My Ideas Are Running For Office…

Ideas That Should Run For Every Office In The Land.

Preamble. Democracy isn’t about voting. It’s about debate. In a healthy democracy, every voting citizen should not only have a ready answer to the question “What would you do… if you were the Mayor… Governor… or President?” but also stand ready to defend their ideas with both facts and arguments, in an animated debate.

In a healthy democracy, everyone’s ideas are always running for office. Not just politicians, not just experts. Democratic wisdom, such as it is, is the wisdom of the common man. Democracy is the belief that the common man is capable of self-reliance, of thinking and acting for himself, in a word, of sovereignty. Never underestimate the common man, if, and this is The Big If of democracy, he must both debate his ideas before forcing them on others, and hear them debate their ideas, before they force theirs upon him.

This weakness is as old as democracy itself. This is precisely the dilemma that Socrates confronts Gorgias with, and their dialogue is as profound and relevant now as then. For any given policy question, Socrates contends that both citizens and their elected politicians should concern themselves solely with the actual truth of the matter, and decide on principle… whereas Gorgias rejects this as idealistic folly, embracing the reality that, in a democracy, persuasion is power: politicians should focus all of their energy on persuading the people, because power, once obtained, is the greatest good.

In that most classic of debates, Socrates’ spirit rings out:

“I would rather . . . that the whole world should be at odds with me, and oppose me, rather than that I myself should be at odds with myself, and contradict myself.”

This is the spirit of the philosopher, the lover of truth, who doesn’t care if a position is popular, only that it is right. But the sophist, corrupt in spirit, cares only for power. Whereas the sophist likes to give speeches, the philosopher prefers to debate, as focused, extended dialogue tends to clarify every issue. In other words, there are gains to trade from dialogue.

The idea that there are “gains to trade from dialogue” is revolutionary: in a debate, both sides always start out wrong, and end up less wrong. The humility of the principle is its genius: people don’t need to agree with each other, or even change their positions, per se, for the mere act of debate to be profitable, to sharpen their thoughts, to expose flaws in their arguments, to force them to consider and react to new facts or ideas. In fact, it is through disagreeing with each other, constantly, on as many issues as possible, that the public benefits from a flourishing of insight.

Insights compound over time, and although we are, in the 21st century, the beneficiaries and heirs not just of centuries, but of several millennia of insight, the wisdom of the dead is useless to us, unless we read their books, think their thoughts, debate them, and seek to apply them. One of tragic failures of modern education is that 21st century America does this less well than 18th century America…

Aside from our Presidential debates — which are staged, over-produced, soundbyte-fests — Americans have been sheltered from mental strife and striving for a century. But in the 18th and 19th centuries, this was the land of debate, of the Founding Fathers, plural, of Lincoln and Douglas: that is what made our political system work.

The genius of the American system comes from its insight that “A singular man cannot be The Hope upon which The System is built.” It is an Anti-Messianic Enlightenment. Indeed, the profound optimism of the Founding Fathers in the potential of the human spirit, unleashed by liberty, was balanced by their profound pessimism in anticipation of violence, theft, and sophistic corruption. As Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers, “If Men were Angels, no government would be necessary.” Or Paine, in the opening lines of Common Sense:

“Some writers have so confounded Society with Government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and Government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first a patron, the last a punisher.

Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.”

In their religious understanding, they did not hope for Utopia, for heaven on earth, and did not place their faith in government for deliverance from all their problems.

Rather the opposite: the revolution and The Constitution that followed was founded in a wariness of power, a fear of tyranny. Instead of Utopia, they hoped for N-topia, as the Quakers who founded Pennsylvania did in the 17th century… The freedom of religion, granted to them by Royal Charter, meant that many communities might arise, each pursuing its own vision of happiness, while individuals retain the right to exit, as, indeed, they had originally, from England.

The Founders hoped, not for Utopia, but for renaissance, for the abundance and flourishing of genius that would emerge from the competition inherent in freedom: from a system that maximized the contest of ideas, from the striving of imperfect sovereigns, competing at every level.

The writer that best recognized and captured the genius of our political system was an outsider, Tocqueville, who could see, with the eyes of an outsider, what was truly brilliant and remarkable about it:

“In towns, it is impossible to prevent men from assembling… They are like great meeting houses, with all the inhabitants as members. In them, the people wield immense influence…”

In every small town and village in America, there was a culture of sovereignty. The individual felt himself to be sovereign. As the son came of age, he became independent of the father. In the same way, a city would recoil at interference from its state in its own concerns. So too for the states: jealous of any expansion of federal power which threatened their rights.

Sovereignty was bottoms-up, instead of top-down. In a top-down model, the sovereignty of The State, of Leviathan, was unbound: nobody could tell The Dictator what to do, but he not only could, but would, tell everyone what to do, because their sovereignty threatens his.

To quote Lewis, writing after World War II, as socialism swept England:

“What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence — moral, cultural, social, or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how Democracy (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient Dictatorships, and by the same methods? You remember how one of the Greek Dictators (they called them ‘tyrants’ then) sent an envoy to another Dictator to ask his advice about the principles of government. The second Dictator led the envoy into a field of corn, and there he snicked off with his cane the top of every stalk that rose an inch or so above the general level. The moral was plain. Allow no pre-eminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser, or better, or more famous, or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level; all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals. Thus Tyrants could practise, in a sense, ‘democracy’. But now ‘democracy’ can do the same work without any other tyranny than her own. No one need now go through the field with a cane. The little stalks will now of themselves bite the tops off the big ones. The big ones are beginning to bite off their own in their desire to Be Like Stalks.”

Whereas the top-down model would suppress freedom as much as possible, the bottom-up model would maximize liberty, to produce the maximum amount of freedom possible under the law, by empowering sovereigns to strive at the lowest possible level, according to the Principle of Subsidiarity.

Indeed, after the Founders won their War of Independence there were no longer any foreseeable external threats to liberty, only the internal threat of encroachment from government itself:

“The only dangers which America had to fear were those which might result from the abuse of the freedom she had won. They had the courage to say what they believed to be true, because they were animated by a warm and sincere love of liberty…”

Although these principles, and others like them, are enshrined not only in The Constitution, but in the writings of the Founding Fathers and in the proud intellectual tradition of Liberty… they have been abandoned by contemporary culture and its politics.

Tocqueville saw this coming. Although “ready to worship” the freedom enshrined in The Constitution, he did not believe that it would function as a Mechanistic Savior — in a democracy, the ultimate arbiter of the people’s freedom would always be popular culture itself:

“The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals; morals can turn the worst laws to advantage. That is a commonplace truth, but one to which my studies are always bringing me back. It is the central point in my conception. I see it at the end of all my reflections.”

Tocqueville’s Democracy In America is NOT optimistic about Democracy. Indeed, he was always warning of its dangers and excesses. Like Aristotle, Augustine, Machiavelli, Ibn Khaldun, Gibbon, and the Founding Fathers themselves, Tocqueville saw the cyclical tendency of cultural and political evolution:

A Cyclical Theory Of The History Of Cultural & Political Evolution…

And yet, he believed in Democracy:

“As for me, I am deeply a democrat; this is why I am in no way a socialist. Democracy and socialism cannot go together. You can’t have it both ways.”

Like the Founders themselves, he balanced his optimism for a culture of liberty and sovereignty, with his pessimism about the socialist tendencies of democracy which were corrupting his native France:

“Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”

The Tendency Of Democracy Towards Socialism

So what? Most Americans today can’t be bothered to care about political philosophy, or even politics, per se, other than in the most sensationalist and petty way…

The “so what” is precisely this, this enervation, this draining of vitality, this lack of energy in thought and in action, this sad decay of our vigorous sovereignty, which we can hear in our public discourse, stilted by political correctness, and which we can see in the sad uniformity and stagnation of our cities, with no more tragic example than San Francisco. How did this happen to America, “land of the free, and home of the brave”?!

Socialism did this. None of this was true of American life before FDR’s election in 1932… The New Deal, which filled Washington D.C. with legions of empowered technocrats, promulgating reams of regulation, did something awful to our culture. It diminished its sovereignty. It made it dependent:

“After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the government then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence: it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

That Tocqueville could foresee this so clearly, in 1840, is frankly astonishing! The obvious explanation is that socialism was already sweeping France in the mid-19th century. A decade after Tocqueville published, the young French Senator, Frédéric Bastiat, found himself in the minority, as socialists convinced the French to vote for all manner of public works, subsidies, trade protection, regulations and fines, especially restricting markets, capital and technology, welfare schemes, and imperialistic misadventures. In a brilliant attempt to persuade his countrymen, he wrote the collection of a dozen essays entitled The Seen & The Unseen, using simple examples to illustrate a single principle: that for every action of government, there is a seen benefit, but an unseen cost; and that this slight of hand is used by socialist technocrats, again and again, to deceive the people.

Socialists wouldn’t capture the United States federal government for nearly a century, until The New Deal of 1933. Taking advantage of Hoover’s disastrous mismanagement of the stock market crash of 1929, in which his monetary policy was, through the Federal Reserve, to exacerbate natural deflation with artificial deflation, and his fiscal policy was to raise taxes precisely when people couldn’t afford to pay, and his trade policy was to enact the biggest protection in history, which reduced trade volume by 40%, and his labor policy was to informally and increasingly formally penalize employers who laid off employees or lowered wages… FDR took over, hired and empowered legions of technocrats, dramatically expanded the number and size of executive departments, and increased the scale of overall government intervention by one or two orders of magnitude, which had the effect of prolonging the already unnaturally prolonged depression of three years, by nearly another decade!

That macro story conceals the millions of tragedies which Hoover’s corporatist technocracy and FDR’s socialist technocracy either presided over or direct perpetrated. The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes tells these stories better than any other history of the period I’ve read…

Quoting Supreme Court Justice Hughes in the 1935 New Deal case Schechter Poultry Corp v. United States, which overturned two prior rulings and unanimously found in favor of the Schechter brothers…

“Extraordinary conditions may call for extraordinary remedies. But the argument necessarily STOPS short of an attempt to justify action which lies outside the sphere of constitutional authority. Extraordinary conditions DO NOT create or enlarge constitutional power.”

