Underthrow

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Her utopia is impossible. His golden age is gone. What if neither the future we imagine nor the past we remember is available to us?

To see why, consider a window.

You’ve heard of the Overton Window. It’s the range of ideas the public will tolerate at a given moment. Inside it are the policies a politician can propose without losing the next election.

Outside lies the unthinkable.

Joseph Overton, a policy analyst in Michigan, sketched the idea in the 1990s. Activists on both sides have used it ever since. Shove it left. Shove it right. Try to make the radical sound reasonable, or the reasonable sound rabid.

But the window has a blind spot. It shows what people will accept politically. It tells us little about what we can build without waiting for politics.

Doors of Possibility

So let me introduce another piece of architecture. Call it Kauffman’s Doors.

Picture a door to a room. You walk through, and it shuts behind you. There’s no handle on this side, so you can never go back through that door. The only way out is through another door, into a room you’ve never seen.

Kauffman’s Doors are the adjacent possible applied to societies and how they evolve. So what’s the adjacent possible? And who is Kauffman?

Stuart Kauffman is a theoretical biologist. At the Santa Fe Institute, he spent years asking how life gets more complex—say, from proteins to people. His answer? Every system sits at the edge of what it can become next.

A primordial soup can’t just produce a human heart, much less a human. It can only make the molecules one catalytic reaction away. But each new molecule opens possibilities that did not exist a moment before. The biosphere grows as each new form of life opens possibilities for what comes next.

Kauffman calls this proximate frontier the “adjacent possible.”

No Way Back

Here’s what that means for us: We cannot restore the past. Whether the Fifties, the Founding, or the Gold Standard, there’s no going back. The open frontier was paved or protected, and today’s pioneers are looking at Mars. Our past rooms held different people with different motivations in different circumstances. And the door to each past room closed when we left it.

Any movement that promises former glory is selling a key to a rusty, antique lock. Any movement that promises a grand utopia is selling socialist snake oil.

Those who want a better future have to move forward, through one of Kauffman’s Doors. And forward means new circumstances. Some will be better. Some will be worse. We don’t get to pick the temperature in the next room. The doors are few, and from any new room, the possibilities are limited.

The Constrained Vision

Now, meet Thomas Sowell.

In his influential book A Conflict of Visions, Sowell described two ways of seeing the world. The constrained vision sees human beings as limited, and every policy prescription as a trade-off. The unconstrained vision places greater faith in moral and intellectual perfectibility, and in an unbounded will to overcome perceived social evils. It imagines elites can design a better society and install it for everyone.

The adjacent possible applies a constrained vision to societal evolution. You can’t skip rooms by designing and installing a perfect society. And you can’t return to the glories of the past, real or imagined.

You can only take the best next steps.

A to Z

Here’s the uncomfortable part. Freedom lovers like to think they get down with the constrained vision. They quote F. A. Hayek and warn about central planners. But too many are quick to draw up their own blueprints.

Abolish the Fed by Tuesday and privatize everything by Friday. We’ll all wake up Monday in Libertopia. They imagine we can get from A to Z without ever passing through B. That’s just the unconstrained vision wearing a Gadsden flag.

A free society won’t be crammed through the Overton Window. Nobody can argue a civilization into existence.

Criticize by Creating

We’ll have to step through Kauffman’s Doors, through things people can build, do, or join right now. Start a microschool. Join a mutual aid society. Use a stablecoin wallet. Project by project, with “ideas having sex,” we move toward our North Star while underthrowing the powerful.

No project is perfect, of course, but each creates possibilities that didn’t exist before. That’s how life did it over four billion years without a blueprint. And that’s how we’ll do it.

So stop looking for a way into the Glorious Past. And stop thinking you can design the Utopian Society of the Future. We must look for the doors before us and choose wisely.

Then we can walk through one and listen as it shuts behind us.

There’s no going back.

The only way forward is through.

I’m Max Borders. Let’s criticize by creating.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit underthrow.substack.com/subscribe

Subscribe and support us at Underthrow.org

Something’s not right. You’ve felt it. Maybe at a dinner-table conversation that went cold over politics. Maybe scrolling at 2 a.m., wondering why everyone seems furious, and nobody seems happy.

You’re not imagining it.

A civilization in decline shows symptoms like a sick body. And ours is running three fevers at once.

The first is ressentiment. That’s Nietzsche’s word for a bitter, impotent envy. When I feel powerless, I can muster the will to do the work and change my life. Or I can convert all that powerlessness into moral outrage at the world. Outrage is easier. It feels righteous. And it lets me off the hook. A culture soaked in ressentiment produces fewer and fewer people who take responsibility for anything.

The second is anomie. Durkheim saw it coming more than a century ago. When shared, sacred norms erode, the individual is left alone with his impulses. Feeling isolated and hyperreactive, he floats in a sea of nihilism with nothing to hold on to. To feel less isolated, he might join the mob or set out to make the world more like what’s inside him.

The third is spectacle. Debord and Baudrillard warned that we would come to live among images instead of in life. Reality gives way to performance. The territory gets lost under layers of maps. Identity becomes a costume, staged for an audience also wearing masks. We curate, we signal, and after a while we forget anything genuine ever existed beneath our thin avatars. Put simply:

People are growing more resentful, more adrift, and more fake.

And they know it.

So they go looking for a cure.

False Cures

Most reach for one of three modern curatives: politics, “spirituality,” or therapy. Each promises relief. Yet in its modern form, each makes the sickness worse.

Start with politics.

The instinct makes sense. Win power. Capture the institutions. Fix things from the top. But look at what those institutions run on. Ressentiment fuels the campaigns. Anomie fills the ranks. Spectacle is the whole show.

You cannot cure a society with heavy doses of the underlying pathology. The reformer who climbs inside a dying institution doesn’t change it. It changes him.

Then there’s spirituality—or what passes for it.

Perhaps it’s the California New Age variety: vibes without vows, bliss without discipline. Maybe it soothes you for an afternoon. Then it evaporates, because nothing was asked of you.

Then there’s contemporary therapy.

