I Believe

We Are All Republicans, We Are All Federalists

Dr. Nick van Terheyden had bone pain that he could not explain. He was fifty-eight, a physician in Maryland. A specialist ordered a $350 blood test for vitamin D deficiency. The test came back positive. The deficiency was severe enough that if left untreated, it would lead to osteoporosis. Van Terheyden’s insurer was Cigna. They refused to pay for the test. The corporate medical director who signed the denial letter said the test wasn’t medically necessary. Van Terheyden read the letter, looking for the clinical reasoning. There was none. Only generic language, a response from a machine. He filed an appeal. A second medical director upheld the denial. To reimburse van Terheyden for the test that had come back positive, van Terheyden would have to prove he had a vitamin D deficiency before the test had been done. He kept investigating. Cigna used a system that flagged mismatches between billing codes and acceptable diagnoses. It let the company’s medical directors deny claims in batches without opening a patient’s file. Internal documents later showed that the doctor who rejected van Terheyden’s claim rejected roughly sixty thousand claims in a single month. Over a two-month window, Cigna physicians denied more than three hundred thousand payment requests. The average review took 1.2 seconds. It took seven months and an external medical review to force the insurer to pay the $350. Two years passed. On December 4, 2024, a man named Brian Thompson stepped out of a New York hotel and was shot dead on the sidewalk. He was the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare. Shell casings left behind were inscribed with three words: deny, defend, depose. Across demographic lines, Americans began telling their own stories. Denials, delays, bankruptcies, deaths. The shooter had read the same files Dr. van Terheyden had. So, it turned out, had millions of others. The event left a question America still cannot bring itself to ask out loud. What would it take to build a healthcare arrangement Americans can actually live with? Act I. The Body In Centerville, Ohio, Tim Anderson watched his wife die for three years. Doctors diagnosed Mary Anderson with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. ALS destroys motor neurons one at a time. The body loses the ability to walk, then to swallow, then to speak, then to breathe. The mind stays. The patient is awake for all of it. By the end, Mary could no longer move her arms or her legs. She could no longer eat without help. Her voice was going. Her physicians prescribed equipment to help her breathe and to help her speak. The Andersons were insured through UnitedHealthcare. UnitedHealthcare denied both claims. Tim Anderson appealed. The company denied the appeals. He appealed again. The denials continued. The medical necessity of the equipment was not in dispute among Mary’s doctors. The diagnosis was not in dispute. The progression of the disease was not in dispute. The only substance in dispute was whether the insurer would pay. The Andersons could not get coverage for the machines that would have helped Mary breathe or speak. Toward the end, Mary communicated by blinking when Tim held up pictures. The family relied on donations from a local ALS group to cover what their insurance had refused. She died in 2022. After the shooting on the sidewalk in New York, Tim Anderson spoke to a reporter. He said this: “The business model for insurance is don’t pay. When Mary could still talk, she said to me to keep fighting this. It needs to be exposed.” The Andersons live in red, rural Ohio. Tim Anderson is sixty-seven. He worked his whole adult life, paid his premiums, raised his family. He didn’t enter the healthcare debate through ideology. His wife’s battle brought him into it anyway. Eight hundred miles south, in Jefferson, Georgia, Luke Seaborn opened a shop to restore classic cars. Seaborn was fifty-four. He had been trained as a chemical engineer and had spent years in corporate work before leaving to do what he loved. The shop was small. The private insurance market for a small business owner in rural Georgia was punishing. For himself and his son, the premiums were close to impossible. In 2023, Georgia’s Republican governor Brian Kemp launched a program called Pathways to Coverage. It was a Medicaid waiver with a work requirement. Eligible Georgians could enroll if they could prove they were working, studying, or volunteering at least eighty hours a month. The program was designed as a conservative answer to Medicaid expansion. It tied coverage to personal responsibility. Seaborn enrolled. He believed in what the program said it was. He was grateful for the coverage. When the governor’s office asked him to film a promotional video, he agreed. He stood in his shop, surrounded by vintage Fords, and praised Pathways as a blessing. The governor used the footage to argue that work requirements foster independence. Then the program began to fail him. Seaborn logged his eighty hours every month, as required. In November, the state canceled his coverage. The state had quietly introduced a new form. It required enrollees to periodically re-enroll by re-entering the same information in a different format. Only an insurance executive Seaborn had met during the promotional shoot could restore his benefits. He had to call her directly. A few months later, a software glitch stopped his text alerts. He logged into the portal in March and discovered his coverage was set to terminate on April first. The state said he had missed an annual income statement. His policy was not yet due for renewal. He could not reach a caseworker by phone. He paid out of pocket for his family’s medications while he tried to fix it. The Pathways program had cost Georgia taxpayers more than eighty-six million dollars by then. More than fifty million had gone to Deloitte Consulting to build the portal. The program had enrolled barely three percent of those eligible. Seaborn said this to a reporter: “I am so frustrated with this whole journey. I did what I was supposed to. But that wasn’t good enough.” Two Americans. Different states. Different tribes. Different illnesses and programs. UnitedHealthcare denied Mary Anderson’s breathing machine. The State of Georgia’s Medicaid portal canceled Luke Seaborn’s coverage. One was private corporate denial. One was public administrative failure. They are the same failure. In both cases, a working American did what the system asked. Paid the premiums. Filed the forms. Logged the hours. Played by the rules of the arrangement. In both cases, the arrangement failed to honor its own terms. The diagnosis, the mechanism, the grief. These are not partisan. The conservative rancher’s widow and the conservative small-business owner are not the only Americans this happens to. The diagnosis runs the country. Healthcare administration, then, is not a debate. It is a machine. Act II. The Architecture In Holly Springs, Mississippi, Dr. Kenneth Williams runs the only hospital within twenty-five miles. Williams is a family physician and the chief executive of Alliance HealthCare System. Holly Springs is in Marshall County. Marshall County has about thirty-eight thousand people. The next-closest hospital is a long drive. Williams has been there since 1999. Sixty to sixty-five percent of his patients are on Medicare. When Medicare Advantage came into the program in 2006, the math of running his hospital changed. For five years before that, Alliance had been profitable. After Medicare Advantage took hold, the hospital lost almost two million dollars in a single year. Denials came in patterns Williams had not seen before. Insurers rejected treatments his physicians ordered. Insurers a thousand miles away shortened stays his physicians said were necessary. The denials killed a geriatric psychiatry program Alliance had built to serve the county’s elderly. The hospital had to close it. Williams was blunt about the system and the insurers. “I knew that our hospital couldn’t exist under the payment system it is under right now,” he said. About the insurers he went further: “They don’t want to reimburse for anything. Deny, deny, deny. They are taking over Medicare and they are taking advantage of elderly patients.” The hospital had already ended inpatient care in March 2023. Then they had to close the only emergency room in Marshall County in April 2024. Williams kept what he could: outpatient services, the clinic, the lab. The architecture had dismantled the rest of his hospital, floor by floor. When a reporter asked him who suffered from the closures, he answered in two words. “My patients.” Williams does not know Dr. Nick van Terheyden. He has never read the ProPublica investigation of Cigna’s algorithm. He has not seen the internal documents showing what 1.2 seconds per claim looks like on a corporate scorecard. He does not need to. He has watched the same gears grind his county for more than twenty years. He watched it kill a psychiatry program for elderly people in rural Mississippi. He watched it nearly kill the hospital itself. The Maryland physician saw the algorithm. The Mississippi physician saw the cemetery. This is the architecture America built. Whether by design or by negligence, we built it. A patient gets sick. A doctor orders a test or a treatment or a piece of equipment. A system designed to find reasons not to pay reviews the order. A doctor does not. The reviewing doctor, if there is one, does not open the file. The system issues the denial. A second reviewer hears the appeal and upholds the first. The patient appeals again, if the patient has the time and the literacy and the energy. Most do not. The question this architecture raises is older than the architecture itself. Who decides? Who has the authority to decide what shall be done with a human body? The person whose body it is, the doctor she has chosen to examine her, or a corporate medical director who has never met her and will not open her file? The American tradition has an answer. The patient and her physician. The body is the first property a person owns, and the right to decide what happens to it is the foundation of the right of liberty. No one has the authority to override that judgment. Not the state. Not a corporation. Not an actuary. The arrangement America built does this routinely. It is our business model. The question of who decides is only half of the moral architecture. The other half is older than the Republic. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise. Time and chance happen to us all. Mary Anderson did not choose ALS. The patients in Marshall County did not choose to be born into a county that lost the only mental health service it had. Time and chance fell on them, inside a system we built as if we believed time and chance did not exist. A healthcare arrangement worthy of the American tradition has to do two things at once. It has to preserve the liberty of the patient and the physician. And it has to provide a floor against the cruel net. The arrangement America built fails at both. It overrides patient and physician judgment through automatic denial, and it leaves people bankrupt when the net falls anyway. It violates liberty without providing security. It manages neither responsibility nor mercy. The country has lived with this long enough to recognize what it is doing. Tim Anderson knew when UnitedHealthcare denied his wife’s breathing machine. Luke Seaborn knew when Georgia’s portal canceled his coverage. Williams has known since 2006. Van Terheyden since 2021. This isn’t partisan. The architecture is the disease. The tougher question is, what do we do about it? Act III. The Long Walls In Big Sandy, Montana, Shane Chauvet was working his ranch when a windstorm came up. Big Sandy sits on the high prairie just north of the Missouri Breaks. Eight hundred people. One hospital. Twenty-five beds. The Big Sandy Medical Center is what the federal government calls a critical access facility. For the ranchers and farmers of that part of Chouteau County, it is what stands between a bad day and a fatal one. The wind that afternoon was strong enough to tear pieces of metal off the outbuildings. A sheet of it caught Chauvet as it flew. The cut nearly took his arm off. His wife loaded him into a truck. They drove to the hospital. They found the emergency room doors locked. The wind had knocked out the power across the county and the staff had moved to a side entrance to run the building on generators. Chauvet’s wife pounded on the doors while his blood pooled on the ground. Someone heard her. The medical staff at Big Sandy stabilized the arm. Then they put Chauvet in a ground ambulance and drove him eighty miles through rain and hail. Chauvet credits the hospital with saving his arm and his life. He told a reporter what he had learned. “I always would say, ‘Oh, they’re nice to have,’ but now I look at the hospital and say, ‘That’s essential to our community.’” The Big Sandy Medical Center may not be there in five years. Since 2010, nearly one hundred rural hospitals across the United States have closed. The reasons are not mysterious. Medicare Advantage and commercial insurers pay below the cost of providing care. The denials grind the margins to nothing. The closures begin with inpatient services, then the emergency room, then the doors. Marshall County, Mississippi, lived through this with Dr. Williams’ hospital between 2023 and 2024. Chouteau County, Montana, is one storm away from watching it happen to its own. When the cruel net falls on a working American in rural America, the architecture that catches him is fragile. The system that overrides his physician’s judgment when he is sick is the same system that dismantles the hospital that will keep him alive when the wind picks up. The architecture that is the disease is not in question. The country has known what its healthcare arrangement is doing for years. The tougher question is, what do we do about it? A national single-payer healthcare system makes sense. Lower administrative cost, universal coverage, the bargaining leverage to discipline pharma and provider pricing, and the elimination of bureaucratic violence. There’s nothing radical about people having healthcare, jobs, and education. We find money for what we prioritize. An America that wanted to make this transition could do it. And it will fail catastrophically if one party passes it 51-49, because half the country will spend the next forty years trying to dismantle it, and the instability of that fight will produce worse outcomes than the broken system it replaced. In May 2026, a prominent progressive leader vying for a presidential run described single-payer healthcare in a single word: forever. Presidents, senators, and elected officials come and go. Single-payer healthcare would outlast them all. This is the language of division. One tribe passes structural reform over the other and locks it in beyond the reach of reversal. And it is exactly the move that guarantees the reform’s failure. The Affordable Care Act is the proof. It passed in 2010 on a party-line vote; every Republican administration since has worked to dismantle it. Every Democratic administration has worked to expand it. Sixteen years later, hospitals cannot plan. Insurers cannot plan. Patients cannot plan. The rules change with every election. The instability is its failure. Now imagine that fight scaled to the entire healthcare economy. Every two years, every four years, the question reopened. A country that cannot agree on how to administer an insurance subsidy cannot administer a national healthcare system passed by half of itself over the other half. The alternative is consensus. Medicare is the proof. It passed in 1965 with substantial Republican support; seventy House Republicans, thirteen Senate Republicans. It has survived sixty years because both parties helped build it. Both parties campaign on protecting it. The durability of consent. Ancient Athens and its port lay four miles apart. The countryside between them belonged to no one in particular and to every army that crossed it. After the Persian Wars, during the half-century the Athenians later called the Pentecontaetia, the city built two parallel walls along the road to the sea. The walls connected the city to the port. They made the four miles between the city and the port indistinguishable from the city itself. An enemy could blockade the city, and grain could come in. Ships could be supplied. The city could not be starved out so long as the walls stood. The walls cost a generation of argument to build. Sparta opposed them. Athenian factions opposed them. The Athenians built them anyway because the men who remembered the Persian