In other words, the government has abused the Schechters, and other businesses, through unconstitutional “coercive exercise of the law-making power.”

The ruling rendered an entire federal agency, and all of its codes, unconstitutional. In just one year, it had generated more paper than the entire legislative output of the federal government since 1789: 10,000 pages of law. And it was only ONE of the 30 (Thirty!) new agencies FDR had created.

To this day, in 2020, at every level — federal, state, and city — our government is still essentially the New Deal government that FDR left behind: it has only grown larger, more technocratic, bloated and tyrannical.

To this day, it has overstepped its constitutional bounds, in violation of the founding principles of this country, not only egregiously so in its recent response to coronavirus — which has done more economic and public health damage than the virus itself would have done, without, arguably, saving any lives — but also in its general regime throughout my lifetime.

To join Supreme Court Justice McReynolds in his lament, ruling on a different New Deal case of the same period: “This is Nero at his worst. As for the Constitution, it does not seem too much to say that IT IS GONE.”

My belief is that we need to return, not only to the founding principles, by restoring The Constitution In Exile and returning to the “Old Deal” of Life, Liberty and The Pursuit of Happiness, but that we need to also restore a culture of debate to preserve and protect that way of life against any future “New Deal.”

In response, one of my Democrat friends, just this week, said: “I think getting back to founding principles is always a useless debate.” “Useless?!” I replied. “I think it is THE MOST IMPORTANT debate of all.”

Reading the history of the Great Depression has made it painfully clear to me that FDR was the most destructive President to constitutional liberty and free markets in the history of our country… and my ideas will campaign against him for the rest of my life, because his ideas are still very much in office.

Returning to Tocqueville, Tocqueville not only foresaw this danger, The Tyranny of Technocracy, but the concomitant danger, the Tyranny Of The Majority:

“In my opinion, the main evil of the present democratic institutions of the United States does not arise, as is often asserted in Europe, from their weakness, but from their irresistible strength. I am not so much alarmed at the excessive liberty which reigns in that country as at the inadequate securities which one finds there against tyranny…

When an individual or a party is wronged in the United States, to whom can he apply for redress? If to public opinion, public opinion constitutes the majority; if to the legislature, it represents the majority and implicitly obeys it; if to the executive power, it is appointed by the majority and serves as a passive tool in its hands. The public force consists of the majority under arms; the jury is the majority invested with the right of hearing judicial cases; and in certain states even the judges are elected by the majority. However iniquitous or absurd the measure of which you complain, you must submit to it as well as you can.

I do not say that there is a frequent use of tyranny in America at the present day; but I maintain that there is no sure barrier against it, and that the causes which mitigate the government there are to be found in the circumstances and the manners of the country more than in its laws.”

A prophetic insight: in a democracy, even with a constitution such as ours, ultimately only the liberal-minded morality of the majority stands in the way of the tyranny of the majority. Even in the 19th century, the tyranny of the majority could already be felt as a restraint against the free expression of ideas:

“In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them. Not that he is in danger of an auto-da-fe but he is exposed to continued obloquy and persecution. His political career is closed forever, since he has offended the only authority that is able to open it. Every sort of compensation, even that of celebrity, is refused to him. Before making public his opinions he thought he had sympathizers; now it seems to him that he has none any more since he has revealed himself to everyone; then those who blame him criticize loudly and those who think as he does keep quiet and move away without courage. He yields at length, overcome by the daily effort which he has to make, and subsides into silence, as if he felt remorse for having spoken the truth…”

I will not subside into silence, and I hope you do not either. Speak up. Otherwise, politics is reductionist. In a two party system, there are only two possible choices when you vote, from an unlimited number of theoretical choices. This works when bottoms-up public debate is animated, and the parties are forced to either respond to and absorb the best insights of the people, of the dead and of the living, although they are inevitably compressed. But when public debate is limited merely to the Presidential stage, and even then, extremely infrequently, the two choices become 2D caricatures of recycled ideas designed to hook various interest groups. In a society of doers and thinkers, united by debate, our candidates would express that richness.

Therefore, it is in the spirit of philosophy, in the spirit of the principles of democracy and liberty which founded this nation and animated its people until their late abandonment, that I conclude my preamble, and commence what I feel to be no other than my essential duty as a citizen: to answer the aforementioned questions… What would I do if I were running for Citizen, Business Partner, Mayor, Governor… President?

For which I state no qualifications, other than the common sense of a common man. Yet these are answers for which I stand ready to debate in public, because as a citizen of a free nation, my ideas should always be running for office, even though I am not.

My Ideas Running For Citizen

In the last century, the two underlying trends that have silently undermined our democracy are the erosion of individualism — in an era of “public education” and “jobs” — and of civic engagement — in an era of “mass communication.”

Our public education system tends to produce “employees,” rather than individuals. Every individual that wishes to retain his sovereign individuality must heed the advice of Mark Twain, and not let his “schooling get in the way of his education.” That is, he must, like Franklin, Jefferson, Rockefeller, Edison, Ford, The Wright Brothers, Disney, Jobs — many of the greatest Americans — teach himself, take responsibility for his own learning, become an autodidact.

In response, the primary rebuttal in favor of public education has always been that many individuals, left to themselves, are lazy, that they lack sufficient will, resources or ability, to improve themselves — they must be helped, they must even be forced.

The resources argument is the most common and the most specious, as so many of the great names aforementioned overcame this, as books are so cheap, as the internet is so ubiquitous, and as in a free society, regardless of the limitations of circumstance, everyone has some measure of agency.

The real arguments to reckon with are those of will and ability. That people neither desire, nor are capable of, self improvement, and that, if they can neither be helped or forced to improve, they must be relegated to some station fitting to their unoriginality, that is, given a “job.”

This idea goes back to Plato’s education dictatorship, in which a Philosopher King holds the masses in tutelage: the original technocratic dream… Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor is the chilling incarnation of this way of thinking:

Would Thou venture thither with Thy vague and undefined promise of freedom, which men, dull and unruly as they are by nature, are unable so much as to understand, which they avoid and fear? — for never was there anything more unbearable to the human race than personal freedom! Dost Thou see these stones in the desolate and glaring wilderness? Command that these stones be made bread — and mankind will run after Thee, obedient and grateful like a herd of cattle. But even then it will be ever diffident and trembling, lest Thou should take away Thy hand, and they lose thereby their bread!

In other words, the Dark Enlightenment of the Socialist Technocrats, is that people do not want to become individuals, and do not want the burden of freedom, but would far rather prefer security, comfort, equality and the guarantee that their material needs will be met.

In other words, people want “The New Deal,” and have no interest in “The Old Deal.” They want “jobs” and “social security” and “free education, healthcare and money.” They want to stay at home, watch Netflix, and order takeout. They don’t want to become individuals. They don’t want “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

The Founding Fathers were not unaware of this dangerous way of thinking. They warned against it. Franklin, for example:

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

This is why Tocqueville kept coming back to the primacy of culture. Liberty is a “hard freedom.” Even if most individuals take the path of least resistance, join with the crowd, and shirk their civic duties, if even a remnant takes up the torch of individualism and citizenship, The Republic will renew its vigor, and the exceptional will raise up the rest by their leadership, their insights, their example, and the progress they create…

A free society requires a deep humanist optimism, a belief that renaissance is not only still possible, but that it may be sustained by culture… I believe that every individual is put on earth for a reason, and that, while we, as neighbors, can challenge, guide and assist each other, it is ultimately up to the individual — not society, the schools or the state — to discover, express and fulfill his or her purpose. There is so much power, so much unique potential, wrapped up in every individual, that our society should interfere less, giving individuals the burden and empowerment of responsibility and the space to unfold the ideas, inspirations, interests and skills which are uniquely theirs.

The more we strengthen our culture of individualism, the stronger our civic culture will become. They are mutually reinforcing. If everyone read Emerson’s essays, just think of the cultural revival, the wave of inspiration and activity, that would sweep the land!

The less government we have, the better — the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal Government, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual.

As for our duty as voting citizens, every individual should, as a universal common denominator: read, write, think, speak up and debate; then conduct their lives and business in accordance with their thinking — that their actions should be in integrity with their beliefs.

Through debate, their beliefs should be questioned until mature. The more they have debated, the more they have confronted skepticism, the deeper they have searched for answers, the richer their evolving answers to the questions of life…

Questions like: Why am I here? What should I be working on? How may I best fulfill my sense of duty to myself, to nature and nature’s God, and lastly, to my fellow men? Having acquitted myself of duty, how shall I pursue my own happiness? How do I define the Beautiful, the Good, and the True? What should I value and how should I incarnate those values? What is true and how do I know? How shall I then live?

These are private and intimate questions, which, again, can only be answered by the individual themselves. Every individual will come up with their own unique answers. But debate can help them arrive at and evolve those answers…

Debate does not arrive at permanent indecision, at nihilism and meaninglessness… Rather, in the spirit of seeking truth, debate helps us arrive at strange conclusions, paradoxical insights, and the harmonization of opposing principles.

Debate does not arrive at all, in any final sense. It forces us to continually evolve… Although evolution is certainly uncomfortable, to refuse to evolve is to jeopardize survival, and thus sovereignty. Evolution does necessarily mean that our beliefs will be continually destroyed and replaced, although that may happen in one area or another, especially in the beginning, but that, once we discover our core principles, they will be adapted and strengthened over time, through the askesis of this exercise.

Once mature, our beliefs will naturally tend towards one of the great problems in the world, and our natural inclinations, as individuals, will find unique expression.

If individuals did this, there would be fewer “jobs,” “careers,” and “industries.” Instead, there would be a renaissance of genius at every level: more artistic, scientific and technological breakthroughs, more innovative teams building singular organizations creating extreme value…

If, instead of competing for jobs, we compete to be the most innovative, the most expressed, the most singular… there will be far more greatness and excellence.

