The Next 250 Years

At our 250th Anniversary Celebration, my friend and Constitutional Action co-founder Ben Wilson announced that he has begun treatment for cancer. The most promising treatments are extremely expensive, and he has requested our support. Please donate if you can here.

(Our A/V situation didn’t go the way we had hoped at the event at the Theater-In-The-Pines on Wednesday, so I’ll likely re-record my remarks. In the meantime, here’s the text.)

I didn’t dedicate a lot of my preparation to the Constitutional Action pitch in particular — I want to talk tonight about the pitch for America. But I’d like to briefly introduce who we are and what we’re about.

Constitutional Action is built on the idea that slavery to proceduralism is un-American.

In fact, the story of American history is the story of bold men taking action in defiance of unjust judges, unjust procedures, unjust decisions.

So even if you were to say, “I’m deeply committed to our current procedural architecture” — well, LBJ made that up, and before him, FDR, and before him, Lincoln, and before him, Jackson.

You don’t have to agree with the substance of all of those bold actions to acknowledge that our situation was not built by rule-followers, but by people making decisions.

You can make decisions. You can take action. You can take Constitutional Action, in harmony with the spirit of the freedoms that the founders intended to preserve.

The Constitution is a product of the American people — the American people are not a product of the Constitution. We predate it. We created it. It is a reflection and articulation — in imperfect words — of who we are and what we believe in.

So, to be enslaved to line-item proceduralism by people who don’t respect, and in fact despise, not only the American idea but all of the people past and present who are responsible for it, is insanity.

And largely the reason that Republicans hide behind that proceduralism is straightforward cowardice.

Republican politicians don’t get invited to parties if they’re honest about that. They don’t get taken out to lunch — and they like being taken out to lunch, and they like going to parties, and that’s why they’re in politics.

So Constitutional Action reflects a new approach.

We are developing new political leaders with the courage to do what is right for the American people, in harmony with the intent of the Constitution — in defiance of stays, and injunctions, and bureaucratic stonewalling from lawyers and judges who do not care about the Constitution, or the American people.

Last month, we did a beautification event at Memory Grove, a veterans’ memorial in Salt Lake City, barely a thousand feet from the Capitol. As you walk through it, it’s beautifully maintained as far as a normal person’s sight lines.

But immediately up the hill, it’s homeless encampments, drug dens, crack pipes, needles. If there’s a better metaphor for the state of things in Utah, I don’t know what it is. They’re excellent at maintaining appearances. They’re excellent at sweeping things under the rug.

We found four truckloads of vagrant garbage, and the people walking through the park were shocked at the pile of stuff that we were able to produce from just this one hillside.

And everybody we spoke to — several politicians at the Capitol, several of the park employees, all of the people we walked past — said, “This is shocking, and thank you for doing this.”

We are looking for these things that everybody wants done, but that are not getting done because of this slavery to proceduralism — this sense that we’re not allowed to fix it, that it’s against the rules to fix it, or that it offends various constituencies (a lot of this is just the fact that vagrancy makes important people money. They get paid to make the problem worse.)

So that’s Constitutional Action. If you want to get involved with our cleanups, or you want to get on the list to come to more events like this, it’s constitutionalaction.org.

But I want to talk about the next 250 years.

It felt important for us to address the mood that I know many people are feeling — and that I was tempted to feel — as we came to America’s 250th anniversary.

You don’t have to be a genius to know that we’re spending more than we take in, and the interest, the servicing of the debt, is stacking up.

People aren’t starting families or having babies, so this growing army of older people is supported by a dwindling population of the young. This, too, is interest stacking up. The demographic debt gets harder to service as it builds. Problems get worse as they get worse. They don’t just accumulate, they accelerate.

We’ve shipped our industrial base overseas, which threatens our global security guarantee. It means we’re not in a position to arm and equip our own soldiers to defend this global industrial system that the things we still produce rely on for import and export. Again, this is a problem where the interest accrues. It gets worse as it gets worse.

Mass migration has created explicitly anti-American constituencies in America’s most powerful cities, who then vote for more mass migration and for the looting of the commons. The interest stacks up. It gets worse as it gets worse.