invasion understood that a city cut off from its port was already lost. They built across disagreement. They built because the alternative was a slow surrender to anyone who could control the road. The framers understood this. The Constitution that we have was the product of a long summer of argument, compromise, and the deliberate construction of an architecture meant to require ongoing consent rather than one-time victory. We argue about Senate representation and the Electoral College, but the small states would not have joined the Union otherwise. The whole document is an exercise in building across difference. Healthcare in America has to be built the same way, or it cannot be built at all. The arrangement we build cannot belong to one tribe. The progressive who calls single-payer forever and the conservative who calls all collective provision socialism are both refusing the harder work, which is the work of building something that survives them. The Republic does not run on wishes and mandates. It runs on consent. In March 1801, after one of the bitterest elections in American history, Thomas Jefferson stood on the Capitol steps and addressed a country that had nearly broken under the strain of the contest he had just won. We are all Republicans, he said. We are all Federalists. He was telling the country that the legitimacy of the new arrangement required incorporating the people who had lost the election, not ruling over them. Healthcare reform of any kind demands the same consensus from a generation that has mostly forgotten how to gain it. The architecture is the disease. We built it. We can build something else. We will not do it as Republicans. We will not do it as Democrats. We will do it as Americans, or we will not do it at all. Sources Patrick Rucker, Maya Miller, and David Armstrong, How Cigna Saves Millions by Having Its Doctors Reject Claims Without Reading Them [https://www.propublica.org/article/cigna-pxdx-medical-health-insurance-rejection-claims]. ProPublica and The Capitol Forum, March 25, 2023. The investigation that exposed the PXDX system, Dr. Cheryl Dopke’s sixty thousand denials in a single month, and Dr. Nick van Terheyden’s seven-month appeal for a three-hundred-fifty-dollar test. PBS NewsHour, UnitedHealthcare CEO Shooting Opens Floodgates of Americans’ Insurance Frustrations [https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/unitedhealthcare-ceo-shooting-opens-floodgates-of-americans-insurance-frustrations]. December 2024. Primary source for the Tim and Mary Anderson story, including the denial of equipment to help Mary breathe and speak, and the pictures Tim held up so Mary could blink. Margaret Coker, He Became the Face of Georgia’s Medicaid Work Requirement. Now He’s Fed Up With It [https://www.propublica.org/article/georgia-medicaid-pathways-brian-kemp-luke-seaborn-testimonial-video]. ProPublica and The Current GA, May 14, 2025. The Luke Seaborn story, the Pathways portal failures, the Deloitte contract, and the three-percent enrollment figure. Gretchen Morgenson, ‘Deny, Deny, Deny’: By Rejecting Claims, Medicare Advantage Plans Threaten Rural Hospitals and Patients, Say CEOs [https://www.nbcnews.com/health/rejecting-claims-medicare-advantage-rural-hospitals-rcna121012]. NBC News, October 31, 2023. Source for Dr. Kenneth Williams’s quote about Medicare Advantage practices. Anna Wolfe, Holly Springs Hospital Ends Inpatient Care [https://mississippitoday.org/2023/03/31/holly-springs-hospital-inpatient-care/]. Mississippi Today, March 31, 2023. The 2006 financial losses at Alliance HealthCare System and Williams’s diagnosis that the hospital could not survive under the existing payment system. Anna Wolfe, Marshall County’s Only ER to Close [https://mississippitoday.org/2024/04/11/holly-springs-hospital-er-closure/]. Mississippi Today, April 11, 2024. The April 2024 emergency room closure and Williams’s two-word answer to the question of who suffered. Dr. Kenneth Williams, The Future of Healthcare in Marshall County [https://www.southreporter.com/news/future-healthcare-marshall-county]. The South Reporter, March 26, 2026. Williams’s own guest column to his community. The landlord-and-tenant framing and the January 2025 presentation to the Marshall County Board of Supervisors. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government [https://www.gutenberg.org/files/7370/7370-h/7370-h.htm]. 1689. Chapter V, particularly section 27: “Every man has a property in his own person.” The foundation of the property argument in Act II. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty [https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34901/34901-h/34901-h.htm]. 1859. The harm principle and the structural question of who has authority over the individual. Ecclesiastes 9:11–12 [https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+9%3A11-12&version=KJV], King James Version. The race, the battle, the bread, and the cruel net. Aaron Bolton and Arielle Zionts, Give and Take: Federal Rural Health Funding Could Trigger Service Cuts [https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/rural-emergency-hospitals-montana-rightsize-downsize-services-transformation-fund/]. KFF Health News and Montana Public Radio, March 27, 2026. The Shane Chauvet story, the Big Sandy Medical Center, and the Rural Health Transformation Program's risk to rural hospitals. University of North Carolina Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research, Rural Hospital Closures [https://www.shepscenter.unc.edu/programs-projects/rural-health/rural-hospital-closures/]. The standard primary source for tracking rural hospital closures since 2005. Pocharapon Neammanee, AOC Responds To Assumptions Of 2028 Presidential Run [https://www.huffpost.com/entry/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-2028-presidential-run-ambition_n_69ff4c6fe4b06e786e3e9347]. HuffPost, May 9, 2026. Representative Ocasio-Cortez at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics in conversation with David Axelrod: “Presidents come and go, Senate, House seats, elected officials, come and go, but single-payer healthcare is forever.” Social Security Administration, The Corning Years: Medicare Is Enacted [https://www.ssa.gov/history/corningchap4.html]. The official history of the 1965 Social Security Amendments, including the bipartisan roll-call votes that created Medicare. Seventy House Republicans and thirteen Senate Republicans voted yes. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War [https://www.gutenberg.org/files/7142/7142-h/7142-h.htm]. Book I, sections 89–93, and Book II, section 13. The Pentecontaetia and the construction of the Long Walls between Athens and Piraeus. Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address [https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/jefinau1.asp]. March 4, 1801. “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.” The constitutional move that named this essay. Companion Pieces Americans’ Unalienable Right to Life [https://joelkdouglas.substack.com/p/americans-unalienable-right-to-life]. Healthcare as a component of the unalienable right to life. The Declaration, the Wyoming Constitution, and the right of the competent adult to decide. Should the American People Fund Cancer Research at Harvard? [https://joelkdouglas.substack.com/p/should-the-american-people-fund-cancer]. The same architectural critique extended to pharmaceutical pricing. Taxpayers fund the research, universities patent the discoveries, drug companies set the prices, and the constitutional test for public spending goes unanswered. The Price Is the Price: A Letter to Raging Moderates [https://joelkdouglas.substack.com/p/the-price-is-the-price]. The minimum wage essay. Lincoln, the Long Walls, and consensus as the precondition for structural reform. 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The Social Responsibility of Government is Sovereignty

The trailer’s loaded by four. Twenty-five head, sorted yesterday, the gate latched twice. The F-350 idles in the yard while he checks the running lights one more time. Jesse watches from the cab, ears up. The Bentley mark on her forehead catches the radio light. She is certain about the day. Buffalo to Torrington is four hours if the roads are dry. He pulls out of the drive at 4:17 and turns south on 25, coffee in the holder, the dog settled, the cattle quiet behind him. The dash reads twenty-six degrees. The eastern sky is still black. He’s made this drive many times over thirty years. His father made it before him in a different truck, but the math was the same. Raise them, feed them, haul them, take what you’re offered. The price is the price. He knows what he’ll get today, give or take. He knew last week. The packers’ bids move together. Four buyers act like one buyer because that's what four buyers do when they're the only four.. He’s run the numbers a thousand times. Grass, water, fuel, vet, the loan in 2022 when the rates were still reasonable. Every time, the numbers are the same. He needs the price to be a little higher than it’s going to be. The radio finds a station out of Casper. He turns it down but not off. Jesse walks a circle on the seat and lies down, chin on the console. Past Glenrock, the sky starts to come up gray. He thinks about their three kids. The oldest is in Denver. He and his wife have been trying to buy a starter house for four years. Every time they save up, the prices have moved. The middle one is in Cheyenne. She’s a nurse, her husband works for the railroad, and they want three kids but can’t afford for either of them to take a year off. The youngest is in Billings. After a year of work, he’s decided to give college a try, looking at the University of Wyoming for the fall. He doesn’t know what he might do after. The ranch needs him to come back and run things. There hasn’t been money for two households in a while. He passes a gas station outside Douglas. Diesel is up again from last week. By the time he hits Torrington, the sun is full up, and the lot is filling. Trucks from Goshen County, from the Panhandle, from up north like him. Men he’s known for years and men he’s never seen. They nod at each other and back their trailers toward the chutes. The auction starts at nine. The buyers are already inside, drinking coffee, looking at the sheets. He kills the engine and sits for a second. Jesse stands up in the seat. A beautiful morning. He’s not asking for anything. He’s done the work. The cattle are good. The truck runs. The loan gets paid. He’d just like the price to be the price his work is worth, in a market that is what it was supposed to be. He opens the door. The cold comes in. Jesse jumps down ahead of him, but she’ll stay with the truck. Act I. Scene 1. The Half of Friedman Everyone Quotes Fifty-six years ago, in September of 1970, the New York Times Magazine published an essay that has shaped American economic thinking ever since. Author Milton Friedman, a University of Chicago economist who would win the Nobel Prize six years later. The title was The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, about three thousand words long. Most people who quote it have read the title and a paragraph or two. This essay, more than any other, changed how business in America works. The commonly understood argument is straightforward. A corporate executive is an employee of the shareholders. His job is to make money for them, within the rules. If he spends company money on social objectives, such as reducing pollution beyond what the law requires, hiring quotas beyond what the market supports, or making charitable contributions beyond what serves the business, he is spending other people’s money on objectives those people did not choose. Taxing the shareholders without their consent. The phrase that survived is the one that was easiest to put on a coffee mug. The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. It became a motto, then a worldview. By the time Reagan took office in 1981, it was the dominant framework of American corporate governance. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it had become something close to common sense. Maximize shareholder value. Let the market sort the rest. Before Friedman’s thesis, many businesses believed they had a broad role to maintain an equitable balance among interest groups. Stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large. Friedman drew a different line. Businesses owed shareholders profits. Social objectives were the work of a different institution. His thesis cleared the way to dismantle the post-World War II structure. Businesses would have minimal obligation to workers, communities, and the country. Their obligation was money. Manufacturing went offshore. Industries consolidated. Productivity gains flowed to CEOs and shareholders instead of workers. Friedman’s thesis was the one people reached for when they needed cover. And the dagger…Friedman was right. The logic is sound. An executive who pursues social objectives with shareholder money is doing two things he is not authorized to do. He is making policy decisions that, in a democratic Republic, are supposed to be made through political deliberation. And he is taxing the shareholders to fund those decisions, without their vote, and without their consent. The objection most people raise to Friedman is that the framework is too narrow. Businesses operate in a society, depend on a society, and owe something back to the society. Treating the corporation as a profit-maximizing machine misses the human reality of what corporations actually are. These objections have weight. Businesses do operate in society and depend on it. But the objection misses the counterpoint. Friedman himself addressed this concern in the same essay. The part nobody quotes. Act I. Scene 2. The Half Nobody Quotes Friedman continued. A few hundred words after the line that became the coffee mug, he wrote that if anyone is going to pursue social objectives with public resources, that person has to be a civil servant. Selected through a political process. If anyone is going to impose taxes and spend money on those objectives, there has to be political machinery. Machinery to decide what taxes to assess. Machinery to decide what objectives to pursue. That’s the part nobody quotes. Friedman is not saying social objectives don’t matter. He is not saying businesses have no obligation to society. He is saying these obligations matter so much that they need a specific kind of institution to pursue them. That institution is not the corporation. That institution is the government. Friedman wrote a complete system. Two halves. The corporation does its job, which is profits. The government does its job, which is everything else the public decides matters. The two halves depend on each other. Social objectives matter. They don’t go away when business stops pursuing them. Without the government doing its job, business doing its job isn’t enough. Friedman knew we need both. He wrote it down. Published it in the same essay. The business disciples kept the first half. They have no role in the government half, so they dropped that part. The part about taxes assessed through deliberation. The part about objectives chosen through consent. The part about political machinery that the public controls. That’s the part that holds the whole system together. And because it had no champion, we lost it. So business profits increased. Industries consolidated. Wages stagnated. Housing got unaffordable. Then, instead of making the rules fair again, making the two halves fit together, we decided we would let business do whatever they needed to increase profits. Workers didn’t get their fair share of wages, but no matter. We would instead funnel money through our political machine to help people have enough money to live. How would we afford to pay for that? A great question. Act II. The Petrodollar The answer is borrowing. For fifty years, we have paid for things by borrowing money instead of raising taxes. That sentence is ‘History 101’ of federal finance since the early 1970s. We spend more than we collect. We make up the difference by selling government debt. Treasury bonds. A buyer hands us cash today, and we promise to pay them back with interest later. For most of those fifty years, the buyer wasn’t us. They were foreign. Specifically, the buyer was a government or a central bank in another country that had piled up dollars from selling oil and needed somewhere safe to put those dollars. American Treasury bonds were the safest place in the world. So the dollars came back to us. We borrowed them. We spent them. The deal worked because countries sold oil in dollars all over the world, and the dollars had to come home eventually, and home was