If every citizen maximizes both their unique expression, and does their duty to participate in the life of thought and civic debate, then we will experience cultural renewal.

Given that radio, television, the internet, and social media have displaced the old town square as mediums of “mass communication” — the question arises, how should the modern individual and citizen engage in civic life? Perhaps, like the Founding Fathers, we can write essays, like their Federalist Papers, and publish them on the internet. Perhaps, like Lincoln and Douglas, we can host debates, but host them on Zoom, and publish them on Youtube. We must find ways to adapt a culture of individual thinking and debate to the internet, without ceding the stage to celebrities only. It is not only for the Presidential candidates to write and to debate, but for each of us.

Everyone is afraid of social or economic reprisals if they say what they think. A married couple that randomly discovered my writing on the internet recently reached out to me to say this:

“Francis, we both enjoy your posts — fighting the good fight against misinformation!

I wouldn’t dare…. My friends would shut me down. I run a service-based business and my clients are my friends — don’t want to get too political… bad for business.

I’m from Soviet Russia — counter opinions got you sent to the gulag. But the people would whisper, “In times of tyranny — speaking the truth is the bravest act.”

I admire you coming out with it.

I encouraged her to find some way, any way, to talk about her story and her values in public. Regardless of how “captured” you feel by the tyranny of the majority, there is a way to speak up. Anyone who says anything that is strange, new and different, even if it is not openly controversial, is creating a space, a clearing, for others to also express themselves. Free expression is a network effect.

Fear not. The only thing to fear is what happens when everyone does NOT publish. Publish or liberty will perish!

The individual citizen fulfills the most important office of government. That is the most radical American idea, and I restore it to pride of place.

My Ideas Running For Business Partner

In a sense, we do “elect” our bosses, because we have the right to speak up, and if our ideas are not heard, to exit. If every organization is as truly unique as the individuals that compose it, then most fully-expressed organizations are not going to be a fit for most fully-expressed individuals, and that’s okay. Everyone filters and self-selects.

And yet, most people hate their jobs, and don’t like their bosses. Why? Obviously, because we’re either afraid of losing our jobs, or don’t know what else we’d do, where else we’d work, or how good it can be. We accept that our lot in life is to suffer.

May it never be! Suffering, indeed, is part of life, but some suffering is needless — the result of a victim mindset. Suppose, for the sake of argument, someone denied the privileges of a good upbringing, a good education, and a good income, and add to all this, family duties which limit time and risk-taking appetite even further… Granted. Even amidst all of these constraints, agency is possible. There is always agency in the mind: Think. Observe. Then speak. Ask questions. There is social agency: Make friends. Lastly, make time, even when there is no time, to learn: whether through audiobooks or through conversations or through Google searches on your iPhone during bathroom breaks — agency is possible. Agency is heroic. Even amidst all of those restraints, you can be the subversive secret agent of your own life, defying the narrative of oppression with one of empowerment.

But most people who hate their jobs and don’t like their bosses are not in such dire straights. They are just not applying themselves. They are complacent.

A great boss can apply some shock therapy, and help them wake up. In the first place, by delivering candid feedback in a job interview: as a great boss should avoid hiring such people in the first place. But when you make a mistake, sometimes you may decide to give someone a chance before firing them. In larger organizations, sometimes you end up managing people you didn’t hire.

In those situations, a great boss can raise the bar, setting a standard of excellence far higher than their team is accustomed to, requiring them to deliver excellent work on time. At first, the boss can force them to prove that they can follow simple instructions to deliver simple work excellently and quickly. Once this trust is established and rewarded, the delegations can become increasingly complex, forcing team members to ascend from the tactical to the operational, and finally, the strategic planes of thought: to think, not just to act.

Once a team member has ascended to the higher levels of delegation, they have become a partner, capable of delivering against operational objectives and weighing in on strategic decisions. By demonstrating this level of ability and ownership, they’ve proven themselves worthy not just of cash compensation, but of equity or some other form of long-term alignment with the organization.

What does a great boss do?

To begin… A great boss finds, trains, aligns incentives, and manages partners towards a mission, ensuring its success.

The mission is all-important. If the mission is fluffy and unrealistic, the organization will drift, and nobody will be motivated. But if the mission is to provide an essential service that empowers customers, and has the potential, at scale, to dramatically transform society, it will motivate.

A great boss, therefore, commits himself and his team to innovation: both in kind and in quality. A great boss drives his team to innovate on efficiency: to do the things that are working Better, Faster, and Cheaper. This creates deflationary abundance for society.

But a great boss also drives his team to invent entirely New Things, to invent The Future, things that have never existed before…

If only ever boss in America drove their teams relentlessly onwards towards both extensive and intensive innovation… What would that do to our abundance, our wellbeing, our rate of progress, our incarnate imagination?

The partners are all-important. If they aren’t fully bought in and passionate, if they aren’t committed to operational excellence, if they aren’t capable of strategic thinking, then they don’t belong on this team, they belong on a different team — and it is better for both parties to part ways. But if they are, if everyone on the team is humming at that frequency, then it will make rapid progress towards achieving its mission.

A great boss is like a great government: that which manages best, manages least. The Principle of Subsidiarity applies in organizations, too, not just in governments. Decisions should be made at the lowest possible level. In a culture of individualism and excellence, partners make most of the decisions on their own, then report up. The decisions they cannot make on their own are made either by their team or its manager. The decisions that boss cannot make on his own escalate to his boss, etcetera… The boss at the top should make as few decisions as possible.

Not too many, and not too few, either. Management should neither be tight, nor loose. The concept is optimal efficiency: the right decisions, driving towards the right goal, executed by the right partners, taking the right actions, on the right things, at the right time.

As a team member ascends from an agent executing instructions, towards a partner operating against strategic objectives, they must learn to think. But thinking involves something more than just commitment to excellence, to the team, or to the mission… Thinking involves disagreement. But disagreement implies misalignment. If a great company cultivates thinking, but also aligns stakeholders, then how does it hold together?

The answer is a concept I call Minimum Viable Alignment. Everything is up for debate, but to an decreasing extent from the bottom-up: the company’s day-to-day operations are up for more debate than its strategy, which is up for more debate than its core values, vision and mission…

Debate at the lowest levels signals the kind of divergence that is inherent in great thinking. Debate at the highest levels signals misalignment which can be resolved in one of three ways: 1) modifying the structure or the strategy as necessary, 2) debating them until there misalignment resolves naturally, or 3) prompting the resignation of misaligned team members.

A great boss maximizes debate on direction while maintaining the alignment required for execution velocity.

This principle is just as relevant to governing a nation as it is to governing a company… Indeed, it is the American principle, the principle inherent in the concept of Liberty, the principle present in The Constitution itself, which is designed to encourage the maximum divergence possible within the limits of the law.

At national scale, Minimum Viable Alignment means non-violence — respecting the rights of your fellow citizens to their property and persons — and loyalty to The Constitution itself. Indeed, it is to “preserve, protect and defend The Constitution of the United States” that we swear our oaths of loyalty. Other than that, we are free. Free to think as we wish, say what we wish, do what we wish… It’s as simple as that.

If these two principles, Subsidiarity and Minimum Viable Alignment, are equally relevant to national and corporate governance… what is unique about the corporation?

Scale, surely, is different. Even at the largest corporations, decisions are happening at a far smaller scale than in the government. One could argue that scale differences are merely quantitative, not qualitative, but history does not bear that out…

President Hoover is the perfect example: a brilliant engineer and executive, capable of maximizing efficiency in a mine, a brilliant federal department head, capable of coordinating multiple states to build a dam… a terrible President, attempting to centralize and coordinate an entire economy with the same efficiency.

Every executive must develop an intuition for balancing centralization and decentralization: to know what decisions are truly theirs to make, which decisions are should be made by their lieutenants, which decisions by theirs… A CEO should manage a COO more loosely than a COO manages a VP of Operations, and so on… At every level, neither too tight, nor too loose. This is why capable operators at one level tend to fail at another level: they are playing a completely different game, moving completely different levers.

Incentives are also different. If the government were run for-profit, it might maximize its Sovereign Wealth Fund without consideration for the liberty and property of its citizens. Again, although it is true that the best way to maximize the long-term performance of a Sovereign Wealth Fund would not be to confiscate all the wealth, but rather to incentivize maximum wealth creation through maximizing liberty and property protections, history is full of tyrants who didn’t care, because beyond a certain level of wealth and power, they cared not about maximizing wealth, but about minimizing threats to staying in power.

In the next section, we will explore how a government might be run for-profit while maintaining constitutional liberties, in a way that, to my knowledge, has never been attempted…

What is categorically and crucially different, is the difference between universals and particulars. Every corporation has a unique identity, values, vision and mission. It is designed to solve a unique problem to a unique set of customers by providing a unique service. It is run by a unique team of unique individuals with unique points of view, making unique decisions, which they execute uniquely. Everything about it is singular, exceptional, particular. Generally, the more singular, the better, as it is less likely to have competitors and more likely to invent a new service for a new market.

Whereas the government concerns itself with universals, and a good government limits these to the minimum viable number: What does everybody need to do? Pay these taxes. Abide by these laws. Etcetera…

A good government is like a good house: it creates space for unique people to move in, to fill unique rooms, with unique things, so that they can lead lives full of unique activity…

What makes this metaphor imperfect, of course, is that every house is unique, whereas the government must limit itself to just those structural universals which apply to all citizens, minimizing its intrusive burden so as to maximize their uniqueness.

There is one last similarity between governments and corporations, sovereignty. The Corporation is a Sovereign entity, a meta-individual. As a Sovereign, it has an Identity and a Will. The genius of a corporation is its ability to align incentives towards the expression of its identity and will, absorbing the expression of the identities and wills of its individual partners within its own expression… The first priority of any Sovereign is to maintain its Sovereignty. That is why a great CEO will prioritize control, ownership, profitability and capitalization, maintaining a strong balance sheet, not just overall alignment.

