On September 10th, a gunman killed Charlie Kirk in Utah. The event reminds us that no one should die over speech, and that we must wrestle with big questions calmly. You don’t have to love him or hate him. At times, his message resonated with many across America. At times, it divided us. If we say we disagree with his points, we should be able to make the case. If we can’t, his spears carry weight.

One of his sharpest questions was this: Does the Civil Rights Act of 1964 violate the Constitution?

Let’s sit with that for a moment. If your first thought is, “That law ended Jim Crow. How could it be wrong?” you’re not alone. We wrote the law to strike down a national disgrace. To end segregation. To stop the humiliation of being turned away from a lunch counter, of being told you couldn’t buy a home in a certain neighborhood, of being trapped in second-class status.

We intended the Civil Rights Act to end those humiliations. To tear down the walls of segregation. To give every American a fair shot.

In that moment, justice demanded action.

But justice isn’t just a word. It’s a goal that shapes real lives. It’s the chance for a kid who grows up in a leaky trailer or in project housing to work, to save, and to buy a house in a neighborhood where their children have a good school and a fair shot. From a word on a page to life on the ground.

According to the Constitution’s chief authors, justice may be the most important of the six national goals that bind our Republic.

But justice isn’t a handout program. Justice is the chance to earn your place. It’s not a promise of results. Because the goals in our preamble, meaning union, liberty, welfare, defence, order, and justice, sometimes compete or clash, we must hold them in balance.

In the end, our goal isn’t to win an argument. It’s to get better, together, at pursuing the ideals that bind us.

So here’s the question: in the balance between Union, Liberty, and Justice, does the Civil Rights Act of 1964 violate the Constitution?

Act One. A Plate of Segregation

In the mid-1960s, Maurice Bessinger’s Piggie Park barbecue ran popular drive-ins and a sit-down sandwich shop around Columbia, South Carolina. The chain routinely denied Black customers full and equal service. Those who were served had to take food at kitchen windows and were not allowed to eat on the premises.

After Congress approved the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title II barred restaurants and other public accommodations from excluding people by race. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it on July 2, 1964, in a nationally televised ceremony attended by lawmakers and civil-rights leaders, among them Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Had equality arrived?

Not everywhere. Piggie Park didn’t change. On July 3, Anne Newman, a mother and minister’s wife, wanted a sandwich. Instead, she got a full plate of rejection. She and her friends went to Piggie Park for lunch. The waitress came out, saw she and her friends were Black, and turned back inside without taking the order.

They went back a month later and were again refused service.

The moment sparked a fight for justice. Newman, Sharon Neal, and John Mungin filed a class action suit seeking an injunction to stop the discrimination at the restaurants.

This wasn’t a casual “we can agree to disagree” dispute. Bessinger stocked his restaurants with booklets defending racial separation. You could pick up this reading with your barbecue. It drew on the Genesis 11 story of the Tower of Babel to argue that God scattered the nations and meant them to remain separate. Integration, he preached, defied divine order. Some pamphlets even claimed biblical warrant for slavery.

At first, the courts split. They wrestled with how far the law reached. The district court agreed that there had been discrimination. They also ruled that drive-ins, where most food was takeout, didn’t have to follow the law. The Fourth Circuit disagreed, saying all Piggie Park locations were public accommodations.

Newman v. Piggie Park went to the Supreme Court in 1968. The high court sided with Newman and made it plain: religion is no excuse for segregation in a public restaurant. The justices called Piggie Park’s claim “patently frivolous.”

Piggie Park wasn’t about handouts or special favors. It was about human dignity. The right to walk into a public restaurant and be served like anyone else. Believe what you want. But if you open your doors to the public, you serve the public.

So…did the Civil Rights Act of 1964 violate the Constitution in Columbia, South Carolina?

Did the decision rob Maurice Bessinger of his religious liberty? He was still free to believe, worship, preach, and pass out booklets. What he couldn’t do after choosing to run a public restaurant was use those beliefs to keep people out.

And he didn’t stop speaking his mind. Before he died, he deeded a tiny patch of ground under the flagpole to the Sons of Confederate Veterans for five dollars so that future owners couldn’t take the Confederate flag down.

But the issue isn’t cut and dry. The stories don’t stop in South Carolina.

Act Two. A Seat With Conditions

In the late 1960s, the University of California, Davis School of Medicine faced a stark reality: its classes had almost no Black, Latino, or Native American students. Justice is the opportunity to earn a place, but what does opportunity mean when the doorway to a profession has been locked for decades?

UC Davis tried a fix: Out of 100 seats each year, they reserved 16 for “disadvantaged” applicants. UC Davis judged those applications by a separate committee, with different standards, and the underrepresented minority applicants competed only for those 16 seats.

Enter Allan Bakke. A Marine Corps veteran and engineer in his early 30s, Bakke had set his sights on medicine. He’d spent years preparing, earning strong grades and MCAT scores. He applied to UC Davis in 1973 and 1974, along with a dozen other medical schools, and he was rejected by all of them. Later, he discovered that some minority applicants admitted through the special program had lower scores.

He believed the school had shut him out because he was white. In reality, records later showed that competition was stiff; as many as 67 applicants had higher scores than his.

Nonetheless, Bakke sued. He argued that a publicly-funded state school couldn’t deny him a seat and still honor the commitment to prohibit race discrimination in federally funded programs.

Regents of the University of California v. Bakke reached the Supreme Court in 1978. The ruling was messy. Quotas, like the 16 reserved seats, were unconstitutional. They could not exclude Bakke based on race. The court ordered him admitted.

But the Court, led by Justice Lewis Powell, also said diversity in education is a compelling goal. Race could be one factor in a holistic review, as long as every applicant competes in the same pool, with no guaranteed quotas.

So…Did the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act violate the Constitution? Did it violate Bakke’s right to justice?

UC Davis had its opinion of justice. It argued that set-aside wasn’t favoritism. It was a correction for a pipeline bent by decades of exclusion. A diverse medical class would better serve California’s diverse communities.

If you were Bakke, would you see justice denied?

If you were a minority applicant, would you see the set-aside necessary to level a field tilted by history?

The Court decided justice meant the opportunity to compete equally, but not a scripted outcome. There could be no reserved seats, no separate tracks. But a school could consider race as one thread in a larger fabric, if every candidate competed equally.

Bakke went on to have a successful career as a doctor in Minnesota.

But the issue still isn’t settled. Let’s move on to Louisiana.

Act Three. From the Classroom to the Shop Floor

In 1965, President Johnson signed Executive Order 11246. In it, Johnson outlined that if a business wanted to compete for federal contracts, it had to follow the rules. If you wanted to do business with the federal government, you had to take “affirmative action” to ensure equal opportunity. This meant companies had to create goals and timetables to hire underrepresented groups. The government insisted these were not quotas. They were temporary tools, intended to pry open doors rusted shut for generations.

At the time, Kaiser Aluminum in Gramercy, Louisiana, filled skilled jobs almost entirely with white workers, and it intended to change. They made a goal that their workforce would represent the local labor force. The company and the union built a training pipeline and reserved half of the slots for Black workers to correct the imbalance.

A white worker named Brian Weber was passed over for promotion in favor of workers with less seniority. He saw a new door being closed in the name of opening another, so he sued. The local court and the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit agreed that Weber was a target of discrimination, but the matter was not settled. Kaiser appealed.

In 1979, the Supreme Court decided United Steelworkers v. Weber. Kaiser Aluminum’s plan survived. The high court said a business could give preferential treatment to minority groups, as long as the company intended the effort to be a temporary fix to balance workforce diversity.

In 1987, Johnson v. Transportation Agency approved a similar approach for gender. A business could choose to hire a woman in a male-dominated job if she and a man were comparably qualified for a promotion, if the plan was modest and temporary.

The tension between the classroom and the shop floor became plain. The high court killed fixed quotas in college. But numbers could steer workplace decisions if businesses called them goals, kept them temporary, and technically kept the door to all applicants open.

On the ground, these goals felt like quotas. If a business chose a woman or minority applicant for a job or a promotion, some believed they were a token hire, not the top choice. If even the rules were fair, the optics were not.

Ricci v. DeStefano drew a bright line in 2009. New Haven, Connecticut, gave firefighters a vetted, job-related promotion exam. One of them, Frank Ricci, was dyslexic. He paid to have the textbooks read onto audiotape. He studied eight to thirteen hours a day. He earned his spot at the top of the list. In total, nineteen of the top candidates were eligible for immediate promotion. 17 were White, two Hispanic. No Black candidates scored well enough for promotion. Fearing a lawsuit, the city threw out the test results.

Ricci sued. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court found that a city couldn’t discard a valid, job-related test because it didn’t like the racial outcome. Merit, tied to the job, had to matter.

Fast-forward to January 21, 2025. President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14173, revoking President Johnson’s Executive Order 11246. The new executive order barred workforce balancing and preferential hiring. It outlined that federal agencies would enforce civil rights laws without identity-based preferences.

Some call Trump’s executive order a return to racism. Others point out that official policy and case law framed federal goals as non-quota, remedial tools. Temporary in purpose and bounded by merit and non-discrimination.

So…Did the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act violate the Constitution? Did it violate Brian Weber’s right to justice? What about the firefighters in Connecticut?

Some would rightly point out that we have not achieved equal representation in the workforce. Others would ask: If the federal government intended numerical goals as temporary, who would decide to eliminate them, and when?

Act Four. The Permanent Question

But hold on. The play on our stage so far today moves from clear, undeniable injustice to increasingly problematic bureaucratic overreach. One endpoint whispers this bureaucratic mission creep has become a cure worse than the disease. That government enforcement created to stop obvious discrimination became a mechanism for institutionalized reverse discrimination.

Before we close the book on this constitutional drama, we need to wrestle with the hardest question of all: What if we didn’t open the door?

Take Cheryl Hopwood, a white mother from San Antonio who sued the University of Texas Law School in 1992. Like Allan Bakke, she argued that racial preferences had cost her a seat. The Fifth Circuit agreed in Hopwood v. Texas and struck down the school’s affirmative action program. Texas celebrated a return to “pure merit.”

But how did Texas measure merit? The LSAT is the test students take to get into law school. The scores correlate with first-year law school grades. But the scores also correlate with family wealth, parents’ education, and zip code quality. When Texas stopped considering race, Black and Latino enrollment plummeted. In 1996, exactly five Black students enrolled in a class of 500.

Was that justice?

Texas panicked.

Rather than accept that merit-based admissions had produced an unwanted outcome, the university created a workaround. UT quietly began weighing “socioeconomic factors.” Were they first-generation college students? Did they come from underrepresented communities? Had they overcome economic hardship?

Admissions officers still tracked racial numbers. They still worried when minority enrollment dropped. They just found new ways to achieve the same results without using the forbidden language of race.

Was the new approach race-neutral? Or was it just more sophisticated racial engineering?

The constitutional question gets thornier when we think more about what “temporary” means. In 1978, Justice Powell allowed race as one factor in holistic admissions. 25 years later, in 2003, Justice O’Connor warned we would be ready to stop considering race in no more than 25 more years.

Here we are, on the cusp of the expiration of those 25 years.

And we have many unanswered questions. What conditions must we achieve to reach equality? How will we know we achieved those conditions? How long is too long? How much preference is too much? If the goal is a level playing field, who decides when we’ve reached it?

Act Five. Dignity and the Doorway

So, where does this play in five acts leave us?

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 opened doors that should never have been closed. For Anne Newman, it was the glass door of a sandwich shop in the South Carolina heat. For Allan Bakke and Cheryl Hopwood, the door to an admissions office.

The law didn’t give them a sandwich or a degree. It gave them the dignity to participate. The right to compete. The right to be judged on their own terms.

But what began as a tool to unlock a door became, for some, a bureaucratic machine rearranging the room.

On the one hand, the foundation of the Civil Rights Act is that all people are equal in dignity and rights. If that is true, no disadvantaged group needs permanent quotas. Promoting a system of quotas only strips the dignity from minority groups. It ensures that every magnificently qualified woman or Black man is seen as promoted because of the need to fill a quota and not based on their merit.

Think of a female pilot in the cockpit of a 747. She is there because of her immense skill, courage, and dedication. But a system of preferences allows a passenger to whisper, “She’s probably only there to fill a quota.”

We can call that passenger a bigot. And he is. But the system feeds his bigotry.

On the other hand, dignity cuts both ways. A female pilot hears whispers about quotas, whether affirmative action exists or not. But if she did receive preferential treatment because of her gender, the injustice becomes undeniable.

The system validates the prejudice it claims to fight.

We cannot reject our commitment to civil rights. We must always celebrate the moral courage of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He spent Easter Sunday, 1963, in a Birmingham, Alabama jail cell, after urging for equality and peaceful protest. He denounced us for being “more devoted to order than to justice … (preferring) a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”

We passed the Civil Rights Act so people wouldn’t have to throw their dignity under the train to join public life. But we must also remember Dr. King’s central vision: a nation in which his children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Merit and character are not the enemies of equality; they are its ultimate destination.

In the balance of our six national goals, justice is the bedrock. It is our most important national goal. But justice is not a guaranteed outcome. It is not a handout. It is the fierce, unwavering protection of opportunity. It’s the promise made to the boy I was, stacking hay in stuffy Missouri barn lofts: that a kid from a leaky trailer or project housing can, through grit and talent, earn a place at any table in the country.

This leaves us with the sharpest question of all.

Does the Civil Rights Act of 1964 violate the Constitution?

May God bless the United States of America.

Music from #Uppbeathttps://uppbeat.io/t/monument-music/betrayalLicense code: ENQWTJMW52NIKTAE

Joel Douglas (00:03) My guest today is Shaka Mitchell, a senior fellow for the American Federation for Children, a Nashville-based attorney, a Belmont adjunct teaching constitutional law, and a leader dedicated to transforming education for underserved families. He’s a featured guest on TEDx Nashville and podcasts like The Learning Curve and Charterfolk. The charter schools Shaka has worked with drive real growth for Nashville’s underserved kids, often doubling district test scores in math and reading. While high-poverty public schools rank in Tennessee’s bottom 30%, Shaka’s schools rank in the top 20% to 25% serving the same communities. Shaka, thanks for being here. Your work with high-performing charters raises big questions about how we fund and deliver education. So, I feel like we have to ask a basic question to get started.

Shaka Mitchell (00:49) Hey, thanks for having me.

Joel Douglas (01:02) Should we fund education at all?

Shaka Mitchell (01:05) Yeah, good question. Well, thanks for having me, Joel, and you’re starting out with a big swing right out of the gate. Should we fund education? I would say yes. I would say yes.