Some of it can help. But too much of the modern therapeutic industry has become iatrogenic. That is, the healer causes the harm. Therapy addictions keep wounds open. Bad therapists keep your locus of control outside of you, so the world is always to blame, and you are never responsible.

“That’ll be $150, please. See you next week.”

Trauma becomes the client’s identity. Dependency becomes the therapist’s business model.

None of that makes the client more self-possessed and sovereign.

The Games Beneath

The philosopher James Carse described two kinds of games.

A finite game is played to defeat others. It has a scoreboard, an ending, then winners and losers.

An infinite game is played to keep the play going. Its purpose is not victory but continued possibility and play.

Modern politics, spirituality, and therapy can hide finite games disguised as paths to fulfillment:

Win the election.Follow your bliss.Blame the world.

Different scoreboards—same trap.

There’s nothing wrong with playing finite games. The mistake is making them the point of life.

So the first important move is to stop believing that winning these games will make us whole. The board is all wrong, and the rules reward the rot.

So the second big move is to play a different game.

In an infinite game, adversity is part of the play. Obstacles appear. Challenges arise. We face them not merely to prevail, but to become more capable players, open more possibilities for cooperation, and keep the play going.

The Turn

So if modern politics is hollow, modern spirituality is empty, and modern therapy too often turns suffering into identity, what feeds a malnourished spirit?

A high-trust community of people living by a code, for starters.

But not just any code—one that helps us become the kind of people capable of building the next great civilization.

It must also help us become cultural, social, and psychospiritual counterpower—a growing fellowship of people who’ve stopped asking permission to build what comes next.

But a community doesn’t hold together on good intentions. Every enduring order has held something sacred, something its members would honor even at great personal cost.

That’s the code. And that’s where the real work begins.

I’m Max Borders. Let’s criticize by creating.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit underthrow.substack.com/subscribe

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-Nearly every time someone complains online about a crazy medical bill, it goes viral. We’ve all been there. Invariably, people in the comments say the same thing:

This is what happens when you leave healthcare to the free market.

It’s a tidy tale. The villain is greed, the cure is government, and the case for single-payer is closed.

There’s just one problem:

A free market in American healthcare doesn’t exist. It never has.

You can’t blame a villain that doesn’t exist. So let’s follow the money and find out what’s really going on.

Follow the Money

In 2026, Americans will spend more than 5.3 trillion dollars on healthcare. That’s eighteen cents of every dollar the economy produced.

Now ask who paid.

Medicare paid 21 percent. Medicaid paid 18 percent. Add CHIP, the VA, TRICARE, and Obamacare, and public insurance covers about half the total bill.

Now trace each dollar back to whoever finally writes the check, and the picture gets clearer. Washington sponsors 31 percent. State and local governments sponsor 16. So government pays for more than half of American healthcare.

Okay, so what about private insurance and out-of-pocket payments? Private insurers paid 31 percent, and households paid 11 percent out of pocket.

Those look like the free-market numbers. But we have to look closer.

The Private Sector That Wasn’t

Start with your employer insurance plan.

It’s a fossil from the Second World War. Wage controls barred companies from raising pay, so they competed with benefits instead. Congress never changed that, so the tax code froze that accident in place.

The problem is, premiums your employer pays are untaxed. That exclusion is worth hundreds of billions a year—to somebody. But it chains your coverage to your job. And it distorts the price, hiding it from the one person who ought to see it: you.

Next, we have the individual market. But the ACA (Obamacare) decides what every plan must cover, how much premiums may vary from person to person, and how much the taxpayer has to chip in.

Then prices. Medicare sets administered rates for hospitals and doctors, and private insurers bargain in Medicare’s shadow. The government price is the anchor.

What about supply? Licensing decides who may treat you. The FDA decides what you may take. EMTALA decides who must be treated.

And in many states, certificate-of-need laws require permission to start a new clinic. The entrepreneur has to get permission from a board where the hospitals already in town get to object.

Nothing fishy about that. Imagine opening a restaurant and needing sign-off from the competitor across the street.

It’s all anti-competitive. It drives up premiums and prices to benefit insurers, hospital systems, and the agencies that shield them. That arrangement has a name.

Call it the Care-tel.

The Expense-Account Effect

So what’s left of the healthcare market?

Out-of-pocket spending sounds like shopping. Mostly it’s deductibles and copays inside the insured system. You pay a slice of a true price you never saw.

So the real market is only a sliver: cosmetic surgery, LASIK, some dental and vision, direct primary care, and over-the-counter drugs. These are but a few percent of the healthcare sector.

But in that sliver, patients see real prices and providers compete for patients. LASIK has spent decades getting better while its real price has held steady or fallen.

Everything else in US healthcare runs on the expense-account effect.

When someone else pays for your blood test, you don’t care whether it costs fifty dollars or five hundred. But the lab does.

So an outrageous bill lands on the insurance risk pool. The pool raises premiums, but all the jacked-up prices stay hidden until you get your premium bill, which not everyone does. (Remember: only those who buy on the private market or pay fully out of pocket see it.)

Too few in that chain have a reason to ask what anything costs, so there is drastically reduced price competition.

The healthcare sector bloats, and we b***h about the final bill. Then people look at all the wreckage and blame “capitalism.”

What a Market Would Look Like

Here’s what reform looks like, starting with what matters most.

* Put the money back in the patient’s hands. Expand health savings accounts and pair them with real catastrophic coverage. Insurance is for a car wreck or a cancer diagnosis. Prepaying for sniffles, stitches, visits, and labs is how a policy becomes an expense account.

* Treat every health dollar the same in the tax code, no matter who pays it. End the wartime tax privilege on employer coverage, and your insurance follows you from job to job.

* Make prices transparent by law. If routine care comes out of our accounts, we’ll all start to care what the blood test costs. You’ll need the number before you agree to pay it.

* Break the supply cartel. Repeal certificate-of-need laws. Speed safe drugs to market. Let more trained people practice.

* Let insurers compete across state lines. If your carrier earns a reputation for denying claims, you should be free to buy a plan from New Hampshire. And forge a clear path to form new mutuals and healthcare associations.

* Help the poor with ownership. Replace Medicaid with means-tested deposits into poor folks’ health savings accounts. Money that belongs to someone gets watched.