the US Treasury. This arrangement has a name. Petrodollar recycling. Here’s how we built it. In 1971, Richard Nixon took the United States off the gold standard. Until that day, every dollar in circulation was backed by gold held at Fort Knox. After that day, the dollar was backed by nothing except the promise of the United States government. Nothing physical. Just a promise. That should have been a problem. A currency backed by nothing usually loses value. Other countries should have stopped accepting dollars and started demanding something more solid. They didn’t. Because three years later, in 1974, America made a deal with Saudi Arabia. The deal was simple. Saudi Arabia agreed to sell its oil only in US dollars. In exchange, the United States agreed to protect the Saudi regime and to let Saudi Arabia invest its oil profits in American debt. Other oil-producing countries followed. By the late 1970s, almost all oil in the world was sold in dollars. Every country that wanted oil had to hold dollars. Every country that sold oil ended up with dollars. And those dollars came back to the United States Treasury, looking for a safe place to sit. That’s the petrodollar arrangement. Oil bought and sold in dollars. Dollars recycled into Treasury bonds. America got to borrow cheaper than any other country in the world, because the world had no choice but to lend to us. When a government has to raise taxes to pay for things, the people feel it. They argue about it. Vote on it. They send representatives to a chamber to fight about what’s worth the tax and what isn’t. That’s the political machinery Friedman said was the whole point. It’s slow. Contentious. It’s how a free people decide what they want their government to do. When a government can borrow instead of tax, the people don’t feel it. The bill doesn’t come due today. The bill comes thirty years from now, paid by people who weren’t in the room when the decision was made. The argument doesn’t happen. The vote doesn’t happen. The political machinery doesn’t run. The dead exercise rights over the living. The petrodollar arrangement let the United States skip the political machinery. The petrodollar wasn’t the only reason we borrowed. Demographics shifted. Healthcare costs ran wild. Tax cuts went through without matching spending cuts. We went to war without war taxes. Recessions came and stimulus answered. The pressures pushing toward more debt were real, and they came from every direction. But every other country in the world faces the same pressures, in some form. And every other country eventually hits a wall. The bond market pushes back. Borrowing costs rise. The currency loses value. The politicians have to choose. America didn’t hit that wall. The petrodollar arrangement absorbed the pressure and dissolved it. We could borrow and keep borrowing, because the world had nowhere else to put its dollars. Want a transfer program? Borrow. Want a war? Borrow. Want to subsidize healthcare, housing, agriculture, energy? Borrow. We still hear these ideas today, in hidden words. How would we pay for healthcare for all? Universal basic income? EV tax credits? A $1.5 trillion defense budget? Tax cuts? The government will pay for it. How? With debt. So, business did its job, government skipped its job, and the bill went on a credit card foreign nations were happy to carry. The political machinery rusted. Deliberation stopped. We no longer needed consent, because we no longer felt the cost. That’s how we could pretend to afford to funnel money through the political machine instead of fixing the rules. We couldn’t afford it. We borrowed it. From people who weren’t in the room. To pay for objectives we never deliberated. Through a machine that rusted and seized up when the bill stopped arriving. Even though we didn’t have to pay the bill up front, we are still paying the cost. Act III. The Bill The arrangement is breaking. Not collapsing. Breaking. Slowly. A piece at a time, each piece small enough to ignore, the cumulative weight harder to ignore each year. Foreign central banks don’t buy as many Treasuries as they used to. China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, and Brazil are settling oil and other commodities in their own currencies more often. They’re buying gold instead of dollars. They’re building payment systems that route around the dollar. Each move is small. Together they’re a drift. The drift is twenty years old now, and it’s accelerating. What it means for us is simple. Borrowing costs more and will keep costing more. The bond market is starting to ask questions it didn’t ask before. The forty-year subsidy on American debt is wearing off. That’s the bill. It doesn’t arrive as a piece of paper with a number on it. It arrives as everything we put off, popping up in the lives of the people who inherited the deferral. The rancher’s been thinking about his kids the whole drive. The oldest in Denver. He and his wife have been trying to buy a starter house for four years. Every time they save enough for a down payment, the prices have moved. The last house they looked at was three-twenty. The bank qualified them for two-ninety. They decided to wait another year. The middle one in Cheyenne. She’s a nurse. Her husband works for the railroad. They have one child. They want three. But the cost of raising each one keeps going up faster than what they can save, and they can’t afford for either of them to take a year off when a baby comes. They decided to wait. The youngest in Billings. After a year of full-time work, he decided to give college a try. The University of Wyoming for the fall. He’s not sure what he’ll study. He’s sure that without the degree, the wage he’s been earning won’t earn the life he wants. The question he can’t answer is what the degree is going to cost. He doesn’t know how much he’ll have to borrow. He doesn’t know what he’ll earn when he graduates. The math is fuzzy. Three kids. Three good kids. Each one in a different city, in a different profession, running into a different version of the same wall. The oldest can’t afford the house his parents bought. The middle can’t afford the family her parents raised. The youngest can’t afford the path we told him would work. This is what the bill looks like when it lands in working lives. Three kids in three cities, deciding to wait. A house deferred. A child deferred. An adult life deferred. The bill is the gap between what their labor is worth and what their lives cost. The petrodollar arrangement let us paper over that gap for forty years by funding programs with deferred borrowing. The patches were transfer programs, and tax credits, and student loans, and housing subsidies, and all the downstream machinery that papered over what was happening upstream. The patches cost money. We borrowed the money. The bill came to the kids. They didn’t borrow it. They got handed the math. The rancher in the auction yard in Torrington. The lot is filling. He’s not angry at the kids. He’s not even worried about them, exactly. They’re working. They’re doing what they were told to do. They’ll figure it out, the way he figured it out, the way his father figured it out before him. But he can see the math. He’s been doing his own version of it for thirty years. Grass, water, fuel, vet, the loan. The price at the auction. The numbers that don’t quite work. He’s been a price-taker his whole life. His kids are price-takers too. Different markets, same lesson. That’s the bill. Not what comes due thirty years from now in some abstract Treasury auction. What comes due right now, in his oldest’s apartment in Denver, in his daughter’s hospital shift in Cheyenne, in his youngest’s tuition decision in Billings. If that’s the bill, how do we pay it? Act IV. The Work There are five things the government has to do. Structural things that set the conditions a working life can fit inside of. Energy. We pump our own oil, refine our own fuel, build the grid that carries our own power. Energy independence isn’t just a trade-balance number. It’s the only way out of the petrodollar arrangement that doesn’t require the world’s permission. We had to make a deal for oil in 1974. We don’t have to make that deal again if we don’t need to import. Reshoring. We bring the factories back. Not all of them. The critical ones. The ones that make the things a country has to make if it wants to be a country. Things like steel, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, inputs to our defense. Tariffs won’t do this on their own. Tax policy, regulatory policy, infrastructure investment, and serious industrial strategy do. Broad tariffs are theater that puts money into one man’s pocket. The work is harder than performance. Antitrust. The four packers. The three airlines. The two grocery chains in most American towns. The handful of tech firms that decide what most Americans see and hear. Markets don’t function when the buyers all act like one buyer. The rancher in Torrington knows this in his bones, and so does anyone who’s tried to start a business in an industry where the incumbent owns the supply chain. Government broke up Standard Oil in 1911 and AT&T in 1982. Government remembers how to do this. We just stopped doing it. Infrastructure. The real kind. The kind that lets a starter house get built in Denver. The kind that builds American tech training instead of hiring foreign workers on H-1B visas. The kind that lets a kid in Wyoming or Delaware go to college without inheriting thirty years of debt. We’ve spent forty years deferring investment in human capability infrastructure because borrowing for transfers was easier than building for capacity. The bridges are the visible part. The harder part is the public goods that make private work possible. Fiscal rules that survive elections. Not austerity. Not a constitutional amendment. The discipline of making each Congress face the cost of what it spends, in the year it spends it, before the bill goes to the bond market. Pay-as-you-go for new programs. Sunset clauses on tax cuts. Honest accounting on entitlements. The mechanics are technical. The principle is Friedman’s. If we want social objectives, we have to deliberate about them, vote on them, and pay for them. That’s the real work. None of it is easy. None of it is fast. All of it is upstream of the lives that are running into the wall right now. This isn’t austerity. It isn’t libertarian. It isn’t a plan to shrink government. It’s a plan for government to do its job. Build the conditions. Set the rules. Fund the commons. Then leave the citizen alone. Because the point of everything the government does, like antitrust, energy, reshoring, infrastructure, and fiscal discipline, is what it produces downstream. A market that’s a market. A wage that supports a life without taxpayer support. A house a family can save for. A college a kid can afford that trains them for a high-paying job. An adult life that doesn’t require deferral. The work is government’s work. But government doesn’t do work that citizens don’t demand. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. The political machinery doesn’t run unless we make it run. The rancher is pulling an empty trailer home. The check in the console. The price was the price. He didn’t get more than he expected. He didn’t get less. Past Glenrock. The sun behind him now, low on the right. Jesse asleep on the seat. The dash reads forty-one degrees. Here’s what the rancher knows. He’s done with voting for politicians who promised America first and didn’t deliver. And he’s done with politicians who raged against the other party, said they would make meaningful change, and failed to deliver for the American people. If the senator had a term and didn’t try to break the meatpacker monopoly, he’s done with him. If the congressman had a term and didn’t try to kick start the small house market, he’s done with her. If the president had four years and the deficit kept climbing while the patches kept failing, they lost their chance. He doesn’t care which party. He doesn’t care what they say next time. He cares what they did with the term they had. That’s not a program. It’s discipline. The kind the Republic requires from its citizens when the institutions have stopped requiring it from themselves. He thinks about the kids. The oldest, doing the math on a house. The middle, doing the math on a family. The youngest, doing the math on a degree. All three of them waiting. He’s not going to wait. His vote is the only lever he has, but at least he has one. He’s going to use it. Every cycle. Against any incumbent who didn’t try. The ranch is a long drive ahead. The Bighorns are catching the last of the light. He pulls onto the gravel. Kitchen window light on. Jesse is up now, ears forward. He kills the engine and sits for a second. The vote is his. And he’s going to use it. Sources Milton Friedman, The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits [https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html]. The New York Times Magazine, September 13, 1970. The full essay, including the part nobody quotes about civil servants and political machinery. Frank Abrams, “Management’s Responsibilities in a Complex World.” Harvard Business Review, May 1951 (paywalled). The Standard Oil chairman’s stakeholder-balance framework, written nineteen years before Friedman pushed back. Frederick Douglass, West India Emancipation [https://www.gilderlehrman.org/ap-african-american-studies/unit-2/organizing-for-freedom/west-india-emancipation-1857]. Speech at Canandaigua, New York, August 3, 1857. Power concedes nothing without a demand. Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Madison, September 6, 1789 [https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/letter-to-james-madison-17/]. The earth belongs to the living letter. David E. Spiro, The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony: Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets [https://www.academia.edu/1773849/The_Hidden_Hand_of_American_Hegemony_Petrodollar_Recycling_and_International_Markets]. Cornell University Press, 1999. The standard academic account. Andrea Wong, The Untold Story Behind Saudi Arabia’s 41-Year U.S. Debt Secret. [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-05-30/the-untold-story-behind-saudi-arabia-s-41-year-u-s-debt-secret] Bloomberg, May 31, 2016. The reporting that revealed the previously classified 1974 Saudi-Treasury agreement. Federal Reserve History, Nixon Ends Convertibility of US Dollars to Gold [https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/gold-convertibility-ends]. Background on the August 15, 1971 announcement. U.S. Treasury, Historical Debt Outstanding [https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/historical-debt-outstanding/historical-debt-outstanding]. Annual gross federal debt by fiscal year, 1790-present. Congressional Budget Office, The Budget and Economic Outlook [https://www.cbo.gov/topics/budget]. Annual report on federal deficits and structural fiscal pressures. U.S. Treasury, Major Foreign Holders of Treasury Securities [https://ticdata.treasury.gov/Publish/mfh.txt]. Tracks the decline in foreign Treasury holdings as a share of outstanding debt. International Monetary Fund, Currency Composition of Official Foreign Exchange Reserves [https://data.imf.org/cofer]. Quarterly data tracking the dollar’s declining share of global reserves. World Gold Council, Gold Demand Trends [https://www.gold.org/goldhub/research/gold-demand-trends]. Central bank gold purchases, including the record buying since 2022. Derrell Peel [https://www.beefmagazine.com/author/derrell-peel], Oklahoma State University Extension. Weekly cattle market reports and analysis on packer concentration. Northern Ag Network, Beef Cattle: Market Concentration [https://www.northernag.net/doj-usda-intensify-scrutiny-of-meatpackers-amid-ongoing-antitrust-probe/]. May 5, 2026. United States v. Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey, 221 U.S. 1 (1911). The 1911 breakup, cited in Act IV as evidence that government remembers how to do this. United States v. AT&T, 552 F. Supp. 131 (D.D.C. 1982). The 1982 consent decree. The other example. Economic Policy Institute, The Productivity-Pay Gap [https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap]. Tracks the divergence of worker compensation from productivity gains since the early 1970s. Joint Center for Housing Studies, Harvard, The State of the Nation’s Housing [https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/state-nations-housing-2024]. Annual report on housing supply, affordability, and the first-time homebuyer wall. Federal Reserve, Consumer Credit Report (G.19) [https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g19/current]. Total outstanding federal student loan debt and trends. Companion pieces The Sand Trap [https://joelkdouglas.substack.com/p/the-sand-trap]. The longer treatment of petrodollar recycling. The Price Is the Price: A Letter to Raging Moderates [https://joelkdouglas.substack.com/p/the-price-is-the-price]. The rancher, the four-packer cattle market, and the price-taker frame. Both Fly [https://joelkdouglas.substack.com/p/both-fly]. The rancher on tariffs and Article I. Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe [https://joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Pursuit, not Happiness