And I want to also give the early disclaimer that I am not a big-government guy. I tend to be pretty skeptical of government. I used to work at one point at a constitutional law firm that came from a libertarian perspective. I really believe in individual liberty, individual rights, and also just an individual’s work ethic. So I am not a big-government guy. That being said, when we’re talking about education, it’s something that I think has a community impact. It’s also something that, from a rule of law perspective, is provided for by every state constitution in the country.

Right? So all 50 states have a constitution that says something about education—that education is valued, that it is highly prized, and that the state is going to do something to fund some system of education for the public. Now, whether or not the government has to provide the actual services, I think we can differ about. That’s where I would say no. But in terms of funding, I would say yes because, listen, if we don’t do it, you can’t just fund your own children. I don’t believe that. I think that looking out for one another’s kids in that regard is a societal benefit.

Joel Douglas (02:47) And really, that’s why I feel like we have to answer this question first. It’s what you just alluded to: you have to fund your kids and everybody else’s kids. If you look at it from a constitutional perspective, I would think about it as, well, we have six national goals, and if one of those is justice, one is liberty, and one is defense, then education fits into a lot of those buckets.

If you think about it from a justice perspective, it kind of gets to an individual—like we need to fund education to help individuals who grew up in a less prosperous or less advantaged background succeed. If you think about it from a defense standpoint, you might think, like the school lunch program was started from a defense requirement standpoint. So if we think about education from a defense standpoint, then that’s kind of a collective; we need to have an infrastructure of training-ready Americans who can go and join the military and serve in defense industries to protect the people of the United States.

But it’s both, right? You can’t just do it from a justice standpoint—that’s not the only reason you do it—but you also don’t only do it for the collective benefit. It goes back to exactly what you said about how we have to pay for each other’s kids, too, because some of them might join the military and also because constitutionally, we have a commitment to the justice of those kids that grow up in a less prosperous environment.

Shaka Mitchell (04:25) Yeah, I think that’s right. And, you know, education is one of these things that, as opposed to, maybe other, say, commodities—things that we buy from the store. The education that I get for myself, yes, it’s important to me personally and individually, but if I’m better educated, that’s going to benefit the community that I’m a part of. It’s going to benefit the private company that I might work for or the nonprofit. It’s gonna benefit the military if I’m a part of the service, right? It’s gonna benefit my neighbors.

So education is not one of these things that’s like going to the grocery store and you buy the kind of breakfast cereal that only you like. You’re the only one in your house that likes it and you say, “Forget about everybody else, I’m eating whatever, Fruity Pebbles. I don’t care if nobody else likes it.” No, education is not that kind of good. It’s the sort of thing that actually has so much benefit.

And I mean, you highlight something really important, too, that I took a look at a little bit this summer and might just write about later. And that is that the armed forces right now are going through the lowest recruitment cycle in history, right? Our military is having such a hard time finding academically and physically ready young men and women, and that becomes a defense problem. So that speaks a little bit to this “education as a national defense” and national security issue as well. There’s a lot of overlap there.

Joel Douglas (06:06) Absolutely, and I don’t want to take too much time on it, but just from a physical education standpoint, PE. When I was a kid, and I grew up in a small town in northern Missouri, the high school football coach was the PE teacher. He used it as the football training program so that we essentially had an extra hour to do stuff. So, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, we'd lift weights. Tuesday, Thursday, we played some sort of sport, so we were running, chasing each other, doing field hockey, or whatever that was.

But my kids today, because I have two teenagers, they don’t do the same kind of stuff in PE. For half of the year, they sit in a health class. And rather than go run for 45 minutes and then have 45 minutes of health class—I don’t want to digress too much—but if they ran for an hour every day, would the military benefit from them being more fit and having a higher pool of candidates who could join after they graduate? Absolutely.

Shaka Mitchell (07:14) Yeah. I’m a big believer in physical education and just the benefits of physical activity in general. I really think that it’s something that, frankly, kind of links together with education in this sort of virtuous cycle. Right? I mean, I think for a lot of kids, and even personally, when I feel better physically because I’ve exercised, I think I’m more mentally sharp and focused and ready for the workday. And I think that’s the same for elementary, middle, and high school kids, too.

Joel Douglas (07:52) Yeah, that’s right. But I’ll get back on track. You said something about how the government doesn’t necessarily outline how to achieve education. So it says what to do. Well, it doesn’t even say that. It says the goals are justice, liberty, defense, and the other three. So you alluded to there being different ways to achieve those. And I know you work with a lot of those, and that’s the work that you do. So, can you talk about that?

Shaka Mitchell (08:24) Yeah, so, you know, a lot of state constitutions—most state constitutions—are really broad, even vague, when they talk about education. They’ll say something like, "The state of [fill in the blank] will provide for an equitable education system." You go, okay, what does that mean exactly? Right? Does that mean we're talking about dollars? Equitable that way? Are we talking about kids who are gonna exit the system with the exact same amount of coursework? It’s so vague nobody really knows. It’s just kind of one of these adjectives that they threw in there, and it sounded good. And then you fast forward just a few years, and you don’t really know what it means.

So one of the problems, of course, in any state is that on the one hand, it’s really efficient, or it seems like it’s going to be efficient, to have one system that you have in place for all the kids to participate in. That seems like it would work on paper; it seems efficient. But then what happens is, as soon as you meet more than one child, you realize that they are different, and you realize that the same system isn’t likely to work for a whole range of students. And that’s within one school, let alone a whole district, state, or country, right?

I live in Nashville, Tennessee, and we’ve got about a hundred thousand school-aged kids. There’s no way one system with one school board of nine people is going to be able to figure out a system that works for every single child because they have different interests. Even in my own house—and I bet this is the same for you and your kids—same parents, but my kids are interested in different things. One is better at math. One is much more interested in the arts. One is much more interested in reading, nose in a book, right? They’re just interested in different things. They’re going to learn in different ways. And that’s in one family. You multiply that out across the whole city, and you've got to do something different. And so that’s really, I think, why I believe so much in school choice.

The idea is that, yes, we’re going to fund education from a central pot. Because again, let’s collect the money that way, easy peasy. But let’s not assume that those nine people on the school board can come up with one system that works for everybody. Let’s let different models work. So if it’s a charter school that’s got a focus on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), cool. Do that. In my city, there’s another charter school that’s really focused on students for whom English is not their first language. Okay, great. Let’s do that because that was something that the district was really struggling with. Or maybe it’s a values-based decision that a family wants to make. You really want your kids to go to a faith-based school. Okay, cool. I think that that’s your right to do. So let’s figure out how to make it work for families and make it more of a partnership rather than this top-down, command-and-control model where you say, "Alright, here’s the one thing that we say you get to have, and if it doesn’t work, too bad. See you in 12 or 13 years." Like, that doesn’t work.

Joel Douglas (12:07) Yeah, and I don’t know if you’ve read the book The End of Average, but it’s a great book. It breaks down that if we average all everybody’s traits, thinking that whatever we produce to make the average will work for most people...

Shaka Mitchell (12:13) Yeah, yeah, I love it.

Joel Douglas (12:28) ...what in fact happens is we average everybody, and it doesn’t fit anybody because nobody is average. And so if you make a pair of pants that fit the average person, then they fit no one. And so that goes to school performance also, because some kids may not necessarily be low performers, but they may need extra time. The book talks about how they may need extra time in a particular core group of academics. And then later, when other kids who performed higher in that block are ahead of them, they might be bogged down by something else that they need to slow down for. But this kid who took more time in block two, as an example, can now speed through block three, and then they’re caught up in block four as compared to the kids who sped through block two, took more time at block three, and now they’re all in the same place in block four.

And I feel like that is a very tough governance problem to have because our public schools today are designed to make everybody fit through the funnel at the same time, and students just don’t do a great job doing that. How would a charter school, or—I’m getting into what you do specifically—but how could other schools kind of solve that problem?

Shaka Mitchell (14:02) Yeah, I think it’s the right question in that we have to be thinking about how we make this work for the end user: the students. So part of that is making sure we’re framing the question in that way. What I see happen too often in school districts is that we say, "Hey, how do we make this easier on the adults?" rather than, "How do we make it work better for the kids?"

Joel Douglas (14:30) Do you mean the parents or the teachers, or both?

Shaka Mitchell (14:32) No, I think we often ask how do we make it easier—sometimes it’s not even for the teachers—it’s how do we make it easier for the central office administrators to track, or how do we make it easier for folks at a state department of education to check the boxes? And so I think a lot of teachers would tell you they spend too much time checking the boxes rather than doing the things that their training would indicate they are uniquely qualified to do. And those are the things that really motivate them, which is, "Okay, how am I going to unlock learning for these specific students?"

That’s what we want teachers focused on, rather than checking the boxes to say, "Okay, well, did my kids have this much seat time this week or this year?" Right? I mean, that’s not—seat time doesn’t mean much. There’s a whole lot of ways to sit in a seat and not be productive.

So I think some things that schools can do—district schools, public schools, private schools, charter, it doesn’t really matter—is to really be student-centric. And then I would also say to not be afraid of innovation. And that’s something that happens in a lot of districts. They say, "Why are you doing it this way?" And the answer is, "Well, we’re doing it this way either to check the box for compliance reasons, or we’re doing it this way because we haven’t looked up and looked around to see what else is even working." And that’s a really unfortunate dynamic if it exists, right? We want to have a place where our schools are innovative and are taking best practices from other industries even and saying, "Alright, what can we do? What’s working at a school across the state? Can it work over here?" rather than just doing things the same old way. Unfortunately, I think that our incentive system is not set up well to foster innovation; it sort of does the opposite. It encourages schools to sometimes just keep doing the same old, same old, and that doesn’t benefit students.

Joel Douglas (16:55) There are at least three challenges, though. I’m sure there’s way more than just three. But what about rural schools that don’t have enough kids? So if you in Nashville can break up a school for this and a school for that, a rural area just can’t do that. They don’t have enough. If you only have, like my school growing up had 27 kids in my class, how do you break them up? And then another challenge is if you take the money from these five kids away from the school and give it to this other school, then what happens to that first school? I think that that’s probably a challenge. And I’ve got my third one already, but I’ll turn it back to you.

Shaka Mitchell (17:37) Yeah. Well, thinking about the rural school question. Here in Tennessee, we have a lot of rural schools also. I mean, obviously, not Nashville; anybody who’s been to Nashville recently knows that Nashville is not rural. Nashville is a little bananas, quite the opposite lately. But you don’t have to go far to find rural schools. And so I think things have shifted a whole lot since you and I were in school. There are a lot of things that did not exist when we were in school. Among them is the ability to take classes online and virtually, right? And connect with faculty members on the other side of the world or connect with students on the other side of the world.

Just a couple of quick examples of this. I received this demo from a company that’s doing work out of Florida. Florida, you know, really leads the country, I would say, in innovative new school models. And Florida actually has a lot of rural schools, too. You don’t really think of it that way because they have some big cities, but there’s not a whole lot between Tampa Bay and Tallahassee. You’ve got a lot of rural areas. So this company has pioneered some virtual education, and it’s with these big VR goggles, right? And so I sat in a coffee shop in Nashville with the VR headset, and I did a lesson on the Constitutional Convention. I was walking around, you know, in this virtual world. I’m walking around Philadelphia, and the professor was there with me. I don’t even know what state he was broadcasting from. His avatar was there with me. We’re looking at things. I’m asking questions. I could turn pages in a book. I mean, it’s just pretty wild. Now maybe that’s not for everybody, but that sort of thing didn’t even exist 10 years ago in a way that was so tactile and constructive. So I think there are just more options in rural schools now.

The other thing is to think about the school building and that time when kids are coming together. It’s like, well, what’s the value of that grouping? Meaning maybe we still want kids to come together for certain subjects or for certain lessons or certain group dynamics, right? People often talk about socialization and whatnot. But even in the homeschool communities now around the country, they have ways of getting together so that their kids have time with one another. And so I can envision things in rural communities where you say, "Okay, we’re going to still be learning in a similar environment, but it’s going to look much more like a one-room schoolhouse, for instance." And you’ve got kids who are working on different content simultaneously, right? It doesn’t all have to be the same one lesson for all the kids in the classroom. It should be differentiated. Because like you said, just because you’re a student who’s doing well in reading doesn’t mean that you’re doing just as well in math. You might be ahead or behind or whatever. And so that’s where you can shift the lessons and really make the lessons match the kids. And you’re seeing a lot of parents are able to piece that together through these choice programs. And again, in Florida, it’s happening. It’s happening in states like Arizona, Indiana—increasingly around the country.

Joel Douglas (21:32) And even here in Wyoming. So my daughter, who is a sophomore this year, is able to take Japanese classes through the University of Wyoming as a part of her high school curriculum. And she can do that at her high school; like she has a free period, and during that free period, she enrolls in a Japanese class that’s taught at the University of Wyoming.

Shaka Mitchell (21:42) Wow. Wow.

Joel Douglas (21:57) And so she also gets college credit for doing that, which saves her money in the long run because she’s not at the university paying tuition rates; it’s included in the cost of the high school. So I could definitely see that that distributed training environment would be—sorry, I have a lot of military instructor background, so I say "training," but let’s just assume I said "education."

Shaka Mitchell (22:09) Right, that’s amazing.

Joel Douglas (22:25) That distributed education environment would really suit a lot of kids well, especially those who were interested in computers or a very unique subset of material that not everyone in their small school would be interested in taking.

Shaka Mitchell (22:44) Yeah, for sure. I mean, AP classes are the best example of this because, you know, unless you’re at a big school—and in particular, a big school in a place that’s more densely populated, maybe an urban area or a suburb that’s close to an urban area—it’s hard to have a lot of AP classes, right? Because you don’t know from year to year if you're going to have enough students who even want to take, say, AP Physics or something like that. I think that’s a place where rural schools have traditionally struggled a little bit to have all those different course offerings, even though the kids might have the aptitude to do it.

So yeah, the virtual space, that’s super cool. To be able to save money and get college credit—even if you didn’t get credit by eventually scoring a four or five or whatever you need to on the AP test, that exposure already is going to be super helpful. You’re still going to get the high school credit you need, and you might just find out, "Hey, I thought that I was really interested in business, and then I took a college-level business course, and it turns out I’m not actually that interested in it," or vice versa. And I think that exposure is really, really good for kids.