* Price the hardest cases honestly. Fund high-risk pools for people with preexisting conditions, with premiums capped at a multiple of the standard rate. Introduce reinsurance programs for crazy-high interventions, but only after getting rid of guaranteed issue and community rating.

Most of this was obvious fifteen years ago, when a certain party shoved Obamacare down our throats. But none of the reforms ever happened, because every item on that list takes something from the Care-tel.

Now the self-same party is whining for Medicare for All, as if CanadaCare and the British NHS are running just splendidly.

No one in those countries has to wait months for treatment, and of course it’s all “free.”

Make Them Compete

Those who want CommieCare have a simple pitch: the market failed, so let the bureaucrats run it.

But it’s a lie. The free market they blame was never even allowed in the waiting room.

What failed is our Frankenstein system—half of it paid for by the state, the rest fenced in by the Care-tel.

Physicians swear an oath: First, do no harm.

It’s time that oath bound our government officials and their greedy corporate supplicants alike.

If you don’t like evil corporations providing your healthcare, don’t hand it over to a giant monopoly. Subject them to more competition. That’ll make them serve us better for far less of our money.

I’m Max Borders. Let’s criticize by creating.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit underthrow.substack.com/subscribe

Subscribe and support us at Underthrow.org--A quick quiz. No wrong answers, just interesting results.

What is the proper role of government?

Pick the answer closest to your gut:

* The Helper. Government ought to solve social problems and help people.

* The Guardian. Government should make moral laws, preserve tradition, and keep order.

* The Referee. Government should just protect your rights to life, liberty, and property.

* None. Government is a corruptible monopoly.

Okay—got your answer? Hold onto it.

We’re going to take each answer seriously. Then we’ll see which ones survive.

Answer A: The Helper

Let’s start with what is arguably the most popular answer. Call it The Department of Problem Solving, or The Helper of Last Resort.

Whether it’s poverty, addiction, housing, or the pothole on Elm Street, when something goes wrong, many think government officials should be responsible for fixing it.

It’s a nice idea. But it has a sorry track record.

First, government officials tend to do things poorly. The people who staff the government aren’t stupid. But they almost never pay the price of failure.

A restaurant that serves bad food closes. An agency that delivers bad outcomes asks for a bigger budget. And it almost always gets one.

So problems don’t get solved. They get displaced, or they metastasize. The War on Poverty is approaching retirement age, yet poverty showed up at its last birthday party.

Moreover, the Helper government changes us.

When there’s a department for every problem, we stop seeing the problems as ours to solve. Responsibility gets outsourced to a faraway bureaucracy with a phone tree. Neighbors who might once have organized a meal train or a mutual aid society can barely muster a thumbs-up on social media.

The Helper helps people, all right. It helps them forget how to help each other while the bureaucrats help themselves to ever-expanding budgets.

And don’t forget: programs almost never die. If no customer can walk away, then no one is accountable. The program hoards resources. The mission creeps.

Have you ever known a government agency to solve a problem and then immediately shut itself down?

I’ll wait [drums fingers].

Answer B: The Guardian

Here, government’s job is to keep us civilized. Enforce decency. Protect our culture. Keep law and order. Many people think government is the body responsible for making us good.

The trouble is, you can’t legislate morality. The state can only legislate punishment or require recompense. If it tries to police a victimless vice, that vice goes underground.

Prohibition didn’t end drinking, after all. It gave us Al Capone. The Drug War didn’t end drug use. It gave us cartels and products laced with fentanyl.

And here’s another problem with Answer B: culture doesn’t need a warden.

Families, congregations, fraternal orders, and schools have carried traditions for millennia without a ministry supervising them. Once the state appoints itself keeper of a tradition, it has to decide whose tradition counts. And your peaceful neighbor, with his different gods and different holidays, becomes a problem to be managed.

Finally, order matters. Nobody wants chaos. But order comes in two major kinds.

Emergent order grows. Language. Markets. Common law. A crowded sidewalk where nobody collides.

Imposed order arrives wearing a badge. No doubt we need policing. We just need to be careful about what we police. Imposed order has a habit of turning intolerant. Then violent.

As Yale law professor Stephen L. Carter reminds us:

Law professors and lawyers instinctively shy away from considering the problem of law’s violence. Every law is violent. We try not to think about this, but we should. On the first day of law school, I tell my Contracts students never to argue for invoking the power of law except in a cause for which they are willing to kill.

Answer C: The Referee

This one’s popular with my audience.

It’s government as a humble night watchman. And if something happens, it’s the fair-minded arbiter who decides who injured whom. Government, on this view, should keep the game fair—not by ensuring equal outcomes, but by applying rules equally.

We can grant that premise. We do need people willing to protect life, liberty, and property.

The trouble is, the Referee—watchman and arbiter—will be tempted by power. Give one faction exclusive power to judge disputes, including those over the extent of its own power, and see what happens.

To avoid such problems, the American founders wrote the most careful referee’s manual in history. A few pages of enumerated powers.

Two and a half centuries later, the referee owns the league, sells the tickets, rewrites the rulebook, and bilks the players. The Referee who started out calling fouls now commits them routinely.

So even if you believe protection and adjudication are core functions every society needs, a harder question lingers:

Is a monopoly government the right body to perform them?

Answer D: None

Which brings us to the fourth answer, the one for outliers:

Government is a corruptible monopoly.

Weigh each word carefully.

A monopoly government is a single provider of governance services, over a vast territory, backed by the threat of force. Corruptible means it is run by people who are vulnerable to temptation and drawn to power.

Combine corruptible and monopoly, and you get the most dangerous arrangement a society can allow: power you can’t refuse, held by people you can’t trust.

We already know how monopolies behave. Higher prices. Worse service. Contempt for the customer. Why do we expect better when the monopoly carries guns, takes no accountability, and is willing to throw its customers in jail?

Well, most people just can’t imagine the alternative.

But there is one.

Competition. In governance itself.

Governance, after all, is a bundle of goods and services: security, dispute resolution, rule-making, safety nets. Each can be provided by entities that have to earn your participation—and keep earning it.