Political paralysis in Washington is also escalating, as the pretense that we’re all on the same team gets thinner and thinner, and the violations of norms justify further violation of norms. Again, it stacks up. All these lines are going parabolic in the wrong direction.

And you’re not just reading about it on Twitter: your salary comes in the dollars that are getting inflated away to service that debt. Your taxes are going to the Social Security Ponzi scheme that’s going bankrupt as the population ages, and you’re not going to see a dime of it. Your job, and everything you buy with your paycheck, is dependent on the globalized supply chain that keeps taking these security shocks, and you don’t know which one’s going to be The Big One.

Your neighborhood — certainly the downtown that you work in — is increasingly an incoherent economic zone full of people who do not believe in the American idea, but who are free to vote for its dissolution.

So you ask yourself: “How could all of that not be going to hell? And if that all goes to zero, where does that leave me?”

“I build dashboards to surface actionable business insights for stakeholders. That may be fake, and it may be soulless, and it may be miserable, but my body is not ready for the Thunderdome. I have kids to feed, and I’m right on the edge of paying my bills as it is.” That’s scary.

But if you ask me, “Is America going to zero?” My answer is: Someone is.

It’s absolutely clear that all these systems that look like they’re failing are failing.

The big managerial Goliath, the money printer, the carrier strike groups, the international rules-based order, the S&P 500, the bipartisan consensus, the global financial system — all of that is in terminal decline, and there’s basically no human agency that could possibly stop it.

The question is: is that America?

Are those the source of America’s freedom and prosperity? Are they, in fact, the only thing between your family and catastrophe?

I’m here to tell you that none of that is America. In fact, all of those things are a blight on America, and the fact that they are dying is the best news we’ve had in decades — for the nation in general, but especially for you and your family.

The average American worker is 2.6 times more productive than the generation that raised four kids on a single income and put a man on the moon.

Do you feel two and a half times wealthier? Where has that productivity gone? Someone is getting a whole lot wealthier. So who is it?

China is the largest manufacturer in the world, but they have more than three times the population: per capita, Americans still do the most building in the real world of any people on Earth.

We’re a net energy exporter. We produce fifteen percent of the world’s food, three times as much as we need — and that’s with all of the headwinds that I’m about to describe.

So I am not here to argue that we’re going to go back to the 1960s, or that we’re going to catch up with China, or that we can be as beautiful and safe and secure as El Salvador.

I’m here to tell you that if we can get out from under this paralyzed, broken, dysfunctional regime, the things that we can accomplish are almost beyond imagining.

People talk a lot online about how the economy is fake — and certainly when you’re sitting in your cubicle working on your B2B SaaS dashboard, it can feel pretty fake.

But you’re encouraged to think that this is your fault — that you wanted to work a fake job because “nobody wants to work hard anymore” — and that’s why the Chinese manufacture everything, and the Mexicans do all the construction, and Hart-Cellar immigrants run all the strip-mall businesses.

Everything in the physical economy is not in your hands — and you’re told that this is really a favor that all these people are doing for you, letting you live this way.

But you need to understand that that is absolutely false — I’m not just saying that because it’s a slander of our country, but because it has enormous consequences for what comes next.

The reason we lost our industrial base to the Chinese is that we have allowed frictionless trade overseas, and an absurd regulatory regime back home.

If you want to build a factory, you have to deal with OSHA and EPA and EEOC and CPSC and FTC and everybody else. If a Chinese guy wants to build a factory, he just needs an uncle on the right Party committee.

The Chinese system is actually deeply bloated and corrupt and inefficient, but it looks like an Ayn Rand fantasy compared to the paralysis in America — so that’s where the factories get built.

Likewise, the black market for labor here at home creates a two-track economy where illegal immigrants and their corporate employers get to live in Ancapistan, where there’s no Obamacare, no workmen’s comp, and no HR department.

If you talk to a corporate factory manager — this is something I’ve done personally — they’ll tell you that illegal workers often aren’t actually paid less than citizens: sometimes they’re paid more. The savings is because they take cash, and they don’t ask questions, and they’ll stick their fingers in the machine when they need to.

But if you want to employ Americans, you have to live with near-EU levels of regulation, precisely because you and they are American citizens.

