Roots

Americanism, Remembered

Something is deeply wrong in American life, and nearly everyone can feel it—even if we argue endlessly about why.

People are working harder than ever, yet feel less secure. Families live one emergency away from economic collapse. Working people are told to lower their expectations and accept instability as normal. We are richer as a nation than at any point in history, yet increasingly anxious, divided, and exhausted.

This is not a failure of character. It is not a failure of effort. It is a failure of structure—and of memory.

We have been taught to see each other as adversaries: left versus right, white collar versus blue collar, generation versus generation. As we fight over labels, something essential has been quietly stripped away — the shared understanding that a society is more than a marketplace, and that citizenship implies obligation as well as freedom.

Before we were divided into ideologies, Americans were forged around a simpler idea: that fellow citizens are kindred, not competitors.

To understand where I am going, you must know where I began.

I am a child of the Bicentennial, born in 1776’s shadow. I was forged in a household where “conservative” was an understatement; my father proudly called himself a “Radical Right-Wing Extremist.” My inheritance wasn’t money—it was a worldview. I’ve sat in militia meetings. I marched with the Patriot movement when it was just beginning. I have owned “assault rifles,” carried an NRA card, and voted for Pat Buchanan. I don’t just understand the Second Amendment; I lived the culture that defines it.

Judge those roots as you will.

I was raised in the kind of poverty that demands you trade your health and your time just to stand still. My parents viewed government assistance as a surrender of character and pride. When the early ’80s left us buried in six-figure debt and little income after a tragic accident, we didn’t turn to food stamps or welfare. We did with little or without. I know the bone-deep cold of midwest winter in a house that couldn’t hold its heat. We lived in ruins owned by slumlords until my parents finally scraped together enough to buy a run down place of our own. We used to joke that we had it good — at least the holes in the roof weren’t big enough to see the stars, and the well hadn’t gone dry - yet.

Through it all, the Founders were our silent houseguests. While other teenagers were reading novels, I was immersed in the Federalist Papers, the Anti-Federalist Papers, John Locke, and William Blackstone’s Common Law. I was raised to believe that the founding of this country wasn’t just history—it was a blueprint for how a people should live.

For years, I drifted away from those old books. But as the world began to fracture, I found myself drawn back to the principles of my youth. I returned to the Declaration, to Thomas Paine, and eventually to a lesser-known work: John Adams’ Thoughts on Government, and its origins.

What I found there shook me.

I had memorized the Declaration at age sixteen, but I realized I had been glossing over its most revolutionary concept: the ’Pursuit of Happiness.’ Like many conservatives, I used to think ’Happiness’ was a weak, subjective word, a watered-down version of John Locke’s ’Property.’ I was wrong. The Founders weren’t being vague — they were being precise. Adams had already given it its fullest definition:

“We ought to consider what is the end of government, before we determine which is the best form. Upon this point all speculative politicians will agree, that the Happiness of society is the end of government, as all divines and moral philosophers will agree that the Happiness of the individual is the end of man. From this principle it will follow, that the form of government which communicates Ease, Comfort, Security, or, in one word, Happiness, to the greatest number of persons, and in the greatest degree, is the best.”

— John Adams, Thoughts on Government

Ease. Comfort. Security.

This was not a passing phrase. What I discovered next was something far more extraordinary than a forgotten definition — it was a fully formed philosophy erupting simultaneously from the same mind in multiple directions.

In the spring of 1776, Adams was not gradually developing his thinking about Happiness. He already knew exactly what it meant. And in the space of a single remarkable week, he expressed it in two separate documents — from the same notes.

On March 20th, 1776, as chair of the committee drafting the Instructions to the Commissioners to Canada, Adams wrote that the purpose of establishing new governments was to ’produce their Happiness.’ Not allow it. Not permit it. Produce it. That same week, from those same notes, he was already writing what would become Thoughts on Government.

This was the architecture of his mind — expressed in committee instructions, in political philosophy, in letters to fellow delegates. Adams was writing the same conviction simultaneously in every direction available to him.

He sent copies of Thoughts on Government to William Hooper and John Penn of North Carolina, to George Wythe — Jefferson’s own mentor and America’s first law professor — and to Richard Henry Lee of Virginia. In his letter to Hooper he defined politics itself as ’the Science of human Happiness.’

What happened next is documented. Scholars have confirmed that George Mason — primary author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights — read Adams’ Thoughts on Government through Wythe and Lee before Virginia’s convention assembled. And in June 1776 Mason wrote:

“That all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights… namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining Happiness and Safety.”

He also wrote, in words that cut to the bone.

“Every selfish motive therefore, every family attachment, ought to recommend such a system of policy as would provide no less carefully for the rights and Happiness of the lowest than of the highest orders of Citizens.”

The Virginia Declaration directly inspired Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence weeks later. Adams was in the room when Jefferson wrote it. Having championed Jefferson as its author. Having defined Happiness himself just weeks before.

