Act 1. The First Food Stamp

Scene One: May, 1939. The Machinist and the Surplus

On the morning of May 16, 1939, Ralston Thayer stood first in line at Rochester, New York’s old post office. He was thirty-five years old. A machinist. A veteran of the Great War. He had been out of work for nearly a year.

Newspaper reporters crowded around him. Photographers jockeyed for position. Thayer was making history, and they wanted a piece of the action. He walked up to the cashier window and handed over four dollars from his latest unemployment check. The clerk gave him four dollars in orange stamps and two dollars in blue stamps, free.

The orange stamps could buy any food. The blue stamps could only buy whatever the Agriculture Department declared surplus. Eggs nobody wanted. Butter that wasn’t selling. The stuff farmers couldn’t move because nobody could afford to buy it. Grocers could exchange the food stamps of both colors at the bank for real dollars. The banks would then redeem the stamps with the US Treasury.

Ralston Thayer became the first food stamp recipient in American history.

Throughout that day, thousands of Rochester residents did as Thayer had done. They handed over cash and got back more purchasing power than they’d walked in with. That afternoon, they flooded the grocery stores with their crisp new booklets of orange and blue stamps. The grocers couldn’t believe their luck. By December, they were ecstatic. The government had sold more than a million dollars’ worth of orange stamps in Rochester alone. That meant hundreds of thousands in free blue stamps pumped directly into hundreds of grocery stores. It was a welfare program for retailers and banks as much as for families.

But the question nobody asked in 1939 was why: Why was Ralston Thayer hungry?

It wasn’t because there wasn’t enough food. American farms were producing too much food. The government was purchasing massive amounts of crops, transporting them, storing them, distributing them. The surplus was so large they didn’t know what to do with it. The grocery stores were full. The problem wasn’t scarcity.

The problem was that the economic system had stopped working. The Depression had destroyed demand. Thayer had worked as a machinist his entire adult life. He had fought in France. He had skills, experience, discipline. Then the Depression hit, and the work vanished. Not because he was lazy. Not because he lacked ability. The entire circular flow of the economy had frozen solid.

Three problems. Farm surpluses nobody could sell. Grocery stores with weak sales. Hungry citizens with seventeen percent unemployment.

So the government created a solution. Tax citizens. Use that money to buy surplus crops from farmers. Give stamps to the needy. Let grocery stores profit from the influx of purchasing power. Then, banks could exchange the food stamps of both colors at the Treasury for real dollars.

Supporters estimated the program would increase grocery sales by two hundred fifty million dollars a year. The grocers loved it. The banks loved it. The farmers loved it. Congress loved it. The surplus problem was solved.

It was a brilliant emergency response. And it was temporary. Everyone knew it was temporary.

The first Food Stamp Program lasted four years. From 1939 to 1943, it reached millions of Americans in half the country. Four million people at its peak.

Then it ended. Not because Congress acted to end it. Because the conditions that created it disappeared. By 1943, America’s response to World War II had created full employment. Wages rose. People could afford food again.

Many vilify President Franklin D. Roosevelt for his social programs. After all, he began food stamps in 1939. But President Franklin D. Roosevelt also ended them in 1943. Not because they didn’t work, and not by executive order. They ended because his administration made them no longer necessary. The economy had recovered. People had work. That work paid enough to buy food. The emergency was over.

FDR restored the ancient principle that by the sweat of your face, you shall eat bread.

This is the decisive point relevant to today. Ending food stamps is possible when people have jobs that pay enough to buy food.

When workers could earn living wages, food stamps weren’t necessary. The government didn’t need to redistribute property through taxation because workers’ labor produced property. They could eat from the sweat of their brow.

When we mix our labor with the dirt, what we create becomes ours. The Constitution protects this. Work and eat. Your labor produces your sustenance. It is the most basic property right in human civilization.

Scene Two: 1961–1964. The Return

But then the food stamp program came back.

President Kennedy revived the program in 1961. On May 29, Mr. and Mrs. Alderson Muncy of Paynesville, West Virginia, became the first recipients. They bought ninety-five dollars in food stamps for their fifteen-person household. Their first purchase was a can of pork and beans.

Why did food stamps come back? Kennedy had campaigned in West Virginia and Appalachia. He was appalled by what he saw. Children in poverty. Families living on surplus lard and corn meal. But those families weren’t living on lard and corn meal because there was a famine.

This wasn’t the Depression. The national economy was growing. Unemployment was falling. The problem wasn’t that the entire economic system had collapsed. The problem was that prosperity wasn’t reaching everyone. Entire regions had been left behind.

President Johnson signed the Food Stamp Act of 1964 and declared it would be one of the most valuable weapons for the war on poverty.

Johnson’s choice of the word ‘war’ is interesting. War is the continuation of politics with other means. Everything in war is simple, but even the simplest thing is difficult.

A simple goal. Eliminate poverty. The challenge is setting conditions for success when you know that success will be fleeting. Victory is temporary. People adapt. Conditions change. So you set limited, measurable, achievable objectives. You define what winning looks like. You establish the conditions that will allow you to declare victory and go home.

FDR understood this. His food stamp program had a clear objective: keep people from starving during an economic collapse. The conditions for success were equally clear: full employment and rising wages. When America met those conditions, the program ended. Mission accomplished.

Johnson declared a war on poverty but never defined victory. No conditions for winning. No way to know when the war could end. We have never tried to figure it out.

If we don’t set conditions for success, temporary relief becomes permanent. If we don’t define victory, emergency becomes normal. If we don’t make and achieve limited objectives, war becomes endless.

That’s what happened to Johnson’s war on poverty.

Scene Three: Today’s Constitutional Failure

More than sixty years later, we call the food stamp program SNAP. SNAP reaches forty-one million people nationwide. Ten times the peak participation of the original program. Half of American children will rely on food assistance at some point during childhood.

Ralston Thayer needed food stamps because unemployment hit seventeen percent and the Depression destroyed the economy. What’s our excuse now?

The problem in 1939 was no work. The problem now is work that does not pay.

Ralston Thayer could not find a job. Today’s SNAP recipients have jobs. They work forty hours a week. They stock shelves at Walmart. They flip burgers at McDonald’s. They go to work, they sweat, they come home exhausted. But they can’t afford to buy food.

A 2020 government report found that 70% of SNAP recipients worked full-time. The government still redistributes property through taxation. Grocery stores still profit. But now corporations benefit from cheap labor subsidized by taxpayers instead of unemployment checks.

Businesses are not the villain here. They are doing exactly what businesses are supposed to do. Maximize profits within the rules Congress sets. The problem is the rules Congress set.

Let’s follow the money. Businesses pay wages competitive enough to attract workers. Workers apply for SNAP. Taxpayers fund the benefits and support business wages. Workers spend SNAP benefits at businesses.

This is not business corruption. This is the system working exactly as Congress designed it. Congress created the conditions where paying low wages and relying on SNAP makes perfect business sense. Any rational business would do the same.

This is not a market failure. This is a constitutional failure.

When a man works and cannot eat from the sweat of their brow, someone is stealing his property. The question is who.

Act 2: The Government’s Duty

The answer begins with an agreement made before there were governments.

Even before Adam and Eve, hands blistered from work, and children’s bellies ached for food that depended on that work. When we work, we are entitled to the bread we create. The oldest law of life itself. Older than the Ten Commandments by maybe fifty thousand years.

This human condition is the foundation of all property rights. You own yourself. You own your labor. When you mix your labor with the world, what you create belongs to you. The American Founders built this philosophy into the Constitution.

The Fifth Amendment says government cannot take your property without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment extends this protection against the states.

But … what is property?

Most people think property means things. Your house. Your car. Your land. The Founders saw it more deeply.

James Madison, more responsible for the US Constitution than any other, wrote that a person has property in their opinions, in their religious beliefs, in the safety of their person. And most importantly, they have property in their labor.

Your labor is yours. The wages you earn through that labor are your property. This is not a metaphor. It’s constitutional law. When you work, you are exercising a property right. Your employer pays you for property you have transferred to them. Your time. Your effort. Your skill.

The government exists to protect this exchange. That is its first duty. We give up some freedom to live under laws to secure our property rights. This is the social contract. We consent to be governed in exchange for protection.

So the government’s duty has two parts, but one comes first.

First and foremost, government must protect the American people’s ability to acquire property through labor. A person must be able to work full-time and afford food. If they cannot, their right to their labor is violated. The government must create conditions where honest work produces enough to live. That isn’t redistribution. It’s preservation of the social contract.

Second, it must protect citizens from government itself, from seizing property through taxation to benefit private interests. Congress cannot use taxation to pick winners and losers.

These duties reinforce each other. When labor pays enough to live, redistribution becomes unnecessary. Property flows naturally from work to worker. The system functions as designed.

But when government fails its first duty, the second duty is violated as a consequence. Workers can’t eat from their labor, so government redistributes through taxation. The constitutional failure isn’t SNAP itself. It’s the abandonment of labor that made SNAP necessary.

We can’t end SNAP by cutting it first. We can only end it by making it unnecessary, by restoring the conditions where labor returns a fair value, where work yields enough to live.

Ending relief before restoring wages isn’t reform. It’s theft. The same theft that created the need for relief in the first place.

Act 3. 1939: The President and the Empty Mills

September 1, 1939. Germany invades Poland.

Within weeks, Europe erupts into total war. Norway falls. Denmark falls. Belgium. France. By June 1940, the swastika flies over Paris.

Across the Atlantic, America remains mired in the Great Depression’s final years. Unemployment hovers around 15 percent. Eight million people without work, nearly a decade after the initial crash. Factories sit dark. Steel mills run cold. In Rochester, New York, the federal government distributes food stamps to Ralston Thayer and thousands of others just to keep people fed.

Some say World War II ended the Depression in America, but that hot take is short sighted. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s leadership ended the Depression.

FDR saw something his contemporaries missed.

He understood that food stamps addressed the symptom, not the disease. They fed people today. But he wanted to restart the American engine. Rebuild the connection between sweat and bread that the Depression broke.

Roosevelt analyzed economic signs like a general reading battlefield terrain.

The challenges in 1939 were not small. Seventeen percent unemployment. Agricultural surpluses rotting in silos. Private capital paralyzed by uncertainty. Congress unwilling to authorize deficit spending at scale.

Roosevelt didn’t see these as discrete problems requiring separate solutions. He saw one frozen system. A failure of the institution that led to a lack of belief.

The question wasn’t whether America could produce. The question was whether the American people could be made to believe that work led to wages, wages to food, and food to hope.

Europe’s Collapse Became Roosevelt’s Opportunity

The world was fighting for its survival. It needed planes, engines, trucks, and wheat. America had the capacity, idle but ready. What we lacked was belief and consensus.

In May 1940, Roosevelt revived the old Council of National Defense and created the National Defense Advisory Commission. He filled it with seven men, each responsible for a key piece of the economy: industry, labor, agriculture, transportation, raw materials, employment, and price control.

He didn’t just work through government. He recruited from both sides of American power. He used business leaders for war planning. William Knudsen from General Motors. Edward Stettinius from US Steel. Sidney Hillman from organized labor. Later, the War Production Board with even broader authority.

Academic elites miss that the state doesn’t need to nationalize production. It needs to create conditions to incentivize private business to voluntarily work toward national goals. Strategic institutional design.

When Roosevelt asked Knudsen to serve, the man was making half a million dollars a year, roughly ten million today! Knudsen resigned and accepted a government salary of one dollar.

Roosevelt offered defense contracts with capped profits. Enough to guarantee stability, not enough to encourage greed. He formed the War Labor Board to hold wages steady, prevent strikes, and protect jobs.

The Institutional Design That Restored Prosperity

Roosevelt offered defense contracts with guaranteed profit margins. Modest, predictable, and capped to prevent war profiteering. He established labor stability through the War Labor Board. Wage floors, minimal work stoppages, employment security.