So naturally, millions of smart and dynamic Americans have crowded into software or into the finance casino, because that’s where they’re still free to build.

They have to pay five figures for a credential from the indoctrination factory because it’s illegal to give them an IQ test, and because there’s no entry-level, middle-class on-ramp to real ownership in the real world. All of that is controlled by the multinational corporations that can afford the compliance burden and send the dirty work overseas.

They huddle in these sterile, atomized suburbs because the cities are controlled by politicians and NGOs who profit from crime, drugs, and misery. They can’t afford to live in the neighborhoods we grew up in, and it’s against the law to maintain safe streets.

You’re dumping all your fake dollars into assets that you know are inflated, but there’s nowhere else to run from the money printer.

So that’s the fake economy. That’s the system you live in, and that’s why you’re stuck in it.

That’s your “privileged” position in it — and you’ve got people actively defrauding the racial spoils system that you pay taxes for, telling you that you’re afraid of competition.

The government spends eighteen billion dollars a day, and that’s outrageous, but it doesn’t even touch the wealth and productive capacity that is locked up in this derangement of our capital markets, our labor markets, our real estate markets — the way we train people, the way we allocate people.

So let’s ask ourselves the question again: what if that was going to zero?

What if that system was in fact destined to be flattened by God, and you got to see it? Would that be worth risking your email job?

What if we could build 1,000 nuclear reactors in this country? What if household energy was too cheap to meter, and we desalinated twenty trillion gallons of water and turned the Great Basin into a green paradise?

What if you didn’t have to go through a four-year, hundred-thousand-dollar compliance test to prove you could handle a job? What if it were legal to train our most gifted students at the speed and intensity of which they’re capable?

What if the stunning advances of software innovation made your real physical environment better, more enjoyable, more beautiful?

What if you could start a production business without asking permission from a dozen regulators, and you could hire anybody you wanted to hire? What if it were legal to build safe and functional cities?

Solving this problem alone (safe cities) unlocks trillions of dollars in real estate value and billions of man-hours of pointless commuting. What if Salt Lake City were a safe and attractive place to raise a family? What would a place like that be worth?

What if you didn’t get paid in counterfeit bills?

What if your mom and dad didn’t furiously vote to juice their house prices because it was viable to save in dollars, and money wasn’t the only way to keep a neighborhood safe?

We could build a world that we can’t even imagine right now — and it’s going to happen.

This fake, absurd system’s confrontation with reality is absolutely guaranteed, and it’s not going to be Mad Max.

Americans are not going to forget how to use electricity or build computers. In fact, we’re going to remember how to use electricity and build computers. Your family is not going to go hungry.

The technology now exists to build things at personal scale that used to require armies — and that’s partly why the managerial system is dying: It isn’t necessary anymore, and it’s being challenged by small, nimble, cohesive groups (most of whom are way dumber than you.)

But things are going to be volatile. A lot of the people who’ve pushed in their chips on this system are going to lose big. A lot of power relationships are going to be renegotiated — but that’s what winning looks like. That’s what it means. That’s what we want.

The only question is: how do we prepare ourselves for that future and position ourselves together to build for what comes next?

Constitutional Action is the civic arm of what we’re doing. I run Exit, which is focused on fraternal and business networking.

The reason we’re doing these events and trash cleanups is to start building the human, personal networks of people with names and faces who love their country and understand what time it is and want to take responsibility for their communities.

As these changes unfold, we’re all going to need good friends, and I’ve been incredibly impressed by the number and caliber of people who show up. They say it’s a curse — may you live in interesting times. I want to live in interesting times. I’m glad that the courage and ambition of the Founding Fathers did not conclusively settle all political questions two hundred and fifty years ago.

I’m glad it’s our turn. It means we get to be Americans. We get to be part of the story. It’s a great day to be an American. God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.

EXIT News

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  • This week (6/30) we had our EXIT Q2 Review and Q3 Preview. The Q3 theme will be “Making Hay While the Sun Shines”. We live in abundant times, and there is so much we can build and accomplish.

  • Next week (7/7) we will have an extended discussion of The Next 250 Years: what is possible for America on the other side of the coming volatility, and how we can be prepared to build it.

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