Unhappy? You have recourse.

Over it? You can exit.

Otherwise, people owe a strong moral justification for why you must accept the monopoly bundle.

But here’s the twist. Choosing “None” doesn’t mean rejecting the Helper, the Guardian, or the Referee. It means we all get to choose them according to our ideals.

Want a community with generous mutual aid?

Join one.

Want strict moral codes and deep tradition?

There’s a covenant for that.

Want a bare-bones night watchman and nothing else?

Sign here, please.

The first three answers become menu options. Nobody gets to impose their choice on you.

That’s what ending the monopoly buys us. Lower prices. Higher quality. And more ways to live and self-organize than any capital could ever conceive.

Coda

Go back to your original answer.

If you picked Helper, Guardian, or Referee, you weren’t wrong about what people need. But you might have been wrong about who ought to supply it—and whether you really get a say in the matter.

So maybe the question isn’t “What is the role of government?” Maybe it’s why we let a single institution be the monopoly provider of some of the most important things in life.

Turns out a few of us are done waiting for permission to build the alternative.

I’m Max Borders. Let’s criticize by creating.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit underthrow.substack.com/subscribe

Human Respect Labs presents: “The Spell That Made Everyone Good” —a short animated parable on force, freedom, and the power of human respect.Please watch and share so we can make more!Got a creative project idea about human liberation? Visit Human Respect Labs to see if you qualify for funding.

There once was a city both ancient and great, Whose greatness gave way to a terrible fate.

The city of Uz, its people once proud, Now lived in the dark of a terrible cloud.

Around every corner, a mugger, a thief,Their victims left standing in stunned disbelief.

Brigands besieged from beyond the high wall, And a TYRANT ruled harshly within the great hall.

The tyrant sent goons to collect all because, He thought of himself as much better than Uz.

The people now lived in perpetual fears, Of the Takers whose taking brought nothing but tears.

An Old Wizard said, “I’ve had quite enough! Of thieves, and tyrants, and brigand-y stuff.”

He worked through the night to craft a spell right, Then cast that spell down upon Uz at first light.

The Makers of Uz noticed nothing at first, So wary of Takers, they planned for the worst.

They hustled, traded, and worked the whole day, And the Takers retreated in total dismay.

The pickpockets picked but couldn’t quite poach; The brigands found out that they couldn’t approach.

The goons of the tyrant grew weak at the knee, Then smashed into shields that no one could see.

Makers could make, but Takers were thwarted. “Everything’s changed!” the people reported.

The city now bustled with commerce and peace.So harmony, joy, and abundance increased!

The Takers grew weary from trying to plunder, Foiled every time, and left there to wonder…

Unable to pilfer a pound or a pence; They couldn’t compel, so they had to convince.Forbidden to take, they had to do good, So life kept improving, just as it should. The Spell had permitted no harm, not a jot, So better and better and better things got. No candy would vanish from innocent hands. The brigands gave up on their plundering plans. The tyrant came down to everyone’s level. No power to dictate, cow, or bedevil. Folks worked and traded, and gave from the heart. And mutual aid played a critical part. After working long days, the Uzites rejoiced; As Uz was now buzzing with compassion and choice.Uz became known as a City of Gold, Where everyone wanted to live and grow old. Till one day, a Dark Mage discovered the Spell. He said, “These Makers don’t give quite enough of themselves.”

“The Old Wizard’s magic is no good for the needy. It lets all the townfolk be selfish and greedy!”

So the Dark Mage incanted with black magic, strong, To cancel the spell that had righted the wrongs. By dawn’s gentle light—the Old Wizard was weak. Only pallor remained on his once-rosy cheeks. The thieves found pockets to pick and purloin. The brigands went back to plundering coin… The Tyrant’s big goons were all taxing by eight. And Uz slid back down to a desperate state. The moral, the lesson, to take, if you could; There’s not enough magic to make us all good.

Yet each of us carries the power to care; So we should try Human Respect everywhere.

Credits

Written by Max BordersStory Editor: Christopher CookSound & Score: James S. BordersVoice Artist: Andrew ChisholmAnimation: Alexandra MurhaStudio: Hound Studio

Please share and discuss this with others—especially younguns. The more eyeballs and interest we get on this, the more likely we are to secure funding for more creative projects.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit underthrow.substack.com/subscribe

Subscribe and support Underthrow.org--

Something strange has happened to the American economy. Ask people whether life has become less affordable, and you’ll probably hear the same story.

The middle class is disappearing. Wages can’t keep up. Our parents had it better. Everything costs too much.

Slivers of that story are true. But then you encounter a chart like this one from the Master of Killer Charts, Mark Perry.

In 1967, adjusted for inflation, about 30 percent of American households earned less than $35,000. Today it’s about 19 percent.

Okay. So where did everybody go?

They got richer.

In 1967, only 16.5 percent of households earned the equivalent of $100,000 or more in today’s dollars. Today? Nearly 45 percent. The middle-income group really has shrunk—from 54 percent of households to 36 percent.

But look where it went… Up.

The disappearing middle class didn’t simply tumble into poverty. Millions of households graduated into higher real incomes, despite persistent inflation. And the percentage at the bottom fell, too.

So America has this weird problem: we’re still getting richer, but we don’t feel richer.

The Great Divergence

Another Mark Perry chart helps explain why. Look at what happened to prices between 2000 and 2025.

TVs became almost unbelievably cheaper. Computer software plunged in price. So did cellphone services and toys. Clothing barely budged. Household furnishings and new cars increased far less than wages.

These are sectors in which competition, technology, globalization, automation, and scale have been allowed to perform their strange magic. Companies figure out how to make more with less. Competitors copy them. New entrants undercut them. Technology improves. And consumers benefit.

Now look at the other end of the chart.

* Hospital services: up 281 percent

* College tuition and fees: up 197 percent

* Childcare: up 159 percent

* Medical services: up 147 percent

* Housing: up 111 percent

Something very different is happening in these industries. And unfortunately, these aren’t trivial.

You can postpone buying a new flat screen, but you can’t postpone appendicitis.

