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I Believe

Joel K. Douglas

Philosophy from the American Experiment | A Spotify Rising Star Podcast

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Tuesday · 17 min
By Hand
The shovel rings. Every year a couple or three fence posts rot along the front lane. Enough moisture gets in the wood and maybe a beetle or two, and the Earth wants to retake what it will. Everything eventually, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. She has a couple of spare fence posts in the barn. Not too many anymore. She shifts other posts to unbury them, and dust and soil puff up, catching in her nose. She carries one out and lays it on the ground next to the leaning post. It’s heavy enough that she can’t carry it and the tools and she has to go back to the barn for those, a shovel, pickaxe, post hole digger. She lays them next to the fence post. She puts on her gloves to protect her hands while she frees the three cross rails from the stubborn upright. Tough yellow tan leather, turning black at the fingertips. Each rail has a screw holding it to the upright, red dust lining the metal edges. She removes them one at a time and wiggles the upright side to side pulling them away from their slot. They stack there, still attached to the side post beside the rotting upright. Then she gets to the rotting fence post. First to remove it. The best way to make progress is just to break it. So she rocks it back and forth, pushes on it with her weight, until it gives at the base. Gray decay sifts into the grass. With the post removed, she gets to work on the rotted wood under the soil line. The shovel makes quick work at first, each bite of the shovel bringing up soft, rotted wood. Before long, the digging has her breathing hard as the hole deepens. She stops to rest, then works the pickaxe through pockets of stubborn wood. At intervals, she leans over and reaches in, feeling for the bottom of the rotted post. Often her hand meets packed earth, only to find more rotted wood just beneath. At last, her hand finds the bottom. She clears as much rotted wood as she can, sorting it from the soil piled beside the hole. Then she lowers the new post into place and shovels enough saved earth around the base to hold it upright. She sets the level against the wood and nudges the post till it stands true, unlike the last one, which still leans a little crooked. Only then does she fill the hole and tamp the earth firm around the post. When the upright stands true, she reattaches the three rails, driving each screw into the fresh wood. Then she gathers her tools. Half a world away, in Sumatra, another shovel bites into the Earth for a cinnamon tree. That evening, in the kitchen, she dusts the scraps of leftover pie dough with cinnamon. Her daughter’s favorite. The spice rises sharp in the air as she slides the small cookie sheet into the oven. While the scraps bake, she blind-bakes the pie crust and prepares the filling. She makes the dough with lard and butter, flour, salt, and water, lard for flake, butter for flavor, salt because salt makes everything better. Rolled thin on the counter over a dusting of flour, wrapped around the rolling pin, draped over the blue fluted pie dish. Foil to line the bottom, then the pie weights to stop the bubbles. Into the oven. She collects the other ingredients from the cupboard: pumpkin pie filling, Libby’s. Sugar, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, flour, condensed milk. She grabs eggs from the counter, fresh from the chickens in the yard. Pumpkin. Her favorite. The directions say to mix the dry ingredients separately, but she knows it doesn’t matter. She opens the can of pumpkin and uses a spoon to scrape out the last bits. She adds the eggs. She adds the dry ingredients straight to the pumpkin and eggs, gives everything a good stir, then pours in the condensed milk and mixes it again. About now the timer sounds. Potholders to grab the pie dish, foil and weights out, pie dish back in to finish the blind-bake. The next morning, pumpkin pie for breakfast. Out of the fridge comes the whipping cream. Two cups into the mixer, then sugar and vanilla. She starts it on low so the cream doesn’t splash out of the bowl, then turns it up to high until the stiff white peaks. The whisk turns faster than her hand could manage. She watches the cream thicken, stops the mixer, lifts the whisk to check. Peaks. She puts a dollop of the whipped cream onto her coffee, her favorite treat, then some onto the pie. She savors the vanilla in the cream, the bite of cinnamon and ginger mixed with the pumpkin, and heads into work. At work, the accounting sheets are waiting. Each needs checked and then checked again. There are more sheets than she has time to go through carefully. She opens a conversation with an AI. She details precise instructions. What she needs to check, what a mistake looks like, what should agree with what. Together they work on a piece of Python code to go through the documents one at a time. The first try isn’t quite right. She changes a term, explains it again. They try another approach. She runs the code, checks what it finds, changes the code, goes back to the conversation. A couple of hours pass this way. Eventually, it works. The code moves through the sheets finding the mistakes that need her attention. She gets to work fixing them. At a desk nearby, a mathematician works through a problem he has struggled with for years. He knows where he gets stuck. He can get partway to an answer, but the next step depends on something he hasn’t been able to prove. Every approach brings him back to the same place. He’s tried changing his starting assumptions. He’s tried approaching the problem from other directions. There are papers on his desk with passages underlined, calculations in the margins. Books and old computer programs he keeps because he thinks he might find the answer there. Some of that work belongs to people who have been working on the problem longer than he has. Some will never work on it again. He opens a conversation with an AI. Types the problem, gives it explicit details, explains where he gets stuck. The AI says it’s thinking about it. Gives an answer back. He reads it chewing on a pencil. For him to get to a final solution he has to prove every line, and he can’t get past the third. He goes back to the AI and explains the mistake, walks it through his reasoning. Another answer. This one a different route that arrives at the same difficulty. He checks each step again anyway. Over the next several days, he returns to the conversation. Sometimes it helps him work through a calculation. Sometimes he spends an hour finding out why a suggestion won’t work. Then the AI suggests a way of writing the problem differently. He copies it onto paper. Works through the first line, then the second. He tries a simple example whose answer he already knows. It works. He tries another. Then he goes back over what they have taken for granted, looking for something that slipped through unnoticed. For the first time, he can see a possible next step. There’s still work to do. He needs to know whether the approach works beyond these examples. He needs other mathematicians to look it over. A promising afternoon is a long way from his end goal. But he turns to a fresh page. We say she dug the hole by hand. We say she made the pie from scratch. And she did. But where does ‘by hand’ or ‘from scratch’ begin? She used a shovel. Somebody made it. Before someone could make the shovel, someone made steel. Someone extracted iron ore from the ground. Someone figured out how to turn it into something useful. They needed furnaces, fuel, equipment to move the material, tools to shape it, people to do the work. Every one of those had to be made or fed, too. And the handle. A tree had to grow. Somebody cut it, moved it, dried the wood, shaped it to fit the shovel, and shaped it so that your hand could hold it. Whatever fastens the blade to the handle has its own need: a pin, a screw, adhesive. How do you make resin from scratch? For every one of them, if you follow their trail backward, there’s more work. Even if she could obtain everything herself, every ingredient, she would still need to know what to do with them. Somebody makes every material. Somebody else discovered how. Somebody learned through years of mistakes what would work. What would hold together? What would fail or rust faster? We could learn what they know, but we don’t have time to live every one of their failures. She doesn’t need to know the history of metalwork. Other people have worked that out, and they gave her a tool she can hold. Most of their names don’t survive. People observed things long ago, before there were papers to publish or patents to file. They tried something. They remembered what happened. They showed somebody else. Knowledge traveled through a family or a community across generations. It could be lost, discovered again, changed by somebody who noticed something others missed. In the kitchen, she measures flour. She didn’t grow the wheat or grind it. If she had, she would use knowledge someone else taught her: when to plant, what to save for seed, how to recognize grain ready for harvest, how to turn it into flour, and how to make flour into something worth eating. The cinnamon arrived in a jar from Sumatra, halfway across the world. In that jar, there are people who grew and harvested it, people who prepared it, people who moved it from one part of the world to another, and behind their work is knowledge that they didn’t have to discover for themselves. When she turns on the mixer, she watches the cream turn into soft and then stiff peaks and decides when it’s ready. She can use the machine without knowing who built its motor or how they did it. She can take the cream out of the refrigerator without knowing how to make a refrigerator. And we still say that she made whipped cream from scratch. Then at work. She knows the result she needs, opens a browser window, explains how she needs to check them. The first version fails; she changes the code, and it fails again. She changes her instructions; it fails. She works through it over and over, tries again, until she achieves her goal. What part of that effort belongs to her? It’s a legitimate question. But we should ask the same question about the shovel, the flour, the refrigerator, the language she uses to explain the problem she has. The question, really, is: what does it mean to do something by hand? Human achievement depends on more human experience than any one person could ever accumulate. We start ahead of the finish line, beginning our lives with answers other people long dead spent their lives finding, and many spent their lives failing to find. Let’s pull on this thread some more and think about another facet of AI that no one is talking about: justice. It’s one of our six national goals, and it means equal treatment under the law, but it also means that a boy or girl who grows up in a trailer and is willing to put in the work can become great. And for AI especially, it’s not really a governance effort because it’s private enterprise. But let’s think about the effort in the context of: does it align with one of our national goals? We’ve already talked about how knowledge is inherited, but access to that knowledge isn’t equal. Some people grow up with great teachers or great professional connections. Their parents have connections, their friends have connections, or they have people who can explain how to start something. Others have ability and ambition, but they don’t have these connections or the guidance. Circumstances narrow our choices in life. If a boy or girl grows up in a trailer and they are curious and willing to work, their circumstances shouldn’t decide how far they can develop their abilities. AI as a tool creates another way to learn and attempt things and to build knowledge and skills that you wouldn’t be able to otherwise. It’s a place to ask questions, request more explanation about something, practice unfamiliar skills, build something useful. New abilities also create new opportunities. It can help finish a project, get a promotion, or develop new skills they can showcase to an employer or customer. AI isn’t an end-all, be-all. But it offers concrete steps toward the goal of an ordinary, worthwhile life: to love your work, raise your family in a safe neighborhood with good schools, and eat and drink with those you love. So let’s judge the technology not solely by the chatter, but by whom it enables and whether it advances our effort toward achieving a national goal. America exists to protect and enable the weak, not the strong. And to do so, we must take deliberate effort to empower those born with nothing who are willing to work to become great. So, what’s better? Human achievement only? Human achievement enhanced with AI ability? And a question we need to ask. There are answers we need for tough questions. When will we get to those answers alone? If one day the answer to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Problem about fluid motion helps us better model solutions for a changing climate, would we ignore the result? Postscript. My stories are mine. For this piece, I read into a microphone and used AI to transcribe for me. And yes, I use the hell out of it to help me write Python code. Around twenty-five hundred years ago we were thinking about the progress of knowlege: 8Ask the former generation and find out what their ancestors learned,9 for we were born only yesterday and know nothing, and our days on earth are but a shadow.10 Will they not instruct you and tell you? Will they not bring forth words from their understanding?” Job 8, 8-10, NIV Sources Steel production, iron ore, fuel, and the materials behind manufactured tools: World Steel Association, “Raw Materials”; World Steel Association, “The Steelmaking Process” Indonesian cinnamon from Sumatra and the people involved in its production: McCormick Science Institute, “Cinnamon”; McCormick, “Empowering Women in Indonesia’s Cinnamon Supply Chain,” March 8, 2023 Human knowledge accumulating through social learning, innovation, and transmission between people: Maxime Derex and Robert Boyd, “The Foundations of the Human Cultural Niche,” Nature Communications, 2015 Returning to dust: Ecclesiastes 3:20, New International Version, via Bible Gateway; the wording “ashes to ashes, dust to dust”: The Book of Common Prayer (1662), “At the Burial of the Dead,” Church of England Learning from earlier generations and the limits of one person’s experience: Job 8:8–10, New International Version, via Bible Gateway How new ideas and technologies spread through communication, social relationships, and adoption over time: Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, fifth edition, Free Press, 2003 Navier–Stokes equations, fluid motion, and the Millennium Prize problem: Clay Mathematics Institute, “Navier–Stokes Equation”; Charles L. Fefferman, official problem description, “Existence and Smoothness of the Navier–Stokes Equation” Mathematicians working with AI on fluid equations, building on earlier human research, and questions about credit and unpublished work: Tristan Buckmaster, public statement on his collaboration with Levent Alpöge and interactions with OpenAI, September 2026 OpenAI’s claimed Navier–Stokes solution and its account of the research process and concurrent mathematical work: OpenAI, “On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem,” September 8, 2026 Fluid-motion equations in numerical weather prediction and modeling systems used for weather and climate: Met Office, “History of Numerical Weather Prediction”; Met Office, “Unified Model” Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe
September 1 · 16 min
Heifers, Water, and Grass
Taking stairs down two at a time from the giant stone building, music thrumming in her AirPods. She rounds the corner and her pace slows to a walk. The Commuter Express is still there, leaving the city. Three-tone white and green and blue, blue cloth seats, standing room only, people in suits and dress shoes. Above the windshield, Backlick Three Ninety-Five lit up in yellow. A twenty-six minute bus ride to the commuter lot. I-95 and then the parkway. The doors fold shut and then the hiss of air brakes. A young man moves his bag away from the seat next to him, but she reaches up to grab the strap hanging from the ceiling and braces for the turn onto the on-ramp. Eyes forward. She’s twelve hours in. During the darkest time of the year this is her favorite moment of the day. As they crest the top of the hill, a glowing river of red on her right. The HOV lane rules say minimum three passengers to get away from the gridlock, and most cars don’t have three. Their brake lights shine as far as she can see, the bus passing them one after another after another. Next stop, the commuter lot. The bus empties in less than a minute. Her car is close, she parked at five-forty this morning. On the way home, she stops at the supermarket. Less than ten minutes now to save the peace of a weekend morning with her coffee and the still of the screen porch, cardinals calling from the tree line and squirrels that chitter in the great woods that line the creek. Vegetables, potatoes, take and bake sourdough. Then the meat counter for some beef. Even the ground is more than seven dollars a pound. The world has gone mad. Heifers Before he can even get a toe to the wood floor she licks his foot. He walks out of the bedroom in the near-dark, and she’s already jogging a circle on the rug next to her food bowl. He puts a scoop in the bowl and hits the coffee grinder button as he walks through the kitchen. She finishes her portion, licks the bowl clean, and still beats him to the door. While she is outside he goes back to the coffee. Ten after five he hits ‘Brew’ and the coffee maker starts to gurgle. Out the sunroom window the sky to the east is a deep pink going yellow at the edge. Jesse is back at the screen door, ready for her treat. Red heeler, white Bentley mark on her forehead, nails ticking on the tile when the door swings. She wolfs the treat down in one bite and runs through the house ready to jump on anyone not out of bed yet. He drinks the coffee with some cream. Only one cup anymore. Jesse is back now; she watches the sparrows flit from tree to tree in the dim light. He grabs his felt with the cattleman’s crease. By six he’s in the pickup with the window down, diesel turbo whining along the two-track up to the north pasture to check water tanks. The tank on the north end runs off a solar well he put in four years ago, and the float sticks sometimes. Today the float is fine. The grass is not. He borrowed eleven thousand dollars through a USDA program four years ago to drill that well. For a cattleman, water means grass. It opened up enough ground to add forty pairs on a section that used to just grow sagebrush. He’s looked into what a second one for the east side would cost more than once. Another sixty pairs, maybe, if the grass would carry them. Imagine walking in to talk to a banker for a loan. Do you have any collateral? Sure do. It’s grass that I’m hoping will survive the drought. The north pasture is grazed short and has been brown all year. He asks Jesse aloud if they’re going to see any snow this winter. Then the math. How many head, how many acres, how much fuel will cost to truck hay in at more than five dollars a gallon for diesel. The math says what it said last year. Keeping cattle means losing money. The pickup idles through and he counts heifer calves. Steers already a check coming regardless. This year’s crop looks good. The kind you want to keep. He turns the radio up when the cattle market report comes on in the background. Heifer calves bringing between four-fifty and some near four-seventy-five a pound. He glances through his heifers. Near four seventy-five a pound means the calves in front of him are twenty-five hundred dollars. Apiece. Or he could lose money to keep them. Then the news. The announcer says the United States would import three hundred thousand metric tons of ground beef to be sold at twenty-five percent below current market prices. The president’s voice says the deal would reduce prices for American families while we work to rebuild the cattle herd and help our ranchers. He shakes his head and turns the radio back down. He looks at a heifer calf. If he keeps her there’s no check in October. She eats hay all winter, and the diesel to deliver it costs more than the hay. Then hope she breeds next summer, lose money again next winter, and then still wait another year. If. If. If. If she breeds. If they get enough snow to grow grass. If the coyotes don’t find the newborn. If all that happens, two springs from now she might put her first calf on the ground. But he still hasn’t made any money. For that to happen that calf would still have to grow, get weaned, and sell for a profit. This is twenty twenty-six. He could get paid in twenty twenty-eight. Somewhere around twenty-thirty, that calf is beef. He has a choice and he doesn’t like either option. He could spend money buying hay and paying veterinary bills and hope for luck for four years but that means losing money and a ranch that loses money doesn’t stay a ranch. Or he could put a check for twenty-five hundred dollars in his pocket right now but every year he does that his cattle herd shrinks and then makes less and less money every year and the ranch doesn’t stay a ranch. And the radio just told him the government will do everything it can to make the cattle market no longer profitable. He spends the rest of the day checking calves and water tanks with Jesse. Around the time he’s wrapping up he remembers a story his dad told him. His dad loved Reagan, always telling these old stories. 