The Open Door. October, 1723. Market Street Wharf in Philadelphia. A seventeen-year-old runaway stepped off a boat. Dirty from the journey, pockets stuffed with shirts and stockings. He carried his entire fortune on him, a Dutch dollar and about a shilling in copper. Food money for a few days and nothing else. He could not afford a room. The shilling went to the boatmen for passage down the Delaware. He had run from his older brother’s printing shop in Boston without permission and with no prospects. He knew no one in the city. He walked up Market Street looking for bread. He asked a baker for three pennies’ worth. The baker gave him three great, puffy rolls. He had nowhere to put them. He carried two under his arms and ate the third as he walked. A young woman watched him pass from her father’s doorway and decided he looked ridiculous. He probably did. Years later, after she had become his wife, they would laugh about it. Walking back toward the river, he came upon a woman and her child who had been on the boat with him from Burlington. He gave them the two rolls he had left. He was tired, friendless, nearly broke, and he had just given away two-thirds of his food. He drifted with the Sunday crowd into a Quaker meeting house near the market, sat down in the silence of unprogrammed worship, and fell asleep. When the meeting ended, a stranger gently woke him. He noted decades later in his autobiography that the meeting house was the first building he ever slept in in Philadelphia. The boy was Benjamin Franklin. The first house he slept in in his new city was a church, and the door was open. No guard checked his papers. No barrier to the kind of stranger Franklin was. Exhausted, unwashed, unknown. The door was open because we had not yet chosen to close it. That door is locked now. Most church sanctuaries in America are bolted on weekdays, and many even on Sundays. We claim good reasons. Security. Theft. Damage. And we’ve locked other doors a young person used to find open. The starter home. The trade. The boarding room. The open campus. Each lock added by someone defending what they had. Hear it again. The declaration of our belief is either true, or it is the most spectacular lie ever committed to paper. We tell ourselves we are dedicated to the pursuit of happiness. The phrase is familiar. National wallpaper. Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary of the English Language defined the words the Founders actually used. He defined “to pursue” as to hazard, to put to chance, to endanger. Pursuit was a verb of risk and motion. The Founders did not protect a state of contentment. They protected an action. Inherent in acting is a place to act, a door to enter, a runway from which to begin. A Republic that locks its doors against beginners has not protected the right to pursue happiness. It has protected the comfort of those who already arrived where the rest cannot follow. Act I. The Verb May, 1776. Three weeks before Jefferson sat down in Philadelphia to draft the Declaration of Independence. A Virginian named George Mason was already drafting the Virginia Declaration of Rights. The document he produced contains a sentence that Jefferson read carefully and then condensed. Mason wrote that all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights. Namely, “the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” Four rights. The first two are life and liberty. Third, the “means” of acquiring property. We might call this ‘effort.’ We own ourselves first, and we labor. Our labor mixed with the world makes it ours. Fourth, the “pursuit” of happiness and safety. If property is the result of effort, happiness is in the pursuit, not the property. Life. Liberty. Effort. Pursuit. The Virginia Declaration is built around what citizens do, not what they receive. Jefferson tightened the language three weeks later. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Three rights, parallel and memorable, recited by schoolchildren two and a half centuries on. But our reading of the words changed over time. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language was the standard reference for the educated Anglo-American world in 1776. Johnson defined to pursue in terms a modern reader would not recognize. To chase. To follow with hostility. To prosecute. To put to chance. To endanger. Pursuit was a verb of motion that cost something. It implied risk, friction, a thing that might fail. A man who pursued happiness in 1776 was not asking the state to deliver it. He was hazarding his life to chase it, knowing the chase might end in ruin. And what was the happiness he chased? Not what we mean by the word now. Eighteenth-century happiness still carried Aristotle’s meaning. The word translated the Greek eudaimonia. Flourishing. An active life of virtue. The full exercise of one’s faculties in the world. Aristotle argued that happiness was not a feeling but the function of a human being living well, exercising reason, participating in the city, raising a family, practicing a craft. The proper end of human life. By Mason’s time, happiness in serious political writing meant the conditions under which a free citizen could flourish. Not a pleasant feeling or satisfied desire. Not guaranteed comfort. So the phrase Jefferson preserved, read in its original meaning, says something close to: the unalienable right to actively chase a life well lived. That is the right the Republic was founded to protect. Not contentment. Not security. Not even comfort. The action of striving, conducted by free citizens moving in an uncertain world. Now consider who this right is for. Pursuit is not evenly distributed across our lives. It is concentrated in the years we stake a claim in the world. We leave home, learn a trade, marry, have children, borrow money, build equity in our first home. How old are we? Roughly between seventeen and forty. The years before, we prepare. The years after, we steward. Pursuit belongs to the young. The state cannot guarantee the young’s success. But the state should not lock the doors. This is not a complaint about older Americans. It is an observation about the structure of human life. A citizen at seventy enjoying the fruits of a long career is not pursuing. They have already achieved what they will achieve. A citizen at twenty-five who is trying to start a business, buy a first home, or raise a child is pursuing. The Constitution does not name pursuit as a right of the young. But the right is exercised primarily by the young. A structure that blocks the young from pursuit fails to deliver on the right. A Republic that takes the verb seriously asks a structural question modern policy debate almost never asks. Are the conditions of pursuit available to those who are just beginning their pursuit? Are the doors open to the seventeen-year-old who arrives with a Dutch dollar and a shilling in copper? Can a young couple of ordinary means, working ordinary jobs, find a starter home in a place where they want to raise children? Can a young person enter a trade without paying for credentials they cannot afford? Can a young family form, take root, and grow? Or do we have good reason to lock the door? We claim so. Security. Theft. Damage. Who benefits when we change from a country where young people can pursue into a country that protects those who have pursued? What did we protect? Act II. A Table With One Short Leg Older Americans hold the wealth. Americans aged 55 and older hold roughly 73 percent of all household wealth in the United States. Americans under 40 hold less than 7 percent. The ratio is at its most extreme in modern American history. It’s a long-term trend that’s been building for forty years. This is not an attack on older Americans. When you’re young, you live in an apartment that’s barely a room. You show up on day one of a job, and you don’t have the money to buy the uniform, so they loan you one. On and on. You have tough choices when you’re young, and you don’t have the resources to solve your problems. Wealth concentrates in older groups, because older people have had more time to save, more years of labor behind them, more compounded returns on whatever they put away. The question isn’t whether older Americans have more than younger Americans. Of course they do. They worked for it and saved. The question is whether the structural conditions that built that wealth are available to the young. Small, modestly priced starter homes on small lots built the postwar middle class. Banks financed terms an ordinary working family could carry. The Levittown houses sold in 1949 for around 9,000 dollars against a median family income near 3,000 dollars. Three to one. Affordable. Then the government got involved. Today, those homes are zoned out of legality across most of the country. In coastal California, the price-to-income ratio is eight, ten, twelve to one. The home that an ordinary working couple bought in 1949 is illegal to build today. A similar problem in trades. A young person in 1950 could walk into a printing shop or a building site and apprentice. Today, there are credentials, intake caps, licensing fees, and waiting lists that ration opportunity. In 1950, roughly five percent of the American workforce needed a government license to do their job. Today, the figure is roughly 25 percent. Fivefold growth in seventy-five years. Two-thirds of that growth came from lawmakers adding new occupations to the licensed list, not from the economy changing. Each rule has its reasons. Some of the licensing protects public safety. Some of the zoning preserves neighborhood character. Some of the credentialing maintains professional standards. Looked at one at a time, each protects an important interest. Together, they are a closed door. A wobbly table with a short leg. The rules protect existing practitioners, existing homeowners, existing professionals. People built this table one rule at a time over decades. They already had what the rules would protect. They weren’t villains. They acted through ordinary politics and ordinary self-interest. Each rule looked reasonable when they wrote it. A young couple paying low prices for clothes and electronics is not in a better structural position than their grandparents who paid higher prices for clothes but could buy a house on one salary. Consumer surplus is not capital. The affordable starter home, the apprenticeable trade, achievable family formation: those are the conditions today’s young cannot reach. The table wobbles. The young are supposed to pursue, and they can’t reach the edge to pull themselves up. The old, who have already pursued, sit at the table that lawmakers tell them is level. Then there are the chains of debt. The federal entitlement system that includes Social Security and Medicare promises benefits we haven’t funded. We didn’t design a system where each generation pays for itself. We built a system where one generation makes promises, and the next generation funds them. Now the trust funds are running down. Social Security’s main trust fund is projected to run out in 2033. Medicare’s hospital insurance trust fund is projected to run out the same year. When that happens, the programs do not disappear. Payroll taxes still come in. Social Security would have enough money to pay about 77 percent of scheduled old-age benefits. Medicare’s hospital insurance fund would have enough money to pay about 89 percent of scheduled costs. Congress can prevent those cuts, but only by raising taxes, cutting benefits, borrowing more, or changing the structure of the programs. The debt is real. The obligation is real. Future workers will service that cost through future taxes, future inflation, future benefit cuts, or a weaker country carrying promises one generation used, passing the cost to another. The earth belongs to the living. No generation can rightly contract debts that the next must pay. No generation may build a country the next cannot live in. The dead have no right to govern the living. That is the moral problem. The people who benefit from this borrowing are not the people who will repay it. The benefit goes to one generation. The cost falls on another. The second generation never consented to the transaction. The structures that protect the wealth of those who have already arrived were built by people who are now dead. We enacted Social Security in 1935 and Medicare in 1965. Zoning rules between 1970 and 2000. Licensing regimes accumulated decade by decade. Lawmakers no longer in office voted for each rule on behalf of people who have since aged into beneficiaries or passed on. We never asked the young of 2026. But they are paying anyway. Payroll taxes fund benefits the programs cannot honestly afford. Housing costs inflated by zoning rules they never voted for. Credentialing fees fund barriers they didn’t choose to build. And we are passing them the federal debt we are adding to keep the system solvent. They are funding a feast for a generation that will not be alive to pay the bill. The dead have no rights over the living. You can argue that earlier generations paid for their elders, too. That’s true. But in exchange, they inherited a country where the basic conditions of pursuit were available to them. Affordable housing supply. Reasonable paths to good jobs without four-year degrees. Career ladders that began in mail rooms and ended in corner offices. The previous bargain was reciprocal even if not formally negotiated. Children paid into systems that supported their parents, and they received in turn a country that worked for their own pursuit. Today’s young face the obligation without the bargain. We need to open some doors. In place of the structural argument, lawmakers in our largest state are having a different one. Act III. The Crux On the November 2026 ballot in California is Initiative 25-0024. The measure would impose a one-time tax of five percent on the worldwide net worth of any California resident whose total wealth exceeds one billion dollars. Roughly 200 people meet that threshold. Together they hold somewhere around two trillion dollars. California projects the measure to raise approximately 100 billion dollars. Where do they intend that money to go? Ninety percent to the state’s healthcare program, Medi-Cal. Ten percent to public education and food assistance. SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West, the union representing the state’s healthcare workforce, sponsors and funds the measure. Proponents present it as a measure of generational and economic justice. The wealthy billionaire pays. The vulnerable Californian benefits. The political class argues that this is justice. Alongside union, order, defense, welfare, and liberty, justice is one of the six national goals named in the Constitution. How could we object? Let’s consider their argument. The wealth being taxed is held by Californians who have already arrived. Most are in their fifties and sixties. The 200 individuals subject to the tax are men and women whose pursuit is behind them. They built businesses, founded firms, accumulated capital, and now hold what their pursuit produced. Whether one approves of the scale of their accumulation is a separate question. The projected revenue will fund Medi-Cal. Medi-Cal is California’s Medicaid program, providing healthcare coverage to roughly 14 million residents. Look at where the dollars actually go. Children and working families are the largest enrollment categories. But seniors, who make up roughly 10 percent of enrollees, cost nearly twice the program average per person. Long-term care recipients who make up under 3 percent of senior enrollment consume roughly six times the next-highest senior care category. In 2024, California eliminated the asset eligibility test for long-term care. The program now subsidizes the long-term care of seniors regardless of their accumulated wealth or property. The wealth-transfer-at-death from one prosperous generation to the next is now structurally protected by the state’s healthcare program. So, what does this Billionaire Tax actually do? It taxes Californians whose pursuit is behind them. It funds healthcare consumption disproportionately