You can keep using your old laptop, but you still need a place to live. And if your kid needs childcare while you work, Amazon can’t ship you a cheaper substitute tomorrow morning.

Such is the paradox of American prosperity. We’re richer. Many of the things we buy have become dramatically better and cheaper. But some of the things we cannot easily do without have become painfully expensive.

So instead of asking “Why is everything unaffordable?” we should ask: What’s different about the things that are?

Follow the Red Lines

Start with housing. Why don’t developers just build more homes where people want them? Often because it’s illegal.

Zoning restrictions and building codes are costly. Minimum lot sizes consume land. Parking requirements increase costs. Permitting adds delays. NIMBY opposition prevents construction. Then we all express shock that restricting the supply of something makes it more expensive.

Or consider health care.

Whatever else American health care is, it is not some laissez-faire free-for-all. It’s a labyrinth of government subsidies, third-party payments, occupational licensing, insurance regulation, patent protections, insurance mandates, in-state monopolies, and restrictions on competition.

Some states even maintain Certificate-of-Need laws, which can require government permission before a provider builds or expands a medical facility. The Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department have criticized such laws for restricting competition.

And then there’s college.

For decades, our solution to expensive higher education has been to give people more money with which to buy increasingly expensive higher education.

This has created a tuition spiral: Loans. Grants. Subsidies.

But subsidizing demand without proportionately increasing supply almost never makes something cheaper. Some of our increased purchasing power becomes higher tuition. Meanwhile, universities compete with amenities, facilities, administration, and prestige — costs that don’t necessarily translate into more learning.

Cost Disease

There is another force at work here, too. Economists call it Baumol’s cost disease.

Some industries become dramatically more productive. One farmer can feed vastly more people than his ancestor could. One factory worker can produce vastly more goods.

But a string quartet still requires four musicians. A nurse practitioner still needs a certain amount of time with a patient. A teacher still needs time with students. A caregiver can only watch so many children.

As wages rise in productive sectors, these labor-intensive sectors have to raise wages too, even though they can’t increase output at anything like the same rate.

So not every red line on this chart is caused by government. But officials can make an intrinsically expensive problem considerably worse.

The Wrong Diagnosis

This is why the standard story matters.

If your diagnosis is that “capitalism” has made ordinary life unaffordable, your solution will probably be more subsidies, more controls, and more regulation.

But what if the diagnosis is backward?

What if competitive markets are actually doing remarkably well in much of the economy—and our worst affordability crises are concentrated in sectors where competition, supply, and productivity are tightly regulated and unusually constrained?

If that’s true, the prescription changes.

For housing: Let people build.

For health care: Create transparent prices and remove barriers to entry and competition.

For higher education: Never assume subsidizing students will discipline prices.

When Baumol’s cost disease is the real culprit, recognize the trade-off instead of pretending there’s a regulatory magic wand that makes labor-intensive services cheaper and more widely available.

This isn’t an argument that every regulation is bad. It isn’t an argument that every subsidy is useless. And it certainly isn’t an argument that Americans who feel squeezed are imagining things.

It’s an argument that we need to identify where the squeeze is actually coming from.

The Affluence Paradox

America isn’t a country steadily sinking into poverty — though it risks it by sinking into ever more debt.

In inflation-adjusted terms, far more households earn six-figure incomes than did two generations ago. Far fewer live at the bottom. And technological progress has delivered goods our grandparents could scarcely imagine at prices they could hardly believe.

Yet we’ve constructed bottlenecks to accessing some of the most important things in life. Housing. Health care. Education. Childcare.

Because those expenses loom so large in a household budget, they can sap all the gains in prosperity.

A 70-inch television for $400 doesn’t help much when your rent just went up another $400 a month.

So maybe the great economic question of our time isn’t “Why doesn’t capitalism work anymore?”

The question is: why do the things exposed to vigorous entrepreneurial competition keep getting better and cheaper — while so many of the things we’ve insulated from it keep getting more expensive?

We need to follow the red lines. They’re trying to tell us something.

I’m Max Borders. Let’s criticize by creating.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit underthrow.substack.com/subscribe

The Lindsay Clancy case is resurfacing a fresh debate about mens rea and actus reus—that is, the guilty mind and the guilty act.

And it’s running along the same lines it always has.

Was she evil, or was she sick? Prison, or hospital?

You know how this goes.

One side says it was a choice. The other says the choice was made for her, by her wiring, her childhood, or her biochemistry. Prosecutors build the first story. Defense attorneys hire experts to build the second. Then twelve people are meant to settle a question philosophers haven’t settled in three thousand years—ideally in time for dinner.

The Question of Desert

Both sides are answering the same question, but it’s the wrong one. Team Criminalization asks whether the accused deserves punishment. Team Clinicalization asks whether she’s too sick to deserve it. Both make desert the gate through which everything passes.

So case after case becomes a referendum on free will, which nobody wins, and the verdict goes to whichever story is more fashionable at the time. Whether the Clancy case pushes us further from criminalization toward clinicalization, I can’t say. I suspect it will. But notice who isn’t always central to either calculation.

The victim.

Three Questions, One Verdict

The way through isn’t to split the difference. It’s to notice that criminal law fuses three separate questions into a single verdict, even though they come apart cleanly.

Did he do it? Is he blameworthy? What is owed?

First question: Did he do it? That’s a question of fact. The act either happened or it didn’t, and that’s answerable by policework, not psychiatry.

Now, the second question: Is he blameworthy? That’s a question about capacity more than diagnosis. Could reasons reach him? That we can investigate. And a psychiatric diagnosis is evidence, not an automatic verdict. Most people with any given diagnosis obey the law most of the time, which shows that a diagnosis alone cannot be exculpatory. Skeptics will say testing responsiveness to reasons just restates the battle of the experts. But there’s a world of difference between asking a clinician to determine a person’s motives, and asking whether an actor could process a basic warning.

Now, the third question: What is owed? That’s the question far too few people ask in these matters. And the important answer is that a debt survives a diagnosis. The man who smashed your window might have been out of his mind. But the window is still broken. Somebody has to pay for the glass, and right now it’s you.