1989, just two months before the Berlin Wall fell, Boris Yeltsin visited a grocery store in Houston, Texas. He roamed the aisles of Randall’s, shaking his head in amazement. He said if ordinary Russians ever saw an American supermarket, “there would be a revolution.” He wonders what happens to the supermarket if ranchers can’t grow their herds. They’re headed back for supper. Outside the window the heifer calves are strung out along the creek in the last light, grazing down by the water. They’re worth more money than any calves in the history of this ranch, every one of them a check he can’t afford to cash, and can’t afford not to. We’ve Been Here Before, But We Were Coming From the Other Direction Nebraska, 1934. The Dust Bowl. America was five years into the Depression. Roosevelt had been president a little more than a year. Washington was inventing agencies faster than most people could learn their initials. None of them could make it rain. The grass had been gone two years. A rancher couldn’t keep an animal he couldn’t feed, and what he couldn’t keep, nobody wanted to buy. A calf was worth less than the corn it would have taken to fatten it, and the corn wasn’t growing either. The Drought Relief Service started buying cattle. Not to eat. To get them off land that couldn’t carry them anymore. Four dollars a head for calves, around a hundred dollars today. Ten to twenty for cows and steers, two fifty to five hundred. More than the packing plants could take. What they couldn’t take, trucks drove to pits we had already dug. Close to one in five of the cattle the government paid for were buried in the ground they’d been trying to graze. There are two ways for a country to spend money on beef it doesn’t have. There were ninety-two years between cattle pits in Nebraska and the meat counter in Northern Virginia. Then: not enough grass and water to grow too many cattle. Now: not enough cattle, and not enough grass and water to grow more. So. Two ways for a country to spend money on beef it doesn’t have. First, fast. Last week, Washington announced it would import up to three hundred thousand metric tons of foreign ground beef without the usual tariff. A ninety-day supply, priced twenty-five percent below market value. This isn’t necessarily wicked, a country buying beef. But let’s be honest about what that leaves us with when the ninety days run out. Not an extra acre of grass. Not a foot of pipe for water. Not one bred heifer standing in the snow we are praying for this winter. And another good question for this approach. Where did that beef come from? A calf that crosses a state line in America has an official tag and a history so USDA can ensure a safe food supply. Born here. Moved there. If it comes from a Western brand state, looked at by a brand inspector before it leaves the state. We know much less about beef imports. The second way. Slow. Painfully slow. Grass, water, and heifers. Grass. In August, a Republican from South Dakota and a Democrat from Minnesota introduced a bill to pay landowners to put marginal cropland back into permanent pasture. Up to twenty million acres under ten or fifteen-year contracts. Sunlight turning land into more grass to grow the national cattle herd. Water. We need more water across the West, and taking more from the Colorado River and aquifers isn’t the solution. If we put marginal crop ground into grazing land, those acres need a fraction of the water draw irrigated row crops need. And the Colorado: a hundred-year-old agreement promised states could take more water than has flowed in the river in decades. Last week, Washington changed those rules. Nevada already sued, arguing that the new decision would leave it with less than half the water it already uses. Nobody’s building a pipeline or a desalination plant by November. No quick solutions, so we better get to work. Heifers. Somebody has to feed her and take care of her, starting from the fall she isn’t sold to the fall her first calf brings a check two years later. Ask any other American small business the country relies on to skip revenue checks on half of their inventory for two years, and every one of them will go out of business. So ranchers need resources. Low-interest loans and tax credits to keep beef heifers. Marry the credits to the ear tags and brand inspections that already exist, so nobody collects on a heifer that quietly went to market. And put an end date on it. A bridge, not an entitlement. When we rebuild the herd, let it die. Then comes the hard part. We wait. The market isn’t broken. The price of calves is real: there aren’t enough of them. Anyone standing in front of a meat case promising lower beef prices by November is making a promise cattle biology doesn’t support. Cheap beef means abundance. Abundance means more cattle than the market wants to pay for. That’s the market working. Cheap beef means: Heifers. Water. Grass. Sources U.S. cattle herd at a 75-year low, ground beef averaging $6.69/lb in Dec. 2025, Argentina beef tariff-rate quota raised to 80,000 metric tons: The White House, “Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Ensures Affordable Beef for the American Consumer,” Feb. 6, 2026; Federal Register, Proclamation 11010, “Ensuring Affordable Beef for the American Consumer” Trump executive order removing tariffs on beef, coffee, and tropical fruit, Nov. 14, 2025: PBS NewsHour / Associated Press NCBA CEO Colin Woodall statement opposing Argentina beef imports: The Center Square, via Yahoo News DOJ meatpacker price-fixing investigation, Executive Order 14364, Dec. 6, 2025: Wikipedia, “Executive Order 14364” Nevada v. Department of the Interior, Colorado River Record of Decision lawsuit, Aug. 24, 2026: Office of Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo, press release Colorado River Record of Decision and Final EIS, governor statements: Office of Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo; Office of Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo 1934 cattle purchase program, packing plants, condemned animals: Wikipedia, “Drought Relief Service” 8.3 million cattle purchased, $111,546,104 cost, 1.5 million condemned: Wikipedia, “Jones–Connally Act 1934” High Plains aquifer system, southeastern Wyoming extent and use: USGS, Scientific Investigations Map 3180; USGS, Fact Sheet 2011–3106, “Groundwater Quality of Southeastern Wyoming” Status of the High Plains aquifer in Kansas, 2023: Kansas Geological Survey, Technical Series 25 Ogallala aquifer depletion rates, Texas High Plains: Texas A&M, Ogallala Aquifer Program; Texas Tribune Irrigated vs. non-irrigated water use, Texas High Plains crop-livestock systems: Zilverberg et al., “Integrated Crop–Livestock Systems in the Texas High Plains: Productivity and Water Use,” 2014 Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe
August 25 · 21 min
The Shortcut Looks Like the Way Home
College girl. Blonde in a bright green shirt holding a clipboard, asking names and questions. Welcoming committee. What’s your major? Chemical engineering. Oh, you’re one of the smart ones. The van pulls forward through the maze of cones and kids wearing shirts that say “Unpack Your Future” that stand ready with laundry carts to take your life’s treasure into the unknown. Who will you meet on your journey? Through the great halls of stone and brick. Unknown sounds and the faces and voices of those someday familiar. Will you take the long road home? Or the shortcut? The shortcut looks like the way home. Your first meal at the feast. Your first night in a strange room. Act I. Argos Christmas Eve. The long night and the wind howling pelting snow sideways against the windows and the drifts that bury the paths and block the roads. Dreams of tunnels and forts and marshmallows dripping with chocolate. Bedtime in the far north. Two bathed now in pajamas and blankets, snuggled in with the old gray dog. Time for a story. The older is at the edge of story time and some nights he wants to listen and some nights not and days move on. Tonight, a new tale. Not an Odyssey. A tale of an Odyssey told from home. Those who remain behind. The reader starts with the title. “Argos. The Story of Odysseus as Told by His Loyal Dog” by Ralph Hardy. Book One. Chapter One. “On the Stupidity of Sheep.” The two giggle. The sheep refuse to find shelter from the storm. Their wool smells. Argos, the great hunting dog born of bear and wolf, their protector. Wet. Chapter One ends: “Some men did return to their homes from Troy to tell the tale. But my master and his men have not. The mountain eagles circle higher and higher, riding the rippling currents, looking for him as I have asked, but see him not. The seagulls I have ordered to fly over every ship to see if my master is enslaved report nothing. Even the vultures, which smell death everywhere, are silent. And so I believe he lives.” February. Smoke in the kitchen. The microwave door hangs open and the smell of burnt oatmeal goes all the way up the stairs. The boy stands back from it with the look of a man watching his first ship sink. Windows open. Ten below outside. The whole house breathing cold air until the smell surrenders. What’s done is done. The house stands. Later we laugh and carry the old microwave out into the snow drift and the smell inside it will never go away. That night, bedtime. Pajamas and blankets and the old gray dog. Book One. Chapter Sixteen. “Tales of Hades:” “I pray that…you set me on a pyre there and burn me with my armor….Do this for me, or I am cursed for eternity.” Honor by fire. Some nights he listens from the doorway. Tonight, he is under the blanket. March came and with it great snowstorms. First we dug tunnels tall enough for a boy to stand in. The roofs sagged and the mound slowly shrank. The book was nearly done now. Bedtime. The reader went up the stairs the way they had all winter. The two bathed and in pajamas under the blanket. The reader had to coax one out to listen, the book was nearly done. The old gray dog circled twice and lay down with his head on a leg. The last chapters. Odysseus returns at last, a stranger in his own home; only one creature in all of Ithaca knows him. Argos. Act II. Lessons Troy. The Trojan War. The legend Homer told took place around twelve hundred years before Christ. He told the tale around five centuries later. Homer begins near the end. For ten years, Greek warriors laid siege to a city that would not bend to their will. Troy’s location wasn’t an accident. It sat at a decisive point to control key geography. The straits didn’t cause the Trojan War, but they are why the city mattered. Then the trickery of the horse. Warriors inside the gates. The city slept. In the dark, the warriors climbed out and opened the gates for the army waiting outside. Houses burned through the night. Men who had names the day before, dead in the streets. They took women and children. Odysseus wasn’t watching Troy burn from a ship. He was inside the horse and inside the walls when the city fell. By dawn, the Greeks had destroyed the city. So. The war is over. There was a way home, and some of the other kings took it. He could go directly home, but there were other matters. Men he was tied to, arguments to settle, other things pulling at him, other routes to consider. Odysseus has a choice. The first: Go to class. Do the work. Come home when you said you would. Save some money. Keep the promise. Stay married. Train when you don’t feel like training. One foot in front of the other, the next step and then the next. None of those things feel heroic while you’re doing them. Or the other: the road that looks shorter. And so begins the Odyssey. Their first stop, a city called Ismarus. It had nothing to do with Troy, but they attacked it anyway. After the assault, Odysseus told the men it was time to go. For ten years there had been a time for war. Troy had fallen. That time was over. But there was food and wine and things to steal and divide, and they stayed too long. By morning, more men had come down from the country and they had to defend themselves. They fought all day, and by the time the Greeks got back to sea, six men from every ship were dead. There is a season, a time and place for everything. A time when your parents woke you up, reminded you where to be, knew where you were at night, and caught some of your mistakes before they became expensive. That season ends. Then an island where three of the men ate the lotus and forgot why they were trying to get home. Not who they were, really. They didn’t forget everything. Just the part where, somewhere across the water, there was another life they were supposed to want and get back to. They forgot. They didn’t want to leave. Odysseus had to drag them back to the ships crying and tie them down. Remember why you came. One of the great treasures in life is to find work you love. Don’t trade that away because something is easier or safer or more pleasant that makes you forget what you wanted in the first place. When you are young, you want to burn the world to the ground. Remember. Then the cave. The men find cheese and sheep and food, and they want to take some and get out. Odysseus wants to stay and meet whoever lives there, and that turns out to be a bad decision he could not have forecast at the time. The Cyclops comes home, rolls a stone across the entrance, and eats two of the men. Later he eats more. Odysseus gets him drunk, tells him his name is Nobody, blinds him, and the surviving men escape when the Cyclops lets the sheep out. It works. They’re back on the ship. They’re leaving. But Odysseus can’t stand that the Cyclops doesn’t know who beat him. So Odysseus shouts his real name and where he’s from. Turns out the Cyclops is Poseidon’s son. You don’t need to tell people how smart you are, how talented you are, how hard you work, how much potential you have. Don’t announce yourself. There’s plenty of time for people to know how great you are without you telling them. People will discover that on their own. Then the King of the Winds. He gives Odysseus a bag with every wind trapped inside except the one blowing toward Ithaca, so only the wind that will carry them home is free. For nine days they sail. Odysseus stays awake at the helm until he can’t take it anymore and falls asleep. When he does, they are close enough to Ithaca to see the fires of their home burning on shore. But the crew has been watching him guard the bag, and out of envy they decide it must contain treasure he hasn’t shared with them. They open it. All the winds come out at once. Odysseus wakes up and watches his home disappear over the horizon because the men he trusted thought he was hiding gold from them. They end up back where they started. You will meet people who have more than you. More money. Better grades. Better connections. There is always someone at the dance that is prettier than you. Maybe they earned it. Maybe they didn’t. It doesn’t matter. Envy will make you destroy your own voyage trying to open somebody else’s bag. Then the giants. Eleven ships go into the harbor. The giants rain rocks down from the cliffs. None come out. The one ship that stayed out of the harbor cuts its line and gets away. Time and chance happen to us all. You will make good choices and still have terrible things happen to you. Keep going. Next, Circe, daughter of the sun god. When Odysseus’s men reach her island, she welcomes them into her house, gives them food and wine, drugs them, strikes them with her wand, and turns them into pigs. Odysseus forces her to turn them back. And in a weird twist, they stay on the island for another year. They fight no battles. There’s no rowing, no storms, plenty of food to eat and warm beds. Eventually, the crew has to convince Odysseus that they should probably go home. There will be times when you need to stop, recover, change your major, take an easier semester, sleep, heal, enjoy yourself. None of those are failure. But eventually, you should probably get going. Then he goes to the land of the dead because Circe tells him that the way home now requires directions from people who are no longer alive. His mother is there, and she wasn’t dead when he left. He asks her what happened and learns that she died while he was gone, grieving for him. He tries to put his arms around her. There’s nothing to hold. He tries again and again. Twenty years is a long time. There are people waiting for you—their lives keep going while you have your adventure. Things happen to them, too. Next up, the Sirens. Odysseus has heard rumor from Circe of what their song does to men, but of course he still wants to hear it. So he comes up with a solution. He has his men put wax in their ears so they can’t hear the song, and then he has them tie him to the mast so he can. Crazypants. He tells them beforehand that no matter what he says, they are not to untie him. When he hears the song, he immediately wants loose. He begs, pleads, orders them, fights the ropes. They keep rowing and tie him tighter. Sometimes you know or suspect that you’re not going to make a good decision. Don’t put it off. Decide while you’re thinking clearly what you’re going to do when the circumstances make thinking clearly difficult. And, maybe Odysseus shouldn’t have listened to the song at all. You don’t have to figure out how close you can get to failure without being ruined. Maybe just put wax in your ears and keep rowing. Then a monster on one side of a passage and a whirlpool on the other. The whirlpool will destroy the ship and kill everyone on it. The monster will take six men. Odysseus knows this before they enter the strait, but he can’t tell the crew. He chooses the passage where six men will die. Some of you will do inherently dangerous things. All of you will face tough choices. Another island, where there are cattle belonging to the sun god. The instructions are simple: don’t eat the cattle. Odysseus tells the crew and makes them promise, and they promise they will not eat the cattle. But then storms keep the ship on the island. The food runs out. Odysseus goes off by himself to pray, and he falls asleep. The men have a choice: they can die from starvation, or they can risk the wrath of the sun god. They kill the cattle. When they finally leave the island, Zeus