Then in 1780 — four years after the Declaration, with every opportunity to choose different language — Adams sat down to author the Massachusetts Constitution. He wrote that government exists for the ’safety, prosperity and Happiness’ of the people. Still the same three concepts. Still the same conviction.

This was not one man’s personal quirk. This was not parallel development. This was a single coherent philosophy traveling from Adams’ notes through Wythe and Lee to Mason to Jefferson and back to Adams himself — expressed in committee instructions, political pamphlets, state constitutions and the founding document of the nation itself.

Happiness is a blueprint. Deliberately laid. By one man’s hand. In one extraordinary spring in 1776.

For someone raised the way I was, that discovery did not land gently.

My roots have always been at odds with the idea of a social safety net. I was raised to believe that helping the less fortunate was the job of the church, the family, or the individual—never the state.

Again, I was wrong.

When you align the Declaration, Common Sense, and Thoughts on Government, a singular and undeniable vision emerges: government exists not to rule, but to create the conditions in which a human being can live a secure, dignified life. True liberty isn’t just the absence of a king; it is the presence of the basic economic security required to actually pursue a dream.

The ideals that founded this country were not conceived through the lenses of socialism or capitalism. Those words did not yet exist. What the Founders spoke of—again and again—was the General Welfare, what John Adams called the “Happiness of society.”

This was not radical thinking in the eighteenth century. It was practical. A republic cannot endure if its people are desperate. A democracy cannot function if citizens are too insecure or too angry to meaningfully participate. A nation cannot call itself free if vast numbers of its people are treated as expendable.

This isn’t a departure from our founding principles. It is the fulfillment of them.

It is __True Americanism__.

The Great Diversion: Who Really Is Picking Your Pocket Clean?

If you’ve followed me this far, something may have quietly shifted. The Founders weren’t describing a handout. They weren’t describing socialism. They were describing America — the one they designed, in their own words, from their own convictions. Ease. Comfort. Security. Not as charity, but as the whole point of We The People coming together to steer ourselves — because that is what govern has always meant. Not to rule. To steer. Together. The helmsman serves the ship. The ship carries everyone.

Here is how it was taken from us.

The class of men who opposed the New Deal — the same class who funded a literal military plot to overthrow FDR in 1933 rather than accept Social Security — understand one thing clearly: you cannot tell a self-reliant American that you’re taking his country from him. He’ll fight you. So instead, you point at his neighbor. They have been fomenting mutiny ever since we refused to let them own the vessel.

You give his insecurity a face. A name. A type. The welfare queen. The lazy millennial. The immigrant taking his job. They point at the tax line on a working person’s paycheck and whisper: “Look what they’re taking from you, to give to people who didn’t earn it.”

It worked. It worked on people like me — raised on self-reliance, proud enough to resent the suggestion we might ever need help. Our own virtues were the weapon. They have made the working poor — a class that has no reason to exist in a just society — feel like their pockets are being picked by their own neighbors, when in reality it is the ultra-wealthy that have robbed us blind by refusing to contribute to the society that made them rich. While we have been guarding our pockets against each other, they have walked out the back door with the vault.

They call it “Socialism” when we work together for the Ease, Comfort, and Security that John Adams put in plain English in 1776. But Adams wasn’t a socialist. He was the architect of the Republic they claim to love while they murder it. By making the working class pay the bill — the entire bill for a society the rich no longer want to fund — they have turned the Social Contract into a protection racket for the elite, refusing to pay their fair share for the very society that made their wealth possible.

True Americanism demands we see through the diversion. The “Pursuit of Happiness” isn’t a drain on our resources — it is the purpose of our Union. And it’s time the people at the top started paying their fair share into the system that made their success possible.

The Founders’ Vision of True Liberty

What Real Liberty Looks Like

We have hollowed out the word “Liberty” until it means nothing more than “leaving me alone.” But the Liberty the Founders envisioned was never that thin.

True Liberty isn’t just the absence of a master; it is the presence of dignity. It is the fundamental ability to pursue meaningful opportunity, to be secure enough to take a risk, to dream, and to contribute. It means having real choices — not just theoretical rights on a piece of paper, but practical possibilities in the real world.

It means a society where a child born in a hollow in Appalachia or a small town in Indiana has the same fundamental shot at a good life as a child born with a silver spoon in their mouth. It is a world where work is respected, contribution is valued, and no one is considered disposable. This isn’t “rugged individualism” in a vacuum; it is a deep, interconnected commitment to one another’s potential.

The Self-Evident Truth of Equality

“We came equals into this world, and equals shall we go out of it.” — George Mason, Founding Father, primary author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights

It is a tragedy that this must still be said, but in our time, it must be shouted: Every person is born equal to every other person. This doesn’t mean we are identical in talent or drive, but we are absolutely equal in our humanity. This is the bedrock.

Every human being has the right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. It does not matter the color of their skin, the God they worship, their gender, or their station. Period.

Even the Founders, who articulated these truths so brilliantly, failed to live up to them. Yet, their own pens betrayed their deeper understanding. When Jefferson wrote that in a pure republic, “every member… has an equal right of participation,” he chose his words with surgical precision. He didn’t say “every white man” or “every landowner.” He said every member.