Law Professor Randy Barnett calls this restitutive justice. Retribution asks what the accused deserves. Rehabilitation asks what he needs. But restitution asks what he owes, and to whom. That third question doesn’t require us to solve the metaphysics of free will, because a debt isn’t a verdict on the soul. It’s an accounting of who bears a cost and who ought to bear it.

The Debt Survives the Diagnosis

Three things fall into place once these questions come apart.

A man in a psychotic break burns down a house. Under retributive justice, we punish someone reasons couldn’t reach. Under rehabilitative justice, the state treats the offender, and the victim’s family eats the loss. Under restitutive justice, we might refrain from assigning blame, but the debt remains. Blame may disappear. Liability need not. That means the loss does not automatically become the victim’s burden.

And we get a verdict that tells the whole truth. “Guilty” can imply a degree of culpability he didn’t possess. “Not guilty by reason of insanity” can sound, to ordinary ears, as though the act itself has somehow disappeared. But a third finding can say two true things: he did it, and the loss is attributable to him.

Whether he’s to blame is a separate finding.

Now, let’s not forget about the problem of therapeutic iatrogenesis: A culture that routes every harm through diagnosis risks manufacturing legions of helpless people with no internal locus of control, who blame the world for everything and answer for nothing. Restitution keeps the ledger open. You may not be found blameworthy, but you are still answerable for paying your debts to your victims and/or their families.

You Can’t Bill a Tornado

Someone will object that a man out of his mind is like a tornado: Destructive, but not an agent. And you can’t send a tornado a bill.

But tort law generally doesn’t let insanity erase liability. When one of two innocent people must bear the cost of a loss, the law often places it on the person who caused it, a rule the courts arrived at long before anyone had worked out what causation implies about our motivations.

In other words, restitution asks the tort question rather than the criminal one, and the tort question already has a settled answer. To those who object that tort only manages property while crime strips physical liberty, Barnett’s point is that we already lock people up. The question is whether we lock them up to satisfy state power’s ‘debt to society’ criterion, or to force a structured accounting to the person they actually harmed.

But the tornado analogy proves too much. A tornado cannot understand a warning, respond to an incentive, make restitution, or alter its conduct in response to consequences. A human being—even one incapacitated by circumstances or chemicals—often can. The moment we recognize that difference, we’ve already left the tornado analogy behind.

What Cannot Be Paid

Now for the sticky part, and I won’t pretend otherwise.

Some debts can’t be paid. A murderer cannot make a murdered man whole. And some people will offend again the day they’re free, no matter what they owe. Critics point out that most violent or psychotic offenders are indigent, meaning the victim’s family gets nothing and the debt remains an abstraction.

But restitution isn’t just financial accounting—it can turn sterile human warehousing into actual reparations. Where money cannot make victims whole, restitution can structure earnings, garnishment, and supervised programs aimed at repairing what can actually be repaired—subject, of course, to firm limits on what the state may compel.

More Due Process

That said, restitution can’t be the whole system. But where restitution runs its course, restraint begins—and restraint is dangerous, because at least debt has a number attached to it. Dangerousness doesn’t. So the constraints on authority have to tighten at that line, not loosen.

If we confine a man because he’s “dangerous” rather than because he’s “indebted,” we owe him more process, not less. Restraint in these cases isn’t retribution. It is society’s self-defense, designed to protect innocent civilians from those likely to reoffend.

Look at who the authorities can hold the longest. A convict has a sentence with an end date. A man acquitted by reason of insanity doesn’t. In 1983, the Supreme Court held that because an insanity acquittee is confined on grounds of mental illness and dangerousness rather than punishment, the maximum sentence he might have served sets no limit on that confinement. And a man found incompetent to stand trial gets no verdict at all. He can wait in a county jail for months—and in some jurisdictions far longer—for a hospital bed, while the question of guilt remains unresolved.

So right now we have this backward in both directions.

The insanity acquittee gets less protection than the convict. The man on the competency waitlist gets less than either.

Due process limits the state’s use of force, but the accused loses his liberty whether we call it a sentence or a treatment plan.

The Determinist

The determinist will say all of this misses the point. If the laws of nature are fixed, no one is ever responsible for what they do, and justice is just a useful illusion.

Maybe so.

But watch what the determinist does when he says it. He doesn’t throw a rock. He doesn’t hand you a prescription. He argues, which means he tries to change your mind. He treats you as precisely the kind of creature that reasons can reach.

Even if he claims he’s just running new physics on your neural software—fine. If an argument is just informational cause-and-effect, then holding a man to his debt is the exact cause-and-effect needed to keep a free society intact.

That isn’t proof of some uncaused ghost in the machine. It’s just the everyday thing that agency requires.

We need the useful illusion.

So when the next headline breaks and the country splits over whether a suspect was evil or sick, don’t accept the choice. Ask whether she did it. Ask what capacities she possessed.

But don’t stop there.

Ask what she owes—and ask who’s been left holding the bill while the rest of us debated her state of mind.

I’m Max Borders. Let’s criticize by creating.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit underthrow.substack.com/subscribe

Subscribe and support at Underthrow.org

Picture this: You walk into your local grocery store in New York City. You load up your cart with fresh produce, milk, and coffee. You get to the register, and the total drops by thirty percent.

Sounds like a dream, right?

Well, if the city’s democratic socialist contingent has its way, this isn’t just a dream—it’s the new order. Their plan? Have the city operate grocery stores at a loss, slashing prices across the board by thirty percent.

And how do you pay for a government-run grocery chain operating at permanent losses? Just tax the rich! The “fat cats.” At least... the ones who haven’t already packed their bags for Miami.

It sounds easy. But in the real world, this model ain’t just flawed—it’s counter-productive and destructive.

Profit and Loss

Let’s talk about profit margins. I know. Socialists hate them. But all organizations have to bring in more money than they spend, or they will run out of money. Even the government.

Now, the average grocery store operates on a margin of one to three percent. It is one of the most volume-dependent, low-margin industries on the planet.

Slashing prices by thirty percent isn’t just cutting into profit—it’s running a massive, continuous deficit on every pineapple or box of Poptarts that leaves the shelf.

When a private business runs at a loss, it goes bankrupt. When a government runs a program at a loss, it raises taxes!