benefiting Californians whose pursuit is behind them. It protects the inheritances of the children of wealthy seniors who would otherwise spend down their parents’ assets on care. It does little for the young Californian with no money striving to pursue. Nothing for the starter home she can’t afford. Nothing for the trade he can’t enter. Nothing for the family they can’t form because the median rent in the city where her job exists requires more than half their combined income. Nowhere does it propose what the alternative would actually require: small homes legal to build, lot sizes the market can clear, prices young families can afford, and healthcare for the children whose pursuit is yet to begin. This is not justice. This is intra-generational accounting, dressed in the moral vocabulary of justice. We cannot recreate the postwar economy. We can recreate the postwar bargain on housing. The small homes, ordinary financing, legal permission to build, without the racial exclusions that disgraced the original. Capital leaving the state makes the structural problem worse. A reported 700 billion to one trillion dollars in California-based wealth has left the state ahead of the January 1, 2026, residency snapshot date. That leaves a hollow tax base. The structural problem of locked doors, unaffordable homes, rationed trades, and bureaucratic accumulation remains untouched. It could be possible to have both redistribution and structural reform. Some redistribution is necessary. Some generational obligation is unavoidable. If the voter agrees to a wealth tax, the state could pair it with two structural reforms: preempt local zoning that prohibits affordable housing, and reform occupational licensing that blocks trade entry. That combination would serve both ends. The objection is not to wealth taxation in principle. The objection is to redistribution that ignores structural reform when the structural problems are within reach of policy. The argument here is not that redistribution is illegitimate. The argument is that redistribution disconnected from structural reform is not justice. It is political theater. The political class is using the word “justice” that could mean two different things. It helps to separate them. California’s meaning is transactional. A wealthy person has more than they need. A vulnerable person has less than they need. Move the surplus from the first to the second. This is the Billionaire Tax. A billionaire pays. A poor or sick or elderly Californian benefits. A transactional model of charity. A coin in the cup. The real meaning of justice is structural. It asks a different question. Not who pays whom inside the system, but whether the system works. Imagine you are designing the rules of a society. You will be a citizen there, but you don’t know where you will land in it. You don’t know whether you will be born wealthy or poor. You don’t know your race, your family, your intelligence, your health, your nationality. You don’t know which generation you will be born into. You don’t know whether you are the billionaire being taxed or the senior receiving Medi-Cal long-term care or the young Californian unable to afford a first home. Knowing none of these things, you sit behind a veil of ignorance and design the rules. Behind the veil, would you choose to inherit the system the United States runs in 2026? You would not. What rules would you choose? Behind the veil, you wouldn’t design a system that takes money out of someone’s pocket claiming to benefit the needy without first fixing the broken structural conditions. You wouldn’t call a one-time wealth tax justice while leaving every locked door locked. The Billionaire Tax sounds just in the first sense. It is a transaction that takes from the wealthy and gives to the vulnerable. Surely that must be justice. The Billionaire Tax fails the second sense entirely. It is a transaction in a system designed for structural injustice. The injustice was in the rules themselves. The zoning, the licensing, the unfunded promises, the locked doors. A measure that operates within those rules while leaving them untouched isn’t justice. It is the opposite of justice. It is a continuation of injustice in the service of the machine. Does this argument hate the poor and the elderly? Does it defend billionaires? Does it prefer that the vulnerable suffer rather than the wealthy contribute? It does not. We have an obligation to feed the hungry and clothe the needy, just as Ben Franklin gave two puffy rolls to the woman and her child. But the highest form of help we can give is not the coin in the cup. It is the restoration of the conditions under which a person can act, work, see, walk, and return to the table as a citizen rather than as an object of pity. The blind receive sight. The lame take up their bed and walk. The man at the gate goes home, returns to his work, and defends himself with his own voice. That is the deeper meaning of help. Not alms, even when they are needed. The removal of the condition that made the alms necessary in the first place. The Billionaire Tax is a transaction conducted around a broken system that it does not address. To insist on alms when restoration is possible is not the deeper love. It accepts the brokenness as permanent. It offers to soften the consequences while protecting the structures that produce them. To love the young is to give them sight. To open the doors. To restore the architecture of pursuit so that they need not depend on the alms of a generation that broke the system in the first place. Pursuit, not happiness. A Republic that takes the verb seriously cannot leave the doors bolted. It has to do the work. Let’s open some doors. Sources Benjamin Franklin’s account of his arrival in Philadelphia in October 1723. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Part One, 1771. Available through Founders Online at the National Archives [https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-01-02-0006]. Samuel Johnson’s definition of to pursue and pursuit. A Dictionary of the English Language, first edition, 1755. Available through Johnson’s Dictionary Online [https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com]. George Mason, Virginia Declaration of Rights [https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/virginia-declaration-of-rights], drafted at Gunston Hall, May 1776, adopted by the Virginia Convention June 12, 1776. Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence [https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript], drafted in Philadelphia between June 11 and June 28, 1776, adopted July 4, 1776. Aristotle on eudaimonia as the proper end of human life. Nicomachean Ethics, Books I and X, fourth century BC. W. D. Ross translation available through MIT’s Internet Classics Archive [http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.html]. John Locke on self-ownership and the labor theory of property. Second Treatise of Government, Chapter V, “Of Property,” 1689. Available through Project Gutenberg [https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7370]. Wealth distribution by age cohort. Federal Reserve Distributional Financial Accounts [https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/chart/], quarterly release. Levittown 1949 home prices. Digital History at the University of Houston, “Levittown” entry [https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?psid=3427&smtID=2]. 1950 median family income. United States Census Bureau, Historical Income Tables, Families [https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/historical-income-families.html], Table F-7. Occupational licensing growth from five percent to twenty-five percent of the U.S. workforce since 1950. The figures appear consistently across sources from across the political spectrum: Council of Economic Advisers, Occupational Licensing: A Framework for Policymakers [https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/docs/licensing_report_final_nonembargo.pdf], July 2015. Issued under the Obama administration. Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, “The Rise of Occupational Licensing” [https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2008/the-rise-of-occupational-licensing], 2008. Mercatus Center at George Mason University, “Changes in Occupational Licensing Burdens across States” [https://www.mercatus.org/research/data-visualizations/changes-occupational-licensing-burdens-across-states], 2018. The finding that approximately two-thirds of the growth in licensing comes from new occupations being added to the licensed list rather than from workforce composition shifts is from the Council of Economic Advisers report cited above. Social Security and Medicare trust fund depletion projections. Social Security Trustees, [https://www.ssa.gov/oact/tr/2024/]2024 Annual Report [https://www.ssa.gov/oact/tr/2024/] (most recent at time of essay drafting). Medicare hospital insurance trust fund depletion projection. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Trustees, [https://www.cms.gov/oact/tr]2024 Annual Report [https://www.cms.gov/oact/tr]. Mechanics of trust fund redemption being funded through federal borrowing. Congressional Budget Office, The Budget and Economic Outlook [https://www.cbo.gov/topics/budget] (annual report). Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, September 6, 1789. The phrases the earth belongs in usufruct to the living and the dead have no rights are from this letter, written from Paris during the early French Revolution. University of Chicago [https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch2s23.html#:~:text=%2D%2DI%20set%20out%20on%20this%20ground%2C%20which,the%20dead%20have%20neither%20powers%20nor%20rights]. Social Security Act of 1935 enactment date. Public Law 74-271, signed August 14, 1935. Available through the Social Security Administration’s history office [https://www.ssa.gov/history/]. Medicare enactment date. Title XVIII of the Social Security Act, signed July 30, 1965, as part of the Social Security Amendments of 1965 (Public Law 89-97). Social Security Administration’s archive of LBJ’s Medicare signing [https://www.ssa.gov/history/ssa/lbjmedicare1.html]. Initiative 25-0024. Full text available through the California Attorney General’s Office of Initiative Coordinator [https://oag.ca.gov/initiatives]. The Preamble to the United States Constitution [https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript], naming union, justice, tranquility (order), defense, welfare, and liberty as the six national goals. Medi-Cal enrollment, expenditure, and demographic data. California Department of Health Care Services, Medi-Cal Statistical Brief [https://www.dhcs.ca.gov/dataandstats]. The findings that seniors at roughly ten percent of enrollment consume close to twice the program average per person, and that long-term care recipients at under three percent of senior enrollment consume roughly six times the next-highest senior care category, are derived from the most recent expenditure breakdowns published by the California Legislative Analyst’s Office [https://lao.ca.gov]. California’s 2024 elimination of the Medi-Cal asset eligibility test for long-term care. California Department of Health Care Services, “Asset Limit Changes for Non-MAGI Medi-Cal” [https://www.dhcs.ca.gov/services/medi-cal/eligibility/Pages/Asset-Limit-Changes-for-Non-MAGI-Medi-Cal.aspx], effective January 1, 2024. John Rawls, the veil of ignorance and the Difference Principle. A Theory of Justice, first published 1971, revised edition 1999, Harvard University Press. The thought experiment of designing rules behind a veil of ignorance is developed in Part One, Chapters 1-3. The earlier theological grounding for the argument appears in A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith, John Rawls’s 1942 Princeton senior thesis, published posthumously by Harvard University Press in 2009 with introduction by Joshua Cohen and Thomas Nagel. The healing of the man born blind. Gospel of John, chapter 9 [https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+9&version=KJV]. The phrase one thing I know, that I was blind, now I see is from John 9:25. The healing of the lame man. Gospel of Mark, chapter 2, verses 1-12 [https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark+2%3A1-12&version=KJV], and parallel accounts in Matthew 9 and Luke 5. The phrase take up thy bed and walk is from Mark 2:9. Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe [https://joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

The Price Is the Price

Gravel lot. Friday morning in Torrington. The trailers are lined up in neat rows at the front, goosenecks and bumper-pulls together, dust still settling from the last one in. He pulls in at the end of the row and steps down from the cab. October cold. His breath hangs in the air and catches the low sun. He only comes on Fridays. The bakery is only open Thursday through Saturday, and there’s no sale at the market on Thursday or Saturday, so Friday it is. Sale at ten. Bakery by noon. Home by four. The brand inspector’s office is off to the left of the building. Proof of ownership for cattlemen who run stock on shared grazing land. A man there in a Carhartt and a good hat, checking papers, making sure nobody’s selling another man’s livelihood. The inspector nods. He nods back. They have known each other a long time. He walks in through the front door. The pay window is right there, three ladies behind it who will take his money if he buys and cut him a check if he sells. They know him too. One of them smiles. He touches the brim of his hat. Through the door to the arena. Tall stairs up to the bleachers. The seats are bench-style, worn smooth by forty years of men in Wranglers. Coffee in styrofoam. Diesel, manure, pine shavings. The smell is the same smell his father knew. A heeler mix trots up the aisle. Red with a bad left ear. She sniffs his boot and moves on. Somebody in the third row has a hot dog from concessions and the dog knows it. The auctioneer is already going. The chant. Workers below move the cattle through the arena, through the pens, out to the holding lots behind the building. From a walkway above you can watch the whole thing. The ring, the pens, the loading chutes, the vet’s shop in the back where the doc is never sitting still. His turn comes. Thirty steers out of the gooseneck that morning. Six-weight, good feed. He’ll come back a couple more times for sales, because his truck can’t pull them all in one go. The gate opens and they come through in a knot, hooves on concrete, and a man with a flag moves them into the ring. Three buyers in the front row. One for a Colorado feedlot. One for Nebraska. One buying for an Oklahoma stocker that ships to Tyson. They don’t look up. The auctioneer starts. The chant rises. A nod. Another nod. A pause. The gavel falls. The price is the price. Set on the board in Chicago before his trailer left the ranch. His cattle are in the pen. He can’t refuse this price without losing money. He goes to the pay window. The lady he knows slides a check across the counter. He folds it and puts it in his shirt pocket and thanks her and touches his hat again. Out the front door. The gravel lot is still full. The sun is higher now. The brand inspector is still at his post. Four blocks to the bakery. He can’t pull his gooseneck over there. Nowhere to park it. It’s only a ten-minute walk even if you don’t hurry, and he doesn’t. Small town. Brick storefronts. The bakery is the one with the line. Tight space. Warm. When he opens the door he has to push through the line. Flour in the air. Crusty French sourdough stacked on the shelf behind the counter. A mostly empty tray of cinnamon crunch croissants, crusty outside and soft in the middle, and whole pies behind the glass when the baker feels like it. His wife wants a pie. Partly because she likes the treat. Partly because she wants the bakery to stay in business. He buys the pie. Apple, because that’s what they have. A cinnamon crunch croissant for the drive. Coffee in a paper cup. He eats the croissant in the window seat and watches the street. The check is folded in his shirt pocket. It’s a good check and a thin margin both, and he knows which one will matter by spring. Nobody at the sale barn asked about his costs. What he paid his ranch hand. What the diesel was. He finishes the coffee. Picks up the pie. Walks back to the truck the long way. The gravel crunches under his boots when he crosses the lot. The trailers are thinning out now. Some of the men who came in this morning are already gone. He loads up. Starts the truck. The pie rides in the passenger seat where his wife would sit. Four hours home. He has all afternoon to think about it. Act