smash and grab is worth the breakage of the system that makes their plenty and safety possible and pleasant.

all agree to be bound because they understand that the reciprocal of bound is “protected” and that it is only by holding up one’s own end that one deserves to demand that others uphold theirs.

the price of the sanctity of your home and speech is the respect for the sanctity of the homes and utterances of others.

it sounds easy.

it’s not.

such social contract constitutes the system most conducive to human flourishing. there is not even a contest. it is the only pareto optimizing system known to man. all the people yammering about “i do not want to live under capitalism” and seeking some semantic justification of “social democracy” or whatever the current vogue in lexical legerdemain may be are, in reality, saying one thing:

i want to be protected but not bound.

i want the right to my speech and property while i take yours.

the positive rights to healthcare, food, housing, and the forced association of DEI and whatever other quota systems are devised to mandate takings and forcings by calling them inclusion are antithetical to social contract. once you place the power to take from one and give to another in the hands of the demos, you get mob rule and base demagoguery to lead it. you’re never going to be able to have non-defection again especially in the presence of low value human capital golden rule disrespectors who see such defection as right and righteous . it’s a race to the bottom to see who can win the smash and grab before one is smashed and grabbed. this destroys not only the systems of flourishing but the morals of those crushed beneath them.

legal plunder is a debased state of humanity punitive to our better angels and rewarding of the rapacity of our devils.

the great american experiment sought to mitigate and proscribe this. its genius and unparalleled creative force lay in one idea, an idea as simple as it was noble, a truth self-evident and inalienable:

that the rights of the individual stand paramount to the prerogatives of the state and inviolate to them.

no diktat, however popular, may take away that which is inalienable. the purpose of a just state is to protect these rights. nothing more. nothing less. leviathan’s powers derive from the consent of the governed. that is the incorporation of the social contract into the very marrow of our nation: it’s government by marshmallow test and this test must be passed by citizen and leader alike.

in the end, there is a choice and the choice is binary.

there is no gray.

there can be no gray.

the moment one says “well, not that speech, because, reasons” or “well, we’ll just take some property from the unwilling and give it to someone else because common good” and the state uses “majority” as a fig leaf to justify that which one free person could not do to another without committing a crime, the rights of the individual are no longer paramount. everyhting else is a negotiation between 3 foxes and a hen about how many chicks from the henhouse shall be eaten and the justifications for it become at once baroque and self-refuting until you wind up in some absurd collectivist famine or the dark-hilarity of majorities voting to call themselves minorities and demanding privilege that they cast as protection.

this runs downhill much faster in places like europe where parliaments wield less fettered majority power.

this was never intended to be the american way.

this is what the republic and its ingrained checks and balances were intended to prevent, a role they performed admirably for generations until the cracks hammered into them grew increasingly into torrents as each new breakage facilitated and catalyzed the next.

“a republic if you can keep it.”

franklin’s words when asked the result of the constitutional convention and what sort of government shall these united states have stand today at once as prescient admonition and accusation.

they also stand as aspiration.

and so today on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of our declaration of independence, let we the people consider the words of our founding. they stand as true today as they did then, more so even for we have seen the power and the potential when they are put into practice.

this is no longer theory. it is fact.

and ways that have been lost may once more be found and when governments become destructive to the ends of liberty, it is and ever shall be the right of the people to alter or abolish them.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

so here we are.

talk is cheap and ideals perhaps cheaper. what we need is praxis and so allow the polemicist pussycat a soap box and lend an ear. i have a plan and none of it is unworkable.

first, a word of explanation: my goal is not perfection. this plan is sure to upset the ideologues, edge lords, and anarcho-catpilast purity signalers. good. it’s also sure to upset the statists, the planners, the collectivists, and the diversity dogmatists. good. is this plan perfect? no. can it be? no. that is not my intent. my intent is to create, from known and validated principles and practices, a plan that is miles better than where we are, one that can and will work. my intent is also to create a plan we could actually implement both as a matter of practical issues like “could you do it?” and of the other critical issue of “could you sell it and get a broad enough group to agree?”

purists may not like it, but politics is the art of the possible and a grand dream of the philosopher kingdom upon a hill that you can never bring about is of no value. it’s just whining and aspiration, the kind of vapid virtue signaling that those of obsessively libertarian/anarchic lean are so apt to condemn among the marxist mavens and collectivist empathycrats, but seem so unable to diagnose in themselves and therefore leaves them ever marginalized as advocates of perfection standing as enemies of the better.

feel free to disagree, but if you’re going to grandstand and edge lord, provide an actual path to getting to whatever destination you advocate that is both possible and plausible else be called unserious and impotent. “but muh utopia” is not a political movement.