But here’s rule number one of municipal finance: You can never just tax the rich.

To cover systemic losses at this scale, the tax base expands to everyone in the city. Which leads to a glaring irony: the working-class New Yorkers who are supposed to be rescued by thirty-percent-off groceries end up funding those exact discounts through higher sales taxes, property taxes, and rising living costs elsewhere.

They aren’t saving thirty percent. They’re just paying for their groceries twice—once at the register, and once on tax day.

Bodega Backfire

Things get worse when you look at who gets hurt by this first.

New York City runs on its bodegas, corner markets, and independent grocers. These small, family-owned businesses cannot lower their prices by thirty percent to compete with a subsidized store down the street. If a state-backed market opens nearby, local corner stores risk going under.

Now, the socialist planners might say: “That’s fine, we’ll just subsidize the bodegas, too!” But think about that logic for a second: Subsidize state stores so they undercut local bodegas; Subsidize local bodegas so they can survive the state stores; and raise taxes on the entire city to fund both subsidies simultaneously. See why this ain’t too bright?

And guess who gets caught in the crossfire? It’s not just mega-corporations. It’s community grocery co-ops—like Key Food or Foodtown—where workers actually own the operations. The very worker-owned models democratic socialists claim to protect will be crushed by socialist competitors!

Now let’s follow the tax trail.

About 44% of NYC’s local tax revenue comes from property taxes, with another 13% coming from sales tax. When property tax rates are bumped up to cover expanding municipal subsidies, who actually pays? The common assumption is that property owners and landlords will just absorb the costs. But property owners aren’t all rich. And landlords pass costs to renters. Raising taxes, especially property taxes, leads directly to higher rents.

When rents spike, the people will cry out! So the next lever they’ll pull is rent freezes.

But with rent frozen, property owners won’t collect enough revenue to maintain their buildings and cover their property taxes. The quality of housing will drop. Buildings will degrade. Eventually, the city will have to step in to take over tax-delinquent properties—creating another municipal sector that requires... you guessed it, more subsidies!

New York City already carries one of the highest tax burdens in the nation.

When you build an entire municipal economy around price controls, artificial discounts, and compensatory subsidies, the math won’t math. You cannot endlessly subsidize basic consumer goods by taxing the very population that buys them.

At a certain point, the state isn’t redistributing wealth from the top down—it’s just shuffling money from the citizen’s left pocket to their right pocket, while skimming half of it on administrative costs. You know, unproductive DSA jobs.

Neither good intentions nor abject stupidity can ever repeal the law of supply and demand.

If you want truly affordable groceries, you don’t want government-run grocery stores funded by endless tax hikes. You need efficient supply chains, lower barriers to entry, and economic policies that leave more money in people’s pockets.

So, either the DSA needs an Econ 101 lesson, or they are actively trying to destroy NYC’s free enterprise system to be replaced with a government monopoly.

I’m Max Borders. Let’s criticize by creating.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit underthrow.substack.com/subscribe

Subscribe and support us at Underthrow.org

--

Look at this yard sign. Pause the video if you need to. Surely you’ve seen it before. For those listening, it reads…

In this house, we believe: Black Lives Matter. Women’s Rights are Human Rights. No Human is Illegal. Science is real. Love is love. Kindness is Everything.

Recently, I casually mentioned my assessment of this sign: “Dumb talking points” with “bumper sticker logic.” I was surprised when a loved one asked me why.

The loved one is young, but he’s no dummy.

And it occurred to me that the ubiquity of this yard sign speaks to its persuasive power. So, I promised to explain my assessment.

I’ll share the result with you, point by point.

In This House, We Believe

It would be too easy to overlook this first bit on the original yard sign. But it frames the sign with powerful ambiguity: It could mean that in THAT house they all happen to believe the same things; or it could mean that if you step into this house, you must believe as we do or you’re not welcome.

Given that the opening line carries the full religious valence of “As for me and my house, we shall serve the Lord,” I’m guessing the ambiguity is intentional. So, every time I see that sign, I feel unwelcome. It’s just too easy to read the intro as: If you don’t share my sentiments, don’t bother knocking.

Black Lives Matter

I don’t want to reopen old wounds or rehash the scandals surrounding the organization’s founders.

I want to look at the phrase itself—and the glaring hypocrisy of how it’s applied.

The implicit premise of the movement is that black lives are under unique, existential threat from systemic violence. But if you look at actual mortality data, the narrative falls apart.

According to the FBI’s 2019 expanded homicide data, in single-offender cases, white offenders killed 246 black victims. That same year, black offenders killed 566 white victims—more than double, despite the white population being roughly five times larger.

Now, the standard defense here is that interracial crime is a fraction of total homicides, and that most crime is intra-racial. That’s true. Overall, nearly 7,500 black Americans were homicide victims that year, and roughly 90 percent of the offenders were black.

Furthermore, police shootings of unarmed black individuals—while tragic and deserving of scrutiny—number in the low dozens per year in a country of 330 million people.

So here is the question of logic: If the slogan is Black Lives Matter, why does the outrage engine activate only in the rarest of circumstances?

Why does an exceedingly rare event stoke nationwide protests, while thousands of daily deaths generate quiet indifference from the very people displaying this sign?

If Black lives matter, they should matter everywhere, at all times—not just when a tragedy fits a preferred narrative.

Women’s Rights are Human Rights

M’kay. This one is a head-scratcher, till you notice the double standard. It comes in how the sign frames universal rights and dignity. Expanding “Women’s rights” into “Human rights” is offered here as a necessary moral upgrade. But if anyone tried similarly to expand “Black Lives Matter” into “All Lives Matter,” they would be accused of erasing the unique struggles of a particular group.

So, universal dignity is treated as the ultimate justification in one context, but a bad-faith distraction in another… On the very same yard sign! Is this subtlety, stupidity, or cynicism? I cannot say. All I know is that the very same people who claim that women’s rights are human rights are not willing to restrict access to immigrants from cultures where most men treat women as chattel... Which leads us to our next bromide.

No Human is Illegal

This bumper-sticker line doesn’t make everyone roll their eyes, but perhaps it should.