destroys the ship, and every one of the crew dies except Odysseus. Eat your bread with joy, drink your wine with a merry heart, and enjoy the hard work of being alive while you can. All the men who left Ithaca with Odysseus are gone. He survives, holding onto wreckage. And the lesson here, which isn’t really part of the story, is that everybody who takes the shortcut thinks they’re going to be the one who survives it. Maybe only one of you will make it. Then Calypso and the seven-year wait. She is more than a beautiful woman on an island paradise. Immortality, eternal youth, love, food, sex. Anything he wants. Except for the one thing. He sits by the sea, crying for home. The gods tell her to release him and he builds a raft and goes back onto the water and Poseidon destroys it. One day you might get an offer that seems like paradise, at least from the outside looking in. Judge well—there is no perfect offer, always a tradeoff, hidden or known. More money or stress or health risk or time away from family that will start their own Odyssey before you expect it. Is it worth it? Maybe yes and maybe no. Only you can decide. Do it with your eyes open. Twenty years after leaving Ithaca, Odysseus drifts ashore there asleep. And home isn’t the place he left. Men fill his house, eat his animals, drink his wine, and court his wife because they think he is dead. His son has grown up without him. His father is old. His mother is gone. Odysseus has spent the whole story trying to get home and when he finally gets there he goes in as a beggar. Nobody recognizes him. Well, almost. Except for Argos. When you go on your Odyssey, you can’t go home to the place you left, because neither you nor home waits in place. Act III. For Those of You Leaving Home in this Season As you go out into the world, The Lord bless you and keep you;Make His face to shine upon you and be gracious to you;Turn his face toward you and give you peace. To those left behind, we remember Argos and the blizzard. Sources Ralph Hardy, Argos: The Story of Odysseus as Told by His Loyal Dog, Harper Collins, 2016: Google Books, Argos Troy, archaeological site at Hisarlık, location near the Dardanelles, and traditional Late Bronze Age setting of the Trojan War: UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Archaeological Site of Troy Homer, approximately eighth century B.C.; Homeric epics recorded in roughly their present form around 750 B.C.; Iliad covers only a small portion of the ten-year siege; Trojan Horse and Sack of Troy preserved in the wider Trojan epic tradition: Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Lore About the Trojan War” Homer, Odyssey, Book 3. Division of the Greek leaders after Troy and the choices surrounding their return home: Perseus Digital Library, Odyssey Book 3 Odysseus and the Greek warriors inside the Trojan Horse and the sack of Troy: Perseus Digital Library, Odyssey Book 11 Ismarus and the Cicones; the Lotus-Eaters; Polyphemus, “Nobody,” Odysseus revealing his name, and Poseidon: Perseus Digital Library, Odyssey Book 9 Aeolus and the bag of winds; the Laestrygonians; Circe and the transformation of the men into pigs; the year spent on Circe’s island: Perseus Digital Library, Odyssey Book 10 Odysseus in the land of the dead; Tiresias; Anticleia, Odysseus’s mother; and the dead who cannot be embraced: Perseus Digital Library, Odyssey Book 11 The Sirens; Scylla and Charybdis; the cattle of Helios; destruction of Odysseus’s final ship and death of the remaining crew: Perseus Digital Library, Odyssey Book 12 Calypso; Odysseus held on Ogygia; his longing and weeping for home; offer of immortality; construction of the raft; Poseidon’s destruction of it: Perseus Digital Library, Odyssey Book 5 Odysseus carried home asleep by the Phaeacians and set ashore on Ithaca: Perseus Digital Library, Odyssey Book 13 Argos recognizes Odysseus after twenty years: Perseus Digital Library, Odyssey Book 17 “There is a season” / “a time for war, and a time for peace”: Ecclesiastes 3:1–8: Bible Gateway, Ecclesiastes 3 “Time and chance happen to them all”: Ecclesiastes 9:11, NKJV: Bible Gateway, Ecclesiastes 9:11 “Eat your bread with joy…drink your wine with a merry heart,” and the enjoyment of life and work: Ecclesiastes 9:7–10, paraphrased: Bible Gateway, Ecclesiastes 9:7–10 “The Lord bless you and keep you…make His face shine upon you and give you peace”: Numbers 6:24–26: Bible Gateway, Numbers 6:24–26 Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe
August 18 · 24 min
The Night Shift | The Bottom 50% Own 2.5% of the Wealth of the Country
Moths circle the streetlights in the mostly empty lot. Blacktop. White parking lines. Road noise. Pickup doors slam shut. They’re supposed to park at the back of the lot. Nobody who would care is here at eleven, and they’ll be gone before Beth gets in. She’s at the door, counting heads. Everyone calls her Lou. “I need you to go get Charlie,” she says. “He was supposed to be here an hour ago.” No problem. Charlie lives in a trailer park pretty close. Tires on gravel. Sideways glances. He bangs on the dark trailer door and waits. Quiet inside. Does it again. After a couple minutes Charlie opens the door, eyes bloodshot, smelling like too much of something. “I’ll be right behind you.” The kid leaves. When he gets back she’s still at the door. “He’ll be here,” she says. “He always comes.” Trucks back up to the dock. Boxes come down the rollers. Cardboard stacks up faster than anyone breaks it down. Most of the crew is new. Maybe they’ll last the week. Charlie comes in at midnight and works the line like a man paying something off. Nobody says anything. At the first break she’s smoking and eating a sandwich. Lettuce packed separate. Bread spread thin with dressing. John sleeps in the corner of the break room. Loud snores. He jerks awake, then nods off again. Above the time clock there’s a board with the stock price on it. Employee ownership plan. Somebody on day shift writes the new number in every day. “That’s not much mayonnaise,” the kid says. “Miracle Whip. If I could afford mayonnaise, I would spread it thick,” she says. He looks at his own sandwich. Eats the rest of it slower. At seven the doors open onto full daylight. The crew walks out squinting. Engines start across the lot, one after another. They pull out and head toward town and bed. He turns west, towards Midway, the sun in his mirrors. His shift at the dairy starts at seven thirty. Act I. Keys Lou’s ring of keys opens nearly every lock in the store. A key to the high valuables cage, the office, the cardboard compactor lockout. She carries them on a metal clip hung over her belt. When she walks the floor, you hear her coming. She keeps a copy of the schedule on a sheet folded in her back pocket. Not her schedule, because she has that one memorized. Everyone’s schedule. Her handwriting, all capitals, pencil. She schedules break times, teaches new workers how to unload trucks and run pallet jacks, moves people around based on who calls in. The store stays open until ten. Night shift starts at eleven. She arrived by nine, through the auto-open doors in pale jeans, shirt tucked in. She walked with highkneed purpose, denim falling straight to white sneakers. Pencil ready. The evening crew has their aisles faced and the dock swept before she comes through. Just before eleven o’clock, she’s at the door to let everyone in. Five tonight. Charlie, John, the kid, a new guy, and a woman who started Tuesday. The truck’s already backed in. She takes the paperwork from the driver and signs it on her leg. The night is orderly. Trailer, then the rollers, then her first Virginia Slim. Pallets to the floor, everyone split aisle by aisle, freight on the shelves, cardboard broken down flat and baled. Then the orders. She’s quick to jump in and fix a jam or rebuild a corner of a pallet herself so a new guy can watch. Then she hands him the next box. She explains to him, “A new truck every night. Nothing to stay in the stockroom, no back inventory. Six hundred boxes in, six hundred boxes onto shelves, cardboard baled, empty dock by seven, and another truck tomorrow.” This summer the kid is new to nights. He’s been with the store for a couple of years on evening shift, and he picked up a second job on the university dairy for the summer. When he got moved to nights she asked him about his schedule. Night shift, off at seven, dairy until five, sleep until ten, five days a week. “That’s not much sleep,” she says. She looks at him like he’s missing something obvious. Once every couple weeks the kid isn’t there at eleven. If the truck is full and the crew is short, she’ll call. If the truck is light she’ll let him sleep until one before she calls. When a truck pulls away she might sneak a puff outside the cone of the dock light. The moths shoot across the light in a streak. Around four the night gets long. Whoever’s dragging worst finds her coming down their aisle with a mini candy bar. She doesn’t say anything about it. The woman who started Tuesday asks her how long she’s been here. Nineteen years, she says. Nights for sixteen. A few nights later the woman asks about her hours. Lou takes the sheet out of her back pocket and looks at it. Thirty-two this week, she says. Forty next week. She folds it back up. Get a thousand hours in the year and you qualify for the profit sharing, she says. You still have to be here at the end of the year. The woman says okay and goes back to her aisle. One night she’s showing the kid how the order system works. He asks her why she doesn’t switch to days. Assistant manager, an office with a door and a chair. That job takes a degree, she says. She scans the barcode in front of an empty shelf to place an order. I’m fifty. Act II. The Crew Charlie arrives just after Lou most nights. He clocks in and heads straight to the dock to check out what the truck has brought him that night. He jokes with the college kids who are going home. The kid only has to go to his trailer once. Nobody brings it up. He works the west side of the store, toys and tools and home goods. He’s fast. Somewhere in the middle of the night he’ll say something the kid thinks about on the drive to Midway. One night, breaking down boxes: why would you worry about something that hasn’t happened yet? Then he tilts the bale of flattened cardboard on a pallet and gets the jack. Nights suit me, he says. John falls asleep whenever he sits down. Lou gives him jobs that keep him on his feet and moving. Clean and polish the floors, move pallets. When break time is up, they wake him up and tell him it’s time to go. That’s just John. Then one night in July, he’s different. Awake. Smiling when he comes through the door, talking during break. He tells everybody he got a machine that helps him breathe when he sleeps. Says he slept eight hours and can’t remember the last time he felt this good. He looks ten years younger. He eats his whole lunch without falling asleep. Along with Lou, they’re the regulars. The day shift is the lifers, evening for the college kids, nights for those caught in between. The crew turns over all summer. A guy who wanted a job with air conditioning. A lady who needed a paycheck, then she was headed to Springfield. They’re friendly and they work hard. Then Lou crosses their name off the schedule. The woman who started that first Tuesday lasts six weeks. One night she just stops coming in. She didn’t quit because she hated anybody. Nights are hard on your body. You work while you’re supposed to be sleeping and you sleep while you’re supposed to be working, and most people’s bodies can’t take it. Every so often a new person will ask: how long does it take your body to adjust? Opinions all around. Two weeks. A month. Six. The answer for some of them? Never. At three in the morning the store hums with noise from the fluorescent ballasts, John running the floor polisher, scrub pads turning circles on the tile, Charlie making the cardboard baler groan in the backroom. The whole town is dark, moths shooting across the parking lot lights, and they’re moving boxes in this lit-up one-hundred-thousand-square-foot metal box. Freight moving from a trailer to a shelf so a woman can buy diapers for her baby at seven a.m. One night a new guy asks about the sign by the time clock. Employee ownership. What’s the dollar sign written in marker? Lou explains. You sign up to buy company stock, they take money out of your check. For every dollar of stock you buy the company puts an extra fifteen cents into your account. Charlie says he thought about it, but he can’t eat stock. John says he signed up once and a doctor’s bill changed his mind. Nobody asks the kid. Lou puts her cigarette out and they go back to work. The stock price on the sign goes up just a little every week, all summer. By August, Lou, John, and Charlie are the only people who have been there longer than the kid. Act III. The Bobcat The sun is low on the horizon. Morning near Midway. He steps on the back of the bucket and into the cab. Safety restraint down, key on, and the diesel engine putters to life. Bucket up, tilt down to check the pins, everything checks out. Most of the day is in this Bobcat. Mixing feed in the auger, evening out the corn silage row, unloading alfalfa bales off semis, cleaning the freestall barn. Almost everyone who works on the dairy is a college kid, except for the manager and the guy who can fix everything. Throughout the day, the college kids talk. Did you hear Sean got a sweet job up in Minnesota? Then the milk parlor, clean the udders, mastitis check, milk machine, clean again. The Holsteins give more milk, the Jerseys more milk fat. The Food Science majors who work in the ice cream parlor on campus will use it to make Tiger Stripe, golden French vanilla with a dark Dutch chocolate ribbon. Gold and black. What do you think of the fall study abroad program in the Netherlands? In the afternoon somebody asks what he’s doing next year. After you graduate? I’m going to be a senior, but I’m not sure yet. I might go back to working with beef cattle. Or I might apply to vet school. Somebody says that’s cool. The talk moves back to Sean’s job. They hose and scrub the milk parlor down when they’re done milking. He drives east toward town, sleeps from five thirty to ten. At eleven, Lou is at the door, counting heads. Act IV. August Two weeks left in the summer. Classes start soon, and the store trades the college kids of summer for the kids of fall. David asks to see him one morning after the shift. White button-down collared shirt, dark pants, black shoes. Assistant manager. They meet near the high valuables cage. “How have you been doing?” he starts. Good. No, really. Beth told me about the dairy. Nights here, days there. We think it’s too much. The kid says he’s been getting along. A flash of concern on David’s face. Classes start in a couple weeks, right? Take those weeks off. Your job will be here when you get back. You’ll go back to evenings. The kid jokes the first thing he’s going to do is sleep for days. Then he asks who fills in on Lou’s crew. Don’t worry about Lou. We’ll make sure she’s good. She knows what’s going on. There is no last night. The shift before the meeting was it. Nobody knew except for Lou. He sees her again in the evenings, at nine o’clock, passing. He walks the store, checking the facing before they turn the shift over to her and John and Charlie. She never says anything about the summer. That year, evening shift helps nights unload the first truck before they leave. Postscript Thanks for joining me for The Night Shift. I’m Joel Douglas, and I believe in America. Every bit of this story is true. That summer I was nineteen. The store was the Walmart in Columbia, Missouri, on Nifong Boulevard. The building is a Hy-Vee Grocer now. The dairy is the University of Missouri’s ‘Foremost Dairy.’ The only place you can buy Tiger Stripe ice cream is Buck’s in Eckles Hall. They have very limited hours. The night crew is real. I changed most of the names. The mayonnaise exchange is near word for word. When summer ended I worked there another year. When I graduated, the district manager offered me a spot in the assistant manager training program. Assistant manager, then store manager, then maybe district. The job that takes a degree. I was twenty and I had one, and I had to turn him down. I already had an Officer Training School slot in the Air Force. The rules said they couldn’t make the same offer to Lou. On my way out the store manager told me if I stayed on the books a couple more weeks, I’d vest in something called profit sharing. I couldn’t stay. I believe she kept me on the books anyway. That June a check came for five hundred and seventy-five dollars, and I didn’t know what it was. Employee ownership was different. You could choose to buy stock out of your paycheck and the store kept the stock price on the sign next to the time clock. For every dollar of stock you bought, Walmart added fifteen cents to the same account. A fifteen percent match. Unheard of for 401Ks today. No degree or credit check or anything. You just had to choose to do it, and that probably meant you needed money left over at the end of the week. About one in four Walmart associates buys stock. Charlie told you why. You can’t eat stock. Now the philosophy. Dennis Kelleher said on a podcast that the bottom 50 percent of Americans, about 165 million people, hold 2.5 percent of the wealth of the country. It’s the Federal Reserve’s own quarterly data. Let’s think about the statistic first. The bottom half’s wealth has gone up, not down, for the last thirty years. Many of those are the youngest Americans who haven’t had time to own much. If we judge across history, Americans are extraordinarily prosperous. Owning wealth is different. Many Americans pay rent for shelter. Their health insurance is tied to a job. Their Social Security keeps them alive, but they can’t sell it or leave it to their kids. Security is important, but it isn’t the freedom of choice that comes with ownership. A paid-off truck means you can take another job. Home equity means you can move. Savings mean you can tell a boss no. A retirement account means more of your future is yours. Just like Lou explaining the store. Boxes come in, night shift puts the goods on the shelves. Nothing in the back room, no inventory. Another truck tomorrow. We designed economic security the same way. Benefits arrive just in time, are consumed, nothing remains. Then we act surprised the ownership column reads 2.5 percent. So. Instead of using it as ammunition for political theater, should we try to change it? Justice. One of our six national goals. Setting conditions so a kid born in a trailer can love their work and eat and drink with the people they love. Food on the table. Heat in the house. In turn, a house to put the table in. Is that enough? Should we make Americans buy stock? When bills are tight and a man picks up a second job, would we order him to buy equities with money he needs to pay a doctor’s note? That would violate another national goal: liberty. Lou never chose to be an owner. Sam Walton enrolled her automatically into profit sharing. The rule did it for her. Let’s recognize it’s not just the choice. It’s tough to pass judgment on someone who can’t afford to buy mayonnaise. But if we are serious, there are three principles that would move more Americans into the ownership half. None of them orders anyone to do anything. They are either automatic or a choice. One. Make ownership easier. Two. Make saving the default. Automatic. Three. Stop government rules that punish people for saving money. Three examples to go with them. An offer for first-time homebuyers: a three percent interest rate on a HUD loan, three and a half percent down, one time, owner-occupiers only, investors excluded. Combine this with building and zoning incentives. Auto-enrollment retirement accounts that you have to opt out of. Congress has proposed these accounts many times through bipartisan efforts. Raise the SSI asset limit and index it, so people can actually save money to buy something. To move more Americans into the ownership half, we have to break the chain of just-in-time benefits. I don’t know what happened to Lou. She’d be about seventy-seven now. I hope more than twenty years of profit sharing went home with her. I hope she’s sitting down to supper with people she loves. Mayonnaise spread thick. Eat your bread with joy.Drink your wine with a merry heart.Enjoy the hard work of staying alive,The Almighty takes pleasure in your pleasure. Sources Bottom 50 percent hold 2.5 percent of U.S. wealth: Federal Reserve, Distributional Financial Accounts; FRED series WFRBSB50215, Share of Total Net Worth Held by the Bottom 50% Dennis Kelleher, Better Markets: bettermarkets.org. Podcast episode here. Wealth by age of family head: Federal Reserve, Survey of Consumer Finances Associate Stock Purchase Plan. 15% match on the first $1,800, more than 400,000 participants, plan offered “for almost 30 years,” Sam Walton on share accessibility: Walmart, “Walmart Announces 3-for-1 Stock Split,” Jan. 30, 2024 U.S. associate workforce (approx. 1.6 million): Walmart, About Walmart Profit Sharing and 401(k) Plan annual reports: SEC EDGAR, Walmart Inc. Form 11-K filings SSI resource limits. $2,000 individual / $3,000 couple, unchanged since 1989: Social Security Administration, “Understanding SSI — Resources” SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act: S. 1234, 119th Congress; H.R. 2540, 119th Congress Auto-enrollment retirement accounts: S. 1526, Retirement Savings for Americans Act of 2025, 119th Congress FHA loans, 3.5 percent down: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, “Let FHA Loans Help You” Buck’s Ice Cream, Eckles Hall, Tiger Stripe (French vanilla with Dutch chocolate ribbon): University of Missouri CAFNR, Buck’s Ice Cream Foremost Dairy Research Center: Missouri Agricultural Experiment Station, Foremost Dairy Ecclesiastes 9, New King James, paraphrased. Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe
August 11 · 20 min
Dogwoods and Two Grand Lies
The dogwoods are blooming along the edge of the great lawn, dark pink and brilliant white. Below the hill, Brush Creek runs slow and clear past the parkway that shares its name. Beyond, Spanish mission buildings catch the morning sun. Saturday in April. The collie comes loping back up the slope. She drops the ball at his feet and barks and backs up, ready. “What’s her name?” The girl from the diner stands at the edge of the grass in a light sweater, holding two coffees. She hands him one. “Penny.” “You said you bring her out here on weekends.” She sits down on the grass. “So I figured Saturday.” He throws the ball. Penny goes. She has brought a stack of index cards, rubber-banded, thick as a fist. Names of bones on one side, in her small neat writing. “You mentioned school.” he says. “What classes are you taking?” “Medical school. UMKC.” He looks at her. “Medical school?” “It’s a six-year program. High school straight in. No college in between.” She turns a coffee cup in her hands, keeping them warm. “They gave me a patient the first month. Mostly I just took his blood pressure and listened to him talk about Korea.” “So what’s the diner?” “Tuition.” “What about you?” “Business school. Rockhurst.” He throws the ball again. “Nights and weekends at my uncle’s shop. Tool and die.” “What’s a die?” “A tool that makes the same part every time, until they eventually wear out.” She does not look at the cards once. They stay until the coffee is gone and then longer. Her hair is up and she smells somehow better than the dogwoods. When she leaves she touches his arm. He has a four o’clock shift at his uncle’s shop. Act I. The Match North Kansas City. A machine shop a block off the tracks. Hydraulic presses shook the concrete. Screw machines never seemed to stop. Over the tool bay radio, “Show Me the Way” played for what felt like the hundredth time while his uncle studied another purchase agreement. The new Cincinnati machining center had arrived in July. Five years of payments sat beside it. The shop makes tooling for the overhaul base at the airport. Engine stands, fixtures, jigs. TWA is the main customer, and they order more every year. The uncle takes the orders. His brother has a desk by the window. Eight years older, married, Missouri Air Guard airlift mechanic. His unit gets called up in December to what his brother calls “the sandbox.” His uniforms still in the office closet because no one believed he’d be gone long. By now he’s twenty. Still in business school across town, nights and weekends in the shop. With his brother deployed, the nights get longer. The uncle might be the boss on paper, but his brother ran the place. In February, his mother calls the office phone. He yells into the phone, a finger in his other ear. A truck rolled on a road north of the border. His brother is alive. His back is broken in two places. The shop fires up again Monday morning. He signs payroll checks for the first time in March. He copies the way his brother wrote them in the green ledger. Six cents and change of every guy’s check comes out of every dollar for Social Security. The shop puts in the same amount. A match. It seems plain enough. The men put in their share, the shop puts in. Someday the government pays it back. Both halves go to the bank in one deposit and then to the government every quarter. He looks for something that says what the money buys. There isn’t one. Just a booklet of tax tables instead. He changes his schedule to night classes. Tuesdays and Thursdays at six. In April a shipment comes back out of tolerance, a die is worn and no one measured it. The rework takes the nights for three weeks. He makes it to one final. Sleeps through the other. In the fall he signs up for two classes and drops one. She calls the shop on Sundays now. He’s there catching up on paperwork when the machines are down. She is on rotations now. They meet at the lawn on Saturdays when she is off and he can get away. Penny is glad to see her. His brother comes home in June with a cane. The cane is not going away. Some mornings he is at the shop, others he doesn’t make it. The uncle drinks his coffee on the floor and tells him. Your brother needs time. When he is right you go back to days. A year later the shop takes on two more men for the TWA work. He is twenty-one. He runs payroll again, eighteen checks and the deposit. In early July he sends the government the largest check he has ever signed. Half came out of the men’s pay. Half from the shop. Act II. The Stub Match Day comes on a Thursday in March. Six years of school for one envelope, opened in a hotel ballroom with everyone else. The envelope isn’t an invitation. It’s orders. Hers says Houston. He drives her to the airport in June. Penny rides in the back with her head out the window. At the curb she holds the dog’s face in both hands for a while, and then his, and then she goes. The Tercel gets sold to a cousin. Everything else fits in two bags. The years in Houston are call nights and loan payments. A hundred hours some weeks. She sleeps in the hospital more than the apartment. The first paycheck comes at the end of July. She reads the stub in the parking garage, line by line. Federal. State. FICA. She asks the chief resident what FICA is. “Social Security,” he says. “Everybody pays it.” She does not read another stub. Her mother mails the Kansas City paper now and then. The airline is in it twice, and then again, and she calls the shop on a Sunday. “It is quieter here than it used to be,” he says. He does not say more and she does not ask. They trade cards at Christmas. In her fourth year, a boy comes in at two in the morning with a burst appendix. Before she takes him back, his mother asks what it will cost. Not whether he will live. What it will cost. She says she doesn’t know, and it’s the stone cold truth. The boy does fine. She never sees a copy of the bill and has no idea how much it costs. She stays two more years after residency to learn children’s surgery. She is thirty-one, and for the first time in her life there’s nothing she wants more. That fall, an envelope comes from the Social Security Administration. She’s curious. Inside is every year she has ever worked and what she earned. She didn’t know someone knew all the history. The diner is there at the top of the list even though she earned nearly nothing. Eleven hundred dollars. Below it is a number for what she will receive at sixty-seven. At the bottom, a paragraph says Congress can change the law at any time, and that by the time she retires, the taxes coming in will cover about three-quarters of what the program has promised to pay. She reads it. She reads it again. Puts it in the envelope where she keeps seven years of paper copies of her taxes. Children’s Mercy calls that spring to offer her a children’s surgeon position. She comes home. The dogwoods are blooming when she signs. Act III. The Letters The uncle signs the shop over to him in ninety-eight. He keeps a key and his coffee mug and comes in on Tuesdays to stand on the floor. His brother signs as the witness. A competitor buys the airline in the spring. They have overhaul shops and suppliers of their own in other states. Orders come in slower all summer and stop in October. Twenty years of tooling sit on the racks in the back. Engine stands, fixtures, jigs. All of it built to print, property of the airline. Good tool steel, and none of it his. He calls three numbers before someone on the other end of the line knows anything. “Scrap it or store it,” the man says. “Nobody is coming for it.” The accountant doesn’t sugarcoat it. He can keep what he has in savings, or he can pay the guys their last payrolls. He tells the men after the final shift, when the checks are ready. Fifteen men shake his hand. One doesn’t. “Should’ve told us months ago, so we could have found another shop.” The men get paid. He takes the deposit to the bank; the men’s share and the shop’s match both. Then, an auction one day in March. The Cincinnati sells to a shop in Wichita. He keeps the green ledger. Her Christmas cards are tucked inside the back cover. The years go by at Children’s Mercy. Operation by operation. She gets good, and then she gets known. Residents ask to train under her. She tells them never to call an operation routine where a family can hear it. When the hospital raises money for the new tower, she gives enough that they ask about putting her name on something. She says no. The fund she starts pays the bills insurance will not for the families who have to ask what it costs. The auction is in the paper that spring, two lines. She reads them. At Christmas she signs the card the same as every year. The uncle dies in November. A widower. No children. He handles the arrangements and calls the number on the government website. The check that came that month has to go back, the woman on the phone tells him. There is a death payment of two hundred fifty-five dollars, for a spouse or a child. He has neither. “Then there is no payment,” she says. She is polite. He thanks her before he hangs up. At the funeral his brother reads the eulogy leaning on the cane. The page begins to shake. He steps beside him and holds the bottom corner. The paper statements stop coming. A card in the mail says they are online now. She creates an account and types a password twice. There it is. A record of every year. Even the diner. Eleven hundred dollars. The paragraph at the bottom is still there. The year beside it is closer. She reads it once. She prints it and files it with the taxes. In the back of the drawer are cards children made for her after their surgery. He gets a job fixing machines at other shops. First, at twelve dollars an hour, then eighteen, then twenty-six. He gets a small house north of the river with a fenced yard. Penny lives long enough to see the yard. He buries her under the maple the next winter. He waits a year before bringing home another collie, and when her time came, one more. The yard is big enough for them to chase the ball. He gets laid off and files for Social Security. He is sixty-two. Deposits come once a month. At sixty-five a letter comes about Medicare. Because of what she earns, her premium for the same coverage will run several times what most people pay. Same card. Same doctors. She reads it. She reads it again. The same week she sends her annual check to the fund at Children’s Mercy. The year he is sixty-five, a letter comes from the Social Security Administration. The trust fund is empty. Starting in January, the checks will be smaller. About twenty percent smaller. The law allows Congress to act at any time, the letter says. Congress has not. He sells the house with the yard in the spring. Moves into an apartment. Third floor. Rent set by his income. There is no yard. The park is a ten-minute drive. Some weeks they go twice. Some weeks they don’t. The collie is old now. She brings him the ball anyway. She chews it and drops it at his feet and backs away, ready. He rubs pain away on the side of his knee. Then he throws it. Postscript Thanks for choosing to spend time with me. Dogwoods and two grand lies. Bookends. At the start, they fall in love on the grounds of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. April, when the dogwoods bloom brilliant white and dark pink. The Missouri state tree. What look like dogwood petals are really modified leaves. The flowers are the small cluster at the center. The wood is hard. Close-grained. Used for tools and machine parts. Beautiful from a distance. Hard enough for tool work. Now the other bookend. The two lies. The first grand lie: We can change the terms for successful people without betraying them because we believe they can afford it. Tax the rich. We tell ourselves this group doesn’t need Social Security. They must already have enough money. But we also say Social Security isn’t an investment. It’s societal insurance. We buy it so the elderly can live above the poverty line and those injured, disabled, or otherwise unable to work can survive. It works. Social Security keeps millions of Americans above the poverty line. A short, rich man in Jericho once stood up at dinner and gave half of everything he had to the poor. Nobody voted. What he gave freely was evidence of his character. What we are arguing about is different. Not what she gives, which is her business and enormous, but what we can force her to give. Generosity is one question. Honest scales, weights, and measures are another. So let’s ask: Social Security is social insurance tied to wages and not a general income tax. Should there be some relationship between what is insured, what is taxed, and what is paid out? Our debate today is really about that principle. Some argue that Social Security should transfer from the wealthy to the poor. They ask very high earners to finance more of the system, even if they receive little or no additional benefit. Others argue that doing so changes the point of the program. They posit what is supposed to be social insurance should be income-transfer. Maybe ability to pay is reason enough. But then we should say plainly what we are doing. Choosing one promise over another. Not keeping both. The second grand lie: We can reduce benefits for unsuccessful or unlucky people without betraying them because that is what the math says. Truth. Congress can change benefits at any time. Roosevelt insisted on payroll contributions because they gave workers a moral and political claim to their benefits and made the program nearly impossible to scrap. And he addressed reality. Before Social Security, the poorhouse was real. It even had an address. Today Social Security lifts millions of Americans above the poverty line. In a small apartment, that means heat, groceries, and rent. We will probably have to break faith with at least one of these groups. Someone will pay more than the agreed terms or receive less than the terms we promised. Let’s thank them with a gracious heart and not pretend they owed it or deserved it all along. And before we levy judgment on either group, let’s remember that none of us are good. We are not to judge between goats and rams. So. Let’s pull out our Social Security Statements and ask what they actually promise, who made that promise, and whether anyone ever had the authority to make it. And let’s stop believing there is someone else who can be made to pay the bill. Sources History and law Luther Gulick, “Memorandum on Conference with FDR Concerning Social Security Taxation, Summer 1941.” Social Security Administration, Historian’s Office, Research Note No. 23. Gulick’s memorandum records Roosevelt’s argument that payroll contributions would give workers a legal, moral, and political claim to benefits and make the program politically difficult to repeal. Flemming v. Nestor, 363 U.S. 603 (1960). The Supreme Court held that paying Social Security taxes does not create an accrued contractual right to a fixed or unalterable benefit. Congress retained authority to revise eligibility and benefit provisions. Helvering v. Davis, 301 U.S. 619 (1937). The Supreme Court upheld the old-age provisions of the Social Security Act under Congress’s taxing-and-spending power and its authority to provide for the general welfare. Social Security Administration, “Historical Background and Development of Social Security.” A history of poor relief, almshouses, poorhouses, poor farms, old-age dependency, and the conditions preceding the 1935 Social Security Act. Larry DeWitt, “The Development of Social Security in America.” Social Security Bulletin 70, no. 3 (2010). A history of the program and the tension between individual equity (what contributors believe they earned) and social adequacy (what society believes beneficiaries need.) Program rules and documents Social Security Administration, The 2026 Annual Report of the Board of Trustees.The Old-Age and Survivors Insurance fund is projected to pay full scheduled benefits until the fourth quarter of 2032. After depletion, continuing income would cover approximately 78 percent of scheduled benefits. Social Security Administration, A Summary of the 2026 Annual Reports. A shorter presentation of the retirement, disability, and combined-fund projections. Social Security Administration, “The History and Development of the Lump-Sum Death Benefit.” Congress established the $255 maximum lump-sum death payment in the 1954 amendments. Social Security Administration, “Lump-Sum Death Payment.” The current eligibility rules for the $255 payment to a qualifying surviving spouse or eligible child. 