You asked a question about money shifting around, too, and that’s one where I think we’re just seeing different dynamics around the country than what we grew up with. We’re just seeing the dollars start to follow the students. And that, I think, is the model that we want to get to. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to have all those resources, all that capital tied up in a building. And often that’s where it gets tied up. I mean, I heard a stat out of the state of Texas where the debt load that districts are carrying because of football stadium construction costs is just astronomical, right? Why do we have so much money tied up in that? And I get it. I mean, folks would laugh if I said that I played high school football, but I did for a very brief period of time. I get it. It’s fun. I like going to games, watching games, whatever. But we don’t need all of our education dollars tied up in the buildings and the stadiums. The whole point is to make sure that when the Friday night lights go off, these kids are prepared to do something as adults. So let’s work on that.

Joel Douglas (25:30) And that may not be a battle that we can win, as far as not having football, but...

Shaka Mitchell (25:36) That’s right. Yeah, I’m not trying to turn Texas away from football anytime soon. I’m not gonna die on that hill.

Joel Douglas (25:43) But there’s also a compliance piece, too. So if we say, "Okay, kids only need to study from home so they can do all their curriculum at home, and then they come to a centralized location to do interaction or whatever," there’s just an inkling in the background of, if they commingle, are they gonna meet all the same public health requirements and the same nutrition requirements as the core group of kids who are in the mix? And that’s very challenging because there are a lot of people, for instance, with vaccines, who feel right now that they want to have a choice in whether or not their kid gets a measles vaccine. But then they also want their kid to be able to play football. And so then if they’re on the football team, do they need to have a measles vaccine? That’s a challenge that legislators are fighting right now.

Shaka Mitchell (26:39) Yeah, for sure. It’s challenging. We don’t wade into those sorts of public health areas, but it’s definitely a challenge. I mean, I think one of the things it highlights, frankly, is that for better and for worse, schools have truly become a hub for lots of other things that are not related to education. Right? So you’ve got schools that are used as public health centers, you’ve got schools that are used for giving out food resources... and I get it, because if this is the place in your community where you’re most likely to see kids or families, I get why you would want to take advantage of that time. But to the extent that we put all that responsibility on school leaders and teachers, I don’t think it’s been really constructive. Let them focus on what they can do, and their locus of control needs to be education. And if that means we’ve got to come up with other ways and other places to do, say, a food pantry, you know, maybe so be it. But I would prefer letting the educators focus on that one thing.

Joel Douglas (28:03) Sure. Yeah, and I know you don't. Because you work with so many underserved communities, I know that you readily acknowledge that for some of those kids, that’s the only meal they’re gonna get that day. And so that is an important thing, and I know that you believe that.

Shaka Mitchell (28:15) Right, right.

Joel Douglas (28:21) You’re talking about a different subset than here in Wyoming or in Missouri where I grew up. We didn’t necessarily see that at the school level, but I certainly believe that in other places, that’s a different thing. So what do you say when a legislator talks to you about, "We don’t want you to take money away from the public schools"? How do you answer that?

Shaka Mitchell (28:49) Yeah, it’s a good question. You know, assuming that it’s asked honestly, right? Then I think that it’s helpful to try to get folks to think about what it is that they actually want the money spent on. And so oftentimes, what people say is, "Well, we don’t want to take money from our public schools." But if what they really mean is, "Let’s make sure students in public schools have the same amount of resources," then I’m like, "Okay, yeah, I get that."

Because here’s the deal: your daughter, the one that we were talking about earlier, the sophomore—let’s just say hypothetically that she moved from a public school to a different school environment, to a private school. Well, she would no longer be a cost to that original school. So why in the world would we continue to send 100 percent of the funds to that original school? Wouldn’t we want her to be funded wherever she goes?

And by the way, here’s the thing: people make it sound controversial when you’re talking about a charter school or a private choice program, but this is exactly what happens anytime someone moves from one county to another county, right? And we don’t stop people from doing that. We don’t say, "Hey, you live in Davidson County, and it’s not fair that if you move to Williamson County, you’re taking money from the public schools." Well, it is true in some sense, but you’re taking the student, too, right? And so I try to get legislators to think about how this kind of already happens in the natural context of people moving around, and we want families to be able to do what’s best for them. So that to me is a higher priority than just sustaining this particular building or that particular building. I want families to thrive, irrespective of what type of school they attend.

Joel Douglas (31:13) Sure, love it. Also, I love the distributed education environment thought. I wrote a piece once about how I feel that, in general, high school kids are not well prepared to move into the working world directly. They have a hard time getting their first job, and then they have a hard time building expertise in whatever they want to do as they grow up.

But if we took kids who were seniors—so say the kids that were on the university track just keep doing their thing, and then kids who were gonna go into a tech field or were hoping for tech certifications—they take their senior year of high school or the first year after high school and do distributed training. And we have businesses that sponsor real-world problems that they’re having. So then during the class, the kids are actually thinking, "Oh, this is a problem that this business is having; this is how I would approach it." Then I think that that would be really valuable real-world expertise that those kids could get. I would love to see that integrated into high school or early post-high school curriculum, but I also understand that that breaks the education mold, and that’s a challenge.

Shaka Mitchell (32:37) Well, you know, it breaks the mold, but it’s not without some precedent. There are many European countries, actually, that have a system of high school internships where the curriculum is basically created by industry and by business leaders. So you’ve got the business leaders who are themselves saying, "We anticipate these needs or those needs..."

(Sound of strong wind in the background)

Sorry, is there—do you hear that?

Joel Douglas (33:20) I was gonna say something. I believe that is the Wyoming wind making its presence felt. Yeah, that’s just our wind in the background. Wyoming is known for our wind, and there it is.

Shaka Mitchell (33:27) No kidding. Okay. Well, I apologize for breaking up our talk. That’s amazing. Okay, well, good, I’m glad it’s that and I’m glad your house is still standing, because that sounds intense.

Anyway, so, yeah, there’s this European model where you’ve got industry and business leaders who might say, "Okay, hey, here’s the training that we think is gonna be really important in the heavy mechanical engineering industry," right? So, big engines, big motors, and things like that, maybe for ships or something. And they say, "Here are the things that we think are going to be really valuable skills and knowledge for the next five years." And they actually work with schools to create that curriculum on a year-by-year basis. And there are some European countries where something like 80% to 90% of high school kids have basically an externship that year where they’re getting some hands-on training. These are kids where some of them are gonna go into the trades, and some of them are gonna go on to do more education.

So I love the idea, not just for one sector of kids, because the reality is, most of us don’t know what we’re gonna do when we’re 16. And maybe we will go to college, maybe we won’t, maybe we’ll go later in life. I mean, I have a lot of formal education, and you know how I spend a lot of time on the weekends? Fixing things around my house. Right? And so it’s not like these things are mutually exclusive. If I have no idea how electricity works, I could get really hurt when I’m trying to, you know, a couple of weeks ago, when I had to fix our washing machine or install a new garbage disposal or whatever. So I think those technical skills really can benefit anybody.

Joel Douglas (35:37) Absolutely, and that idea really comes from the Air Force Weapons School. The Weapons School is the Air Force’s version of Top Gun. It’s structured differently, and I won’t go into it... but there are blocks. And in that block, you might have two or three days’ worth of education. You’re in class from 7:00 in the morning till 5:00 or 6:00 in the evening, and then you study that evening. You take a test in the morning the next day, then you start academics again at 7:00. You go through two or three days of that, and then on, say, day four, the instructors give you a problem set of, “Hey, this is a real-world scenario, and you have until tomorrow night to come up with a presentation which you will teach back to the instructors outlining your approach to solve this real-world problem.” And what you learn is, on day four, you feel ready to go, and you’ve gotten good test scores the first three days because you take a test every day. You get the problem set, and you learn you didn’t retain what you thought you did.

Shaka Mitchell (36:47) Right.

Joel Douglas (36:50) And then you have to teach it to yourself again so you can teach the instructors at the end of the next day. It’s a fantastic education model, and I would love to see it—well, it was a very beneficial education model for me, and I’m sure it would benefit other kids. It’s a tall order to ask a high school kid to do that kind of stuff.

Shaka Mitchell (37:16) Maybe it is, but I’ll tell you, I had a conversation with a researcher at Johns Hopkins University, and she does a lot of work on what she calls "education pluralism." She’s done a whole lot of work researching different school models around the world, really. And then also school culture within a school building—meaning, like, how rigorous is it? You know, what are the expectations? And she would say that we are grossly under-challenging our kids in school. And that resonates with me.

I mean, you think about how many kids are so-called "behavioral challenges," but actually the challenge is often academic, right? Kids who talk a bunch in class—it’s often because they’re not engaged for one reason or another. Maybe they’re not engaged because they don’t understand the content. Maybe they’re not engaged because they do understand it, and it’s really boring, and they would rather be doing something else. They’re not dumb, and they realize, “What am I doing here?” Right? And so in both cases, unfortunately, we end up doing the wrong thing, and we sort of say, “Alright, you’re out of here, go to the principal’s office,” or whatever, rather than saying, "Are we actually matching the challenge to the child’s aptitude and their capabilities as we see them right now?" And so I think we could do a better job. So it sounds like a tall order, what you have in mind, but I would be willing to say, hey, let’s not play slow-pitch all the time. Let’s throw a little bit harder and see if our kids can make contact.

Joel Douglas (39:14) Yeah. I want to give you a chance to talk about whatever you want to talk about for however long you would do that for. So you could pitch charter schools, you could pitch the work that you do.

Shaka Mitchell (39:26) Yeah, thanks, Joel. Well, one of the things that I’ll mention—I think it’s a really exciting time in education policy in terms of what we’re seeing around the states and even at the federal level. And I think it couldn’t come at a better time. So just yesterday, some new data was released from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. It’s called the NAEP.

Joel Douglas (39:56) Yeah, I saw the performance report.

Shaka Mitchell (39:56) Yeah, and what was released were some 12th-grade math and reading scores and an eighth-grade science score. This is often called "the nation’s report card." So this isn’t some ticky-tack little assessment. This is for kids in every state in the country—kids in private schools, public schools, charter schools take it. But the public schools' scores were released, and in math and reading—in reading, for instance, the scores were some of the lowest in history. In math, they were the lowest point since 2005. And remember, these are the kids whose eighth-grade year was when COVID hit. So it’s been super disruptive for them. And I think in some ways, these scores just confirmed what a lot of parents saw during that time, which is, "Hey, this system just isn’t really serving our children as well as it could be." Again, not all schools, but system-wide, we had some major problems.

What that looks like, for instance, is that only 35 percent of 12th-graders were proficient in reading. Thirty-five percent. In math, on the opposite end of the spectrum, 45 percent were below basic. So it goes below basic, basic, proficient, and then there's advanced. But 45 percent below basic in math. So who’s gonna be surprised if we have a rising and continuing national debt problem in the future? Who’s gonna be surprised if personal finance is just a mess for this cohort of kids? If you can’t do basic math, it’s gonna be a problem. It’s gonna manifest itself as a major problem when you do hit the working world and you’re not quite sure, like, what do these things like interest rates mean? Whether it’s on a credit card or for a home that you’re trying to purchase or a car or whatever.

So those do concern me. That being said, on the encouraging side of the ledger is what’s happening in many states with these programs that allow parents to get public dollars for their choice in education. I think now we’ve got 18 states that have what we call a universal choice program. And we also have now, I believe, 48 states that have charter schools. And so those are public schools that are independently run and operated so that a school leader and its school board can make personnel decisions, they can make curriculum decisions.

And really, I encourage families to not feel like you have to be satisfied anymore if your child is in a school that’s not working well for them. In most states now—not all, but in most states—you have some options, and that number is increasing on an annual basis. You know, if you’re in a position where your child comes home and he or she is really discouraged, really disappointed in what’s happening, don’t take it for granted that this is your only option. You may have some other options out there. I definitely encourage folks to, you know, check out our website or do some other research online and see what options are available in your state because you might be able to get some scholarships to attend the school of your choice.

Joel Douglas (43:54) Awesome. Hey, Shaka, I really appreciate you being on the show today.

Shaka Mitchell (43:59) Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Joel Douglas (44:03) Thank you.

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Should Public Money for Schools Guarantee More Than Learning?

This week, the National School Lunch Program, born out of national defense, and the rise of homeschooling vouchers, where freedom meets responsibility.

And next week, we’ll dig even deeper with our guest, Shaka Mitchell!

But for now … the lights are dimming.

Look! There's the curtain!

Scene One. Frontier America, 1809

Education, even without public funds, can serve national goals like Union and Liberty.

A father and mother have their second child! A boy named Abraham, born in a one-room log cabin in Kentucky. The father, a cold and stern man, had built the structure by hand. Dirt floor. No windows. A fireplace for heat and little else. The boy’s father couldn’t read. His mother knew her letters, but not much more. When she died, the boy was nine years old. He was left in the care of his 11-year-old sister.

His father soon arranged a marriage of convenience with a widow who had three children of her own. When she arrived at the farm, she found his two children so filthy that the first thing she did was draw a bath for them.

She was a godsend for the boy, loving him like her own children. Neighbors called him lazy because he wasn’t much for farm work, and the boy and his father had heated arguments. But his new mother saw something different. He was hungry. Yes, for food. But also for words.

There was no school, so she taught him how to teach himself. She got him books, like the family Bible, but also “Aesop’s Fables,” “Robinson Crusoe,” and “Pilgrim’s Progress.”

She taught him “how” to learn, to study, to chase every scrap of knowledge he could find. At night, by firelight, he copied passages onto wooden shingles with charcoal. He had no paper, no ink. He’d rub out the words, write again, and memorize them line by line.

Neighbors remembered seeing him walking with a book in one hand, axe in the other, reading between swings.

He left home in his young twenties to seek his fortune, but he always came back to see her every year or two. He bought some property for her to live on after his father died.

The last time he saw her was in 1861, when he stopped to bid her farewell before leaving for Washington and his inauguration as the 16th President of the United States. She mourned his death in 1865, and she passed in 1869.

With Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln’s backing, the boy who copied Bible verses onto wooden shingles with charcoal grew into the man who wrote the Gettysburg Address, President Abraham Lincoln.

Would we say today that Abraham Lincoln was homeschooled? Uneducated? Self-taught? However we label it, no one could argue that his lack of formal schooling limited his potential.

Lincoln, self-taught in a Kentucky cabin, became a president who preserved the Union. His education, guided by a caring stepmother, shows how learning builds national strength, even without public funds. But when public money enters the picture, what ensures the child’s welfare?