We do not honor the Founders by excusing their failures; we honor them by fulfilling the universal truths they identified but could not complete. When we say “all people are equal,” we must mean it without exception, exclusion, or asterisk.

Happiness: The Security of the Soul

From this equality, we derive our inalienable rights. But we must stop “glossing over” what those rights actually require:

• Life: Not just a heartbeat, but the means to sustain it.
• Liberty: Not lawlessness, but as Jefferson defined it: unobstructed action within limits drawn by the equal rights of others.
• The Pursuit of Happiness: Not a fleeting mood, but as Adams defined it: the attainment of ease, comfort, and security.

These rights are a three-legged stool; if one is missing, the whole thing collapses into ruin. Liberty without Security is just the freedom to starve in the cold. Security without Liberty is mere subsistence—the life of a well-fed prisoner. And Life without the Pursuit of Happiness is nothing more than a desperate struggle for survival, devoid of the dignity the Founders envisioned.

They limit and define each other. If one person’s “liberty” to accumulate unlimited wealth destroys another person’s “security” to live a dignified life, the stool has been tipped over. Just as we do not grant a man the liberty to threaten your life, we cannot grant him the economic liberty to threaten your security. To protect one leg, we must balance all three.

The Forgotten Balance: Kindred, Not Enemies

Society exists because humans realized early on that we are safer and happier together. Thomas Paine observed that when people build communities out of necessity, “man becomes what he ought. He sees his species, not with the inhuman idea of a natural enemy, but as kindred.”

Government is supposed to be the tool that protects this “kindred” bond, that binds We the People. But how do we ensure one person’s rights don’t crush another’s?

Jefferson’s “nose” rule provides the answer. My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins. Likewise, the right to accumulate wealth must end where it threatens the economic security of the society. When wealth becomes so concentrated that it buys the political system, it is no longer “business” — it is a subversion of the Republic.

When we join the social contract, we aren’t just living side-by-side; we are agreeing to limits that protect us all. Adams and Paine knew that protecting rights requires active measures. A corporation or an individual that amasses power beyond what is necessary for their own “ease and comfort” is no different than a King usurping the rights of the people. True Americanism demands we recognize that our rights are interconnected. My liberty to succeed cannot come at the cost of your security to live. We are kindred, not enemies.

The Social Contract We’ve Forgotten

In a True American system, power flows upward from the people, never downward from a ruler. The Founders didn’t just fire a King; they fired the very concept of top-down rule.

Thomas Paine famously wrote: “In America, THE LAW IS KING.” The law is supposed to be a tool of the people’s will. Any concentration of power — whether it’s in a government office or a corporate boardroom—must serve rather than rule.

The Revolution is often framed as a revolt against taxes. That story misses the point. The Founders were not rejecting contribution; they were rejecting exclusion. “Taxation without representation” meant that the product of their labor — their time, their risk, their lives — was being taken without their consent or voice. They were not demanding freedom from obligation. They were demanding inclusion in the decisions their sacrifices made possible.

Power is only legitimate when it is:

1. For the Common Good: Prioritizing the whole over the privileged few.
2. Accountable: Operating in the light, with a meaningful voice for those it affects.
3. Balanced: Checked by the “eternal vigilance” Jefferson demanded of us.

In modern America, we have drifted. When financial institutions determine your security more than your own hard work, or when private interests override the public good, the “King” has returned. He is no longer wearing a crown; he is wearing a suit or hiding behind a corporate logo. Reclaiming our Republic means remembering that power belongs to We the People, not the oligarchs. It means demanding a government that looks like the people it should be serving. It means our representatives should have calluses on their hands, not their hearts.

The Economic Equation

Foundations

Time is money.

We’ve all heard this phrase. We’ve internalized it. But we’ve never really examined what it means. Let’s flip it and see what’s actually hiding inside this cliché.

Money is time. Or more precisely: Money is crystallized human time and effort.

Every dollar in your pocket represents someone’s, likely yours, finite hours of life converted into exchangeable form. But even this isn’t complete. Let’s build the real equation from the ground up.

Let’s start with: Time = Value

But that’s obviously false. Time spent sleeping doesn’t create economic value. Time spent staring at a wall doesn’t either. What creates value is work - human effort applied over time.

(Labor × Time) = Value?

Closer, but still wrong. You can spend years perfecting mud pies, but if nobody wants them, they have no value. We’re missing something essential: desire, or as economists call it, demand.

(Labor × Time) × Demand = Value

This isn’t the equation economists talk about. They’ll tell you about M×V=P×Y (money supply and velocity), or Qs=Qd (supply and demand equilibrium), or Y=C+I+G+NX (GDP components). These are all important, but they’re describing the mechanics of markets, not the origin of value itself.

Our equation is more fundamental - it’s what makes all those other equations possible. Before you can have money supply, velocity, or GDP, you must have value. And value only exists when human effort meets human desire.