That is also why a great CEO will not be what I call a Corporate Isolationist. Corporate Isolationism is bad for America. The vast majority of CEOs have become Corporate Isolationists. Corporate Isolationists try to keep themselves, and their companies, out of trouble, by keeping quiet and staying disengaged. They say as little of political import as possible, and what they do say, they ensure is politically correct.

Worse than Corporate Isolationism are the Industrial Complexes. When Corporate Isolationist CEOs become big and successful, they tend to become Special Interest CEOs. When a CEO can afford it, he will often hire lobbyists to grease the palms of any and all politicians, parties and organizations that can advance his organization’s interests by any means, such as subsidies, tariffs, or regulations that protect incumbents, regardless of their Constitutionality or objective merit.

What’s the alternative? Free Companies with Free Partners.

The CEO of a Free Company will not only speak his mind, as an individual and a citizen, on all matters that concern him personally, but will encourage his Partners to also speak their minds, as individuals and citizens, so that when he speaks, he is not always speaking as “the company’s voice.”

He will not encourage them to agree with him. If anything, he will encourage them to disagree with him! It is crucial that he neither police their personal speech, nor let them police his.

Unless, and this should be done with great reservation for fear of setting adverse precedent, misalignments emerge through public expression and debate that are so fundamental they jeopardize the minimum alignment required to run the business. Again, minimum is the key word here.

On issues which concern not only him personally, but the company — and these, by the same principle, should be reduced to a minimum — the CEO reserves the right to speak with “the company’s voice.” The discretion of a great CEO is to know when this is necessary and appropriate, and to acquit himself well of his duty, but otherwise to speak in “his personal voice.”

What issues concern the company, and require It to speak, through the mouthpiece of its CEO? The company should be wary of any encroachment on its sovereignty by Industrial Complexes, Regulatory Capture, or any threats to the Property, Trade and Liberties upon which it depends for its continued existence and prosperity.

I believe that this vision, that of free enterprises which unite the incentives and express some of the economic and technological ideas of their business partners, who, in turn, freely express their own opinions and ideas on a far wider range of social issues, is the most aligned with the founding vision for the nation.

Freedom is mutually reinforcing. Free individuals and engaged citizens are the kinds of people that establish free enterprises. Free enterprises are the kinds of companies that encourage the development of free-thinking individuals and engaged citizens…

In summary, vote for CEOs that find, train, align incentives, and manage partners towards a mission, ensuring its success. The more sovereign the company, the better its team, the more motivating the mission, the more committed to alignment, efficiency and innovation, and the better the company understands how to organize itself so that decisions are made at the right level… the better.

After individuals, the most important officers of government in America are its business partners: the team members, team leaders, managers and executives that lead our corporations. This is also a radical bottoms-up American idea, and the reason why we were once, and probably still are, the most innovative country in the world, in spite of decades of cultural, technological and economic stagnation…

How rapidly would that stagnation be replaced with progress,
How many daunting challenges and big problems would be solved,
How much abundance would be created, and how much waste eliminated,
How marvelous would the innovations be, and how exciting our future…
If every company in America was committed to greatness?

My Ideas Running For Mayor

Stagnation. American cities have stagnated. To recognize this, all one needs to do is walk around the streets of San Francisco, Los Angeles or New York, to see that we are not only stuck in the 20th century, we are, in many ways, falling behind even our former glory…

Analysis. Any free-thinking individual and patriotic citizen should be gravely concerned with this state of affairs, and not be afraid to openly question how this stagnation came out, what to begin to turn it around, and how to progress, from here, towards a beautiful future.

Questions. The question ‘What makes a great mayor?’ is related to the question ‘What makes a great city?’

My answer to the latter is ‘A great city invites great individuals and great organizations to make it their home, and to express their greatness within it, coexisting with maximum harmony…’

My answer to the former is ‘A great mayor aligns incentives to transcend the economic tradeoffs inherent in limited space…’

Tradeoffs. What are the public goods we desire in a city? Here a short list:

• Architectural beauty.
• Clean buildings and streets.
• High quality and inexpensive housing.
• High quality and inexpensive education.
• High quality and inexpensive transportation.
• Highly effective and minimally intrusive security.
• Highly diverse and inexpensive art.
• Highly diverse and inexpensive education.
• Highly diverse and inexpensive entertainment.
• High quality and high quantity business and trade opportunities.
• Highly festive and creative, but minimally conformist, society.
• High quality neighbors: fully-expressed, free-thinking individuals and engaged citizens.
• Minimal regulation and taxation.

Conventional wisdom says that you can’t have all of these things. That there are trade-offs. That you have to choose.

Transcendence. Genius lies in elegantly transcending tradeoffs by aligning incentives towards innovation. When imagination and creativity succeed in creating broad-based abundance, politics becomes less acrimonious, and technocratic socialism has less appeal…

The underlying economic insight in what follows is that the city can incentivize all of these goods, while simultaneously minimizing regulation and even eliminating taxes, if it establishes sovereignty, safeguards liberties and aligns incentives with constitutional mechanisms, and exercises the power of eminent domain to exponential skyward growth.

There is no better expression of transcendence than the skyscraper!

Tradeoffs that exist in two dimensions, may not in three…

The Sovereign City-State. Let us take New York City as a concrete example. If I were the mayor of New York City, I would make a bid to secede from New York State.

New York City is a Blue City. New York State is a Red State. The State ends up being Blue, because of the City. The City ends up being governed by The State, because of The Governor. This arrangement makes no sense.

Upstream entanglements lead to downstream entanglements… The NYC Subway, for example, is leased to the NYC Transit Authority, a state agency and subsidiary of The MTA…

Seceding from The State would force The City to become more self-reliant, to get serious about solving its own problems, and to debate… Civic engagement increases when citizens feel that they have agency, and Sovereignty would definitely increase local agency.

Obviously, it would be politically difficult to execute secession: Tammany Hall would be against it. But The People of upstate New York would love to be unshackled, and it is also in the best interests of The People of the City, so The People might just overrule The Establishment by voting in State Legislators who would pass the bill.

Naturally, this would create a political crisis as New York City would be unrepresented in the United States Senate, and would have to be recognized as a State — which begs the question of its name, let us rename it New Athens.

The City’s two Blue senators should counterbalance the State’s two Red senators, so the move is half as dramatic as it sounds, amounting to the loss of two Blue Senators… Although, a Red Mayor might also be able to turn the city Red, and so inevitable resistance from the Blues must be overcome democratically…

These dynamics are true in other States in the Union. Red California is shackled by Blue Los Angeles, and to a lesser extent, Blue San Francisco… which are, in turn, shackled by The Red State…

The City-State of New Athens that emerges from this would include the entire NYC metro-area with its roughly 10M inhabitants… And The Sovereign Will of New Athens, the Identity seeking Expression, will be to become literally, a new Athens, like the Old Athens of the Golden Age: a city of genius, trade, wealth, power, science, technology, commerce, art, and the humanities…

The City Constitution. I would convert the new City-State of Athens into a for-profit corporation, with residents as voting citizen-shareholders, appointing a Board of Directors every two years, one for each of the five boroughs, electing its Mayor every six years, with term limits for all offices of eight years.

The voting power of city officials shall be apportioned as follows. With each of the five Directors voting, plus the Mayor, receiving two votes, there shall be seven votes, with debates required on all votes, with discussions publicly recorded and uploaded to YouTube. Directors may introduce any measure, but The Mayor has the singular ability to veto any measure.

Unless in a declared state of emergency, with an emergency budget passed by the Board of Directors, the city shall be forbidden, constitutionally, from either:

• raising taxes of any kind, as its revenues shall be financed by the sale of 100-year leases to developers,
• regulating beyond a set maximum number of 100 pages, or
• running a deficit in its operating budget.

The constitution requires the city to either buy back shares, or issue new shares equally to residents, every four years, to maintain 70% of its shares owned by residents, although 30% may be traded on the open market to set the price and create liquidity.

Shares sold to non-residents will be non-voting shares.

Shares issued to residents will vest on a ten year schedule, with a four year cliff. Vested shares will be immediately exercisable.

As for any surplus profit the city generates, there will be a constitutionally-set minimum Savings Rate (10%) to build up the city’s Balance Sheet, and a constitutionally set minimum Dividend Rate (5%) once the Balance Sheet rises beyond a certain figure.

Of course, Mayors are encouraged to Save and Divest more than these minimums, if they cannot identify high ROI ways to spend money for the public good… Speaking of which, the City is required to provide an Annual Report to its Citizens on the ROI of all spending, on its revenues, balance sheet, market capitalization, and other metrics, and a qualitative analysis of its own long-term grand strategy…

The constitution also prohibits the city from functioning as a landlord, utilities operator, or as the operator of any city service, other than policing…

The city may pay vendors to provide services to its citizens, as long as these services can be proven to be truly universal necessities, otherwise they shall be declared unconstitutional…

Procurement of public services shall be publicly transparent, and vendor incentives shall be tied directly to measured and publicly reported outcomes…

The constitution also prohibits the city from owning any assets other than its own real estate, and insurance policies that benefit all residents…

Upon signing, the constitution requires the Mayor to sell bonds to pay for the immediate liquidation of legacy pensions for city employees… Such pensions are forbidden in the future…

Upon signing, the constitution requires the Mayor to fire all city employees, and then run a competitive hiring process to run the city with 3/10th its current headcount or less…

The new, smaller team, including the Board of Directors and the Mayor, will have cash and equity incentives, benchmarked against market. Although pensions and benefits will be forbidden, the equity will be provided in non-voting resident shares.

This constitution is designed with the following intent: that the city government be as limited, focused and aligned as possible towards its highest and purest functions:

• Incentivizing high quality growth: maximizing the quality and quantity of individual and corporate residents, maximizing the quality and quantity of city buildings, parks and infrastructure, maximizing the value of city real estate, maximizing the quality of living, while minimizing the cost of living.
• Providing universal services of the highest quality at the lowest cost.
• Providing insurance against universal calamity or disaster.
• Making city government as unintrusive, inexpensive and profitable as possible for its citizens.