I. The Goal, Maths, and Patterns The wage debate is asking the wrong question. What has to be true about the rest of the economy before a wage floor can do what its advocates claim? An Abraham Lincoln draft he wrote before taking his seat in Congress. “To secure to each labourer the whole product of his labour, or as nearly as possible, is a most worthy object of any good government.” Restated. A goal of good governance is that businesses pay workers a wage high enough that their neighbor doesn’t have to make up the difference for them to live. Jessica Tarlov [https://substack.com/profile/299453586-jessica-tarlov] and Scott Galloway [https://substack.com/profile/451231761-scott-galloway] make the case on their podcast Raging Moderates that America needs a twenty-five-dollar federal minimum wage. Galloway’s argument, developed over several years in his writing and in his 2024 TED talk, is that we’ve transferred America’s wealth from young to old over four decades, and raising the minimum wage is the most elegant tool to reverse it. Tarlov shares the position and carries it into the daily political conversation. Serious people making a serious argument. American workers are getting squeezed. The current federal minimum wage is a cruel joke. A country that can’t pay its workers enough to keep them off social programs is not the country it claims to be. I agree with them about the goal: If you work, your employer owes you enough money that your neighbor doesn’t have to give you extra money out of their pocket. A business that pays wages so low that the taxpayer has to fill the gap for you to heat your house and put food on the table isn’t a business standing on its own. It’s a business subsidized by every working American who files a tax return. The Lincoln standard, at minimum, is that the whole product of labor means the business pays for it, not the taxpayer. So let’s do some math. The federal Earned Income Tax Credit phases out for a single adult with no dependents at $19,104 in 2025. If that adult works a full-time job, that means 2,080 hours a year. Divide by 2,080 hours and you get $9.19 an hour. SNAP gross income for a single-person household tops out around $20,331, or $9.77 an hour. Medicaid in the forty states that expanded it under the Affordable Care Act cuts off for a childless adult at about $21,597, $10.38 an hour. Below these numbers, the single adult working full time is guaranteed to be on some form of federal assistance. The taxpayer is making up the difference. Call it ten dollars and some change, or even eleven. That is the subsistence floor for a working single adult with no dependents. It’s the wage below which the government takes money from your neighbor’s pocket to give it to you. The federal minimum wage today is $7.25. It hasn’t moved since 2009. Whatever else we argue about, no one should be allowed to pay less than the wage that keeps a working single adult off the programs designed to combat poverty. A business that cannot pay ten dollars an hour to a full-time adult worker is a business being subsidized by its neighbors, and neither party should defend that arrangement. Now run the same test the other direction. Twenty-five dollars an hour for a single adult with no dependents is $52,000 a year, well above every threshold in the hard welfare cluster. For that worker, twenty-five dollars is far more than self-sufficiency in large parts of the country. The neighbor is not making up the difference anymore. The wage has cleared the bar and then some. But twenty-five dollars isn’t enough for a family. The traditional American expectation is a family where one parent stays home with the children. The EITC threshold for a married couple with two children is $64,430. Divide by 2,080 hours and you get $30.98 an hour. That is the single-earner floor for a traditional family of four to get off the programs. For three kids, $33. One working parent has to earn over thirty dollars an hour to achieve self-sufficiency without taxpayer support. Twenty-five dollars isn’t enough. No politically viable national wage floor is enough. We have a systemic problem, and wages are only one part of it. We want passion. We want overt shows of strength. Strength is the dull, patient, unglamorous work of a Republic that understands the difference between strength and the appearance of strength. We saw this when the administration imposed tariffs on China and the rest of the world. The argument was that the tariffs would bring the factories back. We had hollowed out our domestic supply chains over forty years. They didn’t reappear when Washington wished them into being. We saw it with Iran. In June of 2025 we struck three nuclear facilities. Iran threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz. Diplomacy held. The administration called it decisive. The administration got lucky. Eight months later, Iran made a different choice. On February 28 we struck again. Iran closed the Strait. Energy prices jumped. We had no Jones Act reform, no pipeline to California, no buffer in the fuel supply chain. The infrastructure we hadn’t built in June was still not built in February. The lesson is that we should not have acted without first building the domestic capacity that made the action decisive. Restoring economic security to America’s youth is the same. Twenty-five an hour is acting with passion, without the right infrastructure in place. Lifting a single-earner family of four to self-sufficiency is structural work that a wage floor cannot achieve. A twenty-five-dollar national minimum wage imposed tomorrow would land on an economy whose supply side is as broken as America’s oil chain and the factory base was when the tariffs hit. Housing supply is inadequate. We aren’t building starter homes. Four packers process eighty-five percent of American beef. We have no national focus on making workers more valuable to their businesses through improved training. Yes. Wages are too low. But so is supply. If all we do is raise wages, we’ve signaled more demand without adding supply. More demand for the same houses means higher prices. The wage increase moves to the housing market. The house the young couple could almost afford at the old price goes up to the point where they can’t afford it at the new price either. The welfare threshold climbs with the cost of living. People still need food on the table and heat in the house. We raised the wage. We moved nothing. The conservative instinct is to wait. Build the supply side first, let wages follow. That idea has merit and zero viability. Indefinitely pause the wage increase and the wage increase never comes. Businesses have a social responsibility to increase profits, not pay workers. The progressive instinct is to raise wages now and build later, or not at all. The single-earner family is no better off than before. The cost of living rises with it because nothing on the supply side has changed. The young family who couldn’t afford the house at the old price still can’t afford it at the new one. The welfare threshold climbs. The single-earner family is no better off than before, and in some places is worse off because the businesses that employed them closed. We have to kick-start both at the same time. Wages and housing. Antitrust. Trade. Input costs. One can’t wait on the other. Ideally the supply side runs slightly ahead so that young people who get a raise don’t watch it burn. The minimum wage we need is the wage that keeps a working single adult off social programs. Ten dollars and some change. Peg it to whichever welfare threshold is actually binding for a single adult, EITC, SNAP, or Medicaid, and let it adjust automatically as those thresholds move. Take the politics out of it. Couple the wage floor to the subsidy so the two cannot drift apart again. Then build three more pieces in parallel. Tax structure. Conditional tax relief for businesses that pay every worker above the social program threshold for that worker’s household. Reward the businesses whose employees don’t need public assistance. Stop subsidizing, through the tax code, the businesses whose employees do. This protects small and mid-sized businesses that could pay more but don’t have the revenue to absorb the cost today. Housing supply. Put housing goals into the Small Business Innovation Research grants at USDA and HUD to incentivize builders to build first-time homebuyer homes. Reform zoning to allow higher density and smaller lots. Permit timeline reform to cut the months between a contractor driving stakes in the ground and getting approval to build. Close the gap between wages and the cost of living by pulling the cost down, not by pushing the wage up past what the economy can absorb. Market structure. Antitrust enforcement in the concentrated industries where price-takers have no lever. An example is the four packers. Tyson, JBS, Cargill, National Beef. Give the rancher more buyers in the front row. Extend this to every sector where oligopoly has captured pricing power from producers and workers. Let producers pay higher wages from their own revenue rather than requiring subsidies to close the gap. The right question is: What has to be true about the rest of the economy before a wage floor can do what its advocates claim? Until we build that infrastructure, an increase in wages in isolation does more damage than good in the places that can least absorb it. Act II. The Sale Barn Back to Friday morning. Torrington. Gravel lot. Thirty steers out of the gooseneck. Three buyers in the front row who don’t look up. The price of live cattle on that Friday was set on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange the day before. The CME has been the reference board for American cattle since 1964. Before Chicago, the trail herds came up from Texas or out west to the Kansas railheads in Abilene, Dodge City, Ellsworth, and rode east in stock cars to the slaughterhouses at Kansas City and Chicago. The stockyards at both cities closed decades ago. The board did not. The cattle stopped going. The price still does. Four packers process eighty-five percent of American beef. Tyson. JBS. Cargill. National Beef. Derrell Peel at Oklahoma State, the livestock economist whose Monday market report is read by every serious rancher in the country, wrote for years about what that concentration does. The packer pays what the four corporations agree to pay. Every link upstream prices off that anchor. The rancher takes what’s left. He is a price-taker on every input cost and a price-taker on the only thing he sells. He drove four hours to Torrington past a closer sale barn in Buffalo. Buffalo has two buyers on a good day. Torrington has eight. He sorted his best-looking thirty black calves, same weight class, and judged that Torrington made more sense. More buyers in the front row means better price discovery. The four hours of diesel is what he pays to find out what his year is worth. That is the thin edge of his agency. He cannot raise his price. He can only choose which room to walk into. Now put a twenty-five-dollar national minimum wage on this economy. Three stops, descending pricing power. A hedge fund in Manhattan pays its receptionist twenty-five dollars an hour and doesn’t blink. Labor is two percent of revenue. The floor is a rounding error on the expense side. Pam owns a diner in Chillicothe, Missouri. She raises the chicken fried steak from fourteen dollars to seventeen. Some regulars stay, some don’t. She has a bad choice, but she has one. She survives. Limping. The rancher at the sale barn has a different story. His costs are already rising. The tariffs were supposed to bring the factories back. They landed on a supply chain that couldn’t absorb them. Fertilizer is up forty percent. Diesel is up. Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz. The deeper reason is that nine administrations since the 1973 oil embargo failed to build the infrastructure that would have buffered the shock. And a twenty-five-dollar wage would raise every one of those costs again, because every supplier has workers too, and every supplier can pass the wage through to him, and he cannot pass it to anyone. The kid who used to ride fence along the north line, where the Bighorns come down to meet the sage, can make twenty-five at the McDonald’s in town. None of that flows into the check the auctioneer writes on Friday morning. He could refuse the bid. In theory. In practice the cattle are in the pen. The fuel to haul them home costs what it costs. The pasture is short, so if he takes them home he has to pay to feed them, and they eat the hay he needs to feed the cattle still on the ranch. Winter is coming. The ranch needs the check. The price on the board is the price he gets, because every other option costs him more than it saves. That is what it means to be a price-taker. It is not the absence of choice. It is a choice between bad and worse, made before he ever left the ranch. So the twenty-five-dollar wage lands differently in each of the three places. The hedge fund in New York absorbs it. Pam adapts. The rancher exits. His ranch hand loses the job. The kid who would have learned to weld and pull calves takes the fast-food job. Six months later the ranch sells to a corporation that has deep pockets and no grandchildren. The community loses both. The families the wage was supposed to lift end up on the programs it was supposed to get them off, in a town that’s a little emptier than before. A wage increase with no supply adjustment might lift some workers at the bottom. It displaces the worker in the middle. It concentrates the damage on the people with the least pricing power in the economy. The rancher and his wife have three grown children. None of them live within three hours of the ranch. The oldest is in Denver. He works in IT. His wife teaches. They’ve been trying to buy a starter house for four years. Every time they save enough for a down payment, the prices move. The last house they looked at was three-hundred-twenty. The bank qualified them for two-ninety. They decided to wait another year. The middle one is in Cheyenne. She’s a nurse. Her husband works for the railroad. They have one child. They want three but can’t afford for either of them to take a year off. They decided to wait. The youngest is in Billings. Not married yet. Dating someone serious. He told his dad over Thanksgiving that he doesn’t know when he’ll be able to afford a ring. Three kids in three cities. The same story runs in every direction. The nurse in Pittsburgh waiting on the second child. The factory worker in Youngstown trying to qualify for a house. The teacher in Memphis who can’t afford to live in the district where she teaches. The rancher looks out across the south pasture and does the math he never thought he’d have to do. He owns the land. His father owned it. His grandfather homesteaded it. The ranch is the thing that made his family possible for three generations. The same ranch cannot, on its current terms, make his grandchildren possible. He can leave them the ranch. One of them might take it. More likely it gets sold when he and his wife are gone, because his children’s lives are no longer in the Bighorns, because the towns that would have held them couldn’t support the jobs or the houses or the childcare that would have kept them here. A twenty-five-dollar wage doesn’t fix any of that. But a conditional tax break for the ranch he earns by proving every worker he pays clears the social program thresholds might let him raise the kid’s wage to twenty-five dollars an hour without losing the ranch. Enough to match McDonald’s. Enough to keep the fence mended and the calves pulled and the ranch viable for more years. Maybe enough to give the youngest son a reason to consider coming home to run it, instead of staying in Billings trying to afford a ring. Antitrust enforcement on the four packers gives him eight buyers in the front row at Torrington instead of three. A hundred dollars more per head. Seventy-eight head across three trips a year. Eight thousand dollars he doesn’t have today. Enough margin for new equipment. Enough margin to hire the kid full-time. Maybe another reason for his son in Billings to come home. A federal challenge to build starter homes under a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, the kind of thing the Small Business Innovation Research program was designed for, might put a house within reach of his oldest and his wife in Denver. Which might end the six-year wait. Which might give him another grandchild. The bridge would let the ranch and the bakery stay open long enough to pass to the next generation. The wage hike mandate lifts wages by a number that’s eaten by higher prices. The structural bridge would lift his family back into the