the core salients of my plan rest upon the pillars above and root in the idea of social contract:

that america and its ongoing dream must derive from high value, exceptional human capital and from the systems conducive to the flourishing of such capital. we must restore the protection of the individual and the possiblity of enduring golden rule social contract. and we must stop excusing or even tolerating deviation or opposition to such: get with the program or get lost. apologising for exceptionalism is the ethos of the slave.

how do we get there?

we need a grand bargain and that bargain must be taken to a constitutional convention and ratified.

much, even most of what i will propose is a simple return to our earlier structures, structures that have been broken and flouted and that must be, once more, restored so that choice and liberty may once more stand above diktat and plundercrat rule. much of this is simply the obvious things that we forgot, the chestertonian fences torn down in incomprehension.

to do this 3 things must occur and no one or even two will be sufficient by themselves:

1. we must regain fiscal control - emprires and democracies die of profligacy and deficit. running $2-3 trillion in annual deficits is not survivable.

2. we must regain control of and curate our human capital - execptionalism must be not only the rule but the requirement. this requires control of borders and birthright. it probably cannot be managed by borderguards alone, we must reverse the draw of low human capital seeking to live off our systems and return to a system that deters and expels it. you cannot get this many illegals and folks who do not fit to exit by rounding them up. they need to want to leave.

3. we must regain control of our instutions - this requires both the removal of anti-republic prerogatives and regulation and of its replacement with systems that are self-policing and self-regulating such that future usurpations will face consequences and choice is devolved to localities instead of centralized to transfer sovereignty to the individual and render him the customer, not the serf of the state.

this is not as difficult as it sounds and rests on a small number of levers, but these levers are serious and take courage and will to pull. time to find it.

“have you actually looked at this?”

pass a balanced budget amendment. the federal government will no longer be allowed to spend more than it takes in. this is simply not possible with the government as currently instantiated, but it’s also not as impossible as it looks.

the core problem is entitlements and “security programs” and the fact that they are a ponzi scheme/plunderocracy that is running utterly out of control. in 2025, $2.6 trillion was spent on medicare and social security. the sum total of all FICA and payroll tax collections was $1.7tn. the system as is cannot be fixed and will only get worse.

it needs to become personal accounts and the state needs to get out of it.

social security should be ended. medicare should be ended.

FICA and payroll taxes should not go to government, they should go to tax-free retirement accounts and health savings accounts owned by individuals. there should be ZERO government health “insurance.” it’s a disaster and corrupt and overpriced beyond belief or redemption. give people money. let individuals spend it on care or on private insurance that is neither regulated nor mandated by the state. medicine is a technology good and drops in real cost every year if it’s cash pay. insurance is not the solution, it’s the problem, a buffet with no price discovery serving only to enrich the shyster class. singapore provides a good example here. if people ask “what does it cost?” and shop on price performance, it’s amazing how good, fast, and cheap health care becomes and how affordable “disaster” coverage for cancer or car crashes becomes.

if americans got the market rate of return on what they paid in social security, they’d retire with many multiples of the payout. the math is stark. letting the feds run this and leaving the money within reach of the demos and demagogue has been a calamity. failed experiment. abandon.

this is all easy and obvious. we need to grasp the nettle. the price of doing this is likely to be “putting a big pile of money into some HSA’s and retirement accounts for those too old to generate their own now.” it’s a one time hit to debt that cures a $900 million a year (and rising) budget shortfall. we means test it, deal with it, and clear the board.

all these accounts become personal property.

then we pull apart the $668bn in medicaid and the $681bn in federal social program outlays and end it. all of it. every last dollar. the federal government removes itself entirely from this field of endeavor and funding to which is was never entitled nor permitted.

all this power goes back to the states and the people. if you want these protections, they have to take place at levels where people can say no.

(more on this in a minute)

the 10th amendment will once more be enforced. the commerce clause will be clarified to mean “the protection of negative rights to trade among the several states” only and none of this positive right “anything that could affect anything anywhere that might cross a state line so growing your own corn for your own use could affect the price in other places so we need to control it” garbage.