This was the invisible hand of institutional design. Government had to intervene. Laissez-faire market forces would not generate an economy to dominate our adversaries.

Businesses knew they could invest in defense production without catastrophic loss. Labor knew it could work without exploitation or arbitrary dismissal. The economic machine fired up again, not because of fear but through incentives.

By 1941, American industrial output began its historic expansion.

Detroit’s automotive plants converted from making Buicks to bombers. Bethlehem Steel operated at capacity, pouring liberty ship hulls continuously. Women entered manufacturing labor markets in unprecedented numbers.

The unemployment rate fell below 10% in 1941, the first time it had dropped below 10% since the Depression began. For the first time in over a decade, ordinary Americans could see economic progress.

When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Roosevelt didn’t scramble to improvise a mobilization strategy. He accelerated the machinery already in motion.

Roosevelt branded our transformation “The Arsenal of Democracy,” but the phrase hid the achievement.

This was institutional engineering at constitutional scale. Roosevelt reconstructed the broken connection between property rights, labor compensation, and general welfare.

No corporation earned a profit without expanding hiring. No one willing to work went hungry. Every wage, every contract, every loaf of bread became part of one living circuit. National incentive led to effort and to bread. That bread led to more effort, which generated national capability.

By 1943, the transformation was complete.

Industrial output doubled. National income tripled. Unemployment fell to 1.9 percent, what economists now call full employment.

From 1942 to 1945, America made approximately 40 percent of global munitions. Aircraft production alone went from fewer than 6,000 planes in 1939 to over 85,000 by war’s end.

Without America’s manufacturing might, the Allies would not have won World War II.

The Department of Agriculture terminated the Food Stamp Program in spring 1943. The program ended as FDR’s leadership made it no longer necessary. In four years, it had served 20 million Americans. Now, those same citizens left relief rolls because work that paid a living wage replaced the need for social programs.

War Destroys Wealth

Yes, the war provided the catalyst. Europe’s desperation created demand for American production. But demand alone doesn’t end depressions. Other nations had demand during World War II and remained poor. What mattered was Roosevelt’s institutional design that channeled that demand into full employment at living wages.

War destroys wealth. Steel that could have become tractors became tanks. Oil that could have powered industry was burned in battle. Labor that could have built homes was spent producing weapons designed to be destroyed.

But Roosevelt didn’t just produce for war. He reconstructed the relationship between work and wages. He proved that strategic government action, not laissez-faire chaos, could restore the constitutional promise that honest labor produces property.

He didn’t seize from one group to feed another.

He built the conditions where every person could feed themselves through work. That is why food stamps ended in 1943. Not through budget cuts or political theater, but through prosperity that made them unnecessary.

Social programs are warning lights. They flash when the connection between labor and sustenance breaks down. When work no longer earns bread. When we restore that connection, the warning light will go dark.

We forgot this lesson. Since the 1960s, we’ve treated welfare as permanent infrastructure rather than emergency repair. We’ve funded the symptom while ignoring the disease.

Ending SNAP tomorrow would solve nothing. Before we can withdraw relief, we must restore what made relief unnecessary in 1943: conditions where honest work puts heat in the house and food on the table.

So…are food stamps theft?

Yes, but not in the way most people think.

The theft isn’t SNAP taking from taxpayers. The theft happened earlier, when government abandoned its duty to protect labor’s value. SNAP is just the cost of that original theft, paid over and over, year after year.

We can end the theft. Not by cutting relief, but by restoring what was stolen: the dignity of work that feeds a family.

Until then, every SNAP dollar is a reminder that we’ve given up on the oldest law: by the sweat of your brow, you shall eat bread.

May God bless the United States of America.

Music from Epidemic SoundArtist: RoofSong: The Grim Reaper

A president offers to buy beef from a country we just bailed out. Argentina. American ranchers call it betrayal. Economists say it won’t lower prices. Everyone calls it stupid.

But that same country just sold seven million tons of soybeans to China instead of us. And three-quarters of their beef exports go to China. And we just gave them twenty billion dollars. And their president is our president’s ideological ally.

Maybe it’s not about beef. Maybe it’s about China.

But the ranchers still get hurt. The consumers still don’t see lower prices. And we don’t know if Argentina will actually pivot away from China, or just take our money and keep selling to Beijing. Maybe we weaken China’s food supply. Or maybe we just weaken our own ranchers.

So…Should American cattle ranchers sacrifice for China?

Act 1. Nixon and the Beef Freeze: When Politics Meets Markets

March 29, 1973.

President Richard Nixon had a problem.

Actually, he had several problems. The Senate had just voted 77-0 to investigate Watergate. The cover-up was unraveling. John Dean was about to flip. Dean knew he was going to be the scapegoat in the scandal and chose to cooperate with investigators to save himself.

But today, right now, the problem was beef.

Beef prices were up 20% in three months. Housewives organized boycotts. One woman in Chicago told reporters she was pricing hamburger like filet mignon. Another said her family had switched to beans and rice.

Fifty million people joined them. The largest consumer protest in American history.

The evening news showed empty shopping carts and angry voters. Walter Cronkite was covering it. Which meant everyone was seeing it.

Nixon’s economists told him to let the market work, and it would self-correct. George Shultz at Treasury. Herbert Stein at the Council of Economic Advisers. They said this was a supply problem. Bad weather. Reduced corn harvest. Feed costs up. Drought in the Southwest meant fewer cattle. Higher prices would drive the market to adjust and incentivize production. Give it time.

But Nixon wasn’t interested in time. He was interested in the evening news.

He’d already broken with Republican orthodoxy in 1971. Imposed wage and price controls. First peacetime controls in American history. Froze wages. Froze prices. Took the dollar off gold. His Treasury Secretary, John Connally, had sold him on it. 5% inflation doesn’t produce great election results.

The controls had worked politically. Nixon won 49 states.

But by early 1973, the controls were creating problems everywhere. Shortages here. Surpluses there. The price system was breaking down.

Nixon didn’t care. Controls were decisive. Presidential. You announce something and prices stop going up. At least for a while. At least long enough.

On March 29, Nixon made his decision.

He would freeze beef prices. No more increases. Prices were locked at current levels. Which were already at record highs. The freeze would last indefinitely.

Shultz and Stein thought it was madness. You can’t freeze one price in a market economy. Everything is connected. Freeze beef and you’ll create chaos.

Nixon announced it anyway.

The Ranchers Respond

The cattlemen understood the economics immediately.

If beef prices were frozen but feed costs kept rising, you lost money every day you fed a steer. The math was simple. The response was simpler.

Stop selling cattle.

“Ranchers stopped shipping their cattle to the market, farmers drowned their chickens, and consumers emptied the shelves of supermarkets.”

Within days, cattle auctions reported volume dropping. Thirty percent. Then forty. Then fifty. Ranchers held cattle off the market. Some waited. Others started culling herds. Selling breeding stock they’d normally keep. Getting out entirely.

The packers had fewer cattle to process. They ran plants below capacity. Sent workers home. The cattle they did get, they couldn’t make money on. Frozen prices. Rising costs.

Then came the shortages.

Empty Meat Cases

By mid-April, grocery stores across the country had no beef.

The beef that existed was lower quality. More hamburger. Less steak. Ranchers were liquidating herds instead of finishing premium cattle. Some stores limited purchases. Two pounds per customer. Others had empty display cases.

Nixon had promised to solve high beef prices. Instead, he’d created beef shortages.

The evening news showed housewives staring at empty meat counters. Before, they could buy beef, even if it was expensive. After the controls, there was no beef to buy at any price.

The black market appeared fast. Ranchers who’d held cattle sold directly to restaurants. To butcher shops willing to pay above the frozen price. Cash transactions. Off the books. The official market was frozen. The actual market found a way.

Restaurants got squeezed the worst. They couldn’t raise menu prices because of the controls. But their costs kept rising as they competed for scarce beef. Some switched to chicken. Others reduced portions. A few high-end steakhouses closed.

Washington Reacts

The American National Cattlemen’s Association flooded Washington with members. Their argument was simple. They called Nixon’s approach “The Wreck.” The freeze was destroying the industry. Ranchers were losing money every day. If it continued, there would be massive liquidation. Breeding stock slaughtered. Herds dispersed. Ranchers bankrupt. Years to rebuild.

The National Farmers Union backed them. Farm-state Senators backed them, Republican and Democrat alike.

Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Herman Talmadge of Georgia called it the most short-sighted agricultural policy since Smoot-Hawley.

The data supported them. Cattle slaughter was up 15% as ranchers liquidated. But beef production was falling. Ranchers were slaughtering younger, lighter animals instead of finishing them. More cattle killed. Less beef produced.

Nixon’s political calculus was failing. The freeze was supposed to show action. Instead, it showed incompetence. Empty meat cases were worse than high prices.

The Reversal

September 12, 1973. Five months after the freeze.

Nixon lifted it.

He didn’t call it a reversal. The announcement said the freeze had “served its purpose.” That “market conditions now warrant” flexible pricing.

Everyone knew what happened. The policy failed.

Beef prices immediately shot up. Higher than before the freeze. Pent-up demand. Disrupted supply chains. Liquidated herds reduced future supply.

By year’s end, beef prices were 30% higher than when the freeze began.

The freeze hadn’t stopped inflation. It deferred it and made it worse.

The Long Damage

But the real damage took years to show.

Cattle don’t turn on and off. A cow has one calf a year. That calf takes time to mature. If you’re building your herd, you keep the female calves so they can grow up and have calves of their own. Half your calves don’t go to market.

When ranchers liquidated in 1973, they sold breeding stock. Fewer calves in 1974. Fewer yearlings in 1975. Fewer finished cattle in 1976.

The hole in the pipeline lasted into the late 1970s. Prices stayed volatile. The cattle industry lost trust in government. They didn’t have much to lose.

When Carter’s Agriculture Secretary tried cattle programs in 1977, ranchers told Washington to stay out.

What Nixon Was Playing For

Nixon froze beef prices for one reason: Political theater.

He wanted the evening news to show him taking action on inflation. He wanted housewives to see a president who cared about grocery prices. He wanted voters to stop being angry.

There was no strategy beyond that. No long-term economic plan. No foreign policy objective. No national security consideration.

Just make the political problem go away before the next election.

It didn’t work. Not even politically. The shortages were worse than the high prices. The reversal looked weak. The long-term damage was real.

The Lesson

Markets work, or they don’t. Agriculture markets are mature and connected.

You can’t freeze one price without creating chaos everywhere else. You can’t solve a supply problem by controlling prices. You can’t make political time match cattle cycle time.

Nixon sacrificed the cattle industry for short-term politics. He ended up with empty meat cases, angry ranchers, and a disrupted market that took years to fix.

Fast Forward to 2025

President Trump is proposing to use beef imports to lower prices. American ranchers are furious. Economists say it won’t work. People are calling it Nixon all over again.

But there’s a difference.

Nixon had no strategic objective beyond the next news cycle. What if Trump does? What if this isn’t about beef prices at all? What if it’s about China?

Argentina just sold seven million tons of soybeans to China instead of us. China buys three-quarters of Argentine beef. We just gave Argentina twenty billion dollars. Their president is our ideological ally.

What if the beef import offer is really about pulling Argentina out of China’s orbit? What if we’re trying to become their agricultural market so they don’t need Beijing? What if this is an attempt at strategic positioning disguised as price policy?

Then it’s different than Nixon’s play. It’s something else.

But American ranchers still get hurt, because cattle profits need to be high to rebuild herds. Consumers don’t see lower prices. And we don’t know if Argentina will pivot to America or just take our money and keep selling to China.

Nixon sacrificed the rancher for politics and got nothing.