Scene Two. Perris, California; January 2018 — Justice and Welfare

Before dawn, a 17-year-old girl climbed out of a basement window with an old phone and dialed 911. She planned her escape for two years, practicing how to use a phone because she’d never been outside alone. Her voice shook as she tried to explain what the house looked like inside. At one point, she said, “My two little sisters right now are chained up.”

Riverside County Sheriff's Deputies walked into darkness and the sour smell of waste. They found 13 siblings, ages 2 to 29. Some were shackled. Most were so thin the deputies thought the older ones were still children.

Food was rationed; they only ate once a day. Showers, once a year. Teeth never seen by a dentist. Beatings and strangling as punishment. The district attorney later said the house was “foul-smelling,” and the children showed signs of long starvation and nerve damage. Seven of the captives were adults, but their bodies looked like they had been kept small. One victim, 29 years old, weighed about 82 pounds.

On paper, this was a school. The adoptive father had filed a private-school affidavit with the state. He listed himself as principal of “Sandcastle Day School.” In California, that filing exempted children from compulsory public attendance, and there was no routine state inspection of such “schools.”

No one looked inside for years.

The girl who called 911 gave them an opening. Deputies cut chains. Paramedics carried out brothers and sisters who could barely stand. Prosecutors charged the parents with torture, false imprisonment, willful child cruelty, and abuse of dependent adults. They later added perjury against the father for lying on the school affidavits. In 2019, both parents pleaded guilty. The court sentenced them to 25 years to life in prison as part of the plea agreement.

The rescue did not end the harm. Some of the younger children were later placed with foster parents who also abused them, and those foster parents were convicted and sentenced. Five years after the rescue, county officials acknowledged that the state failed to get basic services to the siblings.

This case is a sinister mirror of President Lincoln’s homeschool experience. A “homeschool” on paper can become a blessing or a cage in practice.

In 2018, a California homeschool hid torture behind a private-school affidavit. Public funds for homeschooling, like those for school lunches, must ensure kids are safe and fed, not starved and chained.

The Test of Legitimacy — Welfare and Tranquility

Now the scene is set, and we can ask our question. As states expand vouchers and tax credits for homeschooling, what obligations follow?

Does accepting the American people’s money for schooling create an obligation beyond academics?

Liberty in private is one thing. Liberty with the people’s money is another. Public funds carry obligations of legitimacy. These are the same assurances schools already provide: food, safety, health, and visibility.

Religious liberty and government overreach are real concerns. So are child welfare checks, meals, vaccinations, and sports. We need a standard that defends liberty and protects children.

We think we care about the freedom to choose how a child learns. We think we care about waste of public funds. We think we care about officials telling our children what they should know.

Take a couple of examples. Some parents want physical education to mean kids running for an hour, not sitting for “health.” Others say there is no such thing as an average child, and any system built for the average will fail the real ones in front of us.

These are legitimate concerns for individuals. I say again—Individuals. Parents should exercise their liberty in how they educate their children. That right stands whether or not public money is involved. And while critics point to abuse in homeschooling, most homeschoolers are not abusive. Abuse exists everywhere. Public and private schools are not automatically safer.

But that is not the decisive concern. The issue is not good parents versus bad parents. It is the obligations that come with public money.

The government owns nothing. Every dollar it spends is the people’s money. We pool those dollars to build what no family can build alone: roads, bridges, water systems, and schools. Because there is more to school than classes.

That collective pool comes with obligations. Every day, in public or private schools, an adult lays eyes on a child. Every day, a child who needs a meal can get one.

So yes, we can support individual choice with the American people’s money. But if we choose to take that money, we also choose an obligation to legitimacy.

The test is simple. Education is a public function, bound by federal rights. Parents have broad freedom to educate their children, but when public money follows the child, they are spending the people’s money.

No one gives you money with no strings attached. The people may ask for basic assurances: that a child is seen, safe, nourished, and protected from disease.

Food as Defense — Provide for the Common Defence

Let’s think about the school lunch program.

Almost every presidential administration fights over school lunches. But the political theater hides the real purpose of the program.

One of the nation’s six goals is to Provide for the Common Defence. That doesn’t stop at buying tanks or building fighter jets. It also means building the human infrastructure to fly those jets and stand watch. A healthy, fit young America is part of national defense.

That’s where food comes in. The men and women who step forward to serve often come from the country’s poorest households. They are America’s finest, but not our wealthiest. For many, school lunch is the one reliable meal of the day in childhood.

The modern program itself grew out of war. During World War II, the Army discovered too many young men were unfit for service, with a nontrivial share failing for nutrition-related reasons, about one in nine by some estimates. That was not just a battlefield problem. It was a factory-line problem, too.

Congress answered with the National School Lunch Act of 1946. The law says its purpose, “as a measure of national security,” is to “safeguard the health and well-being of the Nation’s children” and to soak up US farm output. President Truman signed it on June 4, 1946. He praised it as “strengthening the Nation through better nutrition for our school children.” Those two concepts, national security and better nutrition, are the program’s DNA.

Today, the program serves around 30 million kids on a typical school day. This is infrastructure, not charity. It is a national system that keeps children fed so they can learn now and serve and work later.

In short, the American people pool our money to pay for school lunches so those kids can grow up and, in return, protect the Republic.

The lunches build “human infrastructure” by ensuring future generations, often from poor households, are physically fit to serve in the military, work in defense industries, or contribute to national resilience. This directly ties child nutrition to America’s defense.

The school lunch program builds human infrastructure for defense, welfare, and justice. Homeschooling with public funds should mirror this, requiring proof that children are nourished and seen, aligning with the same national goals.

Parents who take public money for homeschooling aren’t just teaching math. They’re spending our collective resources. Like school lunches, which ensure kids eat to thrive, homeschoolers should show kids get enough food and regular check-ins to prevent abuse.

Does Public Money for Schools Demand More Than Academics?

We’ve seen what education can do without public funds: Abraham Lincoln in a Kentucky cabin, teaching himself by firelight.

We’ve seen what happens when freedom without oversight collapses: thirteen children chained in a California basement, hidden under the cover of a “school.”

And we’ve seen how public funds, when tied to national goals, build lasting infrastructure: the National School Lunch Program. It isn’t charity. It’s defense.

So the question stands: when the American people’s money funds schooling, what are we owed in return? Is it enough to teach math and reading? Or do we, as a people, have a right to expect food, safety, health, and legitimacy?

Break break.

Next week, I’ll be joined by Shaka Mitchell, Senior Fellow at the American Federation for Children. Shaka is an expert in constitutional law and education. He’s helped shape voucher and education savings account debates in states like Tennessee.

Our opening question will go one level deeper: Should we pay for public education at all?

May God bless the United States of America.

Postscript. If you read this, you might check out the audio version just for the song! Starts around 15:10. Enjoy!

v/rJoel

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Act 1: The Insurmountable Challenge

In 1817, New York voted to dig a ditch. And not just any ditch. A grand canal! Dug by hand, 363 miles long, across forests, swamps, and rock. Most experts scoffed. George Washington had dismissed similar ideas decades earlier. Thomas Jefferson called it “a little short of madness.”

At the time, farmers and manufacturers in the West faced a brutal choice. To reach markets, they had to send their goods down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, the country’s greatest seaport. From there, shipments went out through the Gulf, around Florida, up the Atlantic, and finally to cities like New York or Philadelphia. It was slow. It was costly. And it made western settlers dependent on a southern trade route they couldn’t control.

The Erie Canal wasn’t dreamed up by powerful men in Albany. The idea came from a flour merchant named Jesse Hawley. He had a strong customer base, but to move his flour to market, he had to ship it by wagon over the Appalachian trails or float it on rivers that ran the wrong way. He went broke, ended up in debtors’ prison, and there picked up a pen. In a series of essays in 1807 and 1808, he sketched a bold plan: a canal from Lake Erie to the Hudson River. He mapped the route, described the locks, and argued the benefits. He didn’t have all the details, but he had vision, and he put it on paper.

New York City mayor and later Governor DeWitt Clinton picked up that vision and ran with it. He wasn’t an engineer or a canal man. He was a politician with a sense of scale. Clinton saw what Hawley’s prison essays meant: an inland waterway would break dependence on the Mississippi, open the interior, and turn New York into the nation’s gateway.

As Governor, Clinton pushed the legislature to back the canal in 1817. The cost was staggering. Seven million dollars, one state spending roughly a third of the entire federal government’s annual budget. Critics mocked it as “Clinton’s Ditch.” They predicted it would bankrupt New York. Some said it would never be finished.

But Clinton pressed forward. He didn’t sell the canal as an engineering marvel. He sold it as a doorway. At the time, moving freight from Buffalo to New York City cost one hundred dollars a ton and took weeks. Clinton promised the canal would cut that to under ten dollars, and in just a few days.

The Erie Canal wasn’t just a ditch. It was America’s first true megaproject, built long before steam shovels, bulldozers, or dynamite. It was the biggest engineering challenge of the 19th century.

How did they dig it? By hand. Tens of thousands of laborers, mostly Irish immigrants and local farmers hired in the off-season, used picks, shovels, wheelbarrows, and horse-drawn carts. There were no roads. When they hit swamps, they laid down logs to make floating roads so carts wouldn’t sink. When they hit limestone cliffs, they drilled holes by hand, packed them with black powder, and blasted inch by inch.

The canal had to climb about 571 feet from the Hudson up to Lake Erie. To solve that, engineers built 83 locks; locks are stone elevators for boats. No one had done this on such a scale in America before. They were inventing the craft as they went.

But they finished it in just eight years.

When water first flowed in 1825, it wasn’t just an engineering triumph. It was an economic revolution. Shipping costs dropped from $100 a ton to under $10. A journey that took weeks now took days. It made bread cheaper. It put tools in the hands of farmers.

It made New York City the nation’s port. It opened the Midwest to settlement. Within a generation, roughly three-fifths of the nation’s trade moved through New York’s harbor, powered by the canal.

Today, we face another insurmountable challenge: a housing crisis.

Instead of a wilderness of rivers, swamps, and mountains, we face a wilderness of bureaucracy. A maze of zoning codes, permit boards, and fragmented governance. Each with its own tolls and delays. Builders spend months fighting hearings and paperwork before they ever turn a shovel, driving up costs and denying millions the chance to build equity through homeownership.

Then, as now, we face skepticism from critics who believe working-class Americans aren’t worthy of bold projects. Washington dismissed it. Jefferson called it madness. The rich, who owned the existing shipping lanes, mocked the project as “Clinton’s Ditch.” Today, skeptics argue that small, affordable homes aren’t profitable or that zoning reforms are too radical. Politicians treat it as impossible.

But every bold fix begins as madness.

Housing is our canal. It’s not a matter of skill or resources. We have both. It’s a matter of clarity, incentives, and purpose. Just as Clinton used a bold state project to open opportunity, we could use a Small Business Innovation Research program to open the housing market.

As of mid-2025, the US median home price sits at around $410,800, while median household income is estimated at $84,000. This makes homes over 4.8 times income, compared to just twice in the 1960s. A record 22 million renter households are cost-burdened, spending over 30% of income on housing, and affordability is at an all-time low. Programs like USDA’s SBIR for rural development and HUD’s $20 million innovation grants (with recent deadlines in July 2025) show the tools exist. We just need to earmark them for starter homes under $150,000, tied to zoning reforms that cut red tape.

This isn’t about handouts; it’s about competition driving innovation, much like Hawley’s essays sparked a revolution.

Instead of a canal, let’s build a pathway to the American Dream for the working class.

Act 2: The Crisis Today – Voices from the Ground

(Voice: Young Homebuyer; mid-20s female, fiery with a mix of grit, sarcasm, and unshakable hope. Think a teacher who’s had it but won’t quit. Background: Gritty urban soundscape. Honking cabs, slamming apartment doors, distant subway rumble, fading in and out.)

Picture me: 25, a teacher in a mid-sized city, grading papers by day, tutoring by night, slinging coffee on weekends. I’m hustling like my life depends on it...because it does. But the American Dream? It’s slipping through my fingers like sand in a busted hourglass.

I’m not asking for a penthouse. I just want a home. A small one! 600, maybe 1,000 square feet. A bedroom, a bathroom, a kitchen where I can burn my first attempt at dinner. But in 2025, that’s a fantasy. I looked it up... the median income is something like 84 grand a year. Median home price? Try 420 thousand. That’s nearly five times what I make. It’s crazy! Back in 1960, homes cost twice the income: twelve thousand on fifty-six hundred. Since then, prices ran past wages and never looked back.

And I hear the pushback: “Homeownership rates are fine.” Sure, overall. But at my age, it used to be higher. By thirty, nearly 6 in 10 Americans from the Silent Generation owned a home, 1 in 2 Boomers, just under half of Gen X, and about four in ten Millennials. Today, 25–34-year-olds sit in the high 30s, recently near 36%. The overall rate didn’t crash. The doorway for us did.

Builders don’t touch starter homes anymore. Why would they? Land’s a fortune, materials are through the roof, and zoning boards pile on fees like they’re playing Monopoly with my future. So they churn out McMansions, the sprawling status symbols for the rich. Me? I’m left scrounging for scraps, priced out of the game before I even roll the dice.

This isn’t just my story. It’s a crisis crushing millions. Over 22 million renter households are drowning, spending more than 30% of their income on rent. Twelve million are barely breathing, forking over half their paycheck. Since 2019, home prices have spiked 60%. If you’re pulling $50 grand a year, good luck! Only one in ten listings is even close to affordable.

It’s like rowing upstream in a boat made of tissue paper. You paddle; work overtime, skip vacations, eat instant noodles, but the leaks keep coming. Rent. Student loans. Fees. They drain you dry before you can save a dime for a down payment.

So we wait. We put off kids. We put off dreams. Some of us are still crashing in Mom’s basement, not because we’re lazy, but because the system’s rigged. We don’t need marble countertops or three-car garages. We need homes under $150,000! Twice today’s median income, like our grandparents had. Without that, the American Dream isn’t just delayed. It’s sinking, drifting downstream, out of reach for my entire generation.

But I’m not giving up. There’s a way to fight back. We need to drain this bureaucratic swamp and build a bridge to ownership. We just need the right tools, the right vision, and a whole lot of grit.

Act 3: Innovation – SBIR for Housing

(Voice: Policy Expert – Confident male, mid-40s, professor-like with a spark of enthusiasm, like a TED Talk speaker rallying for change. Background: Subtle office sounds: typing, flipping blueprint pages, faint construction hum, fading in and out.)

So, how do we pull the American Dream back from the brink? We need homes under $150,000! You've heard the grim math from our teacher in Act 2. That five-times-income ratio is a trap. But it's a trap we can engineer our way out of. It’s our Erie Canal moment, and the tool to dig it is competition.