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

that alone will put the fiscal house in order. no new federal debt will be allowed nor any new money printing. 10% of all tax receipts need to go to paying down debt principal.

end the fed. it’s a disaster. replace it with a sensible system of private currencies competing with and checking/auditing one another as stores of value, means of exchange, and transactional simplicity and privacy. money is none of the state’s business and letting leviathan run the banking system is like letting rats run the granary. this experiment has failed everywhere. end it and forbid it.

next:

repeal the 17th amendment. (case made at length HERE and summarized below:)

the intended role of the senate in the US federalist republic was not to stand for the people, it was to stand for the states.

the house was intended to stand for the people and was thus elected by the people.

the role of the senate was different.

the role of the senate was to protect the states, their governments, and their prerogatives from the federal government.

there is a reason that approval of supreme court justices, other federal judges, cabinet members, and suchlike was a power vested in the senate. it was supposed to be used by representatives of the state legislatures in defense of the state legislatures and to protect them from predation by a grasping center as lecherous leviathan sought to sink tentacles into that which was meant to be reserved for the states, taking their rightful powers for itself like a central government sinkhole expanding to consume a nation.

such jurists and cabineteers as appointed by state legislatures in defense of state legislatures would tend to have an altogether different character, one rooted in the primacy of the several states and in which the federal government would be seen as a nuisance and a trespasser, not as a solution or a suzerain.

restore this. the 1-2 punch of “enforce the 10th and repeal the 17th” puts us back on federalist footing, restoring the vision of “these united states” in which states stand as primary actors instead of a vastly overpowered swamp drowning them all.

this restores choice and accountability because states are fiscally and socially constrained; americans can simply move when and if they go to hell or stop protecting liberty providing attractive cost-benefit. the states should also follow suit and devolve as much power as possible to the localities and move as many systems as possible to “user pays.” you want a bridge? fund it with a toll. apply this to everything.

ban public school. no state or town shall ever again run a school. close the department of education. fund students, not systems. people are going to demand some sort of sponsorship, so the compromise is the entire nation has 5 years to move to a voucher system. existing schools all go up for bid. new schools and AI and distance learning/homeschool curriculums are all free to compete and no government may set criteria for doing so. pure market based solutions. a few bad outcomes are a tiny price compared to the monolithic mediocrity (and falling) currently imposed. set our children free from indoctrination and stultification. develop our human capital to its maximum extent.

explicitly ban all limits on and compulsion towards association or commerce. no one can tell competent adults who to hire or serve or speak to or marry. it’s all free choice. there are no quotas or limits, and “because that’s what i want”is always and everywhere a valid reason under the law. you want a restaurant for women only? do it. you want asian only cub scouts? do it. you want to hire using IQ tests? do it. it’s none of the state’s business. you want to call someone a jerk because you don’t like the choice they made? do it. but if you get called a jerk for calling others a jerk? deal with it. choice lies with the individual and no one has to lose it because they run a business. time for big boys and girls wearing big boy and girl pants. can’t handle free choice and free association? maybe exceptionalism is not for you. don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.

same goes for commerce.

government is explicitly banned from mandating purchase of products or telling you from whom you may buy them. it’s not a power with which politicians can be trusted. the minute you give them the ability to say “you need to install a heat pump” the politicos all get bought by the makers of every product you don’t want and they force you to buy one. again, failed experiment, end it.

next:

get control of who lives here and our human capital:

the 14th amendment is ridiculous and needs to be clarified to eliminate “magic dirt birthright citizenship.” it was not intended this way and the function is pernicious especially in conjunction with a welfare and services state handing out free stuff that’s multiples of the standard of living in many of the awful reservoirs of low value human capital around the world.

stop handing out citizenship and voting rights. no one else lives like this and neither should we. this is like running a french fry stand on seagull island.

the borders need to be policed as do illegals but the real nub is this: who the immigration is matters.

the US is rightly called an immigrant nation. we thrived on it. but we thrived on it for two reasons:

“beacon on a hill” and “tough times and tough selectors.”

the beacon on the hill drew the best and brightest, the builders and the high value human capital who saw america and said “that’s the place to go do my thing.” we wanted those people and want them still. they are the wealth of the world and the most talented few are more important than any time in history. but to get the eagles and not the seagulls, you need life to be hard. the selector must be significant, the hill steep. it’s not about race or creed or gender, it’s about “do your values align with our values?” and “is your capacity sufficient to make it here?” can and will you join and follow the social contract and can you thrive by virtue of your own devices?

there is no shortcut for varsity team tryouts. not if you want to field a serious team.

as soon as you offer up free stuff and unaccountable fiat to rob and rape and plunder because “oh, they’re new here, they don’t understand” you run an adverse selector for the worst and dimmest, those who would live parasitically off the others. it seems to offend ideas of empathy to let the 80 IQ gimmiegrant go rough, but what of the empathy for america upon whose largess they feed upon and whose institutions they demolish, whose schools they bury and children they impede? sorry. we’re going back to doing unapologetic exceptionalism and “make it on your own.” if that is not your cup of tea, no worries. i wish you well in pursuing your happiness elsewhere, but you may not come and take from and live off of the social contractors here.