Real Estate Development. How can the government create high quality growth, without expanding the scope of its regulation and taxation?

Skyward growth. Sovereignty and constitutional liberty being attained, my next priority will be to 10X the size of New Athens, announcing a plan to grow from 10M inhabitants to 100M inhabitants by the end of the 21st century, generating revenue to improve the city in every dimension.

100M isn’t a crazy number. Beijing is already nearly there!

To do this, I would eliminate taxes entirely to stimulate growth and investment. With at State tax of 0% and a City tax of 0%, New Athens is now the most attractive city to move to in the United States!

To replace revenue lost in the elimination of taxes, I would release a 50 year schedule for exercising Eminent Domain over entire neighborhoods, raising money with enormous bonds to purchase them outright, at market price.

Once the first neighborhood is purchased, The City would retain ownership of the real estate forever, then according to its long-term city plan, rezone as desired.

After rezoning, The City would then sell a 100-year lease to the highest-bidding and highest-scoring developer, reviewing bids from both individuals and organizations.

By means of selling these leases, The City shall finance the repayment of its bonds, cover the cost of all of its staff and activities, and whatever is left over shall be the profits by which it builds its Sovereign Wealth Fund.

Bids are not only sorted by price, but also scored on quality, by vote of the Directors and the Mayor.

Developers will be scored, not just during their first bid, but throughout their lease, on their performance across all dimensions of public good listed earlier: on everything from the architectural beauty of their buildings, to the originality of their restaurants and entertainment, to the quality of their parks, to their trash disposal services…

For dimensions which cannot be measured objectively, The Board of Directors and Mayor will debate how to score them subjectively and then vote their scores, all while on the record, so that they are ready to defend their scores in the next public debate for re-election…

The developers scoring lowest will be fined highest, according to publicly listed fines corresponding to each score… Developers scoring too low for too long will be bought out of their lease by The City according to set terms.

Within fifty years, all of the land in the city will be owned by the city, then leased back to private organizations or individuals with these 100-year leases… Not only does this guarantee a windfall of government revenues every century with the lease comes due for renewal, the expectation of such renewal drives will drive up the value city stock, as real estate is the ultimate scarce resource, and New Athens will ultimately own 100% of the land in New Athens… Meanwhile the fines and threat of lease buybacks disincentivize developers performing poorly on any number of dimensions…

City Services. Using a similar system as that just described for real estate, city services which cannot be provided by local developers, and which are truly universal to all residents, such as, for example, city-level waste disposal, may be bought by the city on behalf of all citizens… As long as the procurement and ongoing vendor-evaluation process is as competitive and results-based as possible.

Other city services are more economically sold than bought. That is, the city will grant a legal right to sell a certain service to its residents, if it can be demonstrated that the market cannot otherwise provide it at comparable price and quality. But, if, on the other hand, it can be demonstrated, then such a legal monopoly will be declared in violation of the city’s constitution…

The city will grant, for a certain number of years, say 10, the right, by legal monopoly, to provide a certain city service to the highest-bidder, scored on price and quality on an ongoing basis, with fines and buyback provisions, just as with developers.

This competitive process should result, for example, in the most beautiful, user friendly and efficient subway system in the world… Better even than Hong Kong’s.

Security & Prisons. The only service which the city will continue to directly provide will be policing. To minimize cost, The Police of New Athens will rely on surveillance technologies and facial recognition to automatically fine residents for any violations of the 100 pages of the civil code, so that they can focus almost exclusively on criminal activity, functioning as close to a military force as possible: small, elite and lethal. Their goal will be to completely and utterly eliminate any criminal activity in the city by lethal force, acting in cooperation with federal intelligence agencies… New Athens doesn’t fuck around: no criminals allowed. Protecting residents from theft and violence will always be the city’s first constitutional priority.

According to the city services provisions above, the city will grant a legal right to provide prison services to one or more providers, in a competitive process, and evaluate them on an ongoing basis on a number of dimensions. The goal is to maximize security, humanity, and rehabilitation with minimal cost and recidivism. For example, one vendor may experiment with providing the prisoners gainful employment, paying them in a savings account that they will be given access to upon graduation. Another vendor may focus on education. Another on peer therapy and carefully monitored business networking.

Museums & Similar Attractions. It is inevitable that a Mayor or Director has an idea for a building project or a service that they think the city should spend money on. It is inevitable that certain such ideas for Zoos, Aquariums, Museums, Operas, etc. become popular. The city’s constitutional policy should always be to welcome such ideas, but then put them to developers, and incentivize them via the scoring system. That way, the city does not end up owning and operating these attractions, and they compete amongst each other. The only attraction the city itself should own, although its maintenance and tourist services should be auctioned to the best vendor, should be The Statue of Liberty itself — our pride and joy, our great symbol.

Labor, Unemployment & Homelessness. There should be no unemployment and homelessness in a city growing from 10 to 100 million residents, in which residents own equity… The city shall eliminate most, if not all, of its labor protections: so its workers will only be protected by federal regulations. That means that the minimum wage in the city will be the federal minimum. And there will be no unemployment insurance provided by the city government. This allows the market to function naturally, and aligns the incentives of both employers and the unemployed to transact as soon as possible.

As for any homeless residents who refuse to avail themselves of any of the privately provided sanctuaries, the city shall classify them as legal dependents, and confide them to a legal guardian.

The guardian system shall be competitive, like adoption. Any philanthropically minded individual or organization may apply to be a guardian. Wards may choose from among the guardians available to them, with as much information and as many interviews provided as mutually desired. Like foster care, a city vendor will meet with each guardian on a regular basis to inspect their care regime, and guardians will be ranked both on the basis of these visits and on the long-term outcomes of their wards. Guardians may be motivated by profit to contract with their wards, as long as wards are duly advised, and the contracts align long-term incentives. For example, a guardian may provide an education and economic opportunities to the ward, if the ward agrees to pay the guardian 10% of any income over $1M a year…

As long as outcomes are measured, incentives are not perverse, activities are as transparent as possible, and the system remains competitive… the city’s solution to homelessness will be the most innovative and humane in the world.

Emergency Services. The hospitals and other emergency services of New Athens shall remain free and private and minimally regulated, but prudence requires that hospital systems be stress-tested for disaster readiness, including surge capacity, required to procure disaster insurance. The hospital system must be anti-fragile for the city to guarantee the health of its citizens in an emergency.

Deflationary Economic Policy. The Mayor’s economic agenda should be simple: to make sure incentives are aligned for the long-term deflation of all major public good price indices, with the exception of the price of city land, which should always be going up. In other words, The Mayor knows that city policy is succeeding when the cost of housing, transportation, education, health care, etc. are going down, while the price of the underlying land is going up. If any major public good is going up for a sustained period, the Mayor and Directors should review city policy to make sure that incentives are aligned with deflation, and that the city is not intervening in the natural deflationary pressures of market competition and technological innovation.

Disaster Planning, Insurance and Grand Strategy. Unforeseen disasters are inevitable, but most disasters can be imagined and prepared for in advance. The constitutional requirement to run a budget surplus should result in a large Sovereign Wealth Fund, to be used in case of emergency. In addition to that safeguard, the city may desire to purchase insurance, and is constitutionally permitted to purchase any policy that can be demonstrated as a public good that would not naturally emerge through market forces.

Annually, the Mayor shall be required to lead the Directors in a Disaster Planning and Grand Strategy exercise. Imagine a cross between a War Planning exercise, Prime Minister’s Question Time, and a real-time State of the Union…

For conversations of this nature, and of this nature only, the Mayor may decide, in the interests of the City, for all or part of the discussions to be held in secrecy. Secret conversations shall be recorded and published no later than 25 years after their recording, although they may be published sooner, at the Mayor’s discretion. No quorum of the Directors shall be allowed to convene to discuss policy without recording protocol being observed.

City Planning & Minimum Viable Alignment. In the City’s Annual Report, the Mayor shall be required to include his Deflationary Economic Indicators, a synthesis of the City’s Grand Strategy, including his Vision for the city, and a formal City Plan, including a map of city real estate with development plans. A great mayor will know how to convey a Strategy and Vision that require Minimum Viable Alignment from the residents, so as to leave most of the imagination of the city’s future up to them. To use my earlier metaphor, a great city is like a great house, it creates space for its residents to express themselves. The ideas, the vision, should be as bottom-up as possible.

Eminent Domain Objection. One might object that Eminent Domain is an intrusion. And it is. It is the one, and the only, form of intrusion that shall occur in New Athens. The city government’s sole focus is on buying back its own real estate, so as to maximize its long-term value, in the interest of all the citizens…

Although it is intrusive, all properties shall be purchased at fair market price, and because the plan will so dramatically increase the value of city real estate, it will be a good exit for landlords.

As for residents, the plan is designed to give the market time — for some neighborhoods years, for others, decades — to adjust, so that grandmas aren’t kicked out in their lifetime.

Private Property Objection. One might object that this model places the principle of “private property” in jeopardy. To which, I would respond that, in a broader understanding, this maximizes the value of private property. Any developer owning title to a 100-year lease has a form of private property, as does any individual or organization owning title to a sublease… Meanwhile, by orienting its entire policy towards maximizing the value of real estate, then purchasing properties at market value, the city is providing a lucrative exit to existing landlords. As ‘property’ refers to all forms of wealth, the advantages of minimizing regulation through the scoring mechanism, while entirely eliminating all taxes, make this exercise of Eminent Domain, in fact, the minimally intrusive mechanism for maximizing property values for all residents.