Picture this: builders racing to craft small, affordable homes. 600 to 1,000 square feet, sturdy and smart, not some cookie-cutter McMansion. The spark? A Small Business Innovation Research program, an SBIR for housing. SBIRs are America’s secret sauce, fueling breakthroughs in tech, defense, and agriculture with competitive grants for small businesses. Phase I: dream up designs, like modular units, shipping-container conversions, energy-efficient builds. Phase II: build prototypes that hit $150,000 or less. Phase III: scale the winners with private capital, flooding the market with homes for first-time buyers, not hedge-fund vultures. Really promising defense proposals go direct to Phase II to get started quicker.

This isn’t a pipe dream! It’s already halfway here. The USDA’s SBIR program for rural development is a goldmine, funding innovations to lift rural America, including housing. USDA’s rural SBIR runs in recurring cycles. We need to earmark funds for starter-home prototypes. For cities, HUD’s got $20 million in innovation grants, with deadlines like July 2025 already pushing affordability. But we need Congress to greenlight a full HUD SBIR, turning empty lots, old warehouses, and dead-end parking slabs into homes for workers, not speculators.

In short, SBIR is Phase I: design; Phase II: build; Phase III: scale, with prizes for those who hit price, speed, and energy targets. USDA’s rural SBIR has upcoming cycles we can earmark for starter-home prototypes; HUD has piloted innovation grants, but Congress should create a full HUD SBIR for cities.

Here’s the kicker: we tie the money to slashing red tape. No zoning reform, no funds. Cities and counties need consistent guidelines: by-right approvals for small homes, no lot-size nonsense above 2,500 square feet, no parking minimums near transit, fees capped at 3% of costs. Reward builders under 500 employees (better yet, under 100) who deliver fast. Under 120 days to occupancy, and cheap, with bonuses for sub-$125k homes. This isn’t a handout; it’s a race. Just like the Erie Canal turned a bankrupt merchant’s sketch into a national artery, SBIR can turn small builders into the architects of a new American Dream.

We’ve done the impossible before. We dug a 363-mile ditch by hand, no dynamite, no excuses. If we can build canals, railroads, and the internet, we can build homes for working families. It’s time to drain the zoning swamp and let innovators lead the way.

Act 4: Bureaucracy Reform – No Reform, No Funds!

(Voice: Builder – Gruff, hands-on male, late 30s, with a tool-belt swagger and a fed-up edge, like a contractor who’s battled city hall and won. Background: Construction site bustle. Hammer strikes, saw whirs, gravel crunch, fading in and out.)

I’m a builder. I don’t wrestle swamps or blast limestone cliffs like those Erie Canal boys. My battleground’s worse: zoning codes, permit desks, and bureaucrats who think they’re gatekeepers to my toolbox. Those rules cost more than stone, and they’re crushing working families.

Take “by-right approvals.” Fancy term, simple idea: if my plans for a 600-square-foot starter home follow the zoning rules, such as lot size, height, and setbacks, I get my permit, no questions asked. No six-month hearings, no neighbors stonewalling, no planning board playing king. Just a quick check by a city clerk to confirm I’m legit, and I’m breaking ground in 30 days. Projects that fit the code skip the red tape.

Adam Smith nailed it in 1776: I don’t build homes out of charity, like some saintly carpenter. I build to make a living. But right now, the system’s rigged. Land’s pricier than gold, materials cost a fortune, and every permit hearing’s a shakedown. Build a 600-square-foot starter home? I’d lose my shirt. McMansions? That’s where the profit’s at. So that’s what gets built, while young folks like that teacher in Act 2 get priced out.

Here’s the fix: homes should cost twice the median income, like in the 1960s. Twelve thousand against fifty-six hundred. Today, with incomes at 84 grand, that means $150,000 homes. Not subsidies, not studies; actual affordability. And the only way there? Competition, unleashed by draining the zoning swamp.

Enter the rule: No reform, no funds. Want federal SBIR cash to spark those starter homes? Cities and counties sign a Housing Reform MOU or get nothing. That means: By-right approvals. Capped fees. 30-day permits. Lot sizes under 2,500 sq ft. No parking minimums near transit. Five-foot setbacks. Pattern books. 120-day to occupancy.

This ain’t about gutting safety codes. Fire, seismic, egress stay tight. Fair housing rules stand. But the games? Done. Only reform zones get SBIR grants. Extra reforms, like lot splits or ADUs everywhere, earn a scoring boost, say 1.2x. We’ve seen it work: the “Montana Miracle,” where the state response limited local governments’ power to impose costly development restrictions, and Texas’ permit streamlining. Scale the concepts nationally, and we change the cost curve.

Government’s job is to protect life, liberty, and property for working people. Today, that means clearing the path so regular folks can own a home, not just rent from some corporate landlord king. This is our Erie Canal. We need to cut through red tape, not rock. No reform, no funds.

Let’s get to work.

Counterarguments: Facing the Skeptics

“$150,000 homes are impossible.”

Not everywhere. Land is cheap in many small cities and rural markets. Factory-built modules, like LEGO homes, are built off-site, cutting labor and waste; new methods can trim material costs. The target isn’t San Francisco high-rises. It’s starter homes where land and rules allow them. The goal is a repeatable $150k path, not a one-off miracle.

“Local governments won’t reform.”

Tie money to reform and priorities move. No reform, no funds. Cities sign a Housing Reform MOU: by-right approvals, capped fees, fast permits, or they sit out. We’ve already seen states streamline reviews and allow more small homes. Put the carrots where the gates are.

“This is a handout.”

SBIR isn’t charity; it’s a race. Phase I designs, Phase II prototypes, Phase III scales with private capital. Builders win by delivering price and speed, not by lobbying for special favors. That’s competition with a finish line that matters.

“Cheap homes will tank values and crowd neighborhoods.”

Small homes done well stabilize ownership and add options without chaos. Pattern books keep design coherent. ADUs and small lots add gentle density. More neighbors, not high-rises.

“We can’t afford this.”

We can’t afford not to. The canal was audacious for its day; it paid for itself in growth. A national SBIR pilot is modest compared to the programs we already run, and it targets the one lever that drops costs for everyone: supply at the starter tier.

Every big American project sounded like madness. Until it didn’t.

We, the People – Our Canal, Our Moment

We, the People, carry a lot at once: wages trail the bills, healthcare scares the insured, debt nibbles every paycheck, childcare rivals tuition, heat and light outpace our raises.

But housing affordability is our biggest opportunity. Businesses can’t pay livable wages if the cost of living keeps outstripping revenue. Workers can’t save for retirement or have babies if they can’t afford a house to sleep in. More than anything, Americans need food on the table and heat in the house.

If we are to open the door to opportunity, housing is the hinge. Fix the hinge, and the door swings freely.

Think of that teacher in Act 2, grading by day, tutoring by night, rowing a tissue-paper boat while the Dream drifts away. Think of the builder in Act 4, fighting fiefdoms of permits, ready to put up the homes she can actually buy.

They’re not asking for favors. They’re asking for a fair doorway. Our grandparents had it: a house only twice a family’s income. Today, the ratio is more than double that. The doorway is slamming.

This is our Erie Canal moment. In 1817, a bankrupt merchant’s prison essays sparked a 363-mile cut through forest, swamp, and stone, paying the nation back many times over. Now we cut through paper, not rock.

The tool is competition: a Small Business Innovation Research program, or SBIR for housing, racing to deliver $150,000 starter homes. And the rule is simple: no reform, no funds. By-right approvals. Capped fees. Fast permits. Pattern books. Public trackers. Competition and conditions that support changing the market for working Americans.

We dug a continent-shaping canal with shovels and black powder. We can clear a pathway to ownership with pens and political will.

Housing is our canal. Open the gates. Build the doorway.

May God bless the builders, the trades, and the teachers, and God bless the United States of America.

Music from #Uppbeathttps://uppbeat.io/t/ceridwen-mccooey/the-peacockLicense code: PLAJBRCEHGUZQDVS

Our neighbors say they love their EVs. We take a test drive. They’re quick. They’re quiet. They’re fun!

Then the facts elbow in. EVs were sold as being cheaper, but in America, they aren’t. Many lose value fast. Some models shed close to half their value in a year. Sales have flattened. They’ll likely spike before the federal credit expires September 30, then sag after.

Some of us want to love EVs, but something isn’t quite right.

Is it the range, shorter in winter, the waits at chargers, or that stations aren’t where we need them?

Maybe none of those. Maybe the cars are designed to be replaced, not to last.

So our question:

Is this new tech built for my life, or for the next sale?

Curtain. Scene One. The 1,000-Hour Lightbulb.

Close your eyes and step onto a city street in the late 1920s. Windows glow like jewels. Streetcars hum. Night is no longer darkness. By 1930, nearly nine in ten urban and nonfarm rural homes had electricity. About one in ten farms did. Light is not a luxury. It is the texture of modern life.

Enter stage left.

At first, bulbs lasted a long time. Early tungsten lamps often burned well past fifteen hundred hours, many to two thousand and beyond. Families loved that. Companies that had built factories did not. In Germany, Osram’s sales fell from sixty three million bulbs in fiscal year 1922 to 1923 to twenty eight million the next year.

On December 23, 1924, the leading manufacturers met in Geneva to form what we now call the Phoebus cartel. Osram, Philips, Compagnie des Lampes, and General Electric’s overseas network joined. Its global reach was unusual for the time. By early 1925, they set a benchmark of a one thousand hour life for household bulbs, down from the fifteen hundred to two thousand hours common before. Shorter than families expected, and exactly what manufacturers needed.

This was not sloppy work. It was engineering with a new purpose. Each factory shipped samples to a central laboratory in Switzerland. Technicians tested life spans against the benchmark. A company paid a fine if a bulb lasted too short or too long for its class. Reliability became real, but a different kind of real. It was no longer ‘this bulb will endure.’

It was equipment that reliably failed on schedule.

Consumers adjusted fast. Every brand converged near one thousand hours. Burnout stopped feeling like a defect and started feeling like life. A 1927 Tokyo Electric memo to the cartel reported a fivefold jump in sales. More failures meant more purchases. The cartel redesigned the market not with a breakthrough that gave people more, but with a standard that made sure they would buy again soon.

At the same time, the manufacturers claimed progress. They said shorter life meant brighter light and better efficiency. At a higher cost. The new standard raised turnover and margins and punished any member tempted to make a bulb that lasted too long.

Companies got paid for replacements. They were not just selling a lightbulb. They were selling this lightbulb and all your next lightbulbs on a schedule.

The world has limits. The cartel did not last. Patents expired. Members fought. World War II shattered coordination. In the United States, courts scrutinized General Electric and its partners for collusive control of the lamp business. In 1949, a federal district court found that General Electric monopolized the incandescent lamp industry in violation of section 2 of the Sherman Act.

A tool’s death isn’t a breakdown. It’s the quiet moment it stops serving your life. The market plans what you will buy next. Some call that progress.

We, the People, need governance to stop failure by design.

When we set standards, we should ask: Is this new tech built for my life, or for the next sale?

Humanity, Existence, and Time

We miss what being is because we forget time.

Life is not a thing on a shelf. It moves. Picture a clearing in a green mountain forest. We step in already involved, tools in hand, neighbors around, choices pressing in. Our kind of life is being-there. We show up to a world that already matters.

Meaning comes through time. Past, present, and future braid every moment. We carry what has been, deal with what is, and anticipate what could be. A rancher does not just cut hay; they remember last year’s rain, read today’s moisture, and watch the three-day forecast. Time makes the work make sense because time sets the limits.

The hard edge of time is death. Not only ours. Tools die too. Death frames our choices. Faced clearly, it does not make life grim; it makes it ours. It calls us to live with purpose.

In that clearing, a tool “lives” when it disappears into the work. It “dies” when it fails our project and forces itself into attention. Philosophy calls the first ready-to-hand; the second is an object in the way.

A tool is alive for us only while it supports our next possibilities. It may not die in a crash. It dies when it stops supporting our lives. Some would schedule that death and call it progress. That is why we need rules that resist quiet, coordinated failure.

In tech, death is not when the device stops working; it is when it stops working for you. So, what does this philosophical lens reveal about our devices today?

Curtain. Scene Two. Apple and Failing Batteries

Winter 2017. Your phone feels slower. Not creek-dropped slow, just sticky. Screens load like they are pulling a sled. Benchmarks confirm what our thumbs already know. Older iPhones with worn batteries run below design speed and perk up after a battery swap. A developer posts the charts. The story catches fire.

Enter stage right.

Earlier that year, Apple pushed a software update that changed how the phone handled power. When a battery aged, or when cold or a low charge cut peak power, the system quietly managed performance to prevent sudden shutoffs. No pop-up. No heads-up. A rule under the hood to smooth over an old battery’s limits. Later, Apple explained the machinery and added a setting so the user could see it and choose to turn it off or replace the battery.

One version of the story called this protection. Better a slower phone than a dead one in your pocket. Another said it felt like a schedule, set without consent, that made aging devices feel obsolete. Apple apologized, cut the out-of-warranty battery price from 79 dollars to 29 for 2018, and promised more transparency. They added battery-health readouts and a switch to disable the slowdown.

Regulators and courts weighed in. In France, consumer authorities fined Apple 25 million euros for failing to inform users that a software update could reduce performance. In the United States, 34 states reached a 113 million dollar settlement over alleged misrepresentations about batteries and slowdowns (without admitting wrongdoing). A federal class action settled for up to 500 million dollars on related claims (again, without admitting wrongdoing).

This is not an attack on Apple. Here is what matters for our piece.

A battery is mortal chemistry. In the cold, it cannot deliver the same peak power. With age, it cannot hold the same charge. The software’s job was to stretch usefulness. Keep the tool “alive” for your day by preventing blackouts.

But the choice was hidden. People felt like their tools were dying because they no longer supported the day’s work. Only after the controversy did Apple present the controls and the explanation. Starting in 2018, Apple and its customers quietly renegotiated the tool’s life.

A tool dies when it stops serving you. We need governance to stop failure by design. When choices are hidden, tools die for us. Is this new tech built for my life, or for the next sale?

Curtain. Scene Three. The Electric Vehicle.

Combustion vehicles age as a negotiation.

Yes, parts wear. But you can rebuild, swap, and refresh. Engines come out. New rings go in. Transmissions get replaced. That is why Americans keep vehicles so long. The average age is nearly thirteen years, and many go far beyond that with routine upkeep. With maintenance, a truck that is twenty years old can still deliver the same range and near original power. The fuel tank did not shrink. Compression and fueling are serviceable systems. Keep the machine fit and it keeps carrying your life.