Strip away the financial instruments, the monetary policy, the complex derivatives - what’s left? Someone did work. Someone wanted what that work produced. The intersection of those two creates value. Everything else is just mechanisms for storing, transferring, and accounting for that basic transaction.

This equation is inescapable. It doesn’t matter if you’re a capitalist, socialist, or any other *ist. Nothing has economic value without labor creating it first (even natural resources require labor to extract and refine). That labor creates nothing of value without meeting demand (nobody wants mud pies, no matter how much work went into them).

The textbooks won’t teach you this because it’s too simple and too revealing. It shows that all economic value - every dollar, euro, or bitcoin - represents crystallized human effort that met human desire. Once you see this, you can’t unsee it.

The implications are staggering.

The Hidden Truth of Supply and Demand

The supply/demand framework doesn’t describe how value is created — it describes how value is priced. When supply rises relative to demand, prices fall. When demand rises relative to supply, prices rise. The fundamental relationship is a ratio: Price is proportional to Demand / Supply.

What the textbooks don’t explain is what these abstractions actually represent:

• Supply = (Labor × Time) — Everything in “supply” is physical manifestation of Labor in Time.
• Demand = Desire — What people actually need or want

So when supply rises and prices fall, what’s really happening is that less human desire exists per unit of labor invested. When demand outstrips supply, human desire has outrun the labor available to meet it. The ratio shifts — but both sides of that ratio are human.

Our equation approaches value from the other direction: not how value gets priced, but how it gets created in the first place. Both components must exist before there is anything to price at all: (Labor × Time) × Demand = Value. No labor, no supply, no value. No desire, no demand, no value.

Together the two frameworks are consistent. Supply/demand tells you how markets adjust the price of value already created. Our equation tells you what had to exist before there was anything to price.

This equation explains everything:

• Why bubbles burst: When demand inflates beyond the actual (Labor × Time) invested, value must eventually crash back to reality
• Why abandoned cities become worthless: Massive (Labor × Time) invested, but demand dropped to zero
• Why billionaires exist: They’ve found ways to extract the (Labor × Time) of millions while providing comparatively little

The Anatomy of Supply

Supply isn’t some neutral economic force or a line on a sterile graph. In our equation, Supply is the physical manifestation of Labor in Time. It is human life-force transformed into goods and services.

When you hold a smartphone, you aren’t just holding glass and silicon; you are holding thousands of crystallized human hours. You are holding the Time of a rare-earth miner whose lungs are heavy with dust, the Labor of a factory worker whose back aches from a twelve-hour shift, and the Life of an engineer who missed dinners with their family to solve a circuit problem.

That coffee in your hand isn’t just a commodity. It is the literal blood, sweat, and tears of the person who planted the seed, the one who tended the crop under a blistering sun, and the one who hauled the heavy sacks to the ship. Every product you consume is a “payment” made in the currency of human existence.

This is why, when we get to the ultra-wealthy’s “buy, borrow, and die” trick to hoard the value of these products, we realize that they aren’t just hoarding money—they are hoarding the spent lives of their fellow citizens. They are “tenants” who have forgotten that the harvest they claim was watered by the sweat of someone else’s brow.

From Value to Wealth

If value is created in moments of exchange of (Labor × Time) × Desire, wealth is value accumulated over time:

Wealth = Accumulated (Labor × Time) × Desire

This isn’t abstract. When someone has a billion dollars, they haven’t “earned more” - they’ve extracted and crystallized millions of hours of other people’s labor.

Let’s make this concrete. The median American earns about $40,000 per year. At that rate:

• $1 million = 25 years of human labor
• $1 billion = 25,000 years of human labor
• $500 billion = 12.5 million years of human labor
• $1 trillion = 25 million years of human labor

That’s not money. That’s entire lifetimes - generations of human effort - crystallized and controlled by one person. When an oligarch’s wealth reached $500 billion, they have captured the equivalent of 278,000 complete human working lifetimes. That’s every single working person in Buffalo, for their entire careers.

The Death Spiral of Hoarding

Before we proceed, we must define the “Ultra-Wealthy” through the lens of our equation. We aren’t just talking about someone with a nice house and a comfortable retirement. We are talking about earners in the U.S. who average between $2.8 million and $3.3 million annually — the CEOs, the titans of finance, and the architects of the “Great Diversion.”

But don’t look at the dollars. Look at the Labor-Time.

Based on our earlier figures, an ultra-wealthy individual captures over 70 years of human labor every single year. Think about that: in a single trip around the sun, one person hordes more than the entire working life of a fellow citizen. They are “tenants” who have claimed an entire generation’s worth of harvest for themselves.

When wealth concentrates to these extreme levels, the economic equation doesn’t just bend; it breaks. Here’s why:

The ultra-wealthy don’t just sit on this mountain of “crystallized labor.” They have created something far more insidious: the “Buy, Borrow, Die” strategy. This is a mechanism that transforms unrealized gains into absolute power. It allows them to live off the value of your spent lives without ever “realizing” a tax bill, while forcing society to bear every ounce of the risk.