Trump might be sacrificing the rancher for strategy. But what if the strategy doesn’t work? What if Argentina takes the bailout, accepts the beef deal, and keeps selling to Beijing anyway?

Then we’ve disrupted our own cattle industry. For nothing. Again.

The question stands: Should American cattle ranchers sacrifice for China?

And the tougher question beneath it: What if they sacrifice and we still lose?

Act 2. US Beef Markets

US beef prices are at record highs. Steak prices are up 17% year-over-year. Ground beef up 13%. Beef roasts up 14%. USDA projects beef and veal prices will rise 12% in 2025, compared to less than 2% for pork or poultry.

The average American family is paying hundreds more annually just for beef.

The cause is the same as Nixon’s crisis. Supply.

The July US cattle herd number is the lowest in recent history.

And it’s going to have a hard time growing. Beef replacement heifers are the future breeding stock. Their numbers are falling.

This is year twelve of the current cattle cycle. Most cattle cycles last 9-10 years. This is the longest contraction phase in 35 years. Industry analysts are calling it a “hypercycle.”

Now the decisive matter. Prices drive cattle numbers in a free market. Tight cattle numbers mean low beef production, higher prices, and strong producer margins. Producers capitalize on strong margins. They retain more heifers, keep more cows, and expand.

But from the time a producer decides to retain a heifer calf in the cow herd, it takes three years for her offspring to contribute to revenue.

Why Isn’t the Herd Rebuilding?

In a normal cycle, record prices would trigger expansion immediately. Calf prices are high. So why aren’t ranchers expanding?

First: Drought. Cows need grass and water. But because of drought, nearly all US beef cows are in states with “very poor” to “fair” pasture. When ranchers have no grass and feed costs spike, they can’t afford to keep their cattle.

Second: The incentive of high prices. Some ranchers are sending cows to market because they judge they’re worth more now than the calves they would produce will be worth in 18 to 24 months.

Third: Demographics and debt. The average rancher is nearly 60. Should they sell today while prices are good, or take on debt at high interest rates to purchase expensive cattle and maintain infrastructure? Many are choosing to exit. Taking their profits. Not rebuilding.

Then there’s New World Screwworm. It’s a parasitic fly eradicated from the US decades ago. Flesh-eating larvae that burrow into cattle and kills them slowly.

Now it’s back at the Mexican border. The government banned live cattle imports from Mexico. In 2025, we imported 80% fewer cattle from Mexico.

So the breeding herd is at a 75-year low from drought and liquidation. The normal supply of Mexican feeder cattle that would help is gone because of disease. And ranchers are selling heifers for slaughter instead of keeping them for breeding because current prices are too good to pass up.

This is why beef prices are high. This is why they’ll stay high. The market is signaling strong demand, and low supply.

Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina!

October 14, 2025.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a $20 billion bailout for Argentina.

Presidents Trump and Milei are allies. Disruptors of government. Trump wants Milei to succeed. So we gave Argentina $20 billion.

Within days, Argentina suspended its export taxes on soybeans.

China saw the door open. They bought seven million metric tons of soybeans from Argentina. In the same timeframe, China bought zero soybeans from the United States.

American soybean farmers were furious. We bailed out our direct competitor. Who immediately undercut us and sold to China.

Then a week later, President Trump posed we could buy beef from Argentina to “bring our beef prices down.”

The ranchers exploded. Wyoming-based Meriwether Farms addressed President Trump directly: “We love you and support you—but your suggestion to buy beef from Argentina to stabilize beef prices would be an absolute betrayal to the American cattle rancher.”

Ranchers Know The Numbers Don’t Work

Economists look at the proposal and see Nixon all over again. Government intervention to solve a political problem that won’t actually solve anything.

Argentina currently accounts for 2% of total US beef imports. Even if we doubled Argentine imports overnight, it would be less than 0.7% of US beef consumption. Statistically invisible.

But not invisible at the Argentinian polls. Argentine midterm elections were two days ago, October 26. Six days after Trump’s announcement. A US commitment to buy Argentine beef on top of the $20 billion bailout is a political gift. It signals American support. It gives Milei something to campaign on.

The American rancher sees this clearly. We’re sacrificing their market stability for Argentina’s election prospects.

Let’s remember that high beef prices are the market working. The herd is at 1951 levels and needs years to rebuild. Ranchers need high prices to recover.

But Trump made a promise. Lower prices. Win midterms.

Maybe this isn’t about beef at all.

Act 3: The China Question

Wait. What if this isn’t about beef at all? Let’s look at the pieces again.

Argentina just sold seven million metric tons of soybeans to China. Three-quarters of Argentine beef exports go to China. China is Argentina’s largest agricultural customer. And we just gave Argentina twenty billion dollars.

What are we doing?

China needs food. One-point-four billion people. Not enough arable land. Not enough water. They import massive amounts of protein. Brazil for soybeans. Argentina for beef and soybeans.

China’s food security depends on South American agriculture. If we want to pressure Beijing without firing a shot, we threaten their food supply.

What if the beef import offer isn’t about lowering American grocery prices? What if it’s about making Argentina an offer: “Sell to us instead of China. We’ll be your market. You don’t need Beijing.”

If Argentina pivots toward the United States agriculturally, China loses access to a critical food source. They’d have to compete for Argentine exports instead of having guaranteed supply. That’s leverage. That’s strategic positioning.

And if other South American countries see Argentina succeed by aligning with Washington instead of Beijing, maybe they reconsider their relationships too. Brazil. Chile. Uruguay. Suddenly China’s food security looks a lot more uncertain.

But here’s the problem. American ranchers still get hurt. Smallest herd in seventy-five years. They survived drought. They liquidated herds. They held on through the worst of it. Now prices are finally high enough to rebuild and recover financially. High enough to make cattle ranching viable again.

And the government is proposing to flood the market with foreign beef.

The signal it sends is devastating: “We’ll undercut you to maybe achieve foreign policy objectives.”

The ranchers who survived the drought need high prices. Not as profit-taking. As survival. As the financial foundation to rebuild herds over the next three to five years.

If we artificially suppress prices now, even symbolically, we extend the recovery period. We punish the survivors. We signal that their industry is expendable for other priorities.

And consumers? They still don’t see lower prices. Two percent of imports won’t move the needle on a twenty-eight-billion-pound annual market. The strategic play doesn’t help them either.

The Hamilton-Jefferson Split

This is one of the oldest arguments in American governance.

Hamilton would say that national interests transcend business interests. If weakening China’s food security serves American strategic goals, we do it. Even if cattlemen get hurt. Even if it’s unpopular. Statecraft requires hard choices. The republic’s long-term security matters more than one industry’s short-term profits.

Jefferson would say: The rancher is the backbone of the republic. We don’t sacrifice them for abstract geopolitical games. They feed the nation. They embody American self-sufficiency. When government chooses foreign allies over domestic producers, it betrays the people it’s supposed to serve.

And there’s still a lot we don’t know. Might never know.

Will Argentina actually pivot? Or will they take American money and keep selling to whoever pays most, which is China?

Does weakening China’s food security actually give us strategic advantage? Or does it just make them more aggressive in securing alternative sources? More investment in Africa, more pressure on Southeast Asia, more reason to invade Taiwan for its agricultural imports?

Agricultural markets are mature, and they are globally connected. Food insecurity drove much of Japan’s expansion before World War II in the Pacific. Do we really think China would just accept it?

And the hardest question. Let’s say it works. Argentina pivots. China’s food security weakens. We gain strategic leverage. Was sacrificing American ranchers worth it?

Or is it more likely that American ranchers pay the price for nothing?

The Question Remains

Should American cattle ranchers sacrifice for China?

Not “sacrifice to help China.” Sacrifice to hurt China. To weaken China’s food security. To pull Argentina out of Beijing’s orbit. To strengthen American strategic position in South America.

That’s the real strategy. And it’s not necessarily wrong, strategically speaking. A nation that can’t feed itself is vulnerable. If we can create that vulnerability for a competitor, traditional statecraft says we should.

Hamilton would make that case. National security transcends one industry’s profits. The long game matters more than short-term pain. Yes, the ranchers suffer. That’s the cost of statecraft. Nations don’t survive by protecting every domestic interest. They survive by accumulating power and leverage.

Even if Argentina keeps selling to China, we drive uncertainty. It forces Beijing to diversify, to hedge. A confident China is a bold China. Maybe the smarter play is to create enough uncertainty that Beijing has to think twice about Taiwan and the South China Sea. The ranchers are important, but temporary. American power is permanent. We can rebuild the herd in five years. We can’t rebuild strategic position if we lose it.

Jefferson would say Hamilton is asking the wrong question. It’s not whether this particular strategy works. It’s what we become when we decide it’s normal to sacrifice the American people for abstract geopolitical advantage.

A republic that asks its productive class to absorb the costs of power has already lost something essential. Not militarily. Not economically. Constitutionally. The rancher isn’t a resource to be expended for statecraft. The rancher is the republic. When government starts treating citizens as expendable for long-term strategy, we stop being a Republic and start being an empire.

And America owes allegiance to no king.

Yes, Argentina will probably keep selling to China anyway. Yes, the strategy is speculative. But even if it worked perfectly, even if Argentina pivoted and China weakened and we gained leverage, the cost would still be wrong. Because we’d have established the principle that your livelihood is acceptable collateral for our vision of power.

If we accept that principle, where does it end? The next sacrifice is easier. And the one after that easier still. Until the Republic has sacrificed so much of itself in pursuit of power that there’s nothing left to be powerful for.

Our question: Should American cattle ranchers sacrifice for China?

The real question: Does statecraft justify the cost of destroying the American rancher? The answer is: not this time. Probably not ever.

May God bless the United States of America.

Music from #Uppbeathttps://uppbeat.io/t/dada/yatagarasuLicense code: 6IWGYQ0DNPHBJY6K

A successful elk season has come and gone. Elk season isn’t just about the harvest, or packing heavy loads out of the mountains, though those activities are often involved.

Elk season is communion. With the mountain, and with each other. It’s a time of remembrance. Checking on kids and wives. Eating and drinking together. You might hunt with someone you see often, or someone you haven’t seen in ten years.

Nearly every hunter in the camps I frequent is a veteran. We tell old war stories, curse aging, lament losses. We help each other hunt. We carry heavy loads on our backs for each other. We share food, water, motivation.

This year, like most years, military service comes up. Every member is proud to have served. Proud of the combat capability we generated for America.

But we also talk about what’s changing. Fewer kids can pass a military physical. Fewer towns send their sons and daughters to serve. The gap between those who defend America and those who benefit from it keeps widening.

So this week we’re sharing three stories we talked about in camp this year. Stories about opportunity, about standards, about the investment required to maintain both.

No old personal war stories though. To hear those, you have to come to camp.

The Story of Audie Murphy

June 1925. Hunt County, Texas. Audie Leon Murphy is born in a sharecropper’s shack outside Kingston. And when I say shack, I mean it had a dirt floor. No electricity. No running water. His father, Pat Murphy, was a sharecropper who worked other men’s land for a cut of the cotton crop. His mother, Josie, bore twelve children. Nine survived infancy.

The Depression hits Texas like a hammer. Pat Murphy starts disappearing, for days at first, then weeks. He’s drinking, chasing work that doesn’t exist, abandoning his family in slow motion. Audie is the sixth child, small for his age, but he becomes the provider. At age twelve, he’s dropping out of school to pick cotton. A dollar a day if he’s fast. He hunts rabbits and squirrels with a borrowed rifle to keep his siblings fed. He becomes an excellent shot because he has to be. Every missed shot is a missed meal.

Audie is sixteen. His mother dies of complications from malnutrition, exhaustion, and poverty. The family disintegrates. The younger children are farmed out to relatives and an orphanage. Audie and his older brother pick cotton and sleep in barns to survive. Pat Murphy is long gone, fully vanished now. Audie weighs maybe 110 pounds. He looks barely fourteen.