Electric vehicles age as a countdown.

EVs run on two clocks. First, the seasonal clock. In real cold, range drops because the cabin needs heat and the chemistry slows. Controlled tests around twenty degrees Fahrenheit found some EVs lost roughly forty percent of their range with the heater on. Reporting from recent cold snaps shows a 10 to 36 percent hit depending on model and use. Preheating and heat pumps help, but they don’t erase the penalty. When spring returns, most of that loss is temporary.

Second, the chemical clock. Lithium ion packs fade slowly. Large fleet datasets put average loss near two percent per year, and many packs are usable for twelve to fifteen years in moderate climates. Most makers back this with eight year, 100,000 to 150,000 mile battery warranties that guarantee about seventy percent capacity within the term.

Many owners, especially those who live in warm climates, will never hit a hard stop. Average degradation is slow and largely predictable, and mild winter penalties are manageable with preheating and heat pumps.

A combustion engine is an open ended project. Repairs may stop penciling out at some point, but the owner has the choice.

An EV is a timed performance. One day the battery will no longer support a trip across the state in the cold. You might be able to replace the pack, but depending on model and supply, it can take weeks or months.

Unlike the secret cartel of the 1920s, today’s EV countdown isn’t an illegal conspiracy. It’s a design trade-off. But the choices nonetheless steer consumers toward the next sale.

Some argue that mandating longevity and a ‘right to repair’ for a nascent technology like EVs would be a catastrophic mistake. It would saddle innovators with the burden of supporting old models, lock in today’s inferior battery chemistry, and dramatically raise the upfront cost of vehicles. But if that argument is true, we shouldn’t be nationally trying to transition to this nascent technology, and there certainly shouldn’t be federal incentives trying to push us in that direction.

This is not a choice between longevity and innovation.

Our goal is not to freeze technology in place, but to make it modular. We should favor swappable, upgradable battery modules intended to achieve a durable chassis that serves a family for twenty years, and a battery system that can be renewed with the best technology available a decade from now. It aligns innovation with ownership as well as sales.

Neither is morally better. A tool dies the day it no longer supports your being. For combustion, when the repair math fails. For EVs, when winter, aging, and route outgrow the pack you have, unless you choose to reset the clock.

If aging becomes a schedule, choose renewal over replacement. Is this new tech built for my life, or for the next sale?

And That Brings Us To Governance

Here’s the transparency. The federal clean-vehicle tax credits end after September 30, 2025. Expect a rush before the deadline and a sag after.

So what should We, the People ask for next?

Tools die when they stop serving us. We need governance that stops failure by design and points incentives at renewal, not replacement.

First, make a right to repair for every car, combustion or electric. Owners and independent shops need parts, tools, and software to keep vehicles alive. States are already moving: Massachusetts’ 2020 law is cleared to be enforced after a federal court dismissal, and Maine voters approved a repair law in 2023. Lock this in nationwide.

Second, write longevity into EVs. Require clear battery-health readouts at sale and resale, enable module-level repair with transparent parts pricing, and set minimum parts-availability windows. If the battery is the heart of an EV, policy should make a heart transplant possible without games.

Third, pursue and deter quiet coordination. The lesson of the 1,000-hour bulb is simple. When firms profit most from replacement, innovation masks decline. Antitrust scrutiny and transparent standards are pro-durability, not anti-business.

Finally, fix the incentive mix. Replace the purchase credit with longevity credits. Support certified battery refurbish or replace programs. Reward vehicles that hit durability milestones with verified pack health. Seed a secondary market for factory-remanufactured modules. Tilt progress toward renewal and individual choice instead of the next sale.

The success of this policy could be measured by a 15% increase in the average age of EVs on the road within a decade, and the emergence of a secondary market where refurbished battery modules cost less than 50% of a full pack replacement. If, after 10 years, the average EV lifespan hasn’t increased and module repair remains niche and expensive, the policy has failed to achieve its goal.

Right now, Americans are asking. Is this new tech built for my life, or the next sale?

Let’s champion the ability for individual Americans to choose a tool that supports their lives.

May God bless the United States of America.

Belief vs. Biology: Is a Sustainable Environment a Human Right?

This week, the world’s highest court spoke. The United Nations’ top judges issued a sweeping opinion: nations might violate international law if they fail to act on climate change (Associated Press, July 23, 2025, Molly Quell and Mike Corder reported). The International Court of Justice (ICJ) opinion posited that a sustainable environment is a human right. And that nations harmed by climate change might be entitled to reparations. The ruling came in response to a campaign by Vanuatu, a small island nation slowly sinking beneath rising seas.

The court’s word carries no binding weight. No country must follow. No law compels it. No court can enforce it. It levies no sanctions, no penalties, and no compliance demands. Though not binding, ICJ opinions shape international norms and give weight to future legal and diplomatic efforts.

The ICJ argued that inaction threatening human health, safety, or survival could violate international law. It cements the idea that environmental protection is a human rights issue. Court President Yuji Iwasawa called climate change ‘an existential problem of planetary proportions.’

The big idea is simple: if clean air, a livable climate, and ecological stability keep us alive and dignified, then they are human rights.

…

This ruling feels detached from reality. We need to dig deeper.

So this week’s question: Is a sustainable environment a human right?

We Have to Start at the Beginning. What is it to be “Human”?

Before we decide whether a “sustainable environment” is a human right, we need to ask a deeper question.

What is it to be human?

A courtroom will tell you a human is a natural person, Homo sapiens, endowed with dignity and moral status. That’s just a shallow definition. Strip it away, and the reality is older and harder.

A human isn’t a symbol or a legal category. A human is a biological creature. We arrive slick with blood. We hunt, dig, plant, and tear up what we need to live. We kill both plants and animals to survive. When our crops fail, we raid new ground. When danger comes, we fight or we flee. That instinct carried us through ice ages, famines, and wars. It still drives the hand that guides the harvester combine or closes a factory gate against cheaper imports. Biology never rests.

No matter how much philosophy or law we try to layer on top, we can’t escape that fact.

But we’re also unlike any other animal. We believe. We invent things no other animal can imagine: laws, borders, rights, money, marriage. Those beliefs let strangers cooperate by the millions. We write constitutions, build courts, and carve order out of chaos. But belief is fragile. When enough people stop believing, currencies collapse, treaties shatter, and thrones fall.

These two forces share the same skull. Biology pushes us to survive at any cost. Belief tells us to restrain that push for the greater good. Sometimes they align. Often they clash.

The International Court of Justice calls a “sustainable environment” a human right. That is a statement of belief, not a law of nature. It says humans must throttle back the internal engines that feed, warm, and defend us. On paper, the duty sounds noble. But in the flesh, it hits every nerve wired for survival.

Humans haven’t been here long in Earth’s timeline. Yet we survived ice ages, famines, and wars by adapting and producing. By overwhelming problems with force. Not by scaling back.

If the obligation demands we shrink the engines that power modern life, the conflict isn’t legal. It’s primal. We are watching belief walk into the ring with biology.

The court asks us to trade proven tools of survival for a moral blueprint still waiting on bricks and rebar. That trade is not impossible, but it will not be easy, and biology will keep the score.

So let’s test this idea against history, starting with the Marshall Plan.

The Marshall Plan

The United States launched the Marshall Plan in 1948. After World War II, Europe lay in ruins. Factories were silent, currencies worthless, and cities hollowed out. Communist parties gained ground, and Washington saw the danger.

We poured more than $13 billion, over $130 billion in today’s dollars, into Western Europe. The program remains a rare case study of large‑scale aid that actually worked: it restored stability, jump‑started shattered economies, and lowered the risk of renewed violence. But the motive was not ideology alone. The United States also needed solvent trading partners to buy American goods and help anchor a fledgling rules‑based order.

Europe needed security; we needed industrial muscle. America cranked up production of steel, food, fuel, and machinery at a pace that could hold the continent together. The emissions were massive, but the overriding question was survival, not cleanliness. We had to build fast enough to keep Europe from falling apart.

Look at the Netherlands. German fortifications and Allied bombing leveled whole districts of a city named The Hague and displaced more than 130,000 residents. After the war, America churned out the steel and cement that rebuilt the city, and the smokestacks poured emissions into the sky. Today, The Hague is the home of the same International Court of Justice that ruled a sustainable environment is a human right.

Marshall Plan funds of about $1.1 billion, the highest per‑capita aid in Western Europe, paid for coal, cement, and specialized equipment to the Netherlands. We rebuilt ports, factories, and housing stock. Within a decade, the city had gone from “largest building site in Europe” to a functioning capital again.

Would we generate more industrial and manufacturing capability to rebuild The Hague today, if necessary? Absolutely, yes. Even though the court that sits there ruled that the resulting emissions might violate international law. The Marshall Plan demonstrated what happens when biology takes precedence over belief.

But of course, nothing is black and white. The ICJ opinion looks forward, not back. It doesn’t punish the Marshall Plan or any past policy.

Let’s look at another story.

The Right to Clean Air: Delhi, India, 2019

In 2019, the air in Delhi turned poisonous. Schools shut down. Authorities grounded flights. Visibility dropped to near zero. Emergency rooms filled with children who couldn’t stop coughing. Construction halted. People wore masks long before COVID made it normal. The Indian government called it a public health emergency.

This event was the predictable result of crop burning, unchecked industrial pollution, vehicle emissions, and seasonal weather patterns that trapped smog like a lid over the city. It happened every year, and every year, people died.

Then, inside India, in one of the most polluted cities on Earth, belief overruled biology in court.

Biology said: Adapt or suffer. People were coughing blood. Kids were developing lifelong respiratory damage. Entire populations were living in a toxic cloud, and from a purely biological standpoint, they should have either fled the region or accepted the toll as the cost of living.

But they didn’t. Citizens sued.

In 2021, the Indian Supreme Court ruled that the right to life included the right to clean air as a binding constitutional right. The court ordered governments to coordinate, enforce pollution controls, and protect public health.

For India, this point wasn’t woke ideology. It was survival. No emissions cuts would fix it overnight, and Delhi still struggles with pollution, but the ruling forced governments to act. Environmental collapse became a human dignity violation, not a policy failure.

Follow-up data show that the ruling was more than symbolic. Since the court’s directives and India’s National Clean Air Programme kicked in, Delhi’s air is about fifteen percent cleaner today. Still triple the safe limit, yes. But every fraction means fewer asthma attacks, fewer cardiac emergencies, and thousands of school days reclaimed each winter. Belief did not cleanse the air overnight. But it forced measurable gains. It’s proof that a legal idea tied to enforcement and money can bend biology in the right direction.

But Now, the Brutal Truth

Even if America reduced its emissions today, would climate change stop? No. Even if we cut all emissions to zero tomorrow, the planet wouldn’t stop warming. Not right away. Not for decades.

Carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. What we’ve already emitted, along with China, India, Europe, and the rest, is already baked in. That legacy carbon keeps trapping heat, melting ice, and driving storms, no matter what we do now.

And we aren’t the only emitter. We are currently responsible for about 13–15% of global emissions, depending on how you count. China emits more than double that. India’s emissions are rising fast. Developing nations, in total, now emit more than developed ones. And we are improving. We’ve cut emissions from electricity production by 35% since 2007.

But even if the United States went to zero, the warming would continue. Sea levels would keep rising. Places like Vanuatu would still drown, just more slowly.

That’s not an excuse for doing nothing. But we need to be honest.

Cutting emissions isn’t a rescue plan. It’s a brake. It slows the damage. It might help future generations, but it doesn’t undo the past. And it doesn’t save the people standing in the water right now.

If we’re serious about survival, emissions cuts aren’t enough. We need adaptation. We need infrastructure. And we need to stop pretending courtroom declarations can replace concrete, steel, and hard physical work.

We survive by adapting, producing, and overwhelming problems with force, not by scaling back. Countries like Vanuatu need our help, not promises made in cities we rebuilt with industrial might that pumped emissions into the air.

What’s It Going to Be?

We began with a court opinion and a question of rights. We trekked through biology, belief, wartime industry, and Delhi’s burning air to see how those rights collide with reality. Now the path loops back to you, the listener.

Here is our problem, simplified: believing that a stable climate is a human right does not cool a single degree of ocean or raise a single stretch of road. Biology will continue to test us, and belief alone will fail that test.

Our solution is equally plain: we need to turn belief into infrastructure. We need to cash our chips out as reinforced coastlines, relocated villages, cleaner grids, and resilient economies. Engineers first, lawyers later.

Every nation, especially the ones with means, has a choice. We can cling to declarations and watch biology take its toll, or we can pick up the tools that have saved us before and aim them at the new threat. History will judge us by reformed infrastructure, not by the eloquence of our court filings.

Belief may bind us together, but it will not overcome biology. Belief sets the goal. Biology will keep the score and decide the winner.

So this week’s question stands: Is a sustainable environment a human right? And if we say yes, what will we build to prove it?

May God bless the United States of America. May we find the resolve to build the consensus to adapt.

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State Government Funding Is a Paradox

State governments do important work, but too often, they’re boxed in. If we want better roads, stronger schools, and healthier communities, we don’t need to cut federal support. We need to change how it works.

Fragmented control kills leadership and accountability. Federal and state officials often share authority with different priorities. That overlap creates seams: delays, miscommunication, and gaps where problems fall through. Even an imperfect decision-maker, if clearly responsible, can move faster than a tangle of agencies working at cross purposes. Clarity beats complexity.

Effective leadership means guidance, resourcing, results, and accountability. To orient in the right direction, there’s one mission, one leader, one line of authority.

State power hasn’t been lost in a courtroom or an election. It’s been hollowed out by how the money works. Federal grants now pay for most of what states do, including roads, education, agriculture, healthcare, and law enforcement.

That might sound like help. But if we look closer, we see that money comes with strings, and those strings are a leash. Voters elect one set of leaders. Then a second, unelected set inside federal agencies writes the rules through grant conditions, deadlines, and compliance forms. The people don’t know who to hold accountable.

So this week we ask: What would it take to make state government matter again?

After all, We the People was never meant to describe a bureaucracy. It was a declaration of self-government. Government of, by, and for the people. Not federal control, but local judgment. Not compliance. Purpose.

The Problem: Compliance Masquerading as Governance

Every year, taxpayers send vast sums to Washington. That money returns to the states, but not freely. It comes with instructions: mandates, formulas, eligibility rules, and layers of accounting. States must apply for federal grants, and they don’t always win. In theory, it’s a partnership. In practice, it’s a transaction with terms that limit what states can do.