20 C.F.R. § 404.390, “Amount of the Lump-Sum Death Payment.” The federal regulation governing the amount of the payment. Social Security Act § 202(i). The statutory basis for the lump-sum death payment. Social Security Administration, “What to Do When Someone Dies.” SSA pays retirement benefits one month behind and pays no benefit for the month of death. A payment made for that month or a later month must be returned. Barbara A. Smith and Kenneth A. Couch, “The Social Security Statement: Background, Implementation, and Recent Developments.” Social Security Bulletin 74, no. 2 (2014). Documents nationwide paper mailings, their suspension in 2011, the online Statement introduced in 2012, and changes in Statement language and distribution. Social Security Administration, “Your Social Security Statement.” The current source for accessing, reviewing, and printing a personal Statement. Social Security Administration, “Social Security and Medicare Tax Rates.” Beginning in 1990, employees and employers each paid 6.2 percent for Social Security and 1.45 percent for Medicare. Internal Revenue Service, Publication 15: Employer’s Tax Guide. The employer guide to withholding, depositing, reporting, and paying payroll taxes. Social Security Administration, “Medicare Premiums: Rules for Higher-Income Beneficiaries.” Higher-income Medicare beneficiaries pay income-related adjustments for Part B and Part D. Poverty and the program’s effect Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “Social Security Lifts More People Above the Poverty Line Than Any Other Program.” The analysis estimates that Social Security lifts approximately 16.9 million people age sixty-five and older above the official poverty line. Medicine and education University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Medicine, “B.A./M.D. Program.” UMKC accepts students directly from high school into an accelerated program in which the B.A. and M.D. can be completed in six years. University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Medicine, “Learning in Docent Teams.” Students begin clinical experiences early through UMKC’s docent system. National Resident Matching Program, “Requesting a Waiver or Deferral.” A Match creates a binding commitment between the applicant and the residency program unless the NRMP grants a waiver or deferral. National Resident Matching Program, “How the Matching Algorithm Works.” An explanation of how applicants and residency programs are paired. Children’s Mercy Kansas City. Institutional background for the pediatric hospital and the fictional surgeon’s later career. Rockhurst University, College of Business, Influence, and Information Analysis.Institutional background for his business studies. Kansas City, TWA, and period setting American Airlines, Annual Report on Form 10-K. American Airlines, through a subsidiary, purchased substantially all of TWA’s assets and assumed certain liabilities on April 9, 2001. Kansas City International Airport, “Airport History.” Background on TWA’s historical presence and overhaul operations in Kansas City. Dennis DeYoung, “Show Me the Way,” performed by Styx on Edge of the Century, 1990. Contemporary reporting on its Gulf War association. The song became associated with Gulf War requests and dedications during early 1991. Dogwoods Missouri Secretary of State, “Missouri State Tree.” The flowering dogwood became Missouri’s official state tree in 1955. Missouri Botanical Garden, Cornus florida. The small central cluster contains the true flowers. The conspicuous white or pink structures are modified leaves called bracts. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, “Cornus florida—Flowering Dogwood.” Flowering dogwood wood is hard, strong, heavy, fine-grained, and shock-resistant. Historical uses include tool handles, mauls, pulleys, shuttles, and other working objects. Scripture Luke 19:1–10, King James. Zacchaeus gives half of his goods to the poor. Matthew 22:15–22, King James. “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” Leviticus 19:35–36, King James. The command to use just balances, just weights, and honest measures. Ezekiel 34, King James. The Almighty will judge. Further reading Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew. New York: Viking Press, 1946. Perkins’s account of Roosevelt, the New Deal, and the formation of Social Security. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Coming of the New Deal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958. The first published appearance of Roosevelt’s payroll-tax remarks based on Gulick’s account. Larry DeWitt, “The Development of Social Security in America.” The single source for a listener who wants a deeper explanation of the program’s competing principles. Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe
August 4 · 22 min
A Yoke Built for Two | A Dead Hog, a Shovel, and a Fifteen-Year-Old
May in Missouri. Warm, not hot like it will be in July. Humidity in the air, mist at the bottom of the hill hiding the green grass. Bright white gravel under tires. He opens the passenger door. He is fifteen. His grandma drove him. The Oldsmobile idles behind him until the screen door opens and a man comes out. Then she pulls away. The man is the rancher’s son. Sixty years old, maybe more. His truck is running in the yard. “You eat breakfast?” he says. Then, “Dad’s in the hospital. Nursing home after that, probably. He won’t be coming back to this.” The house first. Old, white, small, on top of the hill. A garden plot on the side, a shotgun sitting by the door nearest the garden. Dogwoods and oaks, leaves out full now. One level. Two bedrooms, a kitchen, a sitting room. Clean. The beds made tight with homemade quilts. Glass jugs on the floor by the kitchen door. “Dad’s corn whiskey,” the son says. The boy can eat lunch in here if he wants. Running water. The well is outside. A newspaper picture in a frame on the side table. Five generations. A new baby, and a great-great-grandmother still alive to hold him. “That’s my mom,” the son says. “Holding the baby. That picture is ten years old now.” Then the work. Build a cattle corral and an alley good enough to back a trailer in and load. Stay out of the old smokehouse. It’ll fall down any day now. One of those sheds needs knocked down before it falls down, you can use the tractor to help. The chicken coop needs cleaned out. Probably hasn’t been since Mom passed. Most of the perimeter fence needs checked. Water tanks sorted. The truck is still running. The son looks at his watch. Plenty to do. “But there’s a job that needs done before all that.” He points down past the pens, to a hog lot at the bottom of the slope. There’s a dead hog in it. “Drag it down the hill and bury it,” he says. “Shovels are in the shed. Twenty years ago I’d have dug it myself.” He shakes the boy’s hand. The truck backs around and goes down the drive and the sound of it fades and then it’s gone. Quiet after that. Wind in the oaks. A rooster somewhere below. Act I. The Hog Lot He doesn’t start with the hog. He walks the place first, down the hill and through all of it, to get eyes on everything. The corral isn’t started. The materials are already there, stacked and waiting. Old railroad ties. Cattle panels. Each tie has a mark on it, showing how deep to set it. The smokehouse is tall and narrow. He’s never seen one before. A fire pit dug in the dirt floor with a simple metal ring, chains hanging overhead. He doesn’t go in. The chicken coop is full of old bedding, gray with dust. Hornets have built above the door. He’ll have to take care of that. One of the water tanks is dry. Wolf spiders in the bottom, big ones. He throws a rock in and they scatter, but they can’t jump out of the tank. An old blue Ford tractor sits by the shed. Small. It doesn’t have a bucket to dig, and even if it did, he doesn’t know how to use it. He’ll have to learn. Shovels inside, and a manual post hole digger leaned in the corner. The pigs and chickens are closest to the house. Cattle beyond. The fields run out to meet wooded hills. Forty acres. A big pond on the far end you can barely see from the house, a smaller one tucked in by the woods. The cattle are moving through the field toward water, and he watches them go. He’s put it off as long as he could and another hour longer. He walks to the hog lot. A short metal hog house, small doors on each end. The hog is dead in the far corner. Big. On its side. The flies rise off it when he comes near and settle again. No mark on it that he can see. No telling what killed it. The son didn’t say how it died. He said drag it down the hill and bury it. He takes hold of a hind leg above the hoof and pulls. It moves about a foot across the metal grate floor, the hide loose over the bone in his grip. He lets go and stands there. The air in the hog house is close now. He takes hold again. It’s downhill. That’s the one thing going for him. He pulls and rests and pulls. The hog gathers grass and dirt ahead of itself. The flies come along. When he stops he can hear them. When he pulls he only hears his breath. He drags the hog under the wire fence. At the bottom of the hill he picks a spot away from the ponds, where the ground looks soft. Nobody said where. Nobody said how deep. The first foot is topsoil and goes easy. Then the shovel rings. Rock. He works around it, pries it, lifts it out. There’s another one under it. The afternoon goes like that. Ring, pry, lift. His hands blister. He walks up to the well, finds some gloves, has a drink and comes back down. He stands in the hole and thinks about how deep is deep enough. Shallow, and something digs it up. Coyotes, or dogs from the next place over. Then it’s all to do again, and worse. He keeps digging. The light goes long across the field. Whippoorwills call from the trees. Gravel at the top of the drive. Headlights swing across the field and stop. The Oldsmobile sits up by the house, lights on, pointed down the hill at him. She doesn’t honk. She waits. He drags the hog to the edge and tips it in. It lands heavy. Filling the hole goes faster than digging it. He mounds the dirt over and stands there a minute in what’s left of the light. Then he carries the shovel up the hill toward the headlights. That night there’s supper, and dishes, and then she asks. What were you doing out there tonight? He tells her. “Did you bury it deep enough to keep the coyotes off of it?” “I don’t know,” he says. They never talked about it again. Act II. Corral and Alley The next morning he starts on the corral. The railroad ties outweigh him. He can’t carry one, so he tips them end over end to where they need to go. The ground is the same ground he dug the grave in. Ring, pry, lift. Each tie has its mark. He digs until he thinks it’s deep enough, then tips each tie into the hole, lifts it out again, and digs some more until the mark disappears. He tamps the dirt back in layers, and pulls on the tie with his whole weight. It doesn’t move. He does the next one. Whoever marked the ties isn’t there to ask. His hands ache and cramp for ten days until they get used to the work. He learns the tractor in the yard. The throttle is steady, and his foot coming off the clutch is not. It lurches and rocks and then it doesn’t. He cleans the old bedding out of the chicken coop, swinging the spring door open and shut, and a hornet stings him in the ear. He buys hornet spray, empties it into the nest, knocks it off the coop with a fence post, and only gets stung the once. He cleans the coop down to the boards. The shed comes down easy. The tractor pushes and the frame lets go at once. He drags the boards clear and stacks what’s worth keeping. It’s good work and it goes fast. The son comes out one day and asks what happened. It was the wrong shed. He spends weeks walking the perimeter fence and fixes what needs fixed. At noon he takes his boots off and eats in the kitchen, standing up. The house stays clean. In late June he turns sixteen. He passes the test in town, and after that he drives himself out in the mornings. There’s a last morning she drives him. Neither of them marks it. After that the mornings are his. He drives the Oldsmobile out himself, plays Metallica too loud the whole way. His grandma hates Metallica. Some evenings he drives to the next town to see a girl he met. Alone, afternoons drift. He is sixteen. He daydreams. Some days he gets less done than he should, and nobody says anything about that either. The cattle get checked every day. By the end of July the corral stands, ties to the mark, panels hung, an alley wide enough to back a trailer in. He would be home for football camp in August. In the fall they sold the animals. The cattle went up the alley the boy built, into a trailer, and down the drive. They leased the ground to a neighbor. The boy went home, back to school. The old man never came home. Act III. Jennies Two summers later. Jerry and the boy ride in Jerry’s F-250 to the local college. Jerry is a rancher who needed another ranch hand. Jerry is more than a rancher. He teaches economics at the college full time, with summers mostly off, and he lays carpet and linoleum in his spare time. He hates the flooring work. He does it if the money’s good, or if he likes you. This job is at the college, and the money’s good. Industrial carpet in a dorm. Take out the old carpet, scrape and clean the floors, put in the new. They set up in the gym. Huge rolls of new carpet, and the boy carries them by himself. The boy brings in the radio. The college cheerleaders come in for practice. The Jennies. Three of them watch him carry a roll all the way across the gym. Then Garth Brooks comes on the radio, “Callin’ Baton Rouge,” and they start dancing, and they sing along. He’s seventeen. The old carpet comes out first. The boy cuts it loose and rolls it and carries the rolls out. Jerry tells him how the floors go: sweep, then sweep a second time. Every time you sweep again, you find something you missed. The boy sweeps a room and calls it clean. Jerry sweeps it behind him and holds out his hand. Two staples and a chip of tile. He doesn’t say anything. The boy sweeps the next one twice. The boy is fast and thorough, but Jerry works most jobs with him the first time he does one. After a few rooms they have a system. Jerry measures the cleaned rooms and marks the new carpet. The boy cuts on the marks, carries the carpet down the hall, and lays it out nearly finished. Jerry follows behind and makes the last cuts, and that room is done. The last cut at every doorway is Jerry’s. He kneels at the metal strip, sets the knife, and makes one pass. The edge lies flat. The boy watches how he holds it, where his weight is, what his off hand does. Jerry goes the speed he goes, whether the boy is watching or not. The rooms go by. Measure, mark, cut, carry, lay, finish. Music from the gym comes down the hall all afternoon. At the end of the day Jerry walks every finished room. He toes a seam. He presses a corner with his boot. He stands in each doorway, looking at the floor. “Good,” he says. They load the truck in the dark. Jerry put him on for as much as he could work. Summer and winter both. Tomorrow the work is hay and fences. Postscript Thank you for spending this time with me today. The entire story you just heard is true, as close as memory gets. The ranch is real. Forty acres in Missouri. The mist, the shotgun by the garden door, the corn whiskey by the kitchen door. The hog and shovel are real. The railroad ties really came with a mark showing how deep. The wrong shed really came down. The Oldsmobile is real. The dancing Jennies are real, and so is “Callin’ Baton Rouge.” Jerry is real. His name is really Jerry. Sweep, then sweep a second time. That’s what he did, job after job. The five-generations picture is real too. I never knew who the baby was. I did omit a key detail. I was the boy. Fifteen, then sixteen, then seventeen. The old man in the hospital was my great-grandfather. He lived to be near ninety-five. The man with the running truck was his son, my great-uncle. My grandpa had passed, so my great-uncle paid my wages to my grandma. And the woman in the Oldsmobile, who waited with her lights on while I finished in the dark, was my grandma. I lived with her that summer and took care of the ranch until the family could figure out what to do with it. What they figured out was to sell the animals. The cattle left through the corral I built. Years later, when my great-grandfather died, the family offered to sell me the land. I was a young man. I didn’t have the money. It sold to someone else and isn’t in the family anymore. One more thing for the ledger. The whole truth. The same summer I buried that hog, I left the ranch for two weeks. For some reason I still don’t know, the state sent me for proctored IQ and ACT tests and called me gifted, and there was a program for kids like that at the University of Missouri, where I’d go to college a few years later. Make a note of that, not because it’s important for me, but because we’ll need it in a minute for the philosophy. Now the question. A political philosopher named Michael Walzer wrote a famous book about justice, and in it he took a hard look at the work nobody wants. Dirty work. Degrading. And he made a claim: When people gain the power to refuse that kind of work, that’s a sign a society is succeeding. Somebody complains the welfare state made people unwilling to take certain jobs? Walzer says good. That was the point. Let’s hear that again. His premise, regarding work, is: The power to refuse degrading work is the measure of success. I’ll be fair to him first. Some people might refuse the work because they believe a yoke must be difficult. But mostly they refuse because it’s hard and it pays badly and nobody thanks them. That’s not weakness. It’s just the math. And I’ll be fair to the economists too. They’ll tell you that early hard work doesn’t make the man. The kid who works young and rises was usually the kid who already had advantages, and the work gets the credit. Believe them. You just heard about my two weeks at the university. I was that kid. If this story claimed the shovel made me, it would be a lie. So what’s true? Nobody told me how deep to bury the hog. Nobody checked. I worked on the ranch the rest of the summer and never checked. I didn’t want to know. My grandma asked the only question anyone ever asked about it. Did you bury it deep enough to keep the coyotes off? I said I don’t know. Thirty-some years on, I still don’t. The railroad ties came with a mark. Some man who wasn’t there set that standard, and it held long after he couldn’t come check it. But here’s what I learned about marks. A mark can tell you how deep. It can’t show you how. Alone, a boy guesses. Sometimes he guesses right and nobody ever knows. Sometimes he knocks down the wrong shed. Jerry showed me how. Jerry worked the first day of every new job beside me. Jerry marked, and I cut on his marks, and he made the last cut at every doorway, and at the end of the day he walked every room. And I think about who Jerry was. An economics professor with a ranch of his own. The man with the most choices in the county spent his summer days on his knees in a dorm hallway. He had every power Walzer measures. Every power to refuse. He did the work if the money was good. Or if he liked you. There’s another philosopher, John Rawls, and he asked a different question than Walzer did. Walzer looked at the hard work and asked who should have to do it, and what we owe the ones who do. Rawls said decide the rules before you know, because time and chance happen to us all. Decide the rules before you know whether you’re born the professor’s kid or the kid whose family is selling the ranch. Then tell me what’s fair. Rawls asked the better question. Because you don’t know. You don’t know if you’re the boy with the marks or the boy without them. And nobody can honestly answer “nobody should have to dig.” The hog doesn’t care about our philosophy. The hog is dead and somebody has to bury it and the tractor doesn’t have a bucket. Somebody has to dig. When we gain the power to refuse the work, the work doesn’t disappear. It moves to whoever can’t refuse it, and we agree not to look. So here’s my answer, and I don’t agree with Walzer. The measure of a society isn’t how many of us escape the work. It’s who climbs down into it on purpose, and who they bring with them. Scripture says, Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden. Take my yoke upon you, for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. Something to note about that verse. The Greek word translated easy does not mean effortless. It carries the sense of something kind, good, or useful. Early Christians described Christ’s yoke as one that does not bruise the neck of the person carrying it. The burden is still a burden. But the yoke is easy, and the burden is good. And a key point: a yoke is built for two. For Christians, that might mean the Almighty is on one side of the yoke. In old agriculture, you pair a green animal with a seasoned one. The seasoned one carries the weight and sets the pace, and the young one learns the pull without being crushed by it. The burden never gets lighter. It gets shared. I stood in my first yoke alone for a summer. It worked out for me. You now know some of the reasons why, and they don’t have much to do with the shovel. For most kids standing alone, the numbers say it doesn’t work out. So here’s the ask. Be the one who chooses the work. The dirty job, the hard job, the one you’ve earned the right to refuse. Choose it in front of your kids, and teach them to choose it too. Not because suffering is holy. Because it’s work that needs done, and doing it next to someone is how people get made. Somewhere near you is a green kid. Don’t wait for a program to save them. A program can’t hold the other end of a yoke. Mark the cut. Stay in the room. My great-grandfather’s ranch is still out there, but it’s not in the family anymore. The corral too, as far as I know. And the grave? I never went back to look. It never stank. I never saw a coyote. But they mostly move at night. Sources Philosophy Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. Basic Books, 1983, Chapter 6, “Hard Work.” My copy from Apple Books. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice. Belknap Press, 1971; rev. ed. 1999. Scripture and Language “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Matthew 11:28–30, King James Version. Lincoln H. Blumell, “Is Jesus’s Yoke ‘Easy’? Reconsidering the Translation of Chrēstos in Matthew 11:30.” BYU Studies 65, no. 1 (2026): 6–36. Labor Economics and Mobility Christopher J. Ruhm, “Is High School Employment Consumption or Investment?” Journal of Labor Economics 15, no. 4 (1997): 735–776. V. Joseph Hotz, Lixin Xu, Marta Tienda, and Avner Ahituv, “Are There Returns to the Wages of Young Men from Working While in School?” Review of Economics and Statistics 84, no. 2 (2002): 221–236. Charles L. Baum and Christopher J. Ruhm, “The Changing Benefits of Early Work Experience.” Southern Economic Journal 83, no. 2 (2016): 343–363. An earlier version appeared as NBER Working Paper No. 20413, 2014. Jared Ashworth, V. Joseph Hotz, Arnaud Maurel, and Tyler Ransom, “Changes across Cohorts in Wage Returns to Schooling and Early Work Experiences.” Journal of Labor Economics 39, no. 4 (2021): 931–964. Thomas Le Barbanchon, Diego Ubfal, and Federico Araya, “The Effects of Working While in School: Evidence from Employment Lotteries.” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 15, no. 1 (2023): 383–410. Raj Chetty et al., “Social Capital I: Measurement and Associations with Economic Mobility.” Nature 608 (2022): 108–121. Work and Identity Blake E. Ashforth and Glen E. Kreiner, “‘How Can You Do It?’: Dirty Work and the Challenge of Constructing a Positive Identity.” Academy of Management Review 24, no. 3 (1999): 413–434. Robin Nagle, Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013. Youth Labor Law and Agricultural Safety Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Hazardous Occupations Orders, 29 C.F.R. Part 570. U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division, “Fact Sheet #40: Overview of Youth Employment (Child Labor) Provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act for Agricultural Occupations.” Revised December 2016. U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division, “Child Labor Regulations, Orders and Statements of Interpretation; Child Labor Violations—Civil Money Penalties.” Federal Register 77, no. 103 (May 29, 2012): 31549–31551. Withdrawal of the proposed 2011 revisions to federal youth agricultural labor regulations. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, “Childhood Agricultural Injury Prevention.” National Children’s Center for Rural and Agricultural Health and Safety, Cultivate Safety. Music Dennis Linde, “Callin’ Baton Rouge.” Recorded by Garth Brooks on In Pieces. Liberty Records, 1993. Referenced by title; no lyrics reproduced. Further Reading Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. Penguin Press, 2009. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon & Schuster, 2000. Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe
July 28 · 27 min
Return Tomorrow | A Warehouse, a Granddaughter, and a Great Society
Her eyes open at five twenty-eight. She lifts her head and switches the alarm off before it kicks on at five thirty. She’s up and moving. Chores to do. Coffee, dishwasher, shower, lunchbox. Their apartment is a one-bedroom in Lakewood, Colorado, on the west edge of Denver. Third floor. She starts the coffee maker and showers while it runs. On the refrigerator door, under a magnet, a printed listing for a two-bedroom on South Ammons Street. Four hundred ten thousand. Beneath the price, handwriting in blue ink: eighty-two thousand down. Below that a column of dates and smaller numbers, one for every month they’ve lived here. The paper has yellowed at one corner. She pours coffee into a steel travel mug, grabs her lunch, takes the stairs, and scrapes frost off the windshield with a plastic dustpan she keeps behind the seat. She drives west on Alameda with the defrost on high. At Kipling she turns north. On her right, Lakewood Park Tennis Center. On her left, a fence. Chain link, eight feet, three strands of barbed wire on top. It runs past the first stoplight. It runs past the second. There’s a gate with a guard shack and a yellow crossing arm, and a white sign that says United States Government Property. The fence keeps going. It takes her a full mile to run out of fence. She doesn’t look at it. It’s been there her whole life. At six twenty, she badges into the warehouse. The reader beeps. Inside the break room, on the long table by the time clock, somebody has laid out nine folders in three neat rows. New hires start today. She’s been here four years. She knows what’s in the folders. Act I. The Wage The safety video runs eleven minutes. She can hear it through the break room wall, the same narrator, the same music, while she tapes the first boxes of the morning. Nine new people in there with their folders open. At seven forty, the break room door opens, and the trainer walks in. His name is Dave. He’s holding his own copy of the folder, open to the tabs. Tab one is the handbook, he says. Tab two is your direct deposit. Tab three is your benefits election. Health kicks in at ninety days, dental at one eighty. Don’t wait on the paperwork, it doesn’t backdate. Tab four, he says, is community resources. Food assistance, Medicaid, child care assistance, help on the winter heat bill. The applications are in there, filled out down to the signature line. Plenty of folks use them the first year. Nothing to be embarrassed about. He says it the way he said the part about the fire exits. She takes one of the nine, a young woman named Reyna, out to the floor and trains her on the scanner. Point, squeeze, wait for the beep. The screen above the aisle shows a number; that number is the building’s rate. Green means the shift is on pace to meet their quota. She’s never seen it red for a whole shift. Somewhere around ten, the number turns green and stays that way. At lunch she eats what she packed at five fifty. Reyna sits across from her with a vending machine sandwich and asks if the insurance is any good. It’s insurance, she says. The deductible is four thousand. You’ll want the paycheck to clear before you pick a plan. Reyna nods and writes something in her folder. At the end of the table, one of the other new hires has his folder open to tab four. He’s copying numbers off a pay stub that isn’t his yet, from the sample page, doing the eligibility math with the folder’s own pencil. First shift. He hasn’t clocked a full day. The horn ends lunch at twelve thirty. Everybody stands at once. Act II. The Plant The afternoon starts out like the morning. Point, squeeze, beep. The screen stays green. Nothing in the building gets made in the building. It comes in full and goes out full. They work on line three. By last break, Reyna runs two under her rate. First day. The belt on line four goes down midshift. Nobody in the building can fix it. The tech comes Thursday, from Phoenix. Nothing to be done, that entire line goes home early. The horn releases the shift at four thirty. In the parking lot her phone buzzes. A text from the storage place on West Colfax. Your autopay of eighty-nine dollars was successful. Thank you for being a valued customer. She was headed there anyway. Two plastic totes in the trunk. Christmas decorations, going back until December. Unit two fourteen. She rolls the door up and the cold air inside smells like cardboard. The totes go on the shelf her husband built from scrap the first winter. Behind them, the rest of it. Her mother’s cedar chest. A kitchen table on its side, six chairs zip-tied to the legs. A crib in pieces, wrapped in a moving blanket, that was her mother’s before it was hers. In the back corner, under a second blanket, the lathe. It’s a South Bend, cast iron, older than everyone she knows. It took four grown men and a rented dolly to get it in here. She pulls the blanket square where it’s slipped off the tailstock, and under her hand there’s a small brass plate, screwed to the base, stamped with three words. War Production Board. She doesn’t know how to run it. Nobody living in the family does. She rolls the door down and clicks the padlock. Her grandmother calls while she’s still in the lot. She puts her on speaker and pulls out into traffic. You eat yet? Her grandmother says. I’m driving home to eat. You’re still paying for that unit. I’m still paying for it. You ought to sell that machine. You’d get something for it. Nobody’s run it in ten years. I’m not selling the lathe, Grandma. Her grandmother is quiet for a second. Then she says, your grandfather ran that lathe thirty-one years at Gates. Nights, at the end. They were going to throw it away, so he took it for his woodworking. Gates got the machine from the ammo plant, surplus sale. My mother made bullets out by you, on Kipling, the whole war. Rode the bus from Tenth Avenue, three shifts going around the clock, twenty thousand people out there. Half of them were women. I know, Grandma. It’s all offices now, her grandmother says. Anyway. You two are coming Sunday. We’re coming Sunday. Bring some folding chairs if you can. They’re in the unit, she says. I was just looking at them. Good, her grandmother says. Then you know right where they are. Act III. The Ledger Friday, twelve oh five. Reyna sets the folder next to her lunch and asks if she has a minute. The application is filled out down to the signature line, like Dave said. What’s left is the list on the back page. Proof of who you are. Proof of where you live. Proof of what you make, thirty days of it. I don’t have thirty days, Reyna says. I have four. There’s a line for that. Employer statement. HR prints it, you ask at the window. Reyna writes that on the folder. Then they schedule you an interview, she says. It’s a phone call. Keep your phone on you at break, and if you miss it, call back the same day. Don’t wait. Did you do all this, Reyna asks. She folds the wax paper over the half of her sandwich that’s left. My first year here, she says. Yeah. She takes her phone, puts it speaker up on the table, and calls the number. It starts with a recording: Last year we proudly served more than one hundred thousand Colorado families. The horn goes. Everybody stands at once. Sunday, her grandmother’s house smells like a roast that went in at seven. A brick ranch off Garrison, two bedrooms, one bath, a furnace that runs loud. Her grandmother has lived in it fifty-eight years. Her husband carries the folding chairs in from the trunk and sets them up at the long side of the table. The game is on low in the front room. Broncos Chargers. A small group watching it. Any luck on a house, her grandmother says, passing the potatoes. There’s a two-bedroom on Ammons we like. What are they asking? Four hundred ten. Her grandmother sets the potatoes down. Your grandfather paid seventeen thousand five hundred for this house, she says. Nineteen sixty-eight. Back then he made nine thousand a year. We lived on one paycheck, pinched every penny, but I didn’t work until your mother was in school. Nobody says anything. In the front room a whistle blows and the crowd complains. After the pie her grandmother stands and favors the new knee, and waves off help before anyone offers it. The knee’s fine, she says. Better than the old one. Four hundred dollars, that’s what the whole thing cost me. Medicare and the supplement took the rest. Four hundred, for a knee. Her grandmother brings out an old photo of her mother in a heavy machinery apron. Dirty. She brought out an old picture or two every time they ate Sunday dinner. This is my mother, your great-grandmother. She rode a bus to a three-shift line and came home tired. She went to work sick or tired or hurt, didn’t matter. They weren’t supposed to, but she got married the day before your great-grandpa left on the ship, and she told me she felt like she was making ammunition for him, and she wouldn’t let him run out. The work was hot and she was on food rations. Everybody was. Almost no meat, no butter. Then, when her husband came home, they wanted to get their own place right away, but there were no homes for sale anywhere. They lived in a shack for a year until houses started popping up. She likes the story every time she hears it. You need anything before we go, she asks her grandmother at the door. Groceries this week, anything. I’m fine, her grandmother says. Check comes next Wednesday, the house is paid, what do I need. She hands them the leftovers in a grocery bag, roast and potatoes in butter tubs, and tells her husband to take the chairs back to the unit. Then she looks at her granddaughter for a second longer than usual. When I’m gone this house is yours, she says. You know that. Grandma. I’m saying it so you know it. Act IV. Payday Friday is payday. The deposit lands at six in the morning while she’s scraping the windshield. That night after supper she stands at the refrigerator with the blue pen. Ninety minutes of overtime on the check. She writes the date and the number at the bottom of the column, under fourteen other dates, and puts the magnet back. Her phone buzzes on the counter. The app that watches the listing sends one line. This home is no longer available. She stands there a minute. Her husband looks up. Somebody bought Ammons, she says. He comes and reads the phone over her shoulder. Neither of them says anything. Then he takes the pen off the counter and draws one line through the address at the top of the sheet. Not through the price. Not through the column. Through the address. We’ll find another one you like, he says. The sheet stays under the magnet. Saturday they take the folding chairs back to the unit. She lifts the blanket square on the tailstock before they roll the door down. Monday she’s up and moving at five thirty. Chores to do. She drives west on Alameda with the defrost on high. At Kipling she turns north. On her right, the tennis center, courts empty in the cold. On her left, the fence starts, and at Gate One there’s a line of cars idling, brake lights back to the road, federal employees waiting to badge through onto the ground where twenty thousand people made the ammunition, going in to work at the offices. The fence runs past the first stoplight. Past the second. A full mile. This time she looks at it. At six twenty, she badges into the warehouse. The reader beeps. In the break room, on the long table by the time clock, somebody has laid out folders in three neat rows. New hires start today. Postscript Thanks for spending this half hour with me. This story is a fable on a bedrock of truth. I made up the characters, the house on Ammons, and the lathe in the storage unit. The warehouse experience is real. So is the fence on Kipling. You can drive by it yourself. And I did not make up the national power that once stood behind it. Behind that fence is the Denver Federal Center. Today it holds more federal agencies than any place outside Washington. During the Second World War, it was the Denver Ordnance Plant, run by Remington. At its peak, about twenty thousand people worked there, half of them women. They made ammunition around the clock. After the war the buildings became offices that now administer programs. The new-hire folder is real too. I’ve been a new hire in a warehouse. The Government Accountability Office found that millions of Americans work full-time while relying on food assistance and Medicaid. Many work in warehouses, retail stores, and restaurants. Some employers really do direct new workers to the applications. This is not the corporation’s fault. A corporate executive works for the shareholders. His job is to make money for them within the rules. If he spends company money on causes the law doesn’t require, like cutting pollution beyond the legal limit, meeting hiring quotas, or paying more than the labor market demands, he is spending someone else’s money on goals they did not choose. But just because the corporate officer has no duty to pursue social goals doesn’t mean no one does. If public money is going to be used for the public good, that work belongs to public servants. These duties matter enough that we created a specific kind of institution to carry them out. That institution is not the corporation. It is our representative government. Our elected officials have a duty to set the rules under which corporations operate. When they fail to do that, you, the taxpayer, make up the difference in wages. Let’s pause to highlight the contradiction. We can’t support policies that allow businesses to pay unsustainable wages and at the same time oppose social programs designed to mitigate the consequences of low incomes. A lot of families receive help from social programs. Half of American children do. Nothing in this story says those programs fail the people who use them. Since those programs began, poverty among older Americans has fallen from roughly one in three to less than one in ten. This is not a sermon against the people sitting at that table. Love your neighbor. But also: the principle to rend our hearts and not our garments means we have to do what matters. So we have a question to ask: Where does this arrangement leave us? When the taxpayer makes up for low wages, much of the money never reaches the worker. In places where only a few employers do most of the hiring, wage subsidies draw more people into the job market. That larger pool of workers makes it easier for employers to keep wages low. One study of the Earned Income Tax Credit program found that employers keep about seventy-two cents of every public dollar spent. Let’s hear that again. The taxpayer means to help the worker. Most of the help ends up staying with the employer and not the worker. That is not a failure of the worker. It’s the way the system works. The help keeps the person going while subsidizing the wages that made the help necessary. Programs started in two key time periods really set it up this way. The first was the nineteen thirties. At the time, Franklin Roosevelt’s relief chief, Harry Hopkins, said plainly that if you give a man a dole, you save his body and destroy his spirit. FDR was for work programs and largely against handouts. The America of FDR’s time built its help around work and contribution. Public jobs built things you can still drive across today, like the Hoover Dam that is the cover image of this piece. They designed Social Security as insurance. A worker paid into it and later collected their earned benefit. It wasn’t a handout they had to apply for. The New Deal was not free of mistakes. The same nineteen thirty-five law also created means-tested welfare, so to be honest we need to say that Roosevelt built both doors. But the main door was work. His programs asked what Americans could build, produce, and insure through their own labor. Thirty years later, America had spent two decades as the world’s dominant economic power. Factories across much of the rest of the world had been destroyed in the war. We had money coming out of our ears. In that setting, Lyndon Johnson sought to expand FDR’s goals. LBJ’s Great Society asked a different question: What goods and services should government “give” to people who don’t have them? Medicare. Medicaid. Food assistance. Housing support. Eligibility replaced contribution. The government bought