Tenant Protection Objection. One might object that Tenants may be oppressed by a bad Developer, that, because of some failure of the scoring mechanism, either isn’t capable or isn’t incentivized correctly. But then natural market mechanisms kick in. Tenants can break their lease or not renew their lease, and move in with any other developer in the city. As so much supply is being built, there should be plenty of high quality and low cost competition…

One might object further that by removing 20th century protections like low-income housing and rent control, New Athens will fail to protect poor tenants against rich developers. But, again, with so much supply being built, and so much competition, there should be plenty of high quality and low cost competition… Regulation is inflationary: it makes it harder for the market to clear, it disincentivizes developers and drives up the cost of development. The cost of housing should be deflationary…

Zoning & Urban Diversity Objection. One might object that the city is incentivized to deal in large neighborhood-sized lots, as fewer Developers will be easier to manage than many Developers. As there are no limits to the height of development, The City may wish to experiment with subdividing some neighborhoods into many small lots. But the most harmonious developments will probably emerge from planning. The City can score plans on the diversity of their architecture, on their zoning for restaurants and other amusements… Alternatively Developers may submit plans for Subleasing so that other individuals and organizations can Develop their own plans within their master-plan…

Historical Buildings Objection. One might object that this process of the City aggressively exercising Eminent Domain to buy up and lease all the Real Estate in New York to competitive Developers will result in the destruction of historic buildings. May it never be so! The most historic properties should be preserved and built around, like the Domino Sugar building in Williamsburg… which is going to turn into the most fabulous historical/futuristic hybrid. I don’t believe in turning cities into mummified museums. I do believe in bringing new life to and drawing new inspiration from historic greatness: not just preserving it, but living in it, working around it...

In summary, New York City would secede from New York State, gaining Sovereignty as New Athens, and then establishing a Constitution to guarantee liberty, good government and profits to its citizens. As first Mayor, I shall use Eminent Domain to purchase all the neighborhoods in the city, and lease them back to the highest-bidding and highest-scoring Developers, creating a system of incentives which aligns everyone around efficiency, quality, convenience, aesthetics, diversity and other values…

No city in the world would be as free, as innovative, as prosperous, as diverse, as dynamic as New Athens… The only thing more extraordinary than the city itself, from its constitution to its buildings to its networks and incentives, would be the genius of its citizens.

The city government accomplishes so much by doing so little: it lets incentives do most of the work. Ultimately the city is designed as a stage, a playground, a blank canvas, a home… for the citizens. The citizens make the city famous.

Someday the number of geniuses per capita in New Athens will exceed that of Old Athens… the first time any city has accomplished this in 2,500 years…

My Ideas Running For Governor

New York State currently owns and operates 100 State Agencies, with a budget of nearly $200B a year! Are those agencies and budgets effective? Do citizens experience the benefits?

Let us assume the Governor of New York, observing the spectacular success of the mayor of New Athens, has the bright idea to replicate these principles successfully at a State level. What would that look like?

How might a great governor encourage and incentivize every city in his state to become like New Athens? How might he actually help them scale so successfully that it makes sense for them too to secede, in a way that benefits the state?

Constitutionally Incentivizing Secession. The State shall write a new State Constitution, modeled after New Athens, and incentivize its cities to do so as well. That is, The State shall be a for-profit corporation, with residents as voting shareholders, forgoing any means of taxation or raising revenue other than selling 100-yr leases to developers and selling the legal right to provide public services to vendors that the market would not otherwise incentivize.

By the same means, all lands outside of the existing cities of The State, The State shall acquire on a 50 year schedule, by the means of selling bonds, and then shall sell 100-yr leases to developers…

The voting difference will be that there will be 9 Directors, one per million people in The State, after the secession of New Athens. These Directors will replace the function of the existing Legislature, which will be disbanded.

The State’s economic policy should be as follows:

• Urban Development. To incentivize no more than three cities — say Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse — to scale, to become the next New Athens, and then to secede. To align incentives, The State should own the entire 30% block of non-resident equity in these Cities upon their secession, which it can then liquidate on the open market when it sees fit. This functions almost like an IPO for The State. Upon secession, the residents of these cities will no longer receive new distributions of shares in New York State, and their existing shares will become non-voting.
• Rural Development. All other cities, towns and villages in the state will be zoned as rural. The State will be divided into zones, say 10 zones. The State will exercise its Eminent Domain to re-acquire the land in these zones, and then sell 100-yr leases of these zones to the highest-bidding, highest-scoring Developers, with plans to create idyllic towns and villages, exclusive residential communities, exotic vacation retreats, adventure clubs, etc… built around the recreational potential of the natural beauty and the pleasures and beauties of small town life… Rural Leases will be more restrictive than Urban Leases for two reasons. First, Rural Developers will function as Regional-Cities, so their tenants must also function like resident-citizens, able to vote, otherwise the sense of local agency is broken. Second, Rural Developers are entrusted with natural beauty, so their right to develop the land freely must be limited, with plans approved by the Governor and Directors.
• State Services & Infrastructure. The State Agencies shall be privatized and sold at auction. The Governor will focus on making public services as competitive and results-based as possible. The State is responsible for A) providing services that connect the cities and B) providing public services to the small cities and rural areas that lack the scale to provide them on their own.

A) is about services like transportation and power. For transportation, The State can pay for services like the development of roads, or auction off the right to sell services, like toll roads and power…

B) is a logistical nightmare, so to eliminate B), The State is strongly incentivized to exercise Eminent Domain over the next 50 years to buy these areas, and then sell them to Developers with the best plans, who will then become responsible for B).

The fear that arises is one of incentives: will the Governor and the Directors over-develop The State, ruining its natural beauty? But the best way to attract individuals, organizations and capital into The State isn’t to ruin it, but to make it the most desirable and attractive place to live… While no constitution can, by mechanism alone, prevent foolish government, this constitution does maintain both local and state-wide accountability while aligning incentives.

The vision for The Empire State should be imperial, and worthy of the name. Imagine a state with three rapidly growing cities, and with ten idyllic rural zones, each with its own attractions, connected by the highest quality and most efficient services… And, just imagine: The State is tax-free, profitable, disaster-hedged, and is amassing a large Sovereign Wealth Fund. All decisions are recorded and published on YouTube. Most decisions are made at the local level, so everyone has a sense of citizenship and agency. Every citizen not only has a vote, but has equity! Who wouldn’t want to live in this modern kingdom of urban power and rural majesty?

My Ideas Running For President

Even contemplating the titanic challenges of the nation is daunting, but I believe they can all be resolved, that the fundamental shifts can occur within the first Hundred Days of a Presidential term, provided that The Political Will exists.

The first problems to consider are those of spending, deficits and debt…

In 2019, the US Federal Government spent $4.5 trillion dollars, with a deficit of nearly $1 trillion dollars. In 2020 both figures will be much larger. Whereas GDP in 2019 was $22T, and will decline in 2020, the national debt is accelerating to $30T and beyond.

Conventional fiscal solutions include:

• Reducing spending.
• Increasing tax revenues by either: 1) increasing the tax rate, or 2) waiting for economic growth to increase tax revenues naturally, or 3) stimulating economic growth further by decreasing the tax rate to increase tax revenues faster…
• Ignore the problem and keep borrowing. Keynesian economists who promote Modern Monetary Theory stipulate that the debt will not become a problem until it reaches a far higher multiple of GDP, or until our geopolitical position deteriorates, or until our underlying economic potential declines…

The second problems to consider are inefficiency, waste & results.

What does all of this spending produce, in terms of measurable outcomes for citizens? Discretionary spending has dubious outcomes. Entitlement costs are increasing faster than tax revenues, which will force us to increase the deficit. Military spending is obviously necessary but ROI performance is highly suspect.

The third problems to consider are those of cultural, technological, economic & national progress & security.

“Cultural… progress & security” — what’s that? I group these four terms together because they are networked and correlated: progress in one drives progress in another, and progress in all four indicates our overall progress as a nation. Cultural weakness often translates into military weakness, for example, like Britain in the interwar period… Technological strength, conversely, obviously translates into military strength… And, to quote Cicero, “the sinews of war are infinite money.”

Arguably, we’ve been stagnating since the 1970s, with some exceptions, like software, computer hardware, and communications. One way to quantify stagnation is through inflation. Over a twenty year period, from 1997 to 2017, a Bureau of Labor Statistics index of US consumer goods and services experienced an overall inflation of 55.6%, inclusive of wage increases (inflation would be even higher assuming fixed wages). The goods and services that deflated — that is, became less expensive and more affordable — were mostly in unregulated sectors, like software and electronics. The goods and services that inflated were mostly in regulated industries like education and healthcare.

What would this graph look like for a nation experiencing rapid economic growth and technological progress? Everything would be blue, except for wages.

Why would that matter? Because when everything becomes better, faster, and cheaper, everyone becomes relatively wealthier, healthier, better educated, etc.

The best way to increase national security, in military terms, is to increase national progress, in cultural, technological and economic terms. And the best way to do that? Deregulating.

Agenda For The First Hundred Days.