State leaders don’t really govern under this model. They implement. Legislators may pass budgets, but terms are set in federal agencies. Local needs or voter demands don’t shape priorities. Instead, federal guidance, often years in advance, sets the conditions.

This isn’t always malicious. The intent is to standardize, promote fairness, and ensure funds are spent wisely. But good intentions don’t guarantee good outcomes. Over time, this system rewards compliance over creativity, and risk avoidance over responsiveness. Innovation dies in the red tape.

Federal power expands under the banner of help; state autonomy shrinks under the burden of compliance. What looks like governance is just administration. What looks like support is control.

The Slow Death of Local Judgment

State governments must be able to set their own priorities, shaped by the needs of their communities. For a long time, they did. As examples, education, transportation, and agriculture were handled almost entirely at the state level. States had less money, but more authority.

Before the 1960s, states ran their own public schools with minimal interference. That changed with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which expanded the federal role. The funding helped rural areas, but it came with strings. Testing mandates and performance targets now shape classroom policy, but national academic outcomes haven’t meaningfully improved, especially in reading and math.

Transportation followed the same pattern. After the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, federal funding brought federal design standards, environmental review processes, and route constraints. Local projects came to depend on federal approval. States could no longer freely set priorities.

Agriculture shifted, too. Local extension offices once worked directly with farmers to adapt to local conditions. That changed with the rise of USDA-administered programs. Now, farmers make decisions based on eligibility for crop insurance, conservation compliance, and commodity subsidies.

One of the clearest effects? Instead of a variety of food crops, the Midwest now grows mostly two: corn and soybeans. Neither is meant for direct human consumption, but they’re the safest bet under federal policy. The heartland used to grow more vegetables; food for people, not for fuel or feed.

To sum up: kids don’t run in PE because they’re prepping for federally required benchmarks, but math scores didn’t go up.

Most roads got safer, but Wyoming got the Snow Chi Minh Trail. It’s I-80’s scenic southern route, built against local advice, now one of the windiest, snowiest, most shutdown-prone highways in America.

And all our food now contains federally subsidized corn sugar. A 2016 study in JAMA Internal Medicine found that Americans whose diets were highest in subsidized calories had significantly higher rates of obesity, high blood sugar, and inflammation.

None of this is inherently malicious. Some of it works. Some doesn’t. But the pattern is clear: as federal dollars expand standardization, local authority shrinks.

The First Stand for States’ Rights

This tension isn’t new.

June and July, 1798. The Fifth Congress of the United States, under President John Adams, passed a series of four laws that became known as the Alien and Sedition Acts. Congress claimed the laws were meant to restrict the activities of foreign residents and silence dangerous speech.

In reality, they made it a crime to criticize the federal government. If an American wrote something unflattering about the president or Congress, they could be fined or jailed. This wasn’t a fringe proposal. They passed and became law. And people were actually arrested, including congressmen, newspaper editors, and publishers.

Now imagine you’re a state leader: a governor, a legislator. You’ve just joined this new American experiment. The Constitution is still fresh. The idea of a federal government this powerful is still new. Suddenly, it starts to look a little too much like the old one you just fought a war to escape. The kind of federal control that reminds you why we added a Second Amendment in the first place.

Even Thomas Jefferson, the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence, and James Madison, the principal author of the Constitution, started to worry. And they didn’t just stand by.

Jefferson drafted the Kentucky Resolutions in October 1798 and quietly passed them to political allies George Nicholas and Wilson Cary Nicholas in Kentucky. The legislature adopted them on November 16.

A few weeks later, Madison followed suit. He drafted the Virginia Resolutions in secret and worked behind the scenes to move them through the legislature. They passed on December 24, just in time for Christmas.

Both men kept their involvement quiet. Jefferson was Vice President. Madison was still in Congress. They knew that open authorship could trigger political backlash, or even charges under the laws they were challenging.

Their resolutions argued that the states had created the federal government, not the other way around, and therefore retained powers not explicitly given away. They claimed the states had both a right and a duty to declare federal laws unconstitutional if those laws went too far.

The resolutions didn’t carry legal weight, but they planted a seed that grew into later doctrines of nullification and state sovereignty.

They weren’t perfect. The resolutions were later cited by those pushing secession at the onset of the Civil War. But in the moment, they were a clear stand for state autonomy against federal overreach.

Most states rejected the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions. But the ideas stuck, and they helped carry the next Democratic-Republican candidate, Thomas Jefferson, into the presidency. When Jefferson took office, he let the Alien and Sedition Acts expire and pardoned those who had been convicted under them. He even returned some of the fines. He erased the laws and made sure their damage didn’t linger.

Today, federal control looks different. It doesn’t come through dramatic laws. It comes through funding and the rules that come with it.

Some of that funding does real good: roads, hospitals, schools. But the more Washington funds, the more it dictates. And the more it dictates, the less space state leaders have to lead.

Federal agencies don’t see day-to-day realities clearly. They’re too distant to make the right call, but they still write the rules.

Maybe there’s a better way.

A Better Way: Fund Goals, Not Control

We need a better way to structure federal support. One that honors constitutional balance, improves real-world outcomes, and respects state autonomy. A model built on four principles: guidance, resourcing, results, and accountability.

Guidance doesn’t mean silence. Congress should set national priorities through laws and budgets. But those broad directions often get buried in red tape, splintered into grant conditions, reporting mandates, and timelines divorced from local realities.

Instead of prescribing how to act, guidance should focus on what we aim to achieve. That means setting shared outcomes, not universal methods, and trusting states, with their varied geographies, cultures, and capacities, to chart their own course. Federal oversight still matters, especially to protect civil rights and prevent abuse, but oversight is not the same as control.

Federal agencies don’t need to vanish. They need to collaborate. Agencies and state leaders should jointly define goals and align their work to meet them. A federal office doesn’t have to report to the state, but it should recognize the state’s voice as legitimate within its borders.

Missouri and Illinois might pursue different agricultural policies. California and Nevada may diverge on environmental rules. Different is okay. A joint state and federal agency team making progress and achieving the goals matters more than methods. The goals are the decisive element.

…

Resourcing

Goals without resources are empty. If states are going to lead, they need the tools to act: funding, usable data, and flexibility. Resourcing isn’t about writing checks. It’s about building capacity and letting strategy guide how dollars are spent instead of bureaucracy.

In a better system, as long as states pursue the shared goals, they should be free to reallocate resources as needed. Leadership works adaptively, not by spreadsheets.

…

Results

People don’t care if a program met its compliance checklist. Not how many forms were submitted, or whether a benchmark was technically met. They care about bridges and infrastructure, if the ER had a doctor, and whether the school taught their kid to read.

Measuring results is harder than measuring process. It requires trust, collaboration, and the humility to admit when something isn’t working. It takes courage to admit we don’t achieve a goal, because it makes us accountable.

Still, we have to measure results against the goals we set. Not because data is perfect. But if we don’t ask whether we succeeded, the system becomes self-justifying.

…

Accountability

In sum, we have the decisive element in place: shared goals. We have the resources to achieve those goals and the flexibility to move them as needed. We have the courage to admit when we succeed, and when we don’t.

We have set the conditions for accountability. When a program fails today, no one knows who to blame. States point to federal rules; agencies point to state mismanagement. When authority aligns with responsibility, voters know exactly who to hold accountable.

Simply Saying We Believe in States’ Rights Isn’t Good Enough

We started with a paradox. State support has become federal control. But the solution isn’t less support; it's smarter support. Support that restores autonomy, honors local judgment, and delivers real outcomes.

We can’t just say we believe in states’ rights. We must prove it. Set goals. Trust states. Measure outcomes. Then hold leaders accountable. Only then will state government matter again.

Government of the people means trusting local judgment more than distant control.

At the same time, federal agencies bring expertise and capability that states don’t have.

Rather than cutting federal agencies that seem to be underperforming, we need to reorient our approach.

Set joint goals. Trust states. Measure what truly matters. Demand accountability.

What would it take to make state government matter again?

May God bless the United States of America, that government of the people might once again serve the people.

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We Don’t Build a Country on Things We Can Touch

Not really.

We build it on belief.

We believe a piece of paper can be worth a dollar. We believe strangers can govern us. We believe that if we follow the rules, justice and liberty will protect us.

None of that is real, not like gravity or fire.

But it works because enough of us believe. That’s what holds a nation together. Not armies. Not buildings. Not slogans. Belief. We think institutions hold society together. But it’s the other way around. We hold them together with belief.

When nothing is real, belief gives institutions value.

Today, we ask, if justice isn’t real, what is its market price?

And I don’t mean metaphorically. I mean literally. What do Americans pay out of pocket to achieve the justice our Constitution promises?

Money Isn’t Real

Money isn’t real. Not like gravity. Not like death. You can’t drop it on your foot. You can’t breathe it. It has no weight, no heat, no life.

Its value depends on whether others believe in it.

Even the bills in our wallets mean nothing. They’re just cotton paper and ink. And most money isn’t even physical. It’s digital, just zeroes and ones on a computer somewhere. If no one believes those numbers are worth anything, they aren’t.

But when enough of us believe in them, they become real.

When we go to the store to buy eggs and butter for breakfast, we might use a debit card for our purchase. We give the store some of our digital zeroes and ones for real eggs that we can eat.

In this way, money facilitates society. It’s a fiction that organizes everything from breakfast to war.

Again, money isn’t real. Even if we think it matters, that’s not enough. It only matters if others think it does. If we stop believing, our money is worthless.

But because enough of us believe in it, belief itself creates the value. The belief makes a dollar worth a dollar, and not just what the cotton paper would suggest.

This principle is society’s basis.

In the same way that money only has value because other people believe it has value, our institutions only have value when enough of us believe in them.

Our institutions aren’t real outside of our shared beliefs. They become real only because we act like they are. Religion, law, the stock market, America, and the Constitution exist only in the human mind, but once enough of us believe, we begin to shape the world.

Our churches can only bring relief to the needy in our communities if enough of us believe not in the rituals, but in the responsibility to care for the needy. It’s not a physical reality. It’s a collective commitment. Shared belief only matters if it produces real outcomes. We measure the value of our churches in meals for the needy, addiction recovery programs, volunteer hours, and youth mentoring. If those disappear, the steeple means nothing.

Our law can only bring order to society if enough of us believe it applies to all of us. If we don’t believe the law applies to all of us, order dissolves. We measure the effectiveness of law by disputes resolved without violence, access to and fair treatment in court, and access to counsel no matter your income.

Belief is the foundation of our institutions. When enough of us share these beliefs, our institutions gain value.

The Day George Washington Gave the Army Back

We think institutions hold society together. But it’s the other way around. We hold them together with belief.

Scene: December 23, 1783. Annapolis, Maryland. The war is over. The Constitution doesn’t exist yet. George Washington entered Congress to resign his military commission.

Everyone held their breath. Washington had led the Continental Army through eight brutal years of war. He was a war hero: beloved, feared, and trusted. If he wanted to become king, no one could stop him.

Rumors of Washington’s intentions to give up power had already crossed the Atlantic. King George III reportedly told the American-born artist Benjamin West that if Washington gave up power, he would be the greatest man in the world.

The American people loved him. He was a star. He didn’t have to give up power. He could be king. The night before the ceremony, they threw him a party. Washington “danced in every set, so that the ladies might have the pleasure of dancing with him, or as it has since been handsomely expressed, get a touch of him.”

But instead of claiming fame and power, he gave it back to the people. America would owe allegiance to no king, and George Washington believed in America. He would not become king.

The next day, he stood before the Confederation Congress, a weak, fragile institution barely holding the states together, and gave up command. To complete his tear-filled address, he said … “Having now finished the work assigned me, I retire from the great theatre of action... and take my leave of all the employments of public life….”

He didn’t have to. He could have stayed in command.

Washington’s single act gave birth to civilian rule. A weak Congress became legitimate, not because it inherently had power, but because one man believed it should. And once Washington believed, others followed. Washington relinquishing command transferred his belief to his fellow Americans.

His belief in rule by the people gave value to the institution that became the Constitution. When James Madison and the other authors wrote the Constitution, they opened with an idea that didn’t exist in governance: ‘We the People of the United States.’ People stopped believing that the Almighty ordained rulers at birth because they came from a ruling family. They started believing people consent to governance for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The idea didn’t stop at the Potomac. It crossed the Atlantic. Less than ten years later, the French violently overthrew their monarchy. The streets of Paris ran red with blood. The Bastille fell. The people executed their king and queen. They refused to be subjects any longer. And it didn’t end in France. Across Europe, the old order trembled. Monarchies began to fall or reform. The divine right of kings gave way to constitutions, parliaments, and citizens.

The transfer of Washington’s belief in rule by the people to the Constitution is sharply evident. Where a king might believe primarily in order, people believe in justice. A king might believe in rules and obedience. People believe in liberty, protest, and the right to bear arms against their rulers.

His belief in rule by the people made the people believe in themselves.

Washington’s act powerfully illustrates how shared belief underpins our institutions. When we believe in an idea, we build institutions. When enough of us share that belief, those institutions gain value.

Of course, like money, we need to be able to measure this value. To measure justice, we need to pick something concrete and clear. We need measures that reflect real opportunity.

Measuring Ideas Like Liberty and Justice

Some think tanks say they can measure the payoff of our belief in the Constitution’s promises. They call their metrics “market quotes” on the value we assign to liberty, justice, and other national ideals.

Organizations like Freedom House publish global reports with titles like Freedom in the World. They attempt to track civil liberties and political rights across 195 countries. These reports have been cited for over 50 years.

But we should reject every proposed measure that comes from outside sources instead of the people. The people are the governed, and only the governed can say whether they are free. An external judge of internal values falls short.

Others suggest questionnaires, letting people rate their own experience. But surveys are subjective. If belief is real, it must leave a measurable trail. We must be able to measure our values like we measure the dollar.

So, how would we measure ideas like liberty and justice? Let’s consider justice. Justice has a dual meaning. It is equal treatment under the law, and it is access to fair opportunity, no matter where you were born.

Let’s consider two critical areas in society: housing and education. Why these two? Because where you live and what you learn directly determine the opportunities you have. Housing and education aren’t luxuries. They’re the foundation of fairness.

Genius hides in poverty. A child born in a trailer or housing project must succeed by structure, not by luck.

We need empirical data to measure whether we achieve our national goal of justice. If they are willing to work for it, a kid born in a trailer or project housing needs to be able to buy a house in a safe neighborhood with a good school for their children.