December 7, 1941.

Audie Murphy decides to enlist. He’s seventeen, has a fifth-grade education, and weighs 112 pounds soaking wet. He tries the Marines first. The recruiter takes one look at this skinny kid with hollow cheeks and laughs him out of the office. “Come back when you’ve grown some, son.”

He tries the paratroopers. Rejected. Too small.

He tries the Navy. Rejected.

His sister helps him falsify his birth certificate to prove he’s eighteen. He tries the Army. June 1942. The recruiter is skeptical, but the Army needs bodies. They take him. Private Audie Murphy. 112 pounds. Five-foot-five. Baby-faced. Assigned to the 15th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Infantry Division.

They ship him to North Africa in 1943. Then Sicily. Then Italy. The kid can shoot! Everyone notices immediately. He’s calm under fire in a way that unnerves the older soldiers. No hesitation. At Anzio, he kills two Italian officers attempting to escape, drops them both at distance with a carbine. His platoon sergeant gets wounded. Murphy takes over, leads the men through German positions, takes prisoners. He’s nineteen years old.

Southern France, 1944.

The 3rd Division lands at Saint-Tropez, pushes north. Murphy’s collecting medals now. Bronze Star, then another. Silver Star. His superiors keep promoting him. Corporal. Sergeant. Staff Sergeant. He’s still barely old enough to vote. His friends keep dying. He keeps replacing them, learning their names, watching them die, replacing them again.

One night in the Vosges Mountains, Murphy’s best friend, a man named Lattie Tipton, gets killed by German machine gun fire, cut nearly in half. The Germans had been waving a phony white flag of surrender. His death hardens Murphy.

By late 1944, Murphy has a Distinguished Service Cross and battlefield commission to Second Lieutenant. The sharecropper’s son from the dirt-floor shack is now an officer. He’s twenty years old and has personally killed approximately 240 enemy soldiers, though he doesn’t brag about it, doesn’t talk about it much at all.

January 26, 1945. The Colmar Pocket, Alsace, France. Temperature near zero. Murphy’s company of 128 men gets orders to hold a position near the town of Holtzwihr against a German counterattack. Six Panzer tanks. Over 250 infantry. Murphy has about 40 effective soldiers left; the rest are wounded or dead.

The Germans attack. Murphy orders his men to fall back to the woods. He stays forward with his artillery observer to direct fire. A German tank shell hits an American M10 tank destroyer near Murphy’s position. It catches fire, ammunition cooking off. The artillery observer is wounded and runs. Murphy is alone.

He climbs onto the burning M10.

Understand that the tank destroyer is on fire. Fuel tanks could explode any second. The Germans can see him, one man, silhouetted against burning metal. He grabs the M2 Browning .50 caliber machine gun mounted on the turret. It’s loaded.

For the next hour, Audie Murphy stands on a burning tank destroyer and kills Germans.

He’s wounded in the leg but ignores it. The radio headset lets him call fire missions to his artillery battery while he’s shooting. German infantry gets within ten yards. He kills them. The Panzers fire at him and miss. He swivels the .50 cal, rakes their supporting infantry, calls in artillery to adjust fire onto the tanks. Rounds are snapping past his head. The tank destroyer is still burning under his feet.

Finally, his ammunition gone, Germans retreating, Murphy climbs down. He walks back to his men. Refuses medical attention until he’s reorganized the defensive line. The citation for his Medal of Honor says he killed or wounded approximately 50 German soldiers during that hour. Some historians think it was more.

The war ends three months later.

Audie Murphy, now Lieutenant Murphy, became the most decorated combat soldier of World War II. Twenty years old, three Purple Hearts, and the Medal of Honor.

The Army sends him on a publicity tour. Life Magazine does a spread. In Hollywood, he meets James Cagney, who suggests Murphy try acting. He’s got the face for it, still baby-faced, unthreatening. Universal Pictures offers a contract.

Murphy uses his GI Bill benefits to take acting lessons. He’s awkward at first, uncomfortable with the attention. But he works. Makes his first film in 1948. Over the next two decades, he appears in forty-four films, mostly westerns. In 1955, he plays himself in “To Hell and Back,” adapted from his memoir. It becomes Universal’s highest-grossing film until “Jaws” twenty years later.

The military gave Audie Murphy what poverty never could. Training, discipline, purpose, opportunity. He buys a house in California. Invests in oil wells and breeding horses. Brings his siblings out of Texas, sets them up, breaks the generational cycle. The sharecropper’s children become middle-class Americans.

But Murphy never pretends military service is easy or cost-free.

He has nightmares. Sleeps with a loaded pistol under his pillow. His first marriage collapses; his wife says he wakes up screaming and unreachable. He struggles with what we now call PTSD, what they called “battle fatigue” or “shell shock” then. The VA doesn’t know how to treat it. Most veterans don’t talk about it.

Murphy talks about it.

He testifies before Congress. Uses his celebrity to advocate for veterans with psychological wounds. Pushes for better VA funding, better mental health care, better recognition that war doesn’t end when the shooting stops. He’s open about his own struggles in ways that are radical for the 1950s and ‘60s. A Medal of Honor recipient admitting he’s damaged, that he needs help.

May 28, 1971. Murphy is flying from Atlanta to Virginia in a private plane. Bad weather. The plane crashes into Brush Mountain near Roanoke, Virginia. Audie Murphy dies on impact. He’s forty-six years old.

They bury him at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors. His grave: Section 46, Grave 366-11, becomes the second most-visited site at Arlington after President John F. Kennedy’s. People still leave medals, coins, flowers. They leave notes thanking him.

From a dirt-floor shack in Hunt County to Arlington. From a dollar a day picking cotton to Captain. From fifth-grade dropout to college courses on the GI Bill. From generational poverty to homeowner, breadwinner, advocate.

The military didn’t just give Audie Murphy a paycheck. It gave him a ladder. And he climbed it all the way to the top.

Murphy’s story isn’t unique in American history. The military has always been the most reliable ladder out of poverty America offers. Training. Discipline. Purpose. Healthcare. Education benefits. A path to homeownership. A chance to break the cycle.

Nearly every veteran has some version of Murphy’s story. Maybe not Medal of Honor level, but the same trajectory: grew up poor, served, came out qualified for something better. The GI Bill. VA home loan. Skills that translate to civilian work. A network of people who’ve supported you along the way.

The men around the fire this year talked about this openly. The financial benefits. The medical coverage their families needed. The education they couldn’t have afforded otherwise. The home they were able to buy. None of them are ashamed of it. They earned it. They carried loads, literal and metaphorical, that many Americans will never carry.

But there’s a disconnect. We know this ladder works. We are living proof that it works. But back home, many of us see generational poverty, families stuck on social programs for decades, with no clear way out. The very cycle Audie Murphy was born into.

Murphy’s transformation wasn’t an accident. It required an intervention. The Army was that intervention. It grabbed him, gave him structure, and demanded he meet a standard.

This led to a hard idea we talked about in camp. If America is serious about willfully breaking the cycle of poverty for kids growing up on social programs, why would we leave the single most effective tool we have, military service, up to chance?

The proposal that came up: What if we connect them? If a family receives federal assistance, the ladder of military service isn’t just an option, it’s the mechanism. Two years of service becomes the pathway to breaking that cycle for good.

Not as punishment. As opportunity. As a deliberate investment. As the most proven pathway out of generational poverty America has. You get training. Discipline. Healthcare. Education benefits. A pathway to homeownership. The same ladder Murphy climbed.

Service is never cost-free. Murphy proved that, too. The nightmares. The broken marriage. The PTSD he carried until the day he died. Some men climb the ladder and make it to the top. Some don’t make it at all.

We shouldn’t pretend otherwise.

But the alternative, generational poverty with no ladder at all, is worse. Murphy knew that. The veterans in camp know it.

The ladder works.

But Murphy’s transformation only worked because the institution he joined was uncompromising. The military didn’t just give him opportunity; it demanded capability. That transformation is only possible if the standards at the other end meet America’s needs.

The Story of Chosin Reservoir

November 1950. North Korea. The Korean War is four months old.

General Douglas MacArthur has pushed north from the Pusan Perimeter all the way to the Yalu River, the border with China. He’s told President Truman the war will be over by Christmas. The troops will be home for the holidays.

The 1st Marine Division, roughly 15,000 men, is deployed around the Chosin Reservoir in northeast Korea. It’s mountainous terrain, remote, brutal. The temperature is already dropping below zero at night.

The Marines don’t know it yet, but 120,000 Chinese troops have crossed the Yalu River and are surrounding them. The Chinese have been moving at night, in complete silence, avoiding roads. American intelligence has no idea they’re there.

November 27, 1950. Night. The temperature drops to 20 below zero. Then 30 below.

The Chinese attack.

They hit the Marines from all sides. Fox Company, Easy Company, positions all around the reservoir. Bugles blowing, whistles, human wave attacks. The Marines are outnumbered roughly 10-to-1, maybe worse in some sectors.

The fighting is close, vicious, desperate. Chinese troops are pouring out of the hills. Some Marines are overrun in their sleeping bags. Others fight hand-to-hand in the dark. Machine guns jam in the cold. Rifle bolts freeze. Morphine syrettes freeze solid. Medics have to thaw them in their mouths before they can inject wounded men.

The Marines hold. Barely.

By morning, it’s clear: the 1st Marine Division is surrounded. Cut off. The Chinese control the roads, the high ground, everything. Major General Oliver P. Smith, the division commander, gets orders to retreat.

Smith’s response: “Retreat, hell! We’re not retreating, we’re just advancing in a different direction.”

What follows is a 17-day fighting withdrawal from Chosin to the port of Hungnam. 78 miles through frozen mountains, under constant attack, in temperatures that drop to 35 below zero.

The Load

Every Marine is carrying 80 to 100 pounds. In subzero cold. At altitude. While being shot at.

Here’s what’s in that load:

An M1 Garand rifle. Weight, 10 pounds, plus 8-10 pounds of ammunition. 80-100 rounds minimum, many carry more. Grenades. 4-6 fragmentation grenades, 1-2 pounds each. Rations: C-rations, frozen solid, 3-5 days’ worth. Water: their canteens freeze. Marines melt snow or carry water inside their jackets against their bodies. Cold-weather gear: a heavy, bulky sleeping bag, parka, wool layers, gloves, and extra socks. Frostbite kills men as fast as bullets. An entrenching tool: For digging fighting positions in frozen ground. Ammunition for larger crew-served weapons: Machine gun belts, mortar rounds. This is distributed among the squads. Medical supplies: Bandages, frozen morphine, sulfanilamide powder.

And that’s just personal gear. The company also has to move:

Crew-served weapons: 31-pound M1919 machine guns, 42-pound 60mm mortars, and ammunition for both. Radio equipment: radios and heavy batteries, essential for calling artillery and air support. The wounded: As casualties mount, Marines carry stretchers, drag sleds, and support bleeding men who can’t walk.

Could They Have Carried Less?

Sure. And more of them would have died.

Every item in that load was survival. If you carry less ammunition, you run out during the next Chinese attack and die. Less food? You lose strength, can’t march, freeze to death, or get captured. Ditch the sleeping bag? You freeze to death overnight. Men are already dying of exposure. Leave the machine guns? You lose fire superiority. The Chinese overrun your position. Abandon the wounded? Not the Marines. They do not leave each other behind.

The Chinese were traveling lighter. They have quilted uniforms, tennis shoes, a bag of rice. No heavy winter gear. Minimal ammunition resupply.

And they’re dying in huge numbers. Freezing to death. Starving. Unable to sustain offensive operations because they don’t have the logistics, the ammunition, the food.

The Marines’ heavy loads were their advantage.