The slogan relies on a semantic trick: it conflates a person’s existential humanity—which cannot be illegal—with a person’s legal status (after unlawful entry).

Jurisdictions have borders that function like porous membranes, regulating the inflow and outflow of people.

Citizenship is a legal designation that defines an individual’s formal membership in a jurisdiction. It carries with it certain rights, duties, protections, and benefits.

None of these is infinite.

So, whatever you think about immigration levels, there must be limiting principles.

Science is Real

Science is real, huh? What does that mean? Science is a process rooted in both skepticism and methods of observation. People apply these in their efforts to determine what is real and perhaps to explain real phenomena.

It’s true that science is not the same thing as writing fiction or making art. But writing fiction and making art are real, too, though writers and artists might be less concerned with investigating reality or explaining real phenomena. Still, why would anyone care if I claimed that art is real?

We can only assume, then, that “Science is real” is shorthand for “Science is a method for understanding the world.” Yet almost no one denies this. So why mention it on the yard sign? Maybe it implies something more like “Trust the Science™,” which we shouldn’t always do, especially because The Science™ is so often corrupted or in error.

Just ask Anthony Fauci and Al Gore.

Love is Love

And a tautology is a tautology. I understand the sentiment: people of any race, sex, or sexual orientation can fall in love, and that isn’t inherently wrong or unhealthy. But as a slogan, it’s more a vague platitude designed to signal moral high ground than to make any meaningful case.

Besides, one can hold traditional taboos or advocate for sexual restraint without opposing the basic truth that love is valuable.

Indeed, sometimes love requires sexual restraint.

Kindness is Everything

Sure, kindness is important. But it’s not everything. Nor is it universally practiced by the people displaying these yard signs.

Starting with kindness is generally good practice. But sometimes we have to get stern. Sometimes we even have to strike fear into real enemies. And kindness cannot be the basis of social or economic policy.

Kindness is a practiced virtue. It’s good. It’s valuable. And it helps hold society together. But it ain’t everything.

So, let’s kindly request a little more critical thinking.

The Whole Enchilada

Now, what can we conclude about the sign, taken as a whole? At best, it’s vague moralism. At worst, it’s a tangle of contradictions and feelings. Somehow, though, it managed to persuade millions of people that it contained a powerful message. It signaled solidarity in sanctimony. But that says so very little about the people who took the money to buy it, and the time to stake it in the ground.

And look. We could do a whole episode about the vacuous bumper-sticker logic of MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. And maybe my loved one would like to see that, too. But for now, we’ve got bigger fish to fry.

Until next week, I’m Max Borders.

Let’s criticize by creating.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit underthrow.substack.com/subscribe

Subscribe and support at Underthrow.org--I was having a conversation with my wife recently.

“When you say you want to create a consent-based society,” she said, “what do you mean?”

I replied that I want all human relationships in that society to be consensual, not compelled. We went round and round for an hour.

I didn’t get very far in persuading her.

To most people—my wife included—the very idea of a society based on consent is a strange abstraction, even though it’s in our Declaration of Independence.

For our entire lives, we have grown up under the authority of a monopoly that, at the end of the day, has power over us. This group of people has the power to tax. It requires us to use debased money. It has the power to kill, and it has done so.

So, if we do not comply, the group can and will compel us.

But the government is not a thing. It’s a group of people, no different from you or me, with a monopoly on the initiation of violence.

It uses the threat of violence to maintain its power to tax, transfer, and erect programs and projects we might despise.

Voting is a Veneer

Around this tremendous power—including the armed agents, the guns, and the jails to put you in if you don’t comply—there is a veneer of legitimacy. We do a little dance every couple of years called an election.

But depending on where you live, the odds that your vote could decide who shall be the senator in your state are about 1 in a million, which is only slightly better than the odds of getting struck by lightning that year. For the U.S. president, your odds of casting the deciding vote are about 1 in 60 million.

You might as well cry a teardrop in the ocean and expect the tide to turn.

Still, most people can’t imagine things being decided any other way. Power gets transferred and tossed around rather arbitrarily by “democracy.” Otherwise, a massive managerial state rules over us, and it’s even less accountable to us lowly voters.

That’s right: lowly. Not only is voting a flimsy accountability loop, but a third of voters don’t even know what the branches of government are, much less anything about the national debt. (It just hit $40 trillion.)

Most of us aren’t hyper-partisan. We just go about our lives sandwiched between two vocal partisan mobs shouting for us to vote this way or that.

Surely we can do better! But how?

It comes down to overcoming people’s failure of imagination. And that’s nigh impossible when the partisans go around with dumb talking points and bumper-sticker logic, and half the voters with intelligence below the mean.

What then?

Okay, so let’s get back to the idea of a consent-based society.

I remember my wife telling me a story about how she hated her AT&T phone plan and decided to switch to Verizon. She promised never to use AT&T again.

“What if things could be more like that?” I said.

By that point, she was tired. We’d been arguing for an hour.

So I’ll wrap up here with three points I wish I’d said to her. It might help you in conversations like this with your spouse:

* Consent means you can leave. If Verizon treats you badly, you can go to AT&T; if Publix disappoints you, you can shop at ALDI or Whole Foods. The simplest test of consent is whether you can say no—and leave the system—without being punished. Otherwise, would anybody propose a grocery store monopoly for 340 million people, give it compulsory dues, and call that consumer choice?

* Competition makes the powerful accountable. Imagine if your phone company could charge whatever it wanted, change the terms whenever it pleased, and send armed men after you if you refused to pay. We would never call it “accountability” if customers got to vote on the CEO every four years.

* Governance doesn’t have to be one-size-fits-all. Different communities could offer different rules, services, and ways of living together—and people could choose among them, just as they choose schools, churches, neighborhoods, insurance plans, or phone companies. Instead of fighting endlessly over who controls the monopoly, we could experiment with ways of breaking it up.

We already understand consent everywhere else: the right to say no, the right to leave, and the right to associate with another organization.

The radical question—the one Thomas Jefferson asked—is why governance should be different.

I’m Max Borders. Let’s criticize by creating.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit underthrow.substack.com/subscribe