Here’s how the scam works:

1. Capture the (Labor × Time) of thousands through stock ownership, business control, etc.
2. Borrow against these “unrealized gains” - no taxes, just pure extracted wealth
3. Buy political influence, media companies, and more assets with the borrowed money
4. Manipulate the system they’ve bought to ensure their stocks keep rising
5. Borrow more against the inflated value, extracting more wealth
6. Die and pass it all to heirs with a “stepped-up basis” (resetting the tax burden), assuming the system doesn’t collapse first

This is economic vampirism. They’re not just avoiding taxes - they’re using unrealized gains that they don’t want taxed, and are not taxed, as collateral to extract real wealth from the system, then using that wealth to rig the game so their unrealized gains keep growing.

When a billionaire borrows $10 billion against their stock holdings:

• They get $10 billion in real, spendable money (tax-free, it’s a loan)
• They use it to buy senators, judges, media narratives
• Their political influence drives policies, lessens regulations & taxes, which increase their bottom line, and pump their stock higher.
• They borrow more against the inflated value
• Repeat until death or worse, until the bubble bursts

When the Bubble Bursts

When those stocks crash, the debt doesn’t disappear. The culprits file bankruptcy. The banks get bailed out. The ultra-wealthy walk away with real estates, real assets, and real political power — all safely hidden behind shadow corporations and offshore accounts.

The losses? Those are yours now.

Those losses result in bank bailouts. Inflation eating your savings. Austerity cutting your services and increasing your taxes. You working five more years before you can retire.

They privatize the gains. They socialize the losses. And they do it by design.

They transform unrealized gains — the crystallized labor extracted from you, the stuff they insist shouldn’t be taxed — into real, tangible wealth and power. Then they make sure that when it all comes crashing down, the wreckage lands on everyone else. We saw it in 2008. Homeowners lost everything. Banks got bailouts. The pattern will repeat — except now the numbers are exponentially larger.

A trillion dollars in unrealized gains, leveraged through loans, can generate tens of trillions in systemic debt. When it collapses, millions of human lifetimes of future labor will be conscripted just to clean up the mess — while the people who made the mess have already converted their paper wealth into permanent, untouchable power.

This isn’t capitalism. It’s a looting operation. They use unrealized gains as a crowbar to crack open society’s accumulated wealth, extract everything of value, and leave the empty shell for your children to pay off.

Breaking the Cycle

The equation reveals a fundamental truth: when wealth concentrates beyond a certain threshold, the economy mathematically cannot function.

Value = (Labor × Time) × Demand

For value to exist, (Labor × Time) must meet Demand. But when excessive wealth accumulates in few hands, two things happen:

1. The wealthy cannot create sufficient Demand. One person with a billion dollars doesn’t buy a million times more groceries than someone with $1,000. They can’t consume enough to match the productive capacity their accumulated labor represents.

2. Workers lose purchasing power. As wealth concentrates upward, those who create (Labor × Time) have less ability to generate Demand. They produce but cannot afford to consume what they produce.

The result is mathematical: Value drops across the economy because Demand cannot match the available (Labor × Time). This isn’t theory - it’s what happened before the Great Depression, the 2008 crisis, and every major economic collapse.

When accumulated (Labor × Time) doesn’t recirculate to create new value, it becomes economically dead - millions of human lifetimes of effort sitting idle while people who could use it to generate value go without. It’s not just inefficient; it violates the fundamental equation that makes economies work. Jefferson understood this when he proposed wealth taxes and inheritance limits to prevent permanent aristocracy. In his 1785 letter to James Madison, after witnessing the extreme poverty in France alongside enormous wealth, Jefferson wrote with striking clarity:

“I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property…”

He went on to propose that legislators should “exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise.”

Jefferson wasn’t speaking theoretically—he had seen firsthand how concentrated wealth destroys civilizations. Adams understood it when he defined government’s purpose as providing “ease, comfort, and security” to the greatest number. They recognized that extreme wealth concentration would mathematically break the republic they were founding.

The solution isn’t ideological - it’s mathematical. Ensure that accumulated (Labor × Time) recirculates at a rate sufficient to maintain the Value equation. This can happen through:

• Progressive taxation that returns hoarded wealth to circulation and those who labored to create it
• Wage policies that ensure workers retain enough of their (Labor × Time) value to create Demand
• Inheritance limits that prevent intergenerational accumulation from breaking the equation
• Public investment that puts idle accumulated labor back to productive use
• Tax unrealized gains at punitive rates to prevent borrowing against phantom wealth

This isn’t about socialism versus capitalism. Both systems fail when they allow excessive accumulation. It’s about recognizing that Value = (Labor × Time) × Demand is as fundamental to economics as E=mc² is to physics. Violate it, and the system collapses - not because of ideology, but because of mathematics.

This is the economic equation the Founders likely understood intuitively. True Americanism demands we honor their vision by restoring balance to this equation, ensuring that the wealth created by human effort serves the common good, rather than destroying it.