services to give to someone instead of putting those people to work building something. Johnson wasn’t wrong about the suffering. Some of what he built is now indispensable. But our focus changed. We stopped asking what individual Americans could produce and began asking what we could give to them. Our spending became open-ended. The government promised to buy whatever help cost, and help never got cheaper. Last year, the federal government spent nearly a trillion dollars on interest alone. The arrangement is expensive because it maintains and maintains and maintains. There’s a constitutional problem here worth a minute of our time, including where the argument breaks down. The Constitution gives Congress the power to spend for the general welfare. In nineteen thirty-six, in United States versus Butler, the Supreme Court said that the general welfare power was broad but not unlimited. Public spending had to serve the common good, not private interests. Taxpayer money could not simply support big business. Then the Court contradicted itself. One year later, it upheld Social Security and more or less said that Congress gets to decide what counts as the general welfare. So no court is going to rule that a public benefit propping up the wage structure of profitable companies violates the general-welfare clause. The Constitution gives us the principle. It leaves enforcement to us, the voters. If seventy-two cents of every dollar intended to help a worker ends up on a corporate ledger, the answer isn’t a lawsuit. It’s citizens telling Congress that public money should build the public, not the corporation. Behind all of this is one central idea. It’s not fairness. Every great nation eventually faces a crisis it cannot buy its way out of. When that day comes, we will rely on the ability of ordinary people to preserve the whole. So the test we should apply to the individual is: Does our arrangement build her ability, or does it only keep her struggling well enough to return tomorrow? That question is bigger than one woman. It’s our factories, the skill of our workers, and the ability of our people to solve hard problems. We can’t buy our way out of a crisis. We need the skills, factories, supply chains, and public will to make what the crisis requires. The last time that day came, twenty thousand ordinary people went to work at an ammunition plant behind a fence in Denver and made what the country needed. And we’ll need to do that again someday. So here’s what I’m asking you to do with all of this. Ask one question. What got better? The next government program that comes through your town, whatever it is, will report its numbers. People enrolled. Dollars delivered. Families served. Don’t sneer at the numbers. They’re somebody’s grandmother, or somebody’s difficult first year. But stop accepting those numbers as the answer. When we think they’re the answer, half of American kids end up needing social program support instead of us insisting on workers making enough that their kids don’t need the programs anymore. Enrollment tells you what the program did. It doesn’t tell you whether anyone came out the other side stronger. So. Again. Ask: What got better? Did the help build the person? Did her skills grow? Did her wages cover her life? Did her savings get closer to what she needs to make the down payment on the house? Did she make, master, own, or pay off anything that would last? Or did our “help,” while trying to be perfectly kind, simply make her struggle bearable without helping her escape it? A great society isn’t a stack of programs. It’s a country where a woman who beats her alarm clock every morning of her life can build herself into someone the country may one day need. Where, on the other side of the crisis, she can enjoy her bread, her wine, and her family. We can build that. Or we can all just return tomorrow. Sources The fence and the ground behind it: the Denver Federal Center, formerly the Denver Ordnance Plant Colorado Encyclopedia, “Denver Ordnance Plant”: Remington-operated; peak near 20,000 workers on three shifts in summer 1943; women about half the workforce; site is now the Federal Center. “Ordnance Plant Has Fine Record,” April 3, 1943 contemporary news account, Plains Humanities Alliance, University of Nebraska. 15,000+ workers, 47 percent women at that date. History Colorado, “Doing Our Part”: $122M Remington contract, January 1941, on the former Hayden Ranch. “Denver Federal Center,” Wikipedia: largest concentration of federal agencies outside Washington, D.C.; West 6th & Kipling, Lakewood; former Denver Ordnance Plant. (For publication, confirm against the GSA Denver Federal Center page.) Full-time workers relying on public assistance GAO, Federal Social Safety Net Programs: Millions of Full-Time Workers Rely on Federal Health Care and Food Assistance Programs, GAO-21-45, October 2020, gao.gov. ~12 million working-age Medicaid enrollees and ~9 million SNAP recipients; two-thirds full-time; concentrated in restaurants, department stores, and grocery stores. Employers capture the wage subsidy Jesse Rothstein, The Unintended Consequences of Encouraging Work: Tax Incidence and the EITC, Princeton CEPS Working Paper 165, 2008, PDF. Low-skill single mothers keep $0.70 per dollar; employers capture $0.72; net transfer to workers under $0.28. Supporting: Ioana Marinescu & Eric A. Posner, “Why Has Antitrust Law Failed Workers?,” 105 Cornell Law Review 1343 (2020), Cornell Scholarship. Documents labor monopsony and the antitrust litigation gap. The alternative: FDR and Hopkins on work versus the dole Harry Hopkins, “Give a man a dole and you save his body and destroy his spirit,” quoted in Democracy in Transition (D. Appleton-Century, 1937), p. 264; corroborated by PBS American Experience and the VCU Social Welfare History Project. Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1944 State of the Union / Economic Bill of Rights, “the right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation,” FDR Presidential Library archive. What the programs did accomplish (the Medicare / elderly-poverty improvements) Elderly poverty fell from 35.2% (1959) to under 10% (1990s): SSA, “Reducing Poverty Among Elderly Women”, citing U.S. Census; NBER, “Social Security and Elderly Poverty”. The fiscal cost of maintaining our system Net interest ~$970 billion in FY2025, surpassing $1 trillion on the public-debt line for the first time: Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget; Peterson Foundation. Long-run trajectory (debt to 120% of GDP by 2036): CBO, The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2026 to 2036, February 2026, CBO Pub. 62105. The constitutional principle and its contradiction United States v. Butler, 297 U.S. 1 (1936), Ballotpedia summary. Broad Spending Clause power for the general welfare, but the AAA struck down on Tenth Amendment grounds. Helvering v. Davis, 301 U.S. 619 (1937), Justia; Constitution Annotated. Upheld Social Security; Congress decides what serves the general welfare unless the choice is “clearly wrong.” The oldest instruction (KJV) Genesis 3:19; Ecclesiastes 9:7 and 9:10; Ecclesiastes 5:18–19. King James Bible Online. Work and national power, the industrial-base warning GAO, Defense Industrial Base: Actions Needed to Address Risks Posed by Dependence on Foreign Suppliers, GAO-25-107283, July 24, 2025, gao.gov. Over 200,000 suppliers; little visibility into lower-tier and foreign dependencies for parts, materials, and microelectronics. A companion piece Joel Douglas, “A New Economics: Reward Work, Build Opportunity.” January 2025. Lincoln’s free-labor doctrine and Theodore Roosevelt’s square deal; the constitutional-mandate argument this postscript inherits. joelkdouglas.substack.com Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe
July 21 · 26 min
What Counts | A Rancher, a Charging Station, and a Twelve-Million-Dollar Letter
A family, driving north out of Denver. They left before light. Mom’s driving. Yellowstone tomorrow. Lamar Valley and the bison and wolves and trout. Tonight, the Sheridan Inn. The car planned this stop in Buffalo before they crossed the Platte. It planned every stop. Dad has the atlas open on his knees, the paper kind. Nobody’s looking at it. Two kids in the back. A yellow dog between them with his chin on the armrest. Somewhere past Kaycee the little one got carsick. Mom keeps empty cups up front for it, and she passed one back without looking. The windows are down now, summer heat and wind noise, and nobody’s saying why. In one mile, exit right. Charging stop. Buffalo, Wyoming. The chargers sit at the Miller Travel Center across the street from the Best Western. Eight stalls, white posts, painted lines. Mom backs in on the first try. Dad’s out of the car before it stops rocking. He takes a deep breath and clicks the cable home. The screen says thirty-five minutes. The kids step out slow. The dog tows the boy toward the grass strip at the edge of the lot, nose down, working. A good stop. Restrooms, coffee, a rack of postcards with bears on them. Everything works, and everything worked the whole way up, and it’ll work the whole way to the park. Somebody built all of it so that it would. A pickup comes down Sixteen pulling a stock trailer. You hear it before you see it. Nobody in the lot looks up except the dog. Leave the family at the charger. They’re fine. Go with the truck. Act I. The Bearing The same morning begins in the dark at both ends of the road. Four thirty, and the kitchen light’s the only one on for eleven miles. Coffee going. She’s up. She always is. The talk is the day’s work, not the letter that’s sitting on the table. Pairs come off the north lease today. The grass up there is done, and the section east of town has been resting since May. Move them today, or watch them walk it to dirt by Friday. The letter’s been on the table since Tuesday. It came certified, from a company out of Denver with a name that doesn’t say what it does. They want to buy the place. All of it, deeded ground and leases and water, and the letter names the number they’d pay. He read it once, standing up, and set it down, and neither of them has touched it since except to move it off the spot where the coffee goes. In a good year, this place clears a hundred and twenty thousand dollars. The number in the letter is not that kind of number. He takes the letter off the table on his way out. Not to do anything with it. It just doesn’t seem like something you leave lying around, the way you wouldn’t leave a loaded rifle on the porch. It rides on the dash. Jesse’s already at the truck. Red heeler, ears up, been waiting in the dark by the left rear tire since the kitchen light came on. Chores first, then town, because the baler’s down and the hay is nearly ready. The parts counter at six forty five smells like oil and popcorn from yesterday. The bearing he needs is backordered ten days. The counter man is a good man. He offers the other way out: the whole assembly, in stock, four hundred and change, upgraded, better than the old one ever was. He stands there maybe a minute. It’s not four hundred dollars against zero. It’s four hundred dollars against ten days of July, against what a rebuilt bearing costs, against how many seasons the old assembly has left anyway. He’s done this math his whole life, standing at this counter, in about this light. The old assembly has two good years in it. The bearing wins. So. Order the bearing. Borrow the neighbor’s baler in the meantime, which will cost him a favor, and favors get paid back in this county at par. Nobody calls it anything. There’s no form for it. But that minute at the counter is an audit, and everything that comes onto the ranch passes one just like it or it doesn’t come. The truck passed one. The trailer passed one. The dog passed one years ago. Out of the lot, up through town, and onto Sixteen with the empty gooseneck rattling behind. The chargers go by on the right. Eight stalls, white posts, painted lines, two cars on them with plates from somewhere else. His eyes do what a cattleman’s eyes do with any pen, any chute, any gate: measure it. The approach, the spacing, the turnaround. Thirty two feet of truck and trailer, and stalls drawn for sixteen. There’s nothing to think about, so he doesn’t think about it. North out of town the pavement gives out to gravel, and the gravel to two-track, and the two-track climbs to where the pairs are scattered across the last of the lease grass, heads coming up one by one at the sound of the diesel they know. Two hundred and fifty miles south, a family out of Denver is passing Chugwater, and their car is already counting on one of those stalls in Buffalo. Act II. The Measure The north lease is forty minutes of gravel and another ten on two-track, a section and change of short grass running up against the timber. The grass is done, time to move on. The pairs know the truck and start drifting toward the corrals before he’s got the gate. As soon as the driver’s door is open, Jesse is out and running. Before he’s in the saddle, she’ll be out of sight, bring in any pairs not with the main group, and come back loping, tongue hanging out the side of her mouth. Ray’s flatbed is already at the pens. Ray runs the neighboring lease and they work it together every year, no money in it, just the arithmetic of neighbors kept square. Ray’s cows wear collars now. He put them on two years ago when the math got undeniable, what the collars cost against what three miles of cross-fence was going to cost, and the fence never got built and never will. Nobody from any government office asked him to do it. Nobody sends him a form about it. The collars either paid for themselves and held his cows off the creek bottoms or they didn’t. They did, and that was the whole conversation. They work the pairs quiet. Hooves in the dust. Cows calling calves. Not much else. Jesse does most of the work. She’ll get the fat off his ribeye at supper. First load on. Ray talks for a minute about the sale barn and goes back to his flatbed. While Ray’s talking, without exactly deciding to, he takes the letter off the dash and puts it in the glovebox. Town is twenty-five minutes with a load on. Through Buffalo, Wyoming Public Radio comes over the speakers. The state’s federal charging program has yet to break ground. Twenty-six point eight million allocated, the announcer says, while the chargers already running, including Buffalo’s, were built by private companies. With zero chargers built, the state asked Washington to call the corridors complete. Then the weather, hot, and cattle prices, high. He’s watching his mirrors as he approaches the interstate by the travel center. Eight stalls, a car from Colorado on the cable, a yellow dog working the grass strip with a boy on the other end of the leash. The trailer rattles and the stalls go by at thirty. Small town. When the chargers went in, they got talked about at church for a month, same as everything else. Now they’re just the thing across from the Best Western. His eyes do what a cattleman’s eyes do. Measure. Every stall drawn for a car. You can’t back up to a charger pulling a cattle trailer. There’s nothing to think about, so he doesn’t. The east section is six miles on the other side of town, deeded ground, and it’s been resting since May, which is the only reason today works at all. Grass is there. Water is the problem. The section has one good well at the north end and nothing at the south, so the south half grazes short or doesn’t graze, and every dry August he hauls water to it in a tank on the flatbed, four hundred gallons at a trip. There’s a fix for that, and it’s not a mystery; it’s pipe. He heard about a grant and applied for it in the spring. Cost share, water development. There’s a conservation plan on file with his name on it, and the woman at the office says the money should be obligated when the government’s new year starts in October. Then the engineer. Then, if there’s a backhoe left in the county, dirt. If you asked the program today, it would say truthfully that the dollars are on track to be obligated. The way it works is he fronts the money and gets paid back after the work passes inspection, which is fair enough if you have the money to front. Fronting it means this fall’s steer money is spoken for until the government pays him back. He thinks maybe he’ll be able to break ground in November. The grass needs water in July. So the tank he’ll use again this August is the four hundred-gallon one on the flatbed, and the pipe exists in a plan, in a filing cabinet, in town. He unloads the first load through the north gate, and while the pairs sort themselves out and go to grass, he checks the well. The pump kicks on. On the pole above it there’s a meter with the co-op’s name on the tag, and the co-op’s name has been on this place longer than he has. Nineteen thirty six, a grange hall not far from here, and a man from the power company stood up in front of a room of ranchers and told them what everybody with credentials knew. Two thousand dollars a mile to string line to country like this, and no way it ever pays it back. He wasn’t lying. It was his honest math. The ranchers formed a cooperative, borrowed the money from the government at cost, hired their own crews and set their own poles, and built it for eight hundred and twenty five dollars a mile. They paid the loans back over decades, at a default rate under one percent. Nobody measured the program by how many meetings it held. The measure was whether the lights came on and whether the loan got paid. The lights came on. The loan got paid. The pump runs. He pays that outfit every month, ninety some years later. Two more loads before supper. Town, the curve, the seams, the stalls, thirty-two feet of truck and trailer. By the second pass, the Colorado car is gone, and another one is on the cable. Act III. The Tally Second load on, and coming south off the lease, his phone rings through the truck speakers. His daughter, from Denver. She calls when she’s walking somewhere, and he can hear the city moving around her. He’s happy to hear from her anytime and tells her she never needs a reason. Family logistics first. Her mother’s birthday, what she’s sending, whether he’s picked up anything yet. He hasn’t, but he’s known for months what he’s getting her. She knows this too. Then her weekend, because he asks. They took the car up to Estes on Saturday and pulled into a charger they couldn’t use. Wrong company. The plug fits the car and everything, but the company would only let their cars charge there, is how she explains it. Their charge app walked them back down the hill to a slow charger, and they sat for two hours having a beer in this old bar until they had enough charge to drive to a fast one they were allowed to plug into. She tells it as comedy. She says the word infrastructure the way her grandmother used to say the word government, and they both laugh, and neither of them explains the joke. She has to go into a meeting. Love you, Dad. The call drops off the speakers and the diesel comes back up under everything. Through town again. The Colorado car is gone off the cable and a Montana one is on it. Somewhere south of the stoplight he does the math, because her story left it sitting there. Sale barn run to Torrington this fall. Two hundred and fifty-five miles down with a full load of calves, and the electric trucks pull maybe a hundred and thirty miles with that weight behind them before they’re done. Say it’s a hundred and fifty being generous. That’s a charge stop each way if everything goes right, and the one fast charger in that country is fifty kilowatts. He knows now what fifty kilowatts is. His daughter sat two hours in one on Saturday. That’s if the stall is open and you can hook up with the trailer attached and the company likes your plug. And there’s nowhere in the arithmetic to put fourteen thousand pounds of calves standing in a steel box in the sun. The math takes him about as long as the bearing took. It’s not against the truck. The day the numbers come