The March

The withdrawal is a continuous running battle. The Chinese attack at night, every night. They blow bugles, charge in waves, try to overrun Marine positions. During the day, the Marines move south, fighting through roadblocks, under sniper fire, in whiteout conditions.

Fox Company, 240 men, holds a mountain pass called Fox Hill for five days and nights against repeated Chinese attacks. They’re surrounded, low on ammunition, taking casualties. Air drops resupply them, but the ammo comes in parachutes that drift into Chinese lines. Marines have to crawl out under fire to retrieve it.

They hold the pass. Without it, the rest of the division can’t escape.

The Chinese have blown a bridge at the Funchilin Pass, a critical choke point over a 1,500-foot gorge. Without a bridge, there is no way forward. The entire division is trapped.

Engineers request an airdrop of Treadway bridge sections. Huge, heavy steel spans. C-119 Flying Boxcars drop them by parachute. The Marines assemble the bridge under fire, in subzero cold. It takes hours.

They get the bridge up. The division crosses. Tanks, trucks, artillery, 15,000 Marines, and over 100,000 North Korean refugees fleeing with them.

The Wounded

Casualties are catastrophic. Roughly 900 Marines killed in action. 3,500 wounded. Over 7,000 non-battle casualties from frostbite, exposure, and exhaustion.

The Marines carry their wounded. Every man. Stretchers, improvised sleds, men supporting men who can’t walk. They carry their dead too. Even had they wanted to, the ground is too frozen to bury them.

On December 11, 1950, the 1st Marine Division reaches Hungnam. They’ve marched 78 miles in 17 days. Fought through 10 Chinese divisions. Brought out their wounded, their dead, their equipment.

The Chinese suffered casualties as high as an estimated 60,000 trying to stop them. Some Chinese units cease to exist. Frozen, starved, combat-ineffective.

Why Heavy Packs Mattered

The Marines survived Chosin because they had capability. Enough ammunition to win firefights every night for 17 nights. Enough food to sustain a forced march at altitude in subzero cold. Enough winter gear to prevent total casualties from exposure. Enough crew-served weapons to establish fire superiority. Enough radio equipment to call in air support and artillery. Enough discipline to carry the wounded and the dead.

Could they have made the packs lighter? Sure, with better materials, lighter fabrics, and more efficient rations.

But had their packs been lighter, the Marines would have filled that weight savings with more ammunition. More machine gun belts. More mortar rounds. More grenades. Because when you’re surrounded 10-to-1 in subzero mountains, you don’t want a lighter pack. You want more capability.

The enemy gets a vote. The terrain gets a vote. Physics gets a vote.

The packs will never be lighter because if gear gets lighter, we immediately carry more ammunition, more batteries, more capability. The weight isn’t arbitrary tradition. It’s what the enemy and terrain demand.

The hard truth:

Some argue we should lighten loads to expand who can serve in combat roles. And we should never exclude any man or woman capable of serving. But the load is determined by the mission, not by who we wish could do it.

If you can carry the load, you can do the job. If you can’t, you can’t. The enemy doesn’t care about our recruiting goals.

So the standards don’t change. The packs don’t get lighter. But that doesn’t mean we turn away any man or woman who can do the job. And we don’t turn away motivated kids who aren’t qualified yet. It means we invest in qualifying them.

The Story of the CCC and Project 100,000

Part 1: The Civilian Conservation Corps (1933-1942)

March 1933. America is in the depths of the Great Depression.

Unemployment is at 25%. Thirteen million men are out of work. Young men, teenagers, early twenties, are riding the rails, sleeping in Hoovervilles, stealing to eat. Entire families are collapsing. Fathers abandon their kids because they can’t feed them. Boys drop out of school to look for work that doesn’t exist.

In rural America, it’s even worse. Farm foreclosures. Dust Bowl. Malnutrition. Kids who look fourteen but are actually seventeen. Underweight, undereducated, no prospects, no future.

Franklin Roosevelt takes office and immediately proposes the Civilian Conservation Corps. It’s an emergency work relief program: take unemployed young men, put them in camps, give them jobs doing conservation work. Reforestation, soil erosion control, building roads and dams in national forests and parks.

Congress passes it in nine days. Roosevelt signs it into law on March 31, 1933.

By July, the CCC has 250,000 enrollees. By the end of 1933, over 300,000. Eventually, nearly 3 million young men will serve in the CCC over its nine-year existence.

Who They Take

The CCC isn’t selective. If you’re male, age 17 to 28 (later expanded), unemployed, and physically capable of manual labor, you’re in.

Many of these kids wouldn’t pass a military physical. They’re malnourished: underweight, vitamin deficiencies, rotting teeth, untreated medical conditions. Some can’t read or write. Some have never held a job, never followed orders, never been away from home.

The CCC takes them anyway.

Here’s the structure:

The camps are run by the Army. Reserve officers and NCOs supervise. The day starts at 6 AM. Reveille. Calisthenics. Breakfast. Then work details: eight hours of hard physical labor. Planting trees, building trails, stringing telephone lines, constructing fire roads.

It’s quasi-military discipline. Work denim uniforms. Not military dress, but standardized. Formations and inspections. Chain of command. Organized barracks life. Rules and consequences.

The food is controlled. Not restricted, because these kids need calories for the manual labor, but structured. Balanced meals, three times a day, more food than most have seen in years. Medical officers monitor nutrition. Underweight enrollees are given extra rations. Overweight enrollees are put on controlled portions and heavy PT.

The average underweight enrollee gains 12 pounds in the first three months.

The Transformation

After six months in the CCC, these kids are different.

Physically: They’re fit. Lean muscle from manual labor and PT. Proper nutrition. Dental work. Many get their first real dental care in the CCC. Medical treatment for chronic conditions. They can march, work all day, handle physical hardship.

Mentally: They’re disciplined. They know how to follow orders, show up on time, work as a team. They’ve learned that effort produces results. That structure isn’t oppression. It’s stability.

Educationally: Evening classes are offered. Reading, writing, arithmetic, vocational training. Many enrollees become functionally literate in the CCC. Some earn high school equivalency certificates. They’re taught skills: carpentry, masonry, equipment operation, forestry techniques.

The CCC pays them $30 a month. The enrollee keeps $5. The other $25 is sent home to his family. It’s federal relief that requires work, builds skills, and maintains dignity.

These young men are sending money home. Supporting their parents, their siblings. Keeping families together. Breaking the cycle.

Transition to Military Service

December 7, 1941. Pearl Harbor.

The CCC suddenly becomes a pipeline to military service. And the CCC veterans transition at higher rates than their non-CCC peers. Why?

Because they’re already conditioned.

They know how to live in barracks, follow a chain of command, wake up to reveille. They’re physically fit, used to hard work, long marches, sleeping outside. They’re disciplined, accustomed to structure, rules, consequences. They’re literate. They can read orders, fill out forms, write letters home. They’ve been away from home, already made the psychological break from family and hometown.

When a CCC veteran shows up to Army boot camp, he’s not starting from zero. He’s already halfway there. The drill sergeants notice immediately. These kids don’t quit. They don’t cry for mama. They don’t wash out in the first two weeks.

Many CCC veterans become NCOs because they know how to lead men, how to work hard, how to endure discomfort.

The CCC essentially was pre-boot camp. It didn’t graduate soldiers. It graduated young men who were ready to become soldiers.

The program ends in 1942 as the war ramps up and unemployment disappears. The camps close. The enrollees enlist. Many go on to serve in World War II. Some die in Europe and the Pacific. Others come home, use the GI Bill, buy houses, start families.

The CCC took broken kids from the Depression and gave them structure, nutrition, discipline, skills, and purpose. It worked.

Twenty-four years later, another administration tried something similar. They got the idea right and the execution catastrophically wrong.

Part 2: Project 100,000 (1966-1971)

Fast forward to 1966. Vietnam War. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara has a problem.

The war is escalating. Johnson is sending hundreds of thousands more troops. But the draft is unpopular. College deferments mean middle-class and upper-class kids aren’t serving. The burden is falling on working-class and poor communities.

McNamara comes up with a solution: lower the standards.

He launches “Project 100,000,” a program to accept men who previously would have been rejected for military service. Men with IQs below 85. Men who are functionally illiterate. Men who fail the Armed Forces Qualification Test. Men who are significantly overweight or underweight.

The stated goal: The military will be a “remedial institution.” We’ll take these disadvantaged young men, educate them, train them, lift them out of poverty. It’s the Great Society in uniform.

McNamara calls them “New Standards Men.”

Everyone else calls them “McNamara’s Morons.”

From 1966 to 1971, Project 100,000 brings 354,000 men into the military who would have been rejected under previous standards. About 40% are Black, double their proportion of the general population.

The Promise vs. The Reality

Here’s what was supposed to happen:

These men would get remedial education, including literacy training, vocational skills, and extra support to bring them up to standard. The military would invest in them. Transform them. Send them back to civilian life qualified for good jobs, upward mobility, middle-class life.

Here’s what actually happened:

They got the same training as everyone else. Same boot camp timeline (eight weeks, not longer). Same Advanced Individual Training. Same deployment schedule.

No extra investment. No remedial programs. No extended preparation.

They were just thrown into the pipeline with everyone else and then sent to Vietnam.

The Results

The data is brutal.

Casualty rates: Project 100,000 men died at nearly double the rate of other servicemen. They were more likely to be killed in action, more likely to be wounded.

Disciplinary problems: Higher rates of non-judicial punishment, court-martials, and dishonorable discharges.

Combat effectiveness: They struggled. Couldn’t read maps. Couldn’t follow complex orders. Made mistakes that got themselves and others killed.

Post-service outcomes: Lower rates of college attendance. Lower incomes. Higher unemployment. Many couldn’t even navigate the VA system to claim their benefits.

One study found that Project 100,000 veterans had lower lifetime earnings than non-veterans from similar backgrounds. Military service made them worse off.

Why It Failed

Project 100,000 failed because it admitted men who weren’t qualified and then didn’t invest in qualifying them.

McNamara wanted the optics without paying the cost. Extra training takes time and money. Longer boot camps require more drill instructors, more facilities, more resources.

So they just lowered the bar and pretended it would work out.

It didn’t.

A kid who can’t read at a fifth-grade level can’t learn land navigation in two weeks. A kid who scores in the 10th percentile on cognitive tests can’t master radio operation, weapons systems, or small unit tactics in the same timeframe as everyone else.

You can’t give him the same eight weeks as a high school graduate and expect the same output.

And when you send him to Vietnam anyway, underqualified, underprepared, you’re not giving him opportunity. You’re sending him to die.

The Betrayal

The cruelty of Project 100,000 wasn’t that it admitted unqualified men. The cruelty was that it admitted them without preparing them.

The CCC worked because it invested six months to transform men before asking them to perform. It built the ladder, then helped them climb it.

Project 100,000 pointed at a ladder these men couldn’t reach and said “good luck.”

We told Project 100,000 veterans military service would be their pathway out of poverty, just like it had been for their fathers’ generation. They believed it. They enlisted or got drafted. But they ended up worse off than when they started.

That’s not opportunity. That’s exploitation.

The Lesson

The contrast between the CCC and Project 100,000 is the entire argument:

If we’re going to admit unqualified service members, we have an obligation to qualify them.

That means longer training timelines. Remedial education. Controlled nutrition to meet physical standards. Medical and dental care. Extended PT and conditioning. Patient, professional instructors who understand the need for more time.

It means higher cost per recruit. More drill instructors. More facilities. More investment.

And it means accepting higher attrition. Some won’t make it through pre-boot camp. Some won’t make it through boot camp. That’s fine. We gave them the shot. The ones who graduate earned it.

But the alternative, admitting them without preparing them, lowering standards to meet quotas, sending them into combat underqualified, is a betrayal.

It gets them killed. And it produces a weaker military.