Securing Economic Justice

Social Security: Fulfilling the Promise of Ease

Social Security is not a gift from the government; it is a practical fulfillment of what Adams defined as happiness: “ease, comfort, and security.” When the Founders pledged to “promote the general welfare,” they weren’t describing a vague feeling. They were designing a society where a lifetime of contribution to society earned you the right to rest — not in fear or discomfort, but in security.

Think of it through our Economic Equation. During your working years, you are investing your Labor and your finite Time into the Republic. You are creating the very Value that allows this nation to function. Social Security is the mechanism that ensures that after your Time to work has been spent, that Value is returned to you. To call this “charity” is a mathematical lie — it is a debt owed to the people who spent their life’s energy to build the world we inhabit today.

The average worker pays into Social Security with every single paycheck. It is the most honest contract in America: I contribute my Labor and Time now, and the Republic insures my dignity later. This is government-run insurance at its best. It doesn’t have a marketing budget, it doesn’t have a CEO with a private jet, and it doesn’t have a “claims department” looking for reasons to deny you your retirement. Its shareholders are you and me.

It is the Social Contract in its ultimate form.

The Insurance of the People vs. The Insurance of the Oligarchs

The “Pursuit of Happiness” is a cruel joke if a single diagnosis can wipe out your family’s entire economic foundation. Adams’ definition of happiness — Security — is impossible in a system where healing is a luxury and sickness is a profit center.

If we truly believe that “all are created equal,” then the right to life must include the right to the care that sustains life. Today, we have allowed a “middle-man” to stand between the doctor and the patient. In our equation, Desire represents the human need to stay alive and healthy—a desire that is absolute. For-profit insurance companies exploit this. They don’t provide the Labor (the doctors do); they don’t give you back your Time (the science does). They simply sit at the junction of the equation and siphon off the Value.

They are a “tumor” in the economic logic of the country, siphoning off billions in premiums — not to heal the sick, but to fund the labor of denying care. This is the death of Liberty. A “Medicare for All” system isn’t a departure from Americanism; it is a fulfillment. It is the only way to ensure that the “Pursuit of Happiness” isn’t cut short by a spreadsheet in a corporate boardroom. It is time to recognize that for-profit insurance is a parasite on the Republic, extracting wealth from our pain and providing nothing but insecurity in return.

The Truth About the Contract: It’s Not a Bank, It’s a Bond

We have to be honest about how insurance actually works. It isn’t a private savings account where your money sits in a vault with your name on it. It is a social promise. I pay in today so that the person currently in a “bad situation”—whether through age, illness, or misfortune—is secure. I do this because I know that tomorrow, I might be the one in that bad situation.

Consider the first people to ever receive a Social Security check. They hadn’t paid into the system for forty years; the system didn’t exist yet. But We the People of that time decided that the dignity of those elders was a higher Value than a strict ledger. They understood that to move forward as a nation, we had to seed the equation with justice. They weren’t looking at a spreadsheet; they were fulfilling the “General Welfare.”

This is the part that my “Radical Right-Wing” roots struggled with, but that the Founders understood: Security is collective. If my neighbor’s equation is broken—if they have the Desire for life but have run out of Time or the physical ability for Labor —my own liberty is diminished. We live in a society of decay and desperation when we ignore the broken.

If we allow for-profit insurance companies to run the show, they do the exact opposite: they hunt for the “bad situations” so they can cut them out of the equation. They want the healthy and the wealthy, and they leave the broken to the wolves. True Americanism says No. We contribute our collective Labor and Time for the “ease, comfort, and security” of the whole. We are all threads in the same fabric. If the equation doesn’t work for the least of us, it will eventually fail for all of us.

Paine’s Ground-Rent: The Debt of Justice

When the ultra-wealthy argue that their wealth is entirely their own and that society has no claim to a ’bond’ of security, they are ignoring the very foundations of Americanism. To set the record straight, I point to the man who wrote the very words that sparked our Revolution: Thomas Paine.

In his work Agrarian Justice, Paine laid out the mathematical foundation of our social obligation. He argued that while the earth is “common property”—and it must be, because we are all only tenants of this world in the end—the value added to it through cultivation is “artificial property” created by labor. Because no one created the earth itself, Paine proposed that every owner of cultivated land owes a “ground-rent” back to the community to fund a national system for the elderly and the disabled.

He addressed the “self-made” myth directly, writing:

“All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man’s own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice… a part of that accumulation back again to society.”

Paine understood our equation intuitively. He knew that while an individual provides the Labor, the Value of that labor is magnified exponentially by the Desire, the infrastructure, and the Security of the society around them. You cannot have “Ease and Comfort” in a vacuum. If you use the Republic’s “well” to grow your crops, you owe a portion of the harvest to ensure the well never runs dry for your Kindred.

Providing for the General Welfare isn’t a “handout”—it is the payment of a debt to the society that made success possible in the first place. It is the only way to ensure the equation of America remains balanced for everyone.

Investing in Ourselves

The General Welfare of the Next Generation

If we accept the equation Value = (Labor × Time) × Desire, we must realize that Labor is not a static number on a spreadsheet. Labor is a human life. And just as a farmer must invest in the soil before he can expect a harvest, a Republic must invest in its people before it can expect Value.