life his grandfather built. Act III. The Long Walls A country that can’t build starter homes will not reform its tax code, break up its packers, and rebuild its housing market in the same legislative session. Not this year. Not next. Probably not in the decade it would take for the rancher’s grandchildren to be born. The policy is not the hard part. The country that could pass the policy is the hard part. That is not a reason to quit. Only a functional government could pass a twenty-five-dollar wage. Only a functional government could coordinate four structural reforms. We do not have a functional government. So the first work is not legislation. It is consensus. Dull, patient, unglamorous. An argument that enough Americans share eventually becomes unstoppable. Abolition took eighty years. The forty-hour week took seventy. Civil rights took a century. The Constitution itself took fifteen years of argument before it could be written at all. Each was won by people who understood that the work was longer than their lives, who did the work anyway. The wage debate is not a debate. It is the beginning of a conversation. This letter to Raging Moderates is an example of that conversation. I agree with them on the goal. I disagree with them on the mechanism. We are both working in the same direction. That is what a coalition looks like before there is a coalition. The consensus is national and local at the same time. It is built in forums like this one, and in bakeries that stay open because the rancher’s wife wants them to. The rancher in the Bighorns and the nurse in Pittsburgh and the teacher in Memphis don’t know that they share a problem. The work is to let them know. The slow accumulation of argument will eventually make the problem impossible to unsee. No bill will pass before enough Americans recognize their neighbor in the argument. Lincoln knew this. He spent the 1850s making the case against slavery, speech after speech, letter after letter, while the country caught up to what he was saying. By the time he took office, the argument was won. The war was the enforcement. Our work today is not the war. It is the 1850s. The bridge will not be built by the government we have. It will be built, slowly, by the country the argument makes possible. That country starts today, at every kitchen table where someone has the conversation with the person across from them. Sources The facts and figures in this piece are from the following. All were consulted directly; nothing has been paraphrased from secondary summaries. Anyone who wants to verify a claim can go to the original. Primary sources Lincoln, Abraham. “Fragments of Notes regarding a Tariff Discussion,” 1846-1847 [https://papersofabrahamlincoln.org/documents/D200423]. The Papers of Abraham Lincoln. The full text of the “whole product of his labour” passage. Also collected in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler, Vol. I, pp. 407-416. Internal Revenue Service. “Publication 596 (2025), Earned Income Credit (EIC).” [https://www.irs.gov/publications/p596] Authoritative source for the $19,104 single-filer threshold and the $64,430 married-with-two-children threshold. U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division. “Minimum Wage.” [https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/minimum-wage] Confirms $7.25 federal minimum wage effective July 24, 2009. U.S. Department of Labor. “History of Changes to the Minimum Wage Law.” [https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/minimum-wage/history/chart] Full history of federal minimum wage rates since 1938. USDA Food and Nutrition Service. “SNAP Eligibility.” [https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/recipient/eligibility] Federal SNAP income limits. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. “2025 Poverty Guidelines” [https://aspe.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/documents/dd73d4f00d8a819d10b2fdb70d254f7b/detailed-guidelines-2025.pdf] (PDF). 138% of FPL for a single individual = $21,597. U.S. Office of the Historian, Department of State. “Oil Embargo, 1973-1974.” [https://history.state.gov/milestones/1969-1976/oil-embargo] The foundational energy-policy event referenced in the piece. Congressional Research Service Congressional Research Service. “U.S. Strikes on Nuclear Sites in Iran” (IN12571) [https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN12571]. June 23, 2025. Official account of the June 2025 strikes on Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. Congressional Research Service. “Iran Conflict and the Strait of Hormuz: Impacts on Oil, Gas, and Other Commodities” (R45281) [https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45281]. Updated March 2026. Meatpacker concentration The White House. “Trump Administration Cracks Down on Foreign-Owned Meat Packing Cartels.” [https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/11/trump-administration-cracks-down-on-foreign-owned-meat-packing-cartels/] November 7, 2025. Official statement confirming the “Big Four” meatpackers (JBS, Cargill, Tyson, National Beef) control 85% of the U.S. beef processing market, up from 36% in 1980. Farm Action. “Meatpacking: Four Corporations, Total Control.” [https://farmaction.us/meatpacking-four-corporations-total-control/] Independent analysis of the Big Four’s 80-85% market control. Investigate Midwest. “Fact-checking Trump’s call for an investigation into meatpacking companies.” [https://investigatemidwest.org/2025/11/18/fact-checking-trumps-call-for-an-investigation-into-meatpacking-companies/] Verifies the 85%/36% concentration figures using USDA data. Cattle markets CME Group. Livestock Futures. [https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/agriculture/livestock.html] Official exchange page for live cattle (traded since 1964) and feeder cattle (traded since 1971) futures. Cambridge University Press. “Paper Steaks: Live Cattle Futures Markets and the Financial Revolution of 1964.” [https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/enterprise-and-society/article/paper-steaks-live-cattle-futures-markets-and-the-financial-revolution-of-1964/D46F1E837AA7D8E2F6DDABA9878F8F2B]Enterprise & Society. Academic history of the CME’s launch of live cattle futures. Encyclopedia of Chicago. “Union Stock Yard.” [http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/2218.html] Authoritative history of the Chicago stockyards, which closed August 1, 1971. Derrell S. Peel, Breedlove Professor of Agribusiness, Oklahoma State University. Faculty page [https://extension.okstate.edu/staff/derrell-peel.html] and weekly Cow/Calf Corner market commentary [https://extension.okstate.edu/programs/beef-extension/cow-calf-corner-newsletter.html]. Medicaid and Social Programs Kaiser Family Foundation. “Status of State Medicaid Expansion Decisions.” [https://www.kff.org/medicaid/status-of-state-medicaid-expansion-decisions/] Confirms 40 states plus DC have expanded Medicaid; childless adults in expansion states qualify up to 138% FPL ($21,597 in 2025). Wyoming is a non-expansion state. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “The Earned Income Tax Credit.” [https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/the-earned-income-tax-credit] Policy analysis of EITC structure and thresholds. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “A Quick Guide to SNAP Eligibility and Benefits.” [https://www.cbpp.org/research/food-assistance/a-quick-guide-to-snap-eligibility-and-benefits] FY2026 SNAP income thresholds. Scott Galloway and Raging Moderates Galloway, Scott. “How the US is destroying young people’s future.” [https://www.ted.com/talks/scott_galloway_how_the_us_is_destroying_young_people_s_future] TED 2024. Source of Galloway’s $25 minimum wage proposal and the “war on the young” framing. Galloway, Scott. “Doing the Minimum.” [https://www.profgalloway.com/doing-the-minimum/] No Mercy / No Malice, September 13, 2024. Written version of the minimum-wage argument. Raging Moderates with Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov. Vox Media Podcast Network [https://open.spotify.com/show/2Kh9t2fiR7kE601GH36ajN]. Economic philosophy Friedman, Milton. “A Friedman Doctrine: The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” [https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html] The New York Times Magazine, September 13, 1970. Original source of the “social responsibility of business” doctrine. Policy mechanism U.S. Small Business Administration. “Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program.” [https://www.sbir.gov/about] Federal program proposed in the piece as the vehicle for directing housing R&D toward affordable starter-home construction. Thanks for staying with me. If this piece said something true, share it with someone who needs to hear it said this way. That is how the 1850s work begins. Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe [https://joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Start With Why

The apartment is cold. Outside, sirens. Somewhere down the block, gunshots. This is Hunting Park, North Philadelphia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunting_Park,_Philadelphia]. The sounds of Hunting Park don’t stop because a mother is trying to feed her children. At the kitchen table, two kids are eating. Whatever was in the cupboard, she put it on their plates. Her son is going blind and needs a doctor. Her daughter is small and hungry. She knows. She sits with them. She is holding a piece of paper. Sometimes a pizzeria menu. Sometimes whatever paper she could find. A flyer, a receipt, anything. She reads it. Studies the pictures, if there are pictures. Asks herself what she would order if she could. She calls this read eating [https://drexel.edu/news/archive/2013/february/witness-to-hunger-in-a-place-at-the-table-documentary]. Her name is Barbie Izquierdo [https://drexel.edu/~/media/Files/hunger-free-center/testimony/barbara-izquierdo.ashx?la=en]. Years later, she will tell advocates what this was. Her stomach had been empty long enough that the brain had learned to feed itself on images. “I was feeding my brain,” she said, “when I couldn’t put food into my stomach.” [https://www.newswise.com/articles/a-philadelphia-witness-to-hunger-takes-the-spotlight-in-a-documentary-film-on-hunger-in-america] She had a job. A full-time job, through her advocacy work. She had done what everyone told her to do. Get off assistance. Get back to work. Climb the ladder. She climbed. Her paycheck put her two dollars an hour over the SNAP threshold [https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/global-citizen-prize-winner-barbie-izquierdo/]. Two dollars. SNAP ended. The childcare subsidy ended. The cash assistance ended. The children’s free and reduced-price school meals ended. Three separate systems, each one operating according to its rules, each one executing those rules without error, collectively produced the outcome in the cold apartment with the pizzeria menu. No corruption. No villain. No malfunction. The machine worked just like all bureaucracy works. “Just enough,” she said, “to feel like you’re still poor but not homeless.” The neighbors sometimes brought a can of beans. A cup of rice. Whatever they could spare, which was never much, because they were her neighbors. This is not a story about a broken system. The system worked just like we designed it. That is the problem. This is a story about a country that wrote a pledge and forgot what it was for. A country that built machinery in the name of that pledge and then let the machine run without looking at it for so long that the machine stopped serving the pledge and started serving itself. A country that now finds itself so loud with argument about how the machine should run that no one remembers to ask why it exists. We are a country at war with itself over the how. We have forgotten the why. And in the space between those two things, a mother sits alone in a cold apartment in Hunting Park and reads a menu while her children eat the last of the food. If we want to fix what is broken in America, we have to go back further than the argument. We have to go back to the page those fifty-six men signed [https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript]. We have to start with why. Act I. Four Score and Seven Years Ago In February of 2011, Simon Sinek walked into the Commandant’s hall at Nellis Air Force Base [https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/local-las-vegas/air-force-helping-hone-new-corps-of-leaders/]. A civilian. An author. A man who had spent years studying what made certain organizations inspire loyalty while others just sold product. Why some thrive while others fail. His thesis fit on a napkin. Most organizations, he argued, start with “what” they do. Great ones start with “why” they exist [https://simonsinek.com/books/start-with-why/]. The room is full of apex predators. Air Force Weapons School [https://www.nellis.af.mil/About/High-End-Training/USAF-Weapons-School/] instructors. Fighter pilots. Weapon System Officers. Before they were students, they were the top officers in their squadrons. Selected, nominated, and sent to the toughest school in the Department of Defense. Six months of grueling hours and indifferent, violent intensity. The best of them graduate at the top of their class and are asked to train the next generation. Every fighter squadron in the Air Force has one. Almost every top officer in the Air Force is a distinguished graduate. Nothing on a military combat uniform is silver, except a Weapons School patch. A silver beacon with a black border. When a Weapons School instructor walks into a briefing room, every pilot in the room sits up straight. Sinek told a room full of Weapons School instructors to start with “why.” I was in that room. I was skeptical. I ran missions for a living. Missions are what. Brief, execute, debrief. Achieve the objective. If you failed, cut everything and everyone to the bone until you achieve it. The whole Air Force runs on what. Sinek was telling us to start somewhere else. Somewhere softer, slower. Somewhere the math was not immediately obvious. It took me ten years to break it down. No organization, movement, or country ever endured because of the what. It endured because of the why. The what changes. The how changes. The why holds. And the American why is written down. Fifty-six men signed it on a hot July day in Philadelphia, in a room that smelled of candle wax and ink and sweat. All men are created equal. [https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript] The Almighty endows each of us with unalienable Rights. Life. Our breath and being. Liberty. To act. Speak. Grow. The right to pursue happiness. And at the bottom of the page, under the last paragraph, we agreed. We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor. A pledge. A contract signed in ink, and within months, in blood. Seventy-six years later, on the Fifth of July, 1852, Frederick Douglass stood in front of an audience in Rochester, New York [https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/speeches-african-american-history/1852-frederick-douglass-what-slave-fourth-july/], and asked a question about the grand national lie. What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? His answer, across pages of the most devastating rhetoric in the English language, plainly stated: The Declaration is either true, or it is the most spectacular lie ever committed to paper. Douglass was not asking a rhetorical question. He was demanding an answer. We either believe that we all share the same rights, or the document is a fraud and the country has no moral foundation. Douglass demanded that the country look at its own pledge and decide whether we had meant it. The Harlan brothers answered him. Two boys grew up under the same roof in Danville, Kentucky, in the early 1800s. The first, John Marshall Harlan [https://www.oyez.org/justices/john_m_harlan], son of James Harlan, a prominent politician and slaveholder. The second, Robert James Harlan [https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/harlan-col-robert-james-1816-1897/]. Born a slave in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, on December 12, 1816. Brought to Kentucky as a boy. Raised in the Harlan household. Educated alongside James’s white sons. It was widely understood in the hushed, polite etiquette of slaveholding society that James Harlan was Robert’s biological father. John and Robert were half-brothers. The two of them ate at the same table. Studied the same lessons. Walked the same halls of the same house. One was free. One was property. The life of Robert Harlan, born a slave, tests our national “why” against reality. The test: given a fraction