The CCC proves transformation is possible. Project 100,000 proves what happens when you skip the hard work.

America has a national obligation.

Any kid who wants to serve should get a chance. But obligation runs both ways. If we admit them unqualified, we owe them the training to become qualified. Not the same boot camp timeline as everyone else. A longer pathway with additional preparation.

The proposal is simple: two tracks, same finish line.

Track One is for kids who meet standards on entry. They go straight to standard boot camp and graduate qualified.

Track Two is for kids who don’t meet standards yet. They go to pre-boot camp first. Three to six months depending on how far they are from standards. Controlled nutrition and PT to reach weight requirements. Remedial education to achieve literacy standards. Basic discipline and military bearing. Medical and dental care.

You graduate pre-boot camp when you meet the standards to enter regular boot camp. Then you go through the same boot camp as everyone else. Same drill instructors. Same PT tests. Same rifle qualifications. Same standards.

This isn’t lowering the bar. It’s building a ladder to reach it.

Higher attrition is probably the reality. Some kids won’t make it through pre-boot. Some won’t make it through boot camp after that. That’s fine. We gave them the shot. The ones who make it will have earned it twice.

Yes, it will cost more. Higher investment per recruit. More drill instructors. More facilities. More time. But it breaks poverty cycles. It creates capability. It fulfills the promise that military service has always represented in America.

Think about Audie Murphy. He probably would’ve been rejected under modern standards. Malnourished, underweight, fifth-grade education. But someone took a chance on him. The military made him qualified through training and structure. He became the most decorated soldier of World War II.

We need to systematize that opportunity. Make it a pathway, not an exception. The CCC proved it works. Project 100,000 proved what happens when you skip the hard part.

The veterans in camp this year understand this. They climbed the ladder. And they want that ladder to exist for the next generation of kids growing up the way they did.

The Packs Don’t Get Lighter

Military service has always been America’s most reliable ladder out of poverty. Audie Murphy climbed it from a dirt-floor shack to Arlington National Cemetery. So did most of the veterans sitting around elk campfires this season. The benefits are real: training, discipline, education, healthcare, homeownership. A pathway that breaks generational cycles.

But that ladder only works if we maintain it properly. Combat loads at Chosin Reservoir weren’t arbitrary. They were the minimum required to survive and win against a numerically superior enemy in subzero mountains. The packs will never be lighter because the mission demands more combat capability at every turn. Standards at the output end are non-negotiable. If you can carry the load, you can do the job. If you can’t, you can’t.

At the same time, we have a national obligation to any kid who wants to serve. The Civilian Conservation Corps proved we can take unqualified young men and qualify them through extended training, controlled nutrition, remedial education, and discipline. Project 100,000 proved what happens when we skip that investment: higher casualties, lower effectiveness, betrayal.

The answer is two tracks with the same finish line. Kids who meet standards go straight to boot camp. Kids who don’t go to pre-boot camp first until they’re ready. Then everyone faces the same drill instructors, the same tests, the same standards. The ones who make it will have earned it twice.

It will cost more per recruit. But it systematizes the opportunity Murphy had. It builds the ladder instead of pointing at one these kids can’t reach. It breaks poverty cycles while maintaining the combat capability America needs.

The ladder works. We just need to build it right and keep the standards at the top unchanged.

May God bless the United States of America.

The Chicken Tax

Scene. It’s 1962. American farmers have cracked the code.

We can raise chickens cheap. Like, really cheap. Industrial-scale factory farms, efficient as hell. We start shipping frozen chickens to Europe by the boatload. German housewives love it. French families love it. Half the price of local chicken. Maybe even tastier!

European chicken farmers do not love it. They’re getting destroyed. So, France and West Germany do what countries do when their people scream loud enough. They slap tariffs on American chicken. Problem solved.

Lyndon B. Johnson is President. He’s not amused. You slap our chickens? We slap back!

In 1963, LBJ announced retaliatory tariffs. 25 percent on potato starch, dextrin, brandy. And … 25 percent on light trucks?

The first three make sense. Targeted. Tit for tat. But light trucks? That was aimed at one company: Volkswagen. Their vans and little pickups were selling like crazy in the States. Detroit hated it. Johnson just gave them what they wanted: A 25 percent wall against the competition.

Here’s the thing about the Chicken War. It ended fast. Europe backed down on chicken tariffs. Trade negotiations happened. The fight over poultry faded into the history books.

But the truck tariff? That one never came down. Sixty-two years later, it’s still the law of the land.

First, let’s clear something up. A tariff isn’t some clever penalty on foreign companies. It’s a tax on us. American importers pay it. Then they pass it along to businesses. Then businesses pass it along to you. At the dealership. At the grocery store. That’s what tariffs are. A tax on Americans buying foreign goods.

That 25 percent wall around light trucks was supposed to be temporary leverage, but it stuck. It became a hidden tax we’ve been paying for six decades.

And with foreign competition locked out, American trucks transformed. They got bigger. Heavier. More luxurious. Way more expensive. The Ford F-150 became the profit machine that drives Detroit. Not because it had to compete on price, but because it didn’t.

Roll back the tape for context. An early 1980s F-150 had a base MSRP under six thousand dollars, roughly nineteen to twenty-four thousand in today’s money, depending on the exact model year and adjustment method. Even after inflation, trucks have leapt to a very different price tier. Now, seventy grand for a well-equipped pickup.

Why would Ford lower prices when the moat was there? Why would GM? They wouldn’t. That’s not how business works.

What started as a spat over frozen chicken became the permanent business model for America’s most popular vehicle.

Harvard PhD Economist Milton Friedman would have loved the Chicken Tax story.

The social responsibility of a business isn’t charity. It isn’t fairness. It isn’t “doing good.” It’s one thing: increase profits. That’s it. Maximize shareholder value. The sacred duty of a business is to make money.

From that view, what Ford and GM did wasn’t shady. It wasn’t corruption. It was textbook. If consumers will pay $70,000 for a truck that costs half that to build, your duty is to keep charging $70,000. Dropping the price voluntarily isn’t noble. It’s malpractice. You’re throwing away profit that shareholders hired you to capture.

It might even be wrong for a business to reduce prices. Voluntarily reducing prices reduces profits. And their duty is to maximize profits.

Now, you can overturn a tariff in court. You can roll back a policy. You can refund the tax.

But you can’t un-ring the bell. You can’t un-teach the consumer what they’re willing to pay. You can’t force a company to charge less when charging more is their duty.

The Supreme Court might rule the tariffs unconstitutional. They probably should. The president doesn’t have the authority to enact sweeping tariffs. It’s about whether one man can impose the largest tax hike on the American people since 1993 without Congress.

But even if the Court strikes them down, even if importers get refunds, your grocery bill isn’t going back to 2024 prices. Your furniture costs aren’t dropping. The new floor is set.

That’s the lesson from the Chicken Tax. Tariffs might be temporary. But once prices go up, they don’t come down. The damage is permanent. It begs the question: What’s the purpose of these taxes?

Why Congress, and Not Kings

Why do we tax ourselves at all?

For most of human history, we didn’t. Early humans lived in bands of fifty, maybe a hundred. Small enough that everyone knew everyone. Cooperation was personal. You helped me hunt, I shared the meat. You watched my kids, I watched yours. No roads. No armies. No infrastructure. No need for taxes, because everything was face-to-face.

Then came agriculture. Cities. Suddenly, humans lived with thousands of strangers. Tens of thousands. Millions. Our brains didn’t evolve for that. We evolved to cooperate with people we know. People we see. People in our tribe.

How do you get a million strangers to cooperate? To build roads none of us would build alone? To fund armies that protect people we will never meet? To create systems like courts, schools, and infrastructure that benefit everyone but cost everyone?

We told stories. Stories big enough that strangers could believe them together. Nations. Laws. Religions. The story of money we all believe is that a one-hundred-dollar bill is worth more than the cotton paper it’s printed on, that invisible numbers on a piece of plastic are worth anything at all.

Taxation is one of those stories. The story says we’re not just strangers, we’re a people. Americans. Because we’re a people, we pool resources. We choose to tax ourselves, to build what none of us could build alone. Interstates, the power grid, the military, the internet.

And tariffs? They’re not some foreign penalty. They’re taxes on us. American importers pay them. Then businesses pass them down. And right now, Americans are paying hundreds of billions through these tariffs. By the time the Supreme Court rules, the total bill could top a trillion dollars.

When one person can tax us without consent, we no longer believe the story. We’re not citizens anymore. We’re subjects.

The American Founders knew this. They’d lived it. James Madison, the architect of the Constitution, said, “Give all power to the many, they will oppress the few. Give all power to the few, they will oppress the many.”

The British Crown taxed the colonies. The colonies had no representatives in Parliament. No voice. No vote. Just the bill. Taxation without representation.

So when the Founders wrote the Constitution, they made a choice. A radical choice for 1787. They gave the taxing power to the American people’s representatives: Congress. Not the President. Article I, Section 8 declares Congress has the power “to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises.”

That’s the philosophy of taxation in a republic. We don’t tax because a king demands it. We tax because we agree, through representation, to build something together.

The Founders believed in something higher than the Crown. They believed in natural law. Rights granted by God, not kings. Life. Liberty. Property.

Benjamin Franklin proposed a motto for the Great Seal of the United States: “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”

That wasn’t a flourish. It was philosophy. If rights come from God or nature, no human has the authority to strip them away. So when a king taxes without consent, it isn’t just unfair, it’s illegitimate. Resisting isn’t rebellion. It’s duty.

So, our choice. Citizen or subject. Representation or tyranny. Republic or monarchy.

America owes allegiance to no king.

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.

But the Matter Isn’t Settled…

Of course, Congress has delegated some authority to the President over trade. In 1977, they passed the International Emergency Economic Powers Act for times of genuine crises. Freeze terrorist assets. Sanction rogue nations. That kind of thing.

But hundreds of billions in new taxes on American importers, passed straight to American families because of trade deficits? Is that a threat to national security?

The courts didn’t buy it. Not one. The Court of International Trade ruled the move illegal. Another federal court agreed. Then the Court of Appeals, three judges, unanimous, said the same thing. All concluded the law was written for emergencies, not long-standing trade policy. Letting the President tax unilaterally would rewrite the Constitution.

Congress gave itself authority to tax in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution for a reason. If Congress wanted to give the President authority to impose hundreds of billions in new taxes, they have to say so explicitly.

The Emergency Powers Act doesn’t do that. It authorizes responses to specific emergencies. Not permanent, sweeping taxation of the entire economy. Letting presidents declare trade deficits “emergencies” and impose massive tariffs would essentially rewrite the Constitution. It would transfer the taxing power from Congress to the executive branch. We don’t amend the Constitution through executive order and creative reading of a 1977 statute.

So the tariffs are illegal. Case closed, right?

Hold your horses, cowboy!

The administration appealed. The appeals court paused its own ruling. Meaning the tariffs remain in effect while the case goes up to the Supreme Court. The government keeps collecting the tax. You keep paying it. Even though three separate courts have ruled it’s unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. Oral arguments are scheduled for November 5, 2025. We’ll have a decision probably by year’s end. Maybe early 2026.

In the meantime, the government keeps collecting. Importers keep paying. And we keep paying. By the time the Court rules, the total tab could top a trillion dollars.

If the Court strikes them down, the companies that paid the tariffs will get refunds. Ford. Walmart. Target. Amazon. Every business that imported goods and paid the tax. They’ll get their money back. But the consumer? We already paid.

And even if the Supreme Court strikes down the tariffs, our prices aren’t coming down. Businesses have a solemn duty to make profits. Once they’ve established that consumers will pay $70,000 for a truck, why would you drop it to $60,000 just because your costs went down? You’d be leaving money on the table. Shirking your duty to shareholders.