This is where the “General Welfare” becomes a mathematical necessity. When Adams defined happiness as “ease, comfort, and security,” he wasn’t just being poetic. He was describing the necessary conditions for a human being to be a productive part of the Republic.

The Math of Hunger vs. The Math of Security

Programs like SNAP (food assistance) and universal school lunches are often attacked as “handouts.” My “Radical Right-Wing” roots taught me that they destroyed character. But look at the equation: A child whose life is defined by Insecurity is a child whose Labor and Time are being wasted on survival rather than growth.

When we provide a child with a school lunch, we are providing the Ease and Security required for them to learn. We are “priming” the human variable in our national equation. A hungry child cannot focus on the Labor of education; their Desire is entirely consumed by the basic need for food. By feeding them, we remove the “cancer” of hunger and allow their potential Value to flourish.

The Architecture of the Mind: No Expense Too Extravagant

If the “General Welfare” begins with a full stomach, it is fulfilled through an educated mind. We have been conditioned to look at the cost of public education—from pre-K to trade schools and universities—as a “burden” on the taxpayer. But John Adams, the man who defined our happiness as Ease, Comfort, and Security, saw it as the single most important investment a Republic could make.

In Thoughts on Government, Adams was explicit about where our resources should go:

“Laws for the liberal education of youth… are so extremely wise and useful, that to a humane and generous mind, no expence for this purpose would be thought extravagant.”

First we must realize that a liberal education in Adams’ time meant a broad, critical education — not just vocational training. It was about creating informed citizens capable of participating in the Republic. Today we would call it a well-rounded education that includes civics, history, science, and the arts.

Adams knew that a Republic only survives if its citizens have the tools to understand and defend their own rights. He didn’t see education as a way to “get a better job” for the sake of an employer; he saw it as a systemic requirement for Liberty itself.

In our equation, Value = (Labor × Time) × Desire, education is the “multiplier” for Labor. Raw labor can move a stone, but educated labor can build a cathedral or design a power grid. When we skimp on the “expence” of education, we are intentionally suppressing the Value of our fellow citizens. We are effectively putting a “cap” on how much value the next generation can create.

The “Extravagant” Lie

The same pundits who tell us that student debt relief or universal pre-K is “too expensive” are the ones who turned a blind eye to the trillions spent on bank bailouts, and “Buy, Borrow, Die” schemes . They want a workforce that is trained enough to operate their machines, but not educated enough to question the equation that is stripping the citizens of their Labor-Time.

Adams tells us that a “humane and generous mind” does not count the pennies when it comes to the education of the youth. Why? Because an uneducated citizenry is the “raw material” of tyranny. When we allow education to become a debt-trap, we are essentially charging the next generation a “Liberty Tax” just for the right to contribute to the Republic.

True Americanism demands that we treat the classroom as the primary workshop of the General Welfare . We must stop asking “how much does it cost?” and start asking “how much Value are we destroying by leaving our our citizens in the dark?

The “Great Diversion”: Corporate Welfare vs. Human Ease

We are told that providing Comfort to the poor is a “drain” on the taxpayer. This is the Great Diversion in action. Look at the math of a multi-billion-dollar corporation that pays its workers so little they require SNAP to survive.

That corporation is extracting the worker’s Labor and Time to create massive Value, but it is refusing to provide the Security that makes that labor possible. Instead, it shifts the cost of that worker’s survival onto the public. The corporation gets the profit; We the People pay for the “Ease” they refused to provide. True Americanism demands we stop blaming the struggling family for seeking Security and start blaming the oligarchs for being “economic vampires” who refuse to pay the true value of the labor they consume.

The Dignity of the Social Contract

The “Pursuit of Happiness” is a mandate to build a society where Ease, Comfort, and Security are the baseline, not a luxury.

1. Ease: Removing the crushing weight of survival-mode poverty so a person can actually think, innovate, and work.
2. Comfort: Ensuring that in a land of unimaginable plenty, the basic needs of life—food, shelter, and heat—are not used as leverage to exploit the desperate.
3. Security: The peace of mind that comes from knowing that a job loss or a family emergency isn’t a death sentence for your future.

Providing for the “General Welfare” is not “socialism”—it is infrastructure. It is the necessary preparation for a functional, high-value economy. If we can find the money to bail out a bank that broke the world with bad math, we can certainly find the money to ensure that no American child spends their Time in a classroom focused on the ache in their stomach instead of the lesson on the board.

We must stop viewing the “General Welfare” as a burden and start viewing it as the Primary Investment. If we want a Republic that produces high Value, we must be a Republic that protects the Ease, Comfort, and Security of the human beings who create it.

On the Present Crisis

The principles of True Americanism are not historical curiosities. They are living, breathing ideals that demand constant vigilance and active defense. There has rarely been a moment in our history when that defense was more urgently needed than it is today.

The Founders had a specific fear about standing armies. They feared them not because they distrusted soldiers, but because they understood what a government with armed force deployed among its own people would inevitably become. They wrote that fear into the Declaration itself — listing among the crimes of King George that he had “kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.”