eliminating all immigrant eligibility for safety net and social programs and the anchor baby loophole thereto will stop and reverse the flood. the astonishing drain of fiscal resources is bad enough, but the large scale introduction of low trust people who will always defect in prisoner’s dilemmas and who will not only fail to return the shopping cart but purloin it is societal strychnine. you cannot have nice things. the first world degrades to the second.

so, sorry, not sorry, american excpetionalism is a specific sort of club and the high trust flourishing society it creates is worthy of protection.

yet nothing may be protected in the absence of basic accountability:

we need to protect and to limit US elections. the US is the richest and most technologically advanced country in the history of humanity. the idea that we cannot hold free and fair elections is absurd. this is a choice. trusting those who benefit from fraud to oversee this is madness. it’s another failed experiment.

elections, federal, state, and local need to be constitutionally placed beyond the reach of the state and the answer to this is open source software running on some sort of publicly available blockchain utilizing ring signatures from the issuers, the specific elections, and the individuals such that the code base is open and auditable by anyone and the cryptography beyond reproach. each voter can, themselves, validate that their vote was cast and correctly counted. the number of votes is provable and predicted. voting keys are given out only to those who have been rigorously validated and identified and such validation must occur and re-occur at regular intervals. you vote, in person, with ID, using these keys. even overseas military and diplomatic corps must vote this way (at a station set up for them). no mail in, no unvalidated voting or ballot harvesting. you show your ID, you get validated, you use your private key, that’s that. voter rolls are assessed and cleaned after every election. this happens in public.

we also need to tighten eligibility. no more voting goodies to yourself. only net taxpayers can vote. if, over the last 12 months, you received more in benefits than you paid in taxes, you are disenfranchised. if you want to vote, settle up. you can live off the state or steer it, pick one. no more “free bread for seagulls” party.

will this solve all of america’s problems? probably not. would be be a helluva start and a platform to solve the rest? i think so.

you control and cultivate the human capital by removing the adverse selectors that are flooding us. immigration can be fantastic or terrible, it depends upon who you get. and we need the ones who get with and further our program. melting pot works. multiculti salad does not. it’s far too easy for far too few to break high functioning systems for everyone. this is the city on the hill. this is the varsity team. you have to make the cut. there are no participation trophies or entitlement.

this newfound spectacle of immigrants talking about how they hate america is a sign of systemic sickness, a failure of the societal immune system. of course they hate you. they think you are stupid and weak and easy to cheat and live off of. that won’t change. what they would respect is being told “no, go find your own way.” then we’d find out who’s who. american tryouts are open. let’s see if you can play at this level.

restore bottom up emergent systems and success.

that’s the selector that works.

rights respecters only.

restore fiscal solvency and remove the moral rot of dependency culture and plunder. restore and sternly enforce the social contract and devolve to the states and to the individuals most of the power to tax and to spend. destroy the federal crony corporatism and allow choice in all things. people will vote with their feet and 50 experiments and 5000 micro experiments within them will compete to offer up versions of the american dream and thereby attract population. you can see this already in flight from NYC and CA. imagine what it would be like without the federal impositions, how different states could be, the discipline imposed by competition.

citizens become the customer and not the indentured servant.

federalism = free market choice for government.

the senate will once more protect this and control scotus and the cabinet yoking them, as intended, into the service of liberty.

the individual and his sovereignty will stand paramount and free in speech, association, and commerce.

and america will have the best century in human history.

we’ve done this before. nothing has changed. it will work again.

it just takes courage born of faith.

we must get past complacency and cowardice. no one said city on a hill was easy, only that it was worth fighting for.

that is what we declared 250 years ago.

if you would celebrate america, celebrate its ideas and its mission.

embrace excptionalism.

exceptionalism is aspirational, the path to better, the path to liberty.

anyone saying otherwise is (wittingly or not) selling something you do not want to buy.

anyone calling it arrogant or shameful is seeking to play at thought police. they are teaching you to subjugate yourself.

it is not empathy to take at the point of a gun.

it is not liberty to demand the serfdom of others to fund your claims to positive rights nor is it justice to spin fables to lionize it.

freedom is the other thing, the hard thing, the beautiful thing, the flourishing of that which is best in humankind and the reaching toward potential, toward better, toward a manifest destiny of greatness free to be we the people secure in ourselves and our prerogatives.

that is life well lived.

that is america.

that is worthy of defense.

there are roads that diverge in this wood:

one is paved with the courage of our convictions

the other is the path of decline.

civilizations fall by forgetting the obvious things.

they rise when they remember.

happy birthday, america.

and many more to come.

LFG.