The market has already adjusted. The new price floor is set. Consumers have demonstrated they’ll pay it. So prices stay high.

The Supreme Court can rule on constitutionality, but it can’t undo the price increases. It can’t force companies to lower prices. It can’t give us back the purchasing power we’ve already lost.

Is It a Win or a Loss for America?

The Court will decide whether the President had the authority to impose these tariffs. The answer, based on every lower court ruling, is probably no.

If the Supreme Court strikes down the tariffs, it will reaffirm a principle that’s stood for 237 years. Congress controls taxation. The President isn’t a king. We govern ourselves through our representatives, not by executive decree.

That’s a win for the Republic. But it’s a hollow victory for our bank accounts.

Even if the Court rules correctly and the system works exactly as Madison designed it, our grocery bills stay high. The damage is done.

The constitutional principle survives. Our purchasing power doesn’t.

And here’s the thing: Tariffs don’t even solve the problem they claim to address.

China controls about 90% of the world’s rare earth element processing. These elements are critical minerals used in everything from F-35 fighter jets to smartphones. Last week, China expanded restrictions on rare earth exports, and the administration threatened 100% tariffs in response.

But raising taxes on Americans doesn’t get us rare earth elements. It just makes Americans poorer while China still controls the supply.

Want to solve the rare earth problem? Build partnerships with Denmark and Greenland, which hold substantial untapped reserves of rare earths and other critical minerals. Work with our NATO ally to develop Greenland’s mining capacity. Invest in domestic processing facilities. Create real alternatives to Chinese supply chains.

That takes diplomacy. Investment. Strategic partnerships. Long-term thinking.

Tariffs? That’s just taxing ourselves and calling it foreign policy.

So is it a win, or a loss, for America?

Jefferson already answered that question.

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.

Not rebellion with rifles. Rebellion with accountability. Rebellion by demanding our representatives actually represent us. We fire the ones who let presidents tax us without a vote. We pick someone else, even if they are from the same party. We insist that we tax ourselves only by agreement of the people. Consent of the governed. Taxing power stays exactly where the Constitution put it: with Congress. With us.

The system Madison and others put in place is resilient. But only if we defend it.

America owes allegiance to no king.

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.

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The Six-Hour Bomb: When Alexander Hamilton Almost Killed the Constitution

June 18, 1787. Philadelphia. The temperature in the Pennsylvania State House had already hit 85 degrees. Fifty-five men in wool coats and powdered wigs sat trapped in a room with the windows nailed shut and doors guarded for secrecy. The delegates chose privacy over performance so they could speak freely. They had been arguing openly for three weeks about how to build a government. Nothing was working.

Alexander Hamilton finally stood. Brilliant, abrasive, born a b*****d in the Caribbean. He’d watched the Continental Congress dither while soldiers froze at Valley Forge. He’d seen New York burn while thirteen states bickered over tax policy.

He had been quiet, boxed in by his own New York colleagues. Then he said the hard part out loud.

“I have well considered the subject,” he began, “and am convinced that no amendment of the confederation can answer the purpose of a good government, so long as state sovereignties do in any shape exist.”

In short, there could be no fix to the Articles of Confederation, the governing document that existed before the Constitution. Maybe it was the heat. Or frustration from the gridlock. But Hamilton was done with democracy’s inefficiency. State sovereignty would always gridlock national purpose. He rejected the proposals on the table from Virginia and New Jersey and aimed higher.

He spoke for six hours. All day. The room heard a full design for a national government.

What Hamilton wanted: A president elected for life. Absolute veto over all state laws. Power to appoint every governor of every state. Senators serving for life. A government that Madison judged to be suspiciously like the monarchy we had just defeated in a prolonged war.

Madison noted, “Give all power to the many, they will oppress the few. Give all power to the few, they will oppress the many.”

In the end, America would owe allegiance to no king.

Hamilton’s model pushed far past what most men in the room would accept. Delegates from Connecticut started whispering to each other. The Virginians exchanged glances. By hour three, some walked out. By hour five, even his allies from New York looked uncomfortable. Benjamin Franklin, 81 years old and sitting near the back, closed his eyes, unclear whether from boredom or horror.

No one took it up for a vote. The plan was never seriously considered. His audacity branded him a monarchist to some. The day after, the Convention went back to the real fight over representation. But something had shifted. The center of gravity slid toward Madison’s national vision because Hamilton had stretched the frame.

What happened next tells you how the room felt. Hamilton left Philadelphia on June 29. He drifted in and out. He returned briefly in mid-August and early September. Fleeting presence meant little influence.

In the end, Hamilton signed anyway. He was the only New Yorker who did. On signing day, he told the other delegates: sign it, even if it’s not perfect. The country needs this.

Then he went home and did something remarkable.

New York wouldn’t ratify the Constitution. The state legislature hated it. Too much federal power, they said. Too much risk of tyranny. So Hamilton spent seven months writing essays in New York newspapers under the pen name “Publius.” He wrote fifty-one of them. Madison and John Jay wrote the rest.

These became The Federalist Papers. The most important commentary on the Constitution ever written.

Hamilton’s task was to convince New Yorkers that a strong executive wasn’t a king. That energy in government didn’t mean tyranny. That the Constitution he’d argued against in private was actually the best hope for the republic.

He lost the room in Philadelphia. But he won the argument in the newspapers. New York ratified. Barely. By three votes.

Hamilton defended a Constitution that rejected his vision because he understood something crucial: a flawed republic beats no republic at all.

Read Madison’s notes closely, and you see he understood the logic of the six-hour speech, even though he disagreed. Hamilton believed human passion would wreck any loose confederacy. He feared both gridlocked democracy and entrenched kings. His cure was durability: long terms, firm vetoes, national supremacy over state mischief. He said the British constitution best united strength with security.

Now, the decisive matter. America’s founders did not fear a British king. They feared an American one. They feared what would happen when blind ambition gathered enough levers to bend the entire machine. They wrote a Constitution that mixes energy with friction so no single person or group could run away with the Republic. The secrecy and sealed windows were tools to make that compromise possible, not symbols of elitism.

Hamilton lost the day, but not the argument. His extreme plan made the moderate path possible. But ideas never really die. His left a permanent temptation on the table: trade our Republic’s checks and balances for speed, trade gridlock for efficiency, trade debate for decisiveness. The room said ‘no’ in 1787. That decision created the Republic of the United States of America.

Hamilton lost, but his argument never died.

It waits for every moment when efficiency and allegiance sound better than divided power. That moment is now.

The Shutdown’s Shadow. When the President’s Memo Becomes a Weapon

October 1, 2025. Midnight. The lights went out across Washington. The federal government shut down for the first time in six years. Congress couldn’t pass a budget, and now 2.1 million civilian employees brace for days without pay. National parks lock their gates. Passport offices close. Air traffic controllers work without paychecks. Food stamp checks bounce in rural counties.

This is the machinery of America, seized.

Gridlock isn’t the problem. We have no king. But this shutdown isn’t like others.

Back in Washington, Russell Vought, Project 2025 author and now head of the Office of Management and Budget, directed federal agencies to prepare “reduction in force” notices. To fire employees whose programs don’t match “the President’s priorities.”

Not illegal programs. Not wasteful ones. Programs the president doesn’t like.

It begs the question: Does the power of the purse still reside in Congress, or has it quietly migrated to the White House?

Hamilton wanted the president to veto laws. The room in 1787 said no. This week, we’re watching what happens when Congress gives up.

The shutdown impacts real people, but the crux of the matter is not the impacted programs. It’s not whether the EPA should exist or the CDC deserves its budget. It’s not even whether these firings save money or waste it.

The crux is Hamilton and Madison.

Hamilton wanted a king, or close enough. A president who could veto laws or Congressional policies they found distasteful. Not just unconstitutional laws. Not just illegal spending. Policies the executive simply disagreed with.

Madison said no. He built a system where Congressional power over spending was sacred. Where the president couldn’t just refuse to execute laws because he thought they were bad policy. Where gridlock wasn’t a bug. It was the entire point.

The question in 1787: What happens when the legislature passes something the executive hates? Does the executive get to ignore it? Does one person’s judgment override the people’s representatives?

The Convention answered: No. The president executes the laws. Congress controls the purse. If you don’t like what Congress funds, you veto the bill before it becomes law. Once it’s law, you follow it.

But what we’re watching now is Hamilton’s vision, 238 years late. A shutdown that becomes a veto. An executive using Congressional paralysis as permission to act. Not just managing the crisis. Reshaping government during it.

This isn’t about President Trump. It’s about whether America still believes what Madison wrote in 1787: that ambition must check ambition. That we must divide power to limit power. That even good policy imposed by one person is tyranny.

Hamilton lost that argument. But his idea never died. It keeps popping up, waiting for the right moment.

Nixon’s Impoundment Crisis: When a President Tried to Be His Own Congress

Richard Nixon looked at the federal budget in 1972 and saw waste. Not illegal spending, just programs he thought were stupid. He blamed the Democratic-led party for excess spending. Water treatment plants in Democratic districts. Rural development funds. Clean water grants.

Congress had passed these appropriations. Nixon had even signed some of the bills. But he decided: I’m just not going to spend this money.

He called it “impoundment.” What it meant: The president can refuse to spend money Congress allocated if he thinks it’s a bad idea.

By 1973, Nixon had impounded over eighteen billion dollars, about twenty percent of controllable federal spending. Clean Water Act funds. Highway construction. Housing assistance. Food stamps.

When Congress asked why, his answer was simple: These programs are wasteful. I’m protecting the economy.

Nixon’s position was that the president has inherent constitutional authority to refuse to spend money he deems unnecessary, regardless of what Congress wants.

Congress sued. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled against Nixon in Train v. City of New York. The law said money “shall be allotted,” not “may be” or “at the president’s discretion.” Shall meant shall.

The courts said clearly: The president cannot refuse to spend appropriated funds based on policy disagreement.

Congress passed the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. The law was simple: The president cannot permanently cancel spending that Congress appropriated. To rescind funds, the president had to ask Congress. Both chambers must approve within forty-five days. If they didn’t, the money must be spent.

The president can temporarily delay spending, but must notify Congress. Congress can force immediate release anytime.

The law was bipartisan. Senate Republicans joined Democrats. Because they understood: If a Republican can do this, so can the next Democrat. This guts Congress’s power permanently.

America need not fear a British king. We should fear an American one. The power of the purse is the power of the people. If we surrender it to the executive, we surrender the Republic itself.

Nixon resigned in August 1974. Every president since has operated under the Impoundment Control Act. They’ve all chafed against it. But they generally followed the process: propose rescissions, let Congress vote, spend the money if Congress says.

Until now. We’ve seen this before. Canceling foreign aid, withholding domestic spending, using shutdown authority to cut programs. It’s Nixon’s playbook.

The argument is similar. These programs are wasteful. The president has inherent authority to manage the executive branch. The Impoundment Control Act itself might be unconstitutional.

The question is the same question from 1787:

Does the president execute the laws Congress passes, or does the president decide which laws are worth executing?

Hamilton said the executive should have that discretion. Madison said no, that’s monarchy. Nixon tried to claim it. Congress and the courts said no.

Now we’re asking again.

Congress Built This Trap

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Congress created this problem.

Not President Trump. Not Russell Vought. Congress did this by refusing to do their job.

The Constitution gives Congress one primary measure against executive overreach: the power of the purse. Article I, Section 9. Every dollar spent must be “in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” Congress decides what gets funded. The president executes those decisions.

For decades, Congress has punted. They pass continuing resolutions instead of budgets. They kick hard choices down the road. They let government lurch from crisis to crisis because making actual spending decisions requires something they can’t muster: consensus.

And when Congress won’t decide, someone else will.

When the legislature abdicates, the executive fills the space. Not because presidents are tyrants. Because someone has to keep the lights on.