Look around you. That army is here.

It is not wearing red coats. It is wearing the badge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And what began as border security has become something the Founders would have recognized immediately — and feared.

In 2025, the number of people held in ICE detention shot up by over 75%, with detention facilities expanding by 91% in a single year. The government is now converting industrial warehouses into detention centers designed to hold tens of thousands of people at a time. Congress has allocated more than $45 billion for ICE detention alone — enough to build a detention system that rivals the entire federal prison apparatus.

But here is what they don’t tell you about who is inside those warehouses.

Arrests of people with no criminal record surged by 2,450 percent in a single year. The percentage of people arrested and held in ICE detention with no criminal record rose from 6 percent to 41 percent. Two out of every three “at-large” arrests during the winter were of people with no criminal record. The claim that ICE was in the streets of Chicago and Minneapolis to round up “the worst of the worst” is provably false.

They are not rounding up criminals. They are rounding up neighbors.

2025 was the deadliest year for those in ICE custody in two decades, with at least 32 deaths — and oversight inspections dropped by 36 percent even as detentions surged. People are disappearing into a system that has deliberately made itself unaccountable. ICE has denied access to detention facilities to members of Congress attempting to check on conditions, even though federal law provides lawmakers the legal right to do so.

Read that again. Elected representatives of We the People — denied entry. By a federal agency. To facilities funded by your taxes.

The Founders called this tyranny. Not a strong word. Not a metaphor. The precise word they used for exactly this: a government that puts itself beyond the reach of the people’s representatives, that deploys force among civilians without accountability, that detains without due process.

We find ourselves in a time of profound crisis. The very foundations of our Republic are under assault. A new class of oligarchs, protected by the politicians they have purchased, has launched an all-out attack on the rule of law. They have abandoned the “General Welfare” to serve raw power and self-interest. They have found in fear — fear of the immigrant, fear of the other, fear of the neighbor — the oldest tool of tyrants. Keep the people looking sideways, and they will never look up.

Make no mistake: this is not normal partisan gamesmanship. This is a direct threat to the soul of our nation. The Founders warned us about the dangers of concentrated power, both political and economic. They knew that a tyrant is not just a man in a crown; a tyrant is anyone who puts himself above the law and his bank account above the We the People.

The Call to We the People

The only force strong enough to resist this tyranny is an engaged and empowered citizenry. This is the call that now falls to us. We must find within ourselves the same resolve that animated the revolutionaries of 1776. We must be willing to stand up, to speak out, and to act with the conviction that our cause—the cause of the human being over the corporation—is just.

This resistance can take many forms: demanding accountability from elected officials who have forgotten who they serve; organizing in our communities to protect the vulnerable and rebuild power from the ground up; shedding the complacency that has allowed our politics to descend into hollow greed. We must reclaim the radical idea at the heart of the American experiment: that We the People are the only legitimate source of power. If this crisis has revealed anything, it is the failure of the “greed-is-good” ethos. It has laid bare the fallacy that we are merely consumers and competitors. We are citizens. We are collaborators. We are the People.

A Republic—If We Can Keep It

The ultra-wealthy want us to believe in a hyper-individualism that leaves us isolated and weak. They want us to denigrate the public institutions that are the only things standing between them and total control. And they want us afraid — afraid of each other, afraid of our neighbors, afraid of the stranger — because a frightened people do not look up. They do not ask who built the warehouses or who is profiting from the beds inside them.

Our task is to meet this moment with the fullness of our moral imagination. We must hold true to and defend our social contracts that honor the dignity of every person and ensures the Security that Adams identified. The road ahead will not be easy. The forces arrayed against us have billions of dollars and the machinery of the state at their disposal. But we stand on the shoulders of generations who faced down kings and slaveholders, who expanded the circle of belonging, and who proved that the “arc of the moral universe” only bends toward justice when we put our weight on it.

Now it is our turn. The promise of a True America is not a given ; it is a choice. It is a challenge to each generation to make real the vision of a nation where all are free and all have the security to pursue a future of dignity.

The time for half-measures has passed. The alarm bells of creeping despotism have been ringing for years, and we have finally woken up. One nation, with liberty, security, and justice for all. That is the True America we must now stand and fight for — not just with our words, but with our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

Benjamin Franklin’s challenge at the dawn of this experiment rings out anew: “A Republic, if you can keep it.” The crisis is here. The choice is ours. The time to act is now.

The Declaration of Independence

In Congress, July 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

A Truly American Creed

I do not ascribe to Republican nor Democrat, Left nor Right, liberal nor conservative.
I ascribe to only what is beneficial for a truly American society
I believe that parties exist to drive us apart
I believe that all people are equal at birth
I believe that all people have rights that are inalienable, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness
I believe that all people within a society have a responsibility to each other in both political liberty, and economic justice
I believe that the power inherent within we the people should serve we the people, not rule them
I believe that economic justice is equally important and necessary for a just and civil society as political liberty.