1. Declare a State of Emergency. Under the pretext of insolvency, and structural, strategic, systemic, and operational failures across the federal government, and regulatory capture.
2. Pass a Constitutional Amendment to prohibit the printing of money or the running of budget deficits, except for a declared Congressional State of Emergency. Surpluses shall be saved in a Sovereign Wealth Fund, and cannot be withdrawn except in a declared Congressional State of Emergency. Once funds exceed $1T, an annual dividend will be paid to citizens, at a rate no greater than 50% of returns above inflation. The Sovereign Wealth Fund will be the only entitlement program moving forward. Like the Sovereign Wealth Fund of New Athens, through buybacks and new share issuances, at least 70% of shares will be owned by citizens, and no more than 30% will be traded on the open market.
3. By an act of Congress, monetize the $30T National Debt by printing dollars. To avoid an inflationary shock, do this over a 30 year schedule.
4. By an act of Congress, unwind all entitlements — social security, medicare, and medicaid — by printing money to send checks to all recipients who have paid into the system, for their estimated lifetime payout. To avoid inflationary shock, do this over a 10 year schedule.
5. By an act of Congress, unwind all civil service pensions, by printing money to send checks to all recipients, for their estimated lifetime payout. To avoid inflationary shock, do this over a 10 year schedule. Moving forward, the civil service will operate like the private sector. Compensation will be benchmarked against the private sector, and equity compensation will be paid in shares of the Sovereign Wealth Fund. There will be no benefits or pensions.
6. By the power vested in him by Article II of the Constitution, the President shall, by Executive Order, reorganize the Executive Branch. The following departments shall be dissolved into a single Department of the Economy: Labor, Treasury, Agriculture, Energy, Transportation, Interior, Education, Commerce, Agriculture, and Health & Human Services. The Department of State, The Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Veterans Affairs shall be dissolved into the Department of Defense. After this reorganization, instead of 15 Executive Departments, there shall be merely 3: Defense, Justice, and Economy.
7. By the same power, the President shall, by Executive Order, fire 90% of civil servants. The top 10% shall assist in rehiring not more than an additional 20% of the prior headcount. The unused Executive Office Buildings shall be auctioned off.
8. Through his Cabinet, the President shall manage this new, smaller government to increase efficiency — to do more with less — by all means available: technological innovation, management reform, incentive reform, procurement reform, and aggressive hiring and firing until every organization has become an elite team. These new teams will get at least twice as much accomplished with less than half the budget. The new budget will be only $2T and ROI measures will be put in place, with more than double the expected outcomes as before.
9. By an act of Congress, The Federal Reserve will be dissolved into the Department of Economy in the Executive Branch.
10. By Executive Order, the Department of Economy will no longer manipulate interest rates, except in a State of Emergency. Rates will move freely, as the market moves them.
11. Pass a Constitutional Amendment prohibiting both the Congress and the President from authorizing corporate bailouts or entitlement schemes other than the Sovereign Wealth Fund previously established.
12. Pass a Constitutional Amendment requiring that “The Law Of The Land” be no longer than 100 easy-to-read pages, sent to every citizen and corporation annually. No one shall be punished for “breaking a federal law” not written in that book. Every citizen and corporation shall receive an updated copy of “The Federal Law” every every legislative session, and it shall include a notice reminding them: In a financial crisis, you will not be bailed out. Save money. Buy insurance.
13. Pass a Constitutional Amendment prohibiting both the Congress and the President from regulating or funding the education system in any way.
14. Pass a Constitutional Amendment prohibiting both the Congress and the President from regulating or funding the healthcare system in any way.
15. Pass a Constitutional Amendment eliminating income and corporate taxes. Even in a declared State of Emergency, the government shall finance itself by printing money, not through these taxes. The only authorized federal source of revenue will be Domestic Sales Taxes & Trade Tariffs, with a maximum rate of 20% on Domestic Sales Taxes. The Department of Defense may levy punitive tariffs as a tool of foreign policy. Otherwise the Department of Economy is now responsible for negotiating mutually beneficial trade regimes with friendly nations.
16. End the State of Emergency.

Phew. What a whirlwind First Hundred Days. Let’s review our accomplishments. We have:

• Unwound the national debt.
• Unwound entitlements.
• Unwound civil service pensions.
• Unwound money printing.
• Unwound interest rate manipulation.
• Unwound industrial complexes in education and healthcare.
• Unwound the borrow/spend/over-consume/bubble/burst/bailout cycle. Replaced with a savings, investment, insurance, innovation and production cycle.
• Simplified the regulatory and legal system, shifting to common law.
• Simplified the executive branch, created efficiency in government, drained the swamp, unwound the Deep State.
• Simplified the tax system with a flat sales tax, achieved budget surpluses.
• Funded a Sovereign Wealth Fund, as an emergency reserve and a dynamic entitlement system.

Hurray! That’s a lot of accomplishments. What problems remain to be solved? The remainder of the first administration will naturally be spent in following through on those big shifts, but once those wins are consolidated, in the second administration, the President should attempt to solve these problems:

1. Federal, Election & Campaign Finance Reform.
2. Solving “market failures:” poverty, healthcare, education, infrastructure, R&D…
3. Restoring culture: Sovereignty, Reading, Expression, Thinking.
4. Restoring Grand Strategy and Geopolitical Hegemony.
5. Preventing Capture & Relapse.

Federal, Election & Campaign Finance Reform.

There is so much money and lobbying power that has amassed that special interest politics is threatening our democracy’s orientation to the will and voice of the people, and there is no better example of that than gerrymandering… Congress is arguably both not large enough to represent local voices on the national stage, or way too large to properly debate subjects of national import… And as we explored in the sections on cities and states, if there is radical bottom-up innovation, we may need to evolve the federal structure while keeping the principles of federalism intact. As for how, I defer judgement…

Although any changes to the structure of our democracy are, almost by definition, the most risky to undertake, and the most political… It would be equally foolish to assume that the Founding Fathers, with the benefit of two centuries of experience, would not undertake Constitutional reform. What is disingenuous is to ignore their intent or to bend our interpretation of the Constitution past the point of recognition. The honest thing to do is to keep working within a Constitutional framework, updating it to make our system even more, not less, aligned with the principles of liberty and democracy.

Market failures.

My bar for market failures is high. Poverty, for example, should be less and less an issue in what is now the most attractive place in the world to do business… Healthcare and education costs should be less an issue, with the government no longer creating industrial complexes through funding and regulation…

Infrastructure is an interesting one. Whatever projects cannot be devolved to states or cities, and truly belong to interstate commerce, I’m inclined to sell at auction. Indeed, it may make sense to sell the Interstate Highway System at auction, to the highest-scoring bidder, optimizing not just for revenue, but for affordability, innovation, etc.

R&D is an interesting one. How about creating huge “X-Prizes” for every hard problem that the market won’t finance? For example, an X-Prize for Clean, Safe, Eco-Friendly, Beautiful, Silent, Insanely-Fast Transportation >>> $1B Prize?! This is a way of using the “convening power” of government, with minimal cost relative to our current profligacy, to stimulate investment, innovation and entrepreneurial activity. Let the market figure it out. Reward results and only results.

Even these should be done sparingly. Making the government profitable, efficient, and effective again, while lowering taxes and simplifying regulation: that is the best way to stimulate innovation.

Restoring culture.

One idea I have is passing a constitutional amendment to require that every citizen must write an essay like this, answering the question “What would you do if you were… Mayor, Governor, President?” every decade. In the intervening years, they would have to publish at least one essay about a book by a dead person which they had read… or they lose their right to vote.

Enforcement questions aside, the signal from even attempting to get such an amendment passed might some of the desired effect. But I am very much in earnest about restricting suffrage to those who have demonstrated that they are serious about civic engagement.

Restoring Grand Strategy and Geopolitical Hegemony.

Whereas the New Deal of the first three FDR administrations was destructive to liberty and prospertiy, FDR deserves credit, after Pearl Harbor for committing the country to total war, to total victory, and to winning a global peace afterwards: to make the world safe for democracy. Although he may be criticized for not coming to Britain’s aid sooner, for confronting Hitler too late, for empowering Stalin too much… His rhetorical strength and resolve, combined with Churchill’s, ultimately helped defed Liberty. That part of his legacy should not only endure, but be renewed…

“If you want peace, prepare for war.” As Commander in Chief, focus the military on a comprehensive strategy for Winning WWIII. Develop reliable counter-measures for nuclear weapons and comparable strategic checks. Develop new, secret offensive weapons. Develop a Top-Secret Plan to overthrow authoritarian regimes in Russia, China, North Korea, Venezuela and Iran to bring Liberty & Constitutional Democracy to the World.

The single greatest national security risk is the inefficiency of our Military-Industrial Complex. We need new innovative companies like Anduril and Palantir to compete with the old guard companies like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics. We should be wary of the failure rates in our deployed machinery… For example, what percentage of F22 Raptors are flight ready? We should be wary that the primary competency of the old guard companies is merely winning the contracts. For the dollars we do spend, we should probably be getting at least 2–3X the geopolitical ROI.

As President, publish an Annual Report, in addition to the State of The Union, reviewing financial performance, outlining problems and proposed solutions, and synthesizing Grand Strategy.

As for the objection, that wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq should caution us against any aggression… I say the lesson is mis-learned. The real lessons of these conflicts were otherwise: not to fight without a Congressional declaration of war (Vietnam), not to fight without total commitment (Vietnam), not to fight without a clear end game (Afghanistan & Irag), not to sink blood and treasure into a quagmire unlikely to change the global geopolitical dynamic (all three).

Preventing Capture & Relapse.

One idea I have to prevent Regulatory Capture, Deep State Capture, or Industrial Complex Capture: by Executive Order, require the Department of Economy to be fully transparent, with every email, file, meeting, not classified as Secret, published on the internet in real time. Meetings must be recorded.

But the only real way to prevent capture or relapse is what Tocqueville kept returning to: culture. Maybe we can create an X-Prize of $1B a Year for new educational approaches to get the average citizen to read more books by dead people? But generally speaking, mechanistic solutions won’t avail. Cultural revival must be organic to be authentic. Every individual must decide for themselves. They cannot be forced to be great. They must be debated and persuaded.

Regulatory Justice Objection. One might object that by deregulating and limiting Federal Law to 100 pages, there will be abuses of power by individuals and organizations. But those abuses will not go unchecked. Markets, cities and states should respond before the Federal government. However if an abuse truly falls within the Federal domain, those 100 pages of law will need to focus on principles, as opposed to the technical legislation that we have today. A violation of those principles may be prosecuted by the Department of Justice, which I’m inclined to believe ought to be more aggressive than it is today, if only the law were not so extensive that everybody, by default, is breaking some unknown regulation. Concurrent with FDR’s abandonment of the Old Deal, the English and Americans almost completely, but not completely, abandoned the tradition of Common Law that dates back before Blackstone in the 16th century… It is a bottom-up system of law, a wise system, a fair system, an evolutionary system. It allows the law to be brief, giving wide scope to wisdom to resolve disputes. What we need is a more efficient judiciary. What we need is a return to Common Law, and Common Sense.