To measure our ability to achieve this goal, we need a test. To pass it, America needs a healthy supply of homes for first-time homebuyers that cost only double the household median income. The median cost for a house in 1960 was $11,900, when the median income was $5,600. The median household income in 2023 was $80,610. So a fair entry point today would be a home under $160,000.

Next, education.

Any loan a low-income student must take to attend a public college is a measurable price of fairness. That price tells us how far short we fall of our national ideal.

We need to track three numbers; each for first-time, full-time undergraduates from the bottom income quartile at in-state public colleges:

First, the average net price after grants: tuition, fees, living costs, minus all aid. If that price rises faster than family income, the system is failing.

Second, the average federal loan balance at graduation. If the poorest students graduate with the biggest debts, we have not achieved equal opportunity.

Third, the three-year default rate on those loans. If defaults are rising, the ladder of opportunity is breaking.

We Believe

When we believe in an idea, we build institutions.

When enough of us share our beliefs, our institutions gain value.

If money isn’t real…

If liberty and justice aren’t real…

If even America isn’t real...

Then our common belief is everything.

Led by George Washington, ‘We the People’ owe allegiance to no king. We believe in the America that is justice and liberty for free people.

Simple ideas, like access to housing and education for Americans no matter where they were born, are achievable. But we will not achieve our goals if we do not measure them.

Justice might not be physical, but its price, what ordinary people pay just to access fairness, is as real as any dollar.

So, if justice isn’t real, what is its market price?

May God bless the United States of America, as we work to ensure every American, rich or poor, has the chance to work, to succeed, and to prosper together.

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The One Big Beautiful Bill: A Poem

Our lives pass like shadows, despair takes root within us.

We convince ourselves property is our natural right; that we can own the land here before us, remaining when we are gone.

We guard it jealously, believing what we earn must remain ours alone.

We charge our leaders with duty: to defend our lives, our liberty, our property.

Yet to do so, we bury the unborn beneath our debt.

One generation fades, another rises. The earth endures; we are dust, mere travelers through a brief season.

We tax our days with worry and grief over troubles we might never see.

We borrow endlessly, debts stretching beyond bearing; chains placed silently upon shoulders yet unborn.

They never chose, never consented.

The dead hold no rights over the living, yet we, the living, pledge away a future’s harvest, earnings of lives not yet begun.

Theft, delayed.

When we pass, soon enough, what do we gain from our toil if all we leave behind is burden?

…

We say we protect property by cutting taxes. So our question: Can we protect what we own today by stealing from the unborn?

Debt Versus Property

Our lives pass like shadows, and despair grows in us. We tax our days and wring our hands with worry and grief over what may never come. No matter how hard we labor, what we own eventually passes to others. We arrive with nothing, leave with nothing, and gain nothing from our labor that we will take with us.

And it makes us worry.

Our humanity creates this problem. Aware of our smallness and short time on earth, we gather what we can and hold tight. We want to keep it. Even when our children die, we carry the feed bucket anyway. The desire to keep what we’ve earned is as old as the first harvest, the first hands that grasped their work with pride.

Out of this hope came the idea of property as a right; that no ruler, mob, or distant power could unjustly take what we’ve earned. This belief is freedom itself. If our labor belongs to us, we are free. If it can be seized, we are servants, whether our master is king, neighbor, or voting majority.

We established laws to protect what we earn, rules that say no one’s wages, harvest, or home can be taken without true cause. Protecting property safeguards liberty.

When we are free to keep what we work for, we can express our being. We can choose. We can grow from the effects of those choices. That is liberty.

But liberty has a cost. To protect our property today, we’ve embraced a dangerous shortcut: borrowing from tomorrow. We say cutting taxes preserves our property, that government should take only what it must. But instead of paying the cost with our own labor, we mortgage the lives of our unborn children. We pass the bill forward to generations who have no voice.

This is our tension. Our contradiction.

We protect the property of the living by indebting those not yet born. We say no one should steal from us, but we steal from those who will follow, who have no vote, no voice, no choice.

Promise

We made a promise in property, and a promise in liberty. We believe a person is entitled to the fruits of their own labor. That what they build, they may keep. That no power, however great, may seize it without just cause. If this is not so, then no man is free.

But this promise carries another. If a person is entitled to the fruits of their labor, then we cannot buy our comfort with another’s sweat. We cannot, by our actions, burden those who had no voice.

Yet today we break both promises at once. We declare no one may take what’s ours, that no ruler or future vote may steal it. But in the same breath, we pledge the labor of unborn generations to pay our debts.

This contradiction cannot stand. A nation cannot uphold a principle and violate it simultaneously. We cannot protect today’s harvest while mortgaging tomorrow’s.

Seed corn is the harvest reserved for planting next year’s crop. Eat it today, and we survive, but guarantee starvation tomorrow.

We must not consume our children’s seed corn or warm ourselves by burning their future fuel. Liberty isn’t free. It cannot be bought with debt or paid with the wages of those yet to be born and who cannot speak, vote, or stand for themselves.

If we believe in keeping what we earn, we must guard it ourselves, paying our cost today. Spending our children’s money means standing for a principle even as we betray it.

An America built on contradiction will not survive.

Broken promises bleed forward, generation to generation, until only the dead remain to answer.

The Dead’s Silent Claim

The dead hold no claim over the living. The next generation owes nothing to the bones beneath the grass.

Every age must choose for itself. Every generation must decide which burdens it will bear, which debts it will pay, and which work it will complete.

We have erred. We claim to protect our property, to keep what is ours, to stand free. But we build our freedom on promises made with labor not our own. We insist future generations pay debts we refuse to shoulder today.

This cannot stand. Freedom and bondage cannot coexist. We cannot guard our harvest by mortgaging someone else’s future. A nation cannot love liberty while chaining children who never chose their burden.

We call ourselves defenders of property, but we steal from tomorrow. With one hand we raise our fists and shout ‘freedom!’ With the other, we tighten our chains.

If reason has a law, it must be this:

A generation cannot call itself free while binding the next.

The dead have no rights over the living. Neither do we have any right to seize from those not yet born, to pile debt on backs that have yet to draw breath.

We claim to guard what is ours, but we have promised away what was never ours to promise.

Back to our question: Can we protect what we own today by stealing from the unborn?

May God bless the United States of America, and grant us the courage to pay our debts today before we ask our children to pay what they do not owe.

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When the Cure Doesn’t Serve the People, the System Fails the Constitutional Test

Public money, on its face, should yield public benefit. But every year, the federal government sends almost sixty billion dollars to universities like Harvard for research and development, most of it through the Department of Health and Human Services.

A university takes federal funding, makes a breakthrough, and licenses it to a drug company. Nothing stops that company from setting a high price, because while the research was public, the product isn’t.

Taxpayers fund the research, then get stuck paying again at the pharmacy. For many, the cost of needed treatment puts the remedy out of reach.

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We drift because we forget our purpose.

The Constitution names six national goals: Union, Justice, Domestic tranquility, Liberty, the common defense, and the general welfare. Every law and every dollar must serve at least one. When a policy misses the mark, it serves power, not people.

The point of American governance is to serve the people. That philosophy is the reason we were born at war. Why we owe allegiance to no king. Why we have our uniquely structured Constitution.

We lose sight of aligning our effort with these national goals. We need to get back on track.

So today, we’re asking whether public funding for private research still serves the general welfare. Does it help all of us, or just a few? To answer that, we go back to the beginning, with a boy named Jimmy, a Boston hospital, and a small act of hope that changed cancer research.

Jimmy’s Radio Miracle

In May 1948, a boy named Einar Gustafson wanted to watch his favorite baseball team, the Boston Braves. Einar had a problem: he didn’t have a television. But he had a bigger problem. He was in the Children’s Hospital ward in Boston, dying of leukemia.

At the time, leukemia was effectively a death sentence. It had been first identified a hundred years earlier, but there was still no treatment, just blood transfusions and comfort care. Then came Dr. Sidney Farber.

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Farber was a pathologist at Children’s Hospital. He’d grown tired of trying to learn why a patient didn’t respond to treatment after they had died and decided to try something new. He devised an experimental blood treatment he thought would block the food cancer cells needed to grow. His small study of just 16 children showed that 10 of them improved. The remissions didn’t last, but the fact that they happened at all was groundbreaking. It was the first time a chemical agent had ever worked against a non-solid tumor.

Farber had introduced the world to chemotherapy, or now the more common term, just “chemo” treatment for cancer.

That same year, Farber and a member of the Variety Children’s Charity were looking for a way to raise money for research. They needed a face for the cause. They found it in Einar, but to protect his identity, they called him “Jimmy.”

…

So they told his story on a national radio broadcast. They said Jimmy wanted a television to watch his Braves. They said cancer research needed support. The country responded. In just eight minutes of airtime, Americans sent in $231,000, more than three million in today’s dollars. The Jimmy Fund was born.

That money launched the Children’s Cancer Research Foundation, which later became the Sidney Farber Cancer Center, and eventually the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, now Harvard University’s principal cancer research center.

But Farber didn’t stop at the lab. He kept pressing Congress, explaining that major breakthroughs would take national funding and sustained effort. And Congress listened. Between 1957 and 1967, the National Cancer Institute’s budget more than tripled.

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Then, in 1971, President Richard Nixon called on Congress for an extra $100 million, nearly $700 million today, to launch an intensive campaign to find a cure for cancer. Later that year, he signed the National Cancer Act, declared a formal War on Cancer, and pumped billions into cancer research nationwide. The act expanded the National Cancer Institute’s power, created new research centers, and marked the first time the federal government treated cancer as a coordinated national challenge.

Since the increased 1971 national commitment, the American people have sent more than $1 trillion to universities for medical research. Progress slowly advances. This year, Harvard Medical tested an anti-tumor vaccine with promising results.

…

We could look at this story as either a success or a failure. A success in that private contributions provided seed money that helped create a medical breakthrough. We have made great advancements. A failure that significant public obligations showed diminishing returns. We have not cured cancer, and American life expectancies have not increased in the last 20 years.

But that is too short-sighted.

It’s not that we should rely only on private funding commitments, or that public funding for private institutions is irresponsible.

Likewise, the crux of the matter is not that public funding is essential to make progress in research and development.

The decisive point is: does our effort advance our progress towards achieving one or more of our national goals? Let's ask the hard questions clearly.

Justice and the General Welfare

Can we definitively say that giving universities money for research and development improves the general welfare?

Can we say the effort advances justice?

Certainly, national infrastructure benefits the whole country. Medical research depends on nationwide clinical trials, standardized data sharing, drug-approval pipelines, and outreach to rural and underserved areas. Only the federal government has the mandate and capacity to serve everyone. We don’t serve the general welfare if cures stay bottled up in Boston.

But if we pay for research and development, and private companies turn the patents into private property and set prices that most families can’t afford, then the investment the American people made to advance justice and general welfare falls short.

The prostate-cancer drug Xtandi is a classic example. Our money helped discover it, but the company that holds the license lists the therapy at more than one hundred twenty-nine thousand dollars a year. More than ten thousand dollars a month! Far beyond the reach of most American families.

Patient advocates have multiple times asked the government to use its lawful authority to force wider access. NIH refused both times. In total, this authority has never been used in the forty-plus years it has existed.

Let me say that again.

In more than four decades, the federal government has never once stepped in to come to the aid of the American people to lower the price of a publicly funded drug.

When a publicly funded drug ends up on the market at a price well beyond what the average American family can afford, the spending fails the general welfare test. It also fails the justice test, because wealth divides the rich and poor, urban and rural, insured and uninsured.

Yes, inequality exists everywhere. But America was built to be different, on purpose.

Part of the reason America exists is justice. Every state in the union agreed that if the people fund medical research, then a poor man and a rich man should have equal access to the benefit.

So… it seems the way we structure public funding for cancer research at Harvard and other universities doesn’t align with our national goals.

How Would We Change That?

Right now, universities take our money in the form of federal research grants, but only part of that money goes to the actual research. The rest, sometimes nearly half, goes toward overhead. This includes administrative costs, building maintenance, and salaries for university staff who never touch the lab.

At Harvard, that indirect rate is nearly 70 percent for research conducted on campus. The indirect rate for research conducted at other Harvard facilities is still high, 26 percent.

So when the American people send a million dollars to find treatments for cancer, four hundred thousand might go toward the effort. The rest feeds the institution.

Second, we have a problem with private ownership of public money. Since 1980, universities have been allowed to patent inventions made with public money. They can then license those patents, often exclusively, to drug companies. There’s no requirement that the final product be affordable or widely available. The government has the power to step in when the public is denied the benefit, but in over forty years, it has never once used it.

Third, we admit where trials fall short. There are rules encouraging inclusion across race, gender, and geography, but enforcement is weak. Most trials still happen at elite hospitals. Rural Americans, tribal communities, and low-income patients are left out.

Again, the structure of public funding for cancer research doesn’t align with our national goals. It doesn’t reflect justice or promote general welfare.

A better system would start with a simple rule: 100 percent of public money goes to the research. If a university believes in the work, it can cover its own administrative costs. The taxpayer’s role is to fund discovery, not to subsidize building cafeterias and paying deans.

Next, any treatment developed with public dollars must be subject to a universal access guarantee. That means open licenses for nonprofit hospitals and VA clinics, and a price ceiling for commercial sale. If a private company uses public research to build a profitable product, the benefit must reach the people who paid for it.

Finally, we demand equity in clinical trials. That means conducting research across the country and proving that results apply to everyone. If we measure every dollar spent by whether it serves the people, across race, income, and geography, then we align with the Constitution.

The effort isn’t intended to punish universities or end research.

The effort intends to ensure that the commitment the American people make to justice and their general welfare serves the nation in return.

Wait…What Happened to Einar?

Einar Gustafson, or “Jimmy,” lived. He left the hospital and went home. He stayed out of the public eye until 1998, when he revealed his identity at a Jimmy Fund event in Boston. By then, he was in his sixties, working as a potato farmer in Maine.

We don’t lack commitment or generosity. We don’t even lack funding.

What we lack is purpose and structure.

Our question isn’t whether we should fund research. We already do. It’s not whether we can make breakthroughs. We already have.

Our question is whether we’re serious about what our Constitution says that funding is for.

This story isn’t about punishing Harvard. It’s about the promises we made when we became a country. It’s about justice, the general welfare, and holding ourselves to our highest standard.

If our effort doesn’t serve justice and reach the people who paid for it, then we are failing to achieve the goals America stands for.

So, should we continue to fund cancer research at Harvard and other universities?

May God bless the United States of America.

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