Obama used executive orders when Congress wouldn’t act on immigration. Bush claimed war powers when Congress wouldn’t debate authorization. Every modern president pushes boundaries because Congress left the boundaries undefended.

Both sides have constitutional arguments.

Advocates for presidential power claim the Unitary Executive position. Article II vests “the executive Power” in the President. Executing laws includes discretion over how and when to spend. The president has inherent authority to decline spending he deems wasteful.

Advocates for congressional power claim the Congressional Supremacy position. Article I gives Congress the power of the purse. Appropriations are laws. The president’s duty is to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” The Framers rejected a presidential line-item veto by design.

Both can cite Founders. Both can find judges who agree. This debate only happens because Congress stopped defending its own power.

The Framers created friction deliberately. Madison designed it that way. Ambition to check ambition. The government grinds to a halt when consensus breaks down because gridlock is the price of divided power.

Here’s the originalist paradox: If this executive power existed all along, why didn’t presidents use it for 184 years?

From Washington to Nixon, presidents generally spent what Congress appropriated. Not because they lacked ambition. But because they understood the constitutional bargain.

When Nixon broke that norm, both parties slapped him down. Republicans joined Democrats on the Impoundment Control Act because they understood: If Nixon can do this, so can the next Democrat.

That’s the test. Not “Do I trust this president?” but “Do I trust every future president?” We can’t complain about executive overreach if Congress won’t exercise legislative power.

Do We Trust Every Future President?

Hamilton wanted a king. The room said no. They built a system where Congress could check the executive through the power of the purse.

But that check only works if Congress pulls the lever.

Madison’s design assumed ambition would check ambition. That Congress would jealously guard its powers.

He didn’t account for a Congress that would rather avoid hard votes than defend its constitutional role.

What’s happening now looks like Hamilton’s vision. But Madison’s system didn’t fail. Congress is failing Madison’s system.

The Founders gave us the tools. Congress just refuses to use them.

So, again. Do we trust every future president?

May God bless the United States of America.

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October 17, 1933. New York Harbor

Albert Einstein stepped off a passenger ship at the Port of New York, carrying two suitcases and a violin case. He and his wife, Elsa, had fled Nazi Germany. His books were being burned. There was a bounty on his head: one million dollars. He had to flee. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, offered him refuge.

American universities, including Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, kept Jewish faculty to a minimum under quotas that lingered into the late 1940s. In 1933, Germany barred universities from employing Jewish instructors.

But Einstein’s unparalleled scientific reputation made him an exception. By 1940, he became a US citizen. A hunted mind found safety and gave its work to the country that offered it. His was the story of America’s ability to attract extraordinary talent in times of global crisis, benefiting both the individual and the country.

Then, a great war… (artillery shells in the distance)

Twelve years later, in September 1945, Wernher von Braun arrived at Fort Strong, Boston Harbor, under very different circumstances. He was a prisoner under military control, not a welcome guest.

Von Braun had been a key figure in Germany’s rocket program. He surrendered to the US Army in the Alps and denied Nazi allegiance. Through Operation Paperclip, the Army shifted his custody into contract work. In total, we brought over more than sixteen hundred German scientists in similar fashion.

America faced a critical shortage of expertise in rocketry, and the Germans were good at rockets. Operation Paperclip prioritized strategic advantage in a rapidly escalating Cold War. We acquired technical skills to compete with the Soviet Union. Yes, Von Braun’s past and role in Germany’s rocket program were controversial. But his expertise helped lay the foundation for America’s space program, including the Apollo missions.

Von Braun would lead teams that researched space programs and weapons technology. He later became the director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

Our stories highlight two faces of America’s approach to global talent. Einstein’s arrival was a humanitarian and intellectual triumph. We welcomed a persecuted genius. He enriched our scientific landscape.

Operation Paperclip, by contrast, was a shortcut. We imported expertise rather than developing it. We chose to prioritize providing for the national defence over the longer work of creating homegrown American rocket scientists.

It would not be the last time we brought in talent rather than build it here at home.

November 29, 1990. The White House

It was the day after Thanksgiving. President George HW Bush was about to sign what seemed like routine paperwork. The Immigration Act of 1990 sailed through Congress with bipartisan support. Democrats held strong majorities in both the House and Senate, but Republicans voted for it too. Senator Ted Kennedy shepherded it. Bush praised it as expanding basic entry rights beyond numbers.

Buried in technical language was a new tool. An H-1B visa for temporary workers in specialty occupations. A cap of 65,000. It felt generous for the handful of firms that might need niche skills. The press barely noticed the H-1B provision. Nobody understood we had just created a constitutional time bomb.

By 1998, the dot-com boom raged. Tech companies begged for more skilled workers in STEM fields. For the first time, we reached the 65,000 visa cap. Instead of asking why American universities weren’t producing the workers American companies desperately needed, Congress simply raised the cap.

Then, we raised the cap again to 115,000. Today, the nominal cap is 65,000 plus 20,000 for US advanced degrees, with exemptions and extensions that let total approvals exceed the cap. It’s the same pattern each time: Companies complain about shortages, and Congress increases the supply of foreign workers.

Nobody asked the hard question: Why can’t we train Americans to do these jobs?

Thirty-five years later, that same temporary program turned constitutional failure just got a $100,000 price tag. But the underlying problem, the broken infrastructure we need to develop human capability, remains untouched.

If this is a temporary measure we’ve already had for 35 years, let’s ask some easy questions. What conditions must we achieve to reach readiness? How will we know we achieved those conditions? How long is too long to keep the program? How much preference is too much? If the goal is a tech-ready American workforce, who decides when we should kill the program?

What Ted Kennedy and George Bush created in 1990 wasn’t an immigration program. It was an admission of constitutional failure. A Band-Aid slapped over a bleeding cut. Our inability to fulfill two of our founding promises: to promote the general welfare and establish justice.

Our constitutional goals often compete. We sometimes ignore one to prioritize another. But not in this case. In this case, we flat-out ignore two of them at the same time.

Call infrastructure what it is: the general welfare. If we expand H-1B, we admit we failed to build the system that produces capability. Justice is the fierce guardian of opportunity. We withhold that protection when we keep Americans born in even our poorest areas from the system.

We’re still overlooking our constitutional requirements today.

September 25, 2025. Capitol Hill

Senators Chuck Grassley and Dick Durbin, Republican and Democrat, sent identical letters to America’s biggest companies. Amazon. Apple. Microsoft. Google. JPMorgan Chase. The question was simple: Why are you hiring foreign workers while laying off tens of thousands of Americans?

The numbers told the story Congress refused to see for thirty-five years. Amazon alone got approval for more than 14,000 new H-1B hires in fiscal 2025, the most of any company, even as it announced layoffs affecting tens of thousands of American jobs. Microsoft, Meta, Google followed the same pattern: hire foreign, fire domestic.

The senators wrote to CEO Andy Jassy…“With all of the homegrown American talent relegated to the sidelines, we find it hard to believe that Amazon cannot find qualified American tech workers to fill these positions.”

The median H-1B salary hit $120,000 in 2024, nearly double what the average American worker earns. These aren’t low-skill jobs being outsourced. They are exactly the high-paying careers we promise American students they can achieve through education and training.

But here’s the constitutional violation hiding in plain sight: We built a system where companies find it easier to import talent than develop it. Amazon can process 14,000 foreign visa applications, but claims it can’t find qualified Americans.

We’ve abandoned the infrastructure that should create American capability and the general welfare in favor of global recruitment.

But there’s another question we have to ask. Is there justice for small businesses?

These big tech companies can absorb the new $100,000 fee and keep hiring foreign workers. Amazon processed 14,000 H-1B applications. What’s another $1.4 billion to them? Microsoft, Google, and Meta can simply pay the tax and move on.

But the startup in your town? The small software company trying to compete with Amazon? The local engineering firm bidding against Deloitte? They can’t afford a $100,000 visa fee. Because we haven’t built our necessary tech infrastructure, they get priced out of skilled talent entirely.

When we create a two-tiered system where only the biggest corporations can access global talent, we’re rigging the game against small business owners. The fee doesn’t solve America’s skills shortage. It hands Amazon an even bigger competitive advantage.

The Constitution promises to establish justice, not auction it off to the highest bidder. We didn’t fix the pipeline. We priced out the people who could.

Eighty years of shortcuts have brought us here. But the Constitution offers a different path.

In Case We’re not Picking Up on the Pattern…

In 1945, we imported German rocket scientists instead of training Americans. In the late 1990s, we imported H-1B tech workers instead of training Americans. In 2025, we raised H-1B fees instead of training Americans.

Rather than decisive efforts to fix our deficiency, we bring in skilled immigrant workers from nations that do a better job of achieving our goals than we have.

Each time, we chose the shortcut over the constitutional path. Each time, we treated symptoms instead of causes. Each time, we failed to ask the fundamental question: What would it take to make these visas unnecessary?

The answer isn’t complicated. It’s just hard. Lucky for us, America is a great nation with tremendous resources.

If we’re serious about reducing H-1B dependency, not just making it more expensive, we need to address the infrastructure failure that created the problem. Three specific steps would transform our approach from Band-Aid to cure:

First: Measure H-1B applications per capita.

Stop tracking how much money we spend on training programs and start measuring whether they work. H-1B applications are a direct measure of American workforce readiness. When applications drop, we’re succeeding. When they rise, we’re failing. Make this the primary metric for evaluating our education and training infrastructure.

Second: Require H-1B companies to participate in local training.

Any company filing H-1B applications must demonstrate active participation in developing American talent. Partner with community colleges. Host career days. Present real-world challenges to students. No participation, no visa applications. This aligns private profit with public need. Exactly what the Constitution requires.

Third: Eliminate student loan interest for low-income students.

The government isn’t a for-profit institution. The nation benefits when its citizens improve their capabilities. Charging interest on federal student loans for low-income students creates a barrier to the technical education we need. Genius hides in poverty. Remove that barrier.

These aren’t radical proposals. They’re constitutional obligations we’ve ignored for thirty-five years while wondering why we still need temporary foreign workers to fill permanent American needs.

The question isn’t whether we can afford to invest in American capability. The question is whether we can afford not to.

So…Why Do We Still Need Temporary Workers After 35 Years?

Einstein’s arrival was a triumph, for him and for America. Von Braun’s expertise launched our space program. Both stories show immigration enriching our nation. But neither shows us building the infrastructure that creates American capability.

The H-1B program continues this pattern. It fills immediate needs but doesn’t address the underlying question: Why can’t we systematically develop the talent we keep importing?

It doesn’t promote the general welfare, because we’re not building American capability. Nor does it establish justice, because it ignores homegrown American tech workers and prices small businesses out of competition.

Let’s come back to our questions. Again, H-1Bs are a temporary measure we’ve already had for 35 years.

What conditions must we achieve to reach national tech readiness? How will we know we achieved those conditions?

How long is too long to keep the program? How much preference to corporations is too much?

If the goal is a tech-ready American workforce, who decides when we should kill the program?

These aren’t rhetorical questions. They’re real questions that demand specific answers from policymakers. They’re the questions Congress should have been asking since 1998. They expose that we’ve never planned to end H-1B dependency.

So, instead of building infrastructure that lets every American kid lead the world in tech innovation, we’re still asking the same question we’ve avoided for thirty-five years…

Why do we still need temporary workers after all these years?

The constitutional violation is the infrastructure neglect, not the immigration. Immigration works when America offers opportunity. We should build the infrastructure that offers that opportunity to Americans, too.

May God bless the United States of America.

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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.

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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.

Music from #Uppbeat https://uppbeat.io/t/dada/stormy-sea License code: ML5WFF9OHYGLPAUV

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

Music from #Uppbeathttps://uppbeat.io/t/philip-anderson/new-beginningsLicense code: BHFHI0ZF5V0XVS5E

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