Social Justice Objection. One might object that by eliminating entitlements and government programs, that the government is perpetuating or even perpetrating injustice. However, as long as Federal Law applies equally to every citizen and is equally enforced, then the Federal Government cannot be said to be perpetrating injustice. As for perpetuating it, it is the role of society and the market, and then of the courts, cities and states, to address social issues… If all of them fail to solve a problem, then the Federal Government should focus on aligning incentives, so long as these adjustments are consistent with Liberty, for example, through an X Prize… Poverty, for example, is an injustice best relieved by society and the market: by charitable individuals, philanthropic non-profits, and creative for-profits… The same is true for healthcare and education. Equality of outcomes is unnatural and should never be the goal in a free system, because it can never be achieved, and progress towards it can only be purchased with injustice, as it was with at least 100M victims in the communist regimes of the last century…

Immigration Objection. One might object that I haven’t addressed immigration. Not all problems can be solved in two terms. But the system I would like to see is one in which there is no illegal immigration, and in which our law is strictly enforced, but in which as much legal immigration as possible occurs, within a dynamic framework: as long as domestic employment is above 95%, and the immigrants pass challenging English and citizenship tests, like the ones proposed above… A growing population of self-reliant and patriotic Americans is the best assurance of the continuation of our tradition of Liberty…

Synthesis & overall analysis. Quoting Thiel: “The Left wants to do More with More. The Right wants to do Less with Less. What about doing More with Less?” This is the net effect of the policies I have outlined.

The cost of the Federal Government should shrink to less than 10% of GDP, with a lower tax and regulatory burden, but higher effectiveness, and instead of creating more liabilities every year, it would be creating more assets every year.

Although the short-term effect of unwinding debt, entitlements and pensions would create inflationary pressure, what will be the long-term effects on the dollar and on inflation?

The dollar will rise. Market confidence will be restored in the strength of America, and that is a hugely positive, bullish signal for the world, and for the future. Eliminating the hidden tax of the national debt, bull signal. Eliminating the looming spectre of an unfunded entitlement bomb, bull signal. Freeing the dollar from printing and interest rate manipulation, bull signal. Deregulating the financial sector, bull signal.

But this will not trigger inflation. In fact, just the opposite. The effect of deregulating every industry, and deregulating capital and labor in general, should drive a boom in employment, productivity, efficiency, automation, innovation and overall technological progress. This should deflate all existing goods, and the only inflation should come from new inventions…

Isn’t that a contradiction in terms? How can the dollar go up in value, while things go down in value?

No. It is not a contradiction in terms. If you artificially double the number of dollars in the system, yes, when the market catches up, every thing should cost twice as much dollars, so a rise in the value of the dollar is always inflationary. But this is a natural rise in the value of the dollar, not driven by an expansion in the money supply, but by market confidence. Conversely, the price of things is being driven down by innovation. So every dollar is simultaneously both worth more, and it buys more things. Double win!

The price of things being driven down is not only good for America, it is good for the world. People living in badly governed countries, whose currencies tend to fall in value, currency inflation is always making things more expensive. But American innovation makes those things cheaper, faster, even, than their weak currency can inflate… then they too can experience deflation, or at the very least, less inflation.

But Americans get the double win.

This would not be like the dreaded deflation of The Great Depression, where trade, employment, and purchasing power collapsed, causing a collapse in prices. This would be combined with full employment, as the unregulated labor market clears. As the deregulated education market upskills workers, and as automation increases the demand for complex knowledge work, wages should go up.

With the value of the dollar going up, and with wages going up, while the price of goods and services goes down: this deflation will be wonderful.

It won’t be a bubble. It’s the opposite of a bubble. If inflation represents more dollars chasing fewer things, this type of deflation represents things outpacing dollars, with both rising. Every dollar will correspond to more actual wealth in the world: purchasing power will increase…

This combination of moves should result in insane bullishness. In a deep, sustained, century-long bull run.

Most importantly of all, this is supply-side economics. This is bottoms-up culture, not top-down government. The growth is coming from freeing the people…

From the President’s perspective, most of the innovation is coming from the Governors. From the Governors’ perspectives, most of the innovation is coming from the Cities. From the Mayors’ perspectives, most of the innovation is coming from Real Estate Developers. From the Developers’ perspectives, most of the innovation is coming from their Tenants: the Individuals and Corporations busy creating the future.

Conclusion.

To return to Tocqueville’s central theme: regardless of the strength of its constitution, the only ultimate bulwark against tyranny — either tyranny of the majority, of a technocratic elite, or of a single dictator — in a democracy is the sound morals, common sense, and courage of the people themselves.

If the people are philosophers, the politicians cannot be sophists. If the people are sophists, the politicians cannot be philosophers.

If The Constitution says that ‘No Law shall prohibit The Freedom Of Speech’, that, a right the nation has bled for centuries to protect… It is all for naught, if you are too afraid or unimaginative to use it; cowed by the majority, afraid of judgement…

Indeed, what good is The Constitution if nobody protests its overthrow?

If the majority should find themselves in precisely such a state, as it does now — afraid of violating an increasingly narrow Overton Window, and being punished by the increasingly zealous police of political correctness — then our democracy finds itself in the ironic state of being silenced by itself.

What makes this historical moment so bizarre, is that not only the minority needs encouragement to speak up against the majority, but the majority needs encouragement to speak at all!

Most Americans are silent, and their silence is deafening. This leads us to the conclusion that although we seem to be led by “the majority,” and we seem to possess the freedom of speech… we have, by our abdication, by our failure to exercise our freedom, ceded control to a hyper-vocal minority — predominant in media, education and politics — pretending to the moral superiority of the majority opinion.

I wish to expose their nakedness. To proclaim what we all know, but don’t dare say: “The Emperor has no clothes!” To remind you that they have no such natural right to govern you, or to silence you. Speak up!

Who are they? They that would usurp The Constitution… Allow me to introduce you to them: the modern “Philosopher” and his peers, “The Experts” and “The Journalists.”

The so-called modern “Philosopher” is corrupt, is indeed a Sophist in Philosopher’s clothing, a Manufacturer of Technocratic Philosophy, promulgating either inane drivel — remarkable for its combination of un-remarkable political correctness and inscrutability, a false esotericism behind which they hide from criticism and debate — or neo-marxist philosophy which erodes what sense we have left for our national identity, or for objective goodness, beauty and truth.

A century ago, this subversion was well-disguised in the minority, for example, in the junket of journalists and academics like Professor Tugwell of Columbia, Paul Douglas of the U. Chicago, Anne O’Hare McCormick and Walter Duranty of The New York Times, who toured Russia and interviewed Stalin in 1927, only to return to New York, as Lincoln Steffens had a few years earlier, glowing with recommendations that we learn from the progress of their new model, and saying things like: “I have been over to the future, and it works.”

This is what The Academy wants from its humanities professors, because the modern Academy, in turn, is Sophistic, promoting its natural interest: the ascendance of technocrats and the technocratic mindset within the political establishment. What better future for a university than one in which a legion of its students wield all power in society, promoting increased state subsidization of education, and conforming all views with those of its professors?

The “philosophers” and “political philosophers” have paved the way for the “envy of science” that infects the rest of the humanities: the economists, historians, anthropologists and sociologists, not to mention minority studies, all pretend to be experts conducting a highly technical “science.”

You hear the politicians worshipping these so-called “experts,” and exhorting us, as Biden recently did, to “follow The Science.” They use phrases like “Studies show…”, “All the models say…” and “Science tells us…” to portray a near-universal “consensus” among The Establishment. But whatever consensus exists, it is political, not scientific.

Science, real science, is inherently skeptical and inviting to contrarians.

“In his essay, ‘What is science?’ Richard Feynman remarked ‘Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.’ A government that respects science should be skeptical of experts and, perhaps, more diligently seek out multiple viewpoints.”

If the philosophers of the humanities departments were true philosophers, instead of sophists, instead of envying science, they would remind us, as Heidegger did, that “Wissenschaft denkt nicht” — “Science does not think.”

Indeed, the problem with technocracy is that it attempts to make science think, in the same way that AI enthusiasts make the mistake of thinking that someday AI will do our thinking for us. Just as AI is fake news, so too, technocracy is fake news: no amount of experts can plan society with utilitarian principles — every time that experiment has tried, both in this country and in others, it has failed spectacularly, to the ruin of property and life.

But “The Journalist” who writes fake news doesn’t know it is fake news, doesn’t know that he is contributing to the bizarre phenomenon that we find ourselves in the midst of: a free press that has created a Propaganda State. “The Journalist” is a product of Academia. He is socialist and technocratic to his core, and his biases are unexamined. He will focus on The Seen: on the credentials of “The Experts,” on suffering, calamity and fear… On whatever drives the clicks that his incentives are tied to… Is this not a form of Sophistry?

The true philosopher loves truth, believes in objective truth, while recognizing that sovereign individuals will disagree on every question of importance. Instead of seeking power by all means, in an attempt to impose ideas on others, the true philosopher embraces debate, and is not afraid of it. Through debate, not only he gains insight, but others may as well. Debate preserves the freedom essential to all thought and action, the pre-requisite for any expression of genius, any pursuit of truth, any genuine enlightenment.

If these are the marks of a philosopher, you will know a sophist by the opposite marks. A philosopher may be a great communicator as well, but the essential difference is this: the sophist seeks power to impose his views on others, whereas the philosopher seeks to minimize any intrusions of power on the freedom of individuals to seek truth and happiness on their own terms.

There has always been a remnant, by which the city is saved. At first, it is never the majority which does the right thing. It is always an individual, determined but alone, who convinces or finds another individual of the same principles… They form a movement, and that movement begins the revival.

The rise and fall of nations is not inevitable; decline is not inevitable. There have been revivals. There have been remnants that have renewed the moral and political will of the nation. Individuals and teams that have restored the economic and military might of their nations.

To this — the restoration of American culture, democracy, liberty, and greatness, individual, civic and national — I pledge my life, my fortune, and my sacred honor.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

— That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,

— That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

…

— And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

THE Conventions of a number of the States, having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best ensure the beneficent ends of its institution

…

Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Amendment II
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Amendment III
No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Amendment V
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Amendment VI
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

Amendment VII
In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

Amendment VIII
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

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

Was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold:
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I WILL NOT CEASE FROM MENTAL FIGHT,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.

I do not know what strength is in my blood, but I will not let the White City fall, or Our People fail.