of the opportunity the Declaration promised, could a Black man match the free men who had kept him in chains? In 1849, he goes to the California Gold Rush. A Black man, legally classified as livestock, runs a business in a boomtown where the rules haven’t finished being written yet. Within eighteen months, he comes back east with a fortune [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-great-dissenter-and-his-half-brother-10214325/] — somewhere between forty-five thousand and ninety thousand dollars in gold and currency. Worth millions today. He returns to Ohio and invests in real estate. He opens a photography and daguerreotype gallery in Cincinnati. He purchases his freedom from the Harlan family. He sails to England [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_James_Harlan]. Spends nine years in the high-society horse racing circuit. The Kentucky style, taught in English jockey clubs by a man who had been born in chains. He comes back. Settles in Cincinnati. He opens the first school for Black children in the city [https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/harlan-col-robert-james-1816-1897/]. He becomes a trustee for the local Colored Orphan Asylum. He becomes the first African American member of the Ohio Republican State Central Committee. In 1872, he serves as a delegate-at-large to the Republican National Convention [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_James_Harlan]. President Ulysses S. Grant requests a private audience with him. They sit together and discuss international treaties with England, because Robert knows England better than most of Grant’s cabinet. They discuss the racial situation in the post-war South. The Cincinnati Commercial quotes Grant afterward [https://nkytribune.com/2021/07/kentucky-by-heart-the-life-of-robert-james-harlan-is-a-fascinating-story-of-overcoming-barriers-prejudice/]: It is not every day that I have the pleasure of talking with someone of your race who can speak for them so well. Robert Harlan, born in Mecklenburg County in chains, in a private audience with the sitting President of the United States, discussing foreign policy. In 1878, President Rutherford B. Hayes commissions him a colonel [https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/harlan-col-robert-james-1816-1897/]. He raises a battalion of four hundred African American men — the Second Ohio Militia Battalion. Ohio’s first Black state militia. When his brother John Marshall Harlan’s music-loving older sister Elizabeth marries Dr. James Hatchitt, Robert buys her a magnificent handmade piano and ships it to her wedding. The piano arrives at the Harlan family home. Heavy. Polished. The weight of it is the weight of a Black man’s wealth in a country that hasn’t decided whether he is allowed to have it. The Declaration is either true, or it is a lie. If the premise in the Declaration is true and “all men are created equal” is a statement about human capability and not empty words, then a Black man born enslaved in 1816, given even partial opportunity, should be able to match or exceed the achievements of the free men around him. Robert did. Which means two things simultaneously, and they have to be held together: One: the why is true. Human equality is real. Robert proved it. Two: the how was a lie. Because the country that signed the pledge in 1776 spent the next century building laws, statutes, and court rulings designed to guarantee that what Robert achieved would remain the exception. Not because the pledge wasn’t true, but because acting on the pledge would have required the country to give up the economic, political, and social arrangements it had built on top of denying the pledge. This is the oldest American argument, compressed into two brothers. Not an argument about slavery. An argument about whether we believe a kid born in poverty has the same right to life, liberty, and the pursuit as a kid born in a mansion. The one we are still having. It brings us to the unfinished work. Act II. The Unfinished Work The Declaration is the “why.” The Constitution is the “what.” The Preamble [https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript] outlines that we have six national goals. Union. Justice. Domestic tranquility. Common defense. General welfare. Liberty. Six goals. Written in 1787. Ratified in 1788. Not poetry. Not philosophy. A contract between the government and the governed. They specify what the machine seeks to achieve. The “why” is the moral premise. The “what” is the blueprint. The “how” is everything else. The laws, the agencies, the tax codes, the zoning boards, the benefit formulas, the eligibility thresholds. The how is where we live. The how is where we fight. The how is where we have gotten lost. There is a philosopher named John Rawls [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rawls/]. He was a World War II combat veteran who came to hate war. He taught at Harvard University for over 40 years. He gave us a tool to measure whether the “how” is doing its job. He called it the veil of ignorance [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/original-position/]. Imagine you are designing America from scratch. You will write the laws, set the thresholds, and build the institutions. But you don’t know where you will land in the country you are building. You don’t know if you will be born in a mansion in Greenwich or a cold apartment in Hunting Park. You don’t know if you will be a senator’s daughter or the daughter of Barbie Izquierdo. Now build your system. No rational person behind that veil designs an economy where a mother works full-time and still can’t feed her children without help. No rational person behind that veil designs a benefits cliff. A cliff that claims to be a safety net for wages that punishes the worker for earning a dollar more of wages that were never high enough to live on. But we built that system. Not by malice. By bureaucratic machine. And the people making the rules have full bellies. Barbie Izquierdo is not an anomaly. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta built a model for this. They call it the CLIFF tool, the Career Ladder Identifier and Financial Forecaster [https://www.atlantafed.org/economic-mobility-and-resilience/advancing-careers-for-low-income-families/cliff-tool]. The Federal Reserve had to build a calculator to help Americans figure out whether a raise would make them poorer. Let’s hear that again. Same meaning. Slightly different words. Rather than spend time and resources to make sure every American benefits from the raises they earn, we spent time and resources to help Americans figure out when they should stay on social programs because more effort would make them more poor. We built a tool to help people figure out when to stop trying. The conservative looks at Barbie’s kitchen and hears that she needs to work harder. But the bureaucratic state punishes the work ethic. A system so tangled in its own rules that it traps the people it was built to free. The liberal looks at the same kitchen and reads that she needs more help. But rather than setting conditions to empower Barbie to succeed on her own, the safety net starves a working mother over a two-dollar technicality. A system so rigid it punishes the people it was built to protect. They are both right. She does need to work hard. Hard work is a part of life, and she is working hard. She also needs help. They are looking at the same kitchen. They agree on the disease. They fight about the treatment. And while we fight about the treatment, Barbie sits with a menu. We will never agree on the how if we cannot agree on the why. It’s the same question Douglass asked in 1852. We are still asking it in Barbie’s kitchen. It’s the how, untethered from the why. At Gettysburg [https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/gettysburg.htm], standing over the dead, Lincoln called it the unfinished work. The unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. The founders didn’t finish the work. The Civil War didn’t. Reconstruction didn’t. The Civil Rights Movement did not finish the work. The work is never finished. A mother feeds her brain with pictures of food because there isn’t enough for everyone. She gives the real food to her children. She is the measure. Not the machine. She is the unfinished work. We are divided. We are told the division is about politics. About parties. About policy. About trans rights or women’s rights or gay rights or whether men are still allowed to be men. It is not. Those fights matter. Every one of them is a fight about who the pledge applies to. But they are downstream of a deeper fracture. It is about the distance between the why and the how. We argue about the how. The tax rate, regulation, statute, court ruling, executive order. Because we have lost the thread back to the why. And when you lose the thread, the argument becomes self-consuming. It feeds on itself. The how argues with the how about the how, and no one in the room remembers to ask: Does a kid born in Hunting Park have the same shot at life, liberty, and the pursuit as a kid born in the Hamptons? That is the only question that matters. And it is not a question about policy. It is a question about whether we believe that we all share the same rights. If we don’t, our beliefs are a fraud. So what do we do? We course correct. It will not happen in Washington. Act III. It Is For Us The Living In the early nineties, a kid named Antong Lucky [https://www.urbanspecialists.org/about] started the first Bloods gang in the city of Dallas. The state looked at him and saw a menace. The judge said so. The statute said so. The how processed him and sent him to prison. Another inmate named Willie Ray Fleming looked at him and saw something else. Young man, if you had the ability to lead these dudes to do wrong, you have that same ability to lead them to do right. You’re a leader. One sentence turned the key. After serving his sentence, Lucky walked out and met a bishop named Omar Jahwar [https://standtogether.org/stories/strong-safe-communities/bishop-omar-jahwar-led-a-movement-of-justice-that-became-heal-america]. Jahwar had a theory, stated in biological terms. Anytime you’re trying to find a cure to a disease, you extract some of the virus for the antibody. The young men the system had written off weren’t the disease. They were the cure. Together they put former gang members into Dallas schools. Not as security. As mentors. Violence dropped. The state had never asked why. Fleming and Jahwar did. Then came July 5, 2016. Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Police killed Alton Sterling outside a convenience store. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Alton_Sterling] The next day, in Minnesota, Philando Castile was shot during a traffic stop. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Philando_Castile] Five days later, on July 7, in downtown Dallas, a sniper opened fire on a police line at a peaceful protest. Five Dallas officers were killed. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_shooting_of_Dallas_police_officers] Ten days after that, on July 17, 2016, in Baton Rouge, another gunman ambushed officers responding to a call [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_shooting_of_Baton_Rouge_police_officers]. Three officers were killed. Two of them, Brad Garafola and Montrell Jackson, left behind widows. For eighteen months, the country held its breath. Every community meeting was a referendum on who was to blame. On Martin Luther King weekend, January 2018 [https://www.theblaze.com/video/dallas-bishop-unites-widows-of-slain-baton-rouge-police-officers-to-meet-family-of-alton-sterling], Jahwar and Lucky didn’t hold a policy summit. They didn’t invite the mayor. They didn’t invite cable news. They brought the family of Alton Sterling together with the widows of the Baton Rouge officers killed in the ambush that followed his death [https://www.dallasobserver.com/arts/heal-america-urban-specialists-dallas-11926082]. Same room. Same stage. Breathing the same air. Sybrina Fulton [https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/sybrina-fulton-1966/], Trayvon Martin’s mother, had given them the line months earlier: Pain, no matter where it’s felt, feels the same. A mother who lost her son to a police bullet. A widow who lost her husband to a gunman’s rifle. Across a stage. In a room no one in Washington had built. Talking to each other. That is the how, restitched to the why. Not with a statute. In a room. There is an old line in Ecclesiastes [https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+2%3A24&version=KJV]. The writer was a king. A man who had tasted everything a life could offer. Wealth. Power. Wisdom. Pleasure. Everything. He wrote it all down and then he asked what a life was actually for. His answer was spare. To eat and drink, and to enjoy the good of all his labour. To eat with the people you love. To enjoy your work. To know that your day’s labor was worth something. That is the purpose. And it’s the same thing as “life, liberty, and the pursuit.” Which implies a home to eat in. A table to sit at. Food on the table. Work worth enjoying. An education that prepares a kid for work worth enjoying. A community to belong to. A neighbor who would bring a can of beans when the cupboard is bare, and a country that would not punish her for doing so. A country that keeps its pledge. Design the system so that a kid who grows up in a cold apartment in Hunting Park can grow into that life. A kid who grows up in a leaky trailer in rural Wyoming can grow into that life. A kid who grows up anywhere in America can grow into that life. That is the why. It is the only test that matters. Back to the Harlan brothers. 1883. Washington. Justice John Marshall Harlan, the son of a Kentucky slaveholder, the boy who had grown up beside Robert, sits at his desk. The Supreme Court has just struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875 [https://www.loc.gov/item/llsalvol-llsal_018/]. Eight to one. The majority ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment only restrains the state, not private actors. A hotel, theater, railway car may discriminate by race as a matter of private liberty. The how has been used, with the clean logic of the machine, to destroy the why of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. The nation is re-segregating itself, one ruling at a time. Harlan resolves to dissent. For days he sits at his desk. The words will not come. He is the only man on the Court who understands what has just been destroyed, and his hand will not move. His wife, Malvina Shanklin Harlan [https://www.amazon.com/Memories-1854-1911-Modern-Library-Classics/dp/0812967445], knows him. Years earlier, Harlan had purchased from the Supreme Court marshal the inkstand that had once belonged to Chief Justice Roger Taney [https://the-artifice.com/an-inkwells-symbolic-influence-on-the-civil-rights-decisions-of-john-marshall-harlan/]. Taney had used it when he wrote the 1857 Dred Scott decision [https://www.loc.gov/item/usrep060393/] that declared Black Americans had no rights the white man was bound to respect. The vessel that held the ink of America’s original sin. Malvina had hidden it. She was afraid her husband might return it to the Taney family. Now, watching her husband fail at his desk, she retrieves it. She cleans it. She fills it with fresh ink. She places it squarely on his writing desk. Harlan sees it. And then, in Malvina’s own words, his pen begins to move across the page like magic. He writes: Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. [https://www.loc.gov/item/usrep163537/] He is using his own pen. He is dipping it into Taney’s inkwell. The vessel that had held the ink of Dred Scott is now giving up its ink, drop by drop, to draft the constitutional blueprint of the 20th-century Civil Rights Movement. The Court would not adopt the blueprint for seventy years. The same inkwell. A new hand. The same why. John Marshall Harlan could see it because he had grown up with Robert. Eaten at the same table. Watched him carry gold back from California. Watched him sit with President Grant. Watched him send a piano to Elizabeth’s wedding. The why wasn’t an abstraction for John Marshall Harlan. It was his brother. This doesn’t start in Washington. Our why is “by the people.” It starts with us. It is not an argument about slavery. It’s about whether we believe a kid born in poverty has the same right to life, liberty, and the pursuit as a kid born in a mansion. The machine forgets. That is the whole country. The unfinished work. We start with why. Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe [https://joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]