in, the truck is just another bearing, and he’ll buy one and never think about it again. The government can count dollars spent, stations built, corridors completed. He has to count what it costs to get a calf to market. Third load is the last and the shadows are getting long. Through town the last time, and the lot has a Montana car charging and a horse trailer parked way out at the edge of the gravel where the trucks go. The woman who hauled it is walking in for coffee she’ll carry back a hundred yards. Doesn’t take a meeting to figure out where to go if you’re pulling a trailer. You learn quick. At the east section gate he reaches into the glovebox for the tally book, and the letter comes out with it. He sets the letter on the seat and counts pairs through the gate against the book, out loud, under his breath. The count is right, and he opens the gate to the new grass. The pump is running at the north end, and the evening cool is coming down off the mountains, and for about a minute the whole outfit is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do, every piece of it paid for and working. That minute is what the hundred and twenty thousand is made of. No part of that minute will appear in any report anywhere, because there’s no line on any form for it. The letter rides home on the seat beside him. Act IV. The Number The yard light comes on by itself at dusk, the way it has since the co-op set the pole. Supper’s late because the day ran long. Jesse gets the fat off his ribeye, as promised. She’s finished with it as soon as it hits her bowl, and then she heads to the porch. The evening cools fast, goes gold and then blue. The letter came in from the truck with him. It’s on the kitchen table. His wife’s at the sink. He sits down with the coffee that’s left and reads it again, all the way through this time, sitting down. The company’s name still doesn’t say what it does. The paragraphs say the things those paragraphs say, honored to express interest, understand the deep connection to the land, prepared to move quickly. There’s a phone number of a man whose title is three words long. And there’s the number. Twelve million dollars. The pump out at the east section is running right now on ninety-year-old wire. The pipe for the south half is in a filing cabinet in town, on track to be obligated. The bearing is ten days out. The steer money is spoken for from October till whenever the inspection passes. And the number on the table is one hundred good years, and he doesn’t have one hundred years, and nobody who would pay twelve million dollars for this ground intends to run cows on it. He looks at it a while. She dries her hands and comes and reads it over his shoulder, which she hasn’t done since Tuesday, and neither of them says anything for a minute, and then she says supper’s getting cold, which is true. He folds the letter back into thirds. There’s a drawer in the kitchen where the important papers wait until they’re dealt with, brand renewals, the lease file, the grant paperwork with his name on it, and he doesn’t put it there. He sets it on the table, off to the side, on the spot where the coffee goes. They eat. The talk is tomorrow’s work. The bearing might come early, the hay won’t wait past Thursday, and somebody has to call about panels before fall. Outside the yard light hums, and the pairs are on new grass six miles east, and the well is running. Somewhere north, in a hotel room in Sheridan, a family is asleep with the curtains open, and their car is in the lot, charged, counting on nothing until morning. Tomorrow the wolves. Postscript A note on the reporting. You just spent half an hour with a mix of people I made up and ground truth, so I owe you a clear line between what I invented and what I didn’t. I made up the rancher, his wife, his daughter, Ray, the traveling family and their yellow dog, and the twelve-million-dollar letter. I did not make up Jesse. The red heeler is real, and she gets the fat off a ribeye from time to time. Everything else these people touched is real too. Every program, budget, regulation, and date in this story is real, and I’ve linked every source in the written version so you can check me. You should check me. If the charging program sounded too absurd to be true, start there. Congress allocated Wyoming twenty-six point eight million dollars for fast chargers along Interstates Twenty-Five, Eighty, and Ninety. In October of twenty twenty-five, the Federal Highway Administration certified Wyoming’s corridors as fully built out. Those two facts are next to each other on purpose, because the gap between them is the story: on the day of that certification, the program had installed nothing in the state. Not one charger. Private companies had built at least thirty-nine stations with their own money, and the state pointed at those to satisfy the federal standard. Certified complete, at zero. That’s not my satire. That’s the approval letter. Federal standards make a charging station report whether a trailer can pull through. They don’t require a station to let a trailer pull through. Nobody backs a one-ton with a loaded cattle trailer up to a charger, and nobody unhitches fourteen thousand pounds of calves in July to top off a battery. Let’s pull on that thread. Say the engineers get there, and one day an electric one-ton out-pulls a diesel, costs less to run, and can pull the heavy load the two hundred and fifty-five miles to the livestock sale barn without stopping. That’s the day the truck passes the rancher’s audit, the day he buys one and never thinks about it again. And on that day, the network waiting for him is one built to a standard that only ever asked whether a car could park, certified complete before he was ever its customer. The truck could earn its way onto the ranch tomorrow. The plug still couldn’t reach the trailer. If the towing math sounded rigged against the truck, testers measured it, I didn’t. A Ford Lightning pulling a sixty-one-hundred-pound camper went about a hundred miles. A Rivian went about a hundred and ten. And note that those trucks are half-tons. The truck that actually pulls a loaded gooseneck is a one-ton, and nobody builds an electric one-ton yet. So the story’s rancher was running his math on the closest truck that exists, and giving it the benefit of the doubt. A heavy trailer turns today’s electric pickups into hundred-to-hundred-fifty-mile trucks. That doesn’t make them bad trucks. It means you’d build the whole job around the range, the charge time, the weather, and whatever’s standing in the trailer while you wait. If the pipe in the filing cabinet felt like a cheap shot, it’s mechanics. The conservation program ranks applications, obligates money when the government’s new year starts in October, and pays the producer back after the work passes inspection. The producer fronts every dollar until then. Nothing there is unreasonable on paper. But notice that it asks the ranch to carry the government’s share for a season, and a project can hold its schedule inside an agency and still miss the grass. Both sides keep their word, and the water still doesn’t come. Ray’s collars, same test the story gives everything. Fence in rough country costs past ten thousand dollars a mile. The collars trade some of that for base stations, hardware, and a subscription. I won’t defend them or attack them. They either hold the cattle and save more than they cost, or they don’t. And if the grange hall sounded like nostalgia, it’s the record, and it cuts against easy conclusions in both directions. In the mid nineteen-thirties, nine American farms in ten ran on kerosene, because the utilities figured rural line at fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars a mile and said it would never pay. They weren’t lying. That was their honest math under their business model. Then the cooperatives standardized the designs, hired local crews, borrowed federal money at cost, and drove the price to about nine hundred forty-one dollars a mile by the end of nineteen thirty-six, under eight hundred twenty-five by thirty-nine. They built the loans to be repaid, and they repaid them. The default rate stayed under one percent. So before we conclude government programs can’t work, let’s remember that Washington held meetings, approved plans, and mailed checks, and one of the best-performing loan programs in American history came out the other end. The meetings weren’t why it worked. The lights came on, the pumps ran, and the money came back. That’s why it worked. A note on EV use. Colorado passed two hundred ten thousand electric vehicles in twenty twenty-five. Wyoming registered about eleven hundred, total. A charging network can serve real people and real demand and still fail the trucks, the trailers, and the distances of the country it crosses. Both things can be true at the same time, and the story asked you to hear them together. The letter is invented. The market that mails letters like it is not. Buyers like data centers are offering farm and ranch ground many times its agricultural worth, and in early twenty twenty-six, landowners turned down fifteen point seven million dollars and eighty million. The number is fiction. The choice on the kitchen table is not. Here’s why any of this should cost you a thought after the audio ends. The next program through your country, whatever or wherever that is, will report what it spent, who it enrolled, how many meetings it held, and what it mailed. Accepting that report as progress costs you nothing today. In the long run it costs you the water, and eventually the ranch. So ask the real question. What got cheaper because it existed. What got safer. What got built that stayed built. What operation came out stronger or more profitable as a result. That’s what counts. Sources The NEVI program in Wyoming: Wyoming’s allocation under the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program totals $26.8 million over five years ($3.9 million in 2022, roughly $5 million annually thereafter), for charging along the state’s Alternative Fuel Corridors, Interstates 25, 80, and 90. WYDOT program page (primary): https://www.dot.state.wy.us/home/planning_projects/electric-vehicle-infrastructure/national-electric-vehicle-infrastructure-(nevi)-program.html. In October 2025 the Federal Highway Administration certified Wyoming’s corridors as fully built out, making Wyoming the third state certified, with no NEVI-funded charger installed in the state; WYDOT identified at least 39 privately owned stations, built independent of federal funding, as satisfying the corridor requirements, and the updated federal guidance dropped the fifty-mile spacing rule. WYDOT announcement (primary): https://www.dot.state.wy.us/news/wydot-announces-nevi-plan-approval-major-program-updates. FHWA full build-out approval letter (primary): https://www.dot.state.wy.us/files/live/sites/wydot/files/shared/Planning/Electric%20Vehicles/2025%2010%2020%20WY%20NEVI%20Fully%20Built%20Out%20Approval%20Letter.pdf The Buffalo charging station: an eight-stall Tesla Supercharger at 74 US-16 in Buffalo (Miller’s Sinclair, formerly Maverik), announced open in March 2026; privately built, no NEVI funds. Station announcement: https://www.basenor.com/blogs/news/new-tesla-supercharger-opens-in-buffalo-wy-8-stalls. Site history and location detail, Tesla Motors Club: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/supercharger-buffalo-wy.333802. Federal minimum standards for NEVI-funded stations require operators to report whether a pull-through stall exists at each port but do not mandate one; 23 CFR Part 680 (primary): https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-23/chapter-I/subchapter-H/part-680 Towing range of electric pickups: Car and Driver’s instrumented test, a Ford F-150 Lightning towing a 6,100-pound camper returned 100 miles of range, less than half its unloaded highway range; a Rivian R1T returned 110. Recap with figures: https://www.theautopian.com/the-2026-chevrolet-silverado-ev-tows-like-a-diesel-truck-but-america-isnt-ready-for-it-yet/. Edmunds four-truck tow test (Lightning vs. combustion pickups): https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/ev-tow-test-ford-lightning-ev-versus-the-world.html. Under heavy trailers, current electric pickups are realistically 100-to-150-mile trucks between fast-charge stops. The water development application: NRCS cost-share through the Environmental Quality Incentives Program; the relevant practices are Livestock Pipeline, Conservation Practice Standard Code 516 (primary): https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/sites/default/files/2022-09/Livestock_Pipeline_516_NHCP_CPS_2020.pdf, and Watering Facility, Code 614 (primary): https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/sites/default/files/2022-10/Watering_Facility_614_NHCP_CPS_2020.pdf. EQIP applications are ranked competitively, funded as dollars are obligated with the federal fiscal year beginning October 1, and paid by reimbursement after the completed practice passes NRCS certification; contracting mechanics (example state guidance, primary): https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/sites/default/files/2024-10/ND%20Fiscal%20Year%202025%20EQIP%20General%20Guidance_V2.pdf Virtual fencing economics: Base station, per-collar hardware, and annual subscription costs against $10,000-plus per mile for physical fence in rough country. Vendor cost overview with University of Arizona economic analysis: https://nodpa.com/n/9203/What-is-Virtual-Fencing. Peer-reviewed comparison of virtual versus physical fence economics, Rangelands (2025): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0190052824000415 The Rural Electrification Administration: Created by Executive Order 7037, May 11, 1935; roughly one farm in ten had central-station electricity. Private utilities’ construction estimates ran $1,500 to $2,000 per mile; REA cooperative borrowers, using standardized designs and their own crews, cut the cost to $941 per mile by the end of 1936 and under $825 per mile by 1939. Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Econ Focus (primary): https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus/2020/q1/economic_history. Living New Deal, with the $825 figure quoted: https://livingnewdeal.org/glossary/rural-electrification-administration-rea-1935/. Encyclopedia.com on the 1936 cost reduction and the utility committee’s 1935 response: https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/news-and-education-magazines/rural-electrification-administration-1934-1941. The Rural Electrification Act of 1936, Section 4, self-liquidating loans at Treasury rates (primary act text): https://courseware.e-education.psu.edu/downloads/geog432/1936b.pdf. Cooperative history and the sub-one-percent default record on REA electric loans: America’s Electric Cooperatives (NRECA), https://www.electric.coop/our-organization/history FasTracks and the Northwest Rail: Approved by voters in 2004 at a projected $4.7 billion, funded by a 0.4 percent sales tax; RTD has spent more than $5.5 billion with four corridors unfinished; a 2025 report required by the legislature put completion at 2034 only if an additional $1.6 billion is found, and RTD’s funding-based projection for the Boulder–Longmont line has run to 2042–2044. 9News on the 2025 report (with the $5.5 billion and $1.6 billion figures): https://www.9news.com/article/travel/fastracks-passenger-rail-lines/73-ef75b633-c88e-4087-ad53-fb2fb2a464f1. Colorado Public Radio, October 2025: https://www.cpr.org/2025/10/24/rtd-report-potential-train-boulder-longmont/. RTD Northwest Rail Peak Service Study (primary, for the program’s own progress language): https://www.rtd-denver.com/about-rtd/projects/northwest-rail-peak-service-study. Corridor history including the 2044 revision: https://www.greaterdenvertransit.com/northwestrail/ Who owns the EVs: Colorado surpassed 210,000 EV registrations in 2025 and led the nation with 32.4 percent of new-vehicle sales electric in the third quarter; Colorado Energy Office (primary): https://energyoffice.colorado.gov/press-releases/colorado-tops-the-country-in-ev-sales-for-3rd-quarter-2025-setting-a-national-state. Wyoming’s registered all-electric fleet numbered roughly 1,100 as of the most recent federal count; U.S. Department of Energy, Alternative Fuels Data Center (primary): https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10962 The purchase letter: Fictional, but the market it arrives from is real: data-center and development buyers have offered multiples of agricultural value across farm country, with individual refusals of $15.7 million and $80 million reported in early 2026. Farm Policy News, University of Illinois: https://farmpolicynews.illinois.edu/2026/03/farmers-increasingly-rejecting-data-center-bids-for-land/ Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe
July 14 · 25 min
Item Six
The agenda is one page. Somebody ran it through the copier this afternoon and the toner is going, so item six is fainter than item five. You can read it anyway. Outside the county annex, there are nine pickups, a sheriff’s Tahoe, and a Buick that belongs to a woman named Arlene who has kept the minutes of this commission for thirty-one years. It is a Tuesday in March on the high plains of Nebraska. The wind is doing what the wind does. Inside, the fluorescent lights hum over four rows of folding chairs. Usually there are three people in them. Tonight there are twenty-six. There is a coffee urn on a card table by the door. It is older than some of the commissioners. Nobody has touched it. Item one is a culvert. Item two, a road easement. Item three is the ambulance service contract, and it runs long, because everything about the ambulance runs long in a county with one of them. Item four is approved without discussion. Item five is the fairgrounds. The grandstand roof failed inspection in October, and the bid to fix it came back at one hundred ninety thousand dollars, and the room takes this news the way you take news about a roof. Somebody says the fair is in July. Somebody else says everyone knows that. Then the chairman squares his papers and reads item six. Item six is a line in the county budget. One hundred twelve thousand dollars. It covers an office in the basement of this building: two salaries, a truck, a phone that gets answered. The line has been in the budget for one hundred and nine years. Tonight the commission decides whether it stays. Act I. Scene One. Nebraska The chairman reads item six the way he read item five, like reading a phone number. County appropriation, University of Nebraska Extension, interlocal agreement, one-hundred-twelve thousand dollars. He asks for a motion for discussion. It comes from his left. Then, a second. He does what the law of Nebraska requires him to do and opens the floor. Twenty-six people shift in their brown metal folding chairs. The extension educator goes first, because it is her office, and she has done this every March for nine years. Her name is Dana Fruehling. The university pays her salary. The county pays for everything that she needs to do her job: the truck, the basement office, the two women who run it, the phone. She has a photocopied annual report. She opens with the sentence that’s the cornerpost of the argument. You can hear that she likes it. The law says the work exists to aid in diffusing among the people of the United States useful and practical information on subjects relating to agriculture and home economics, and to encourage the application of the same. Land-grant university extension. Teaching people practical information they would otherwise never know. She gives the year. Two hundred forty soil samples. Thirty-one pesticide applicators certified. A hundred and six kids in 4-H. Somewhere north of nine hundred phone calls, logged by hand because the county never bought the software. Commissioner Ben Hollis waits until she sits down. Hollis sold crop insurance out of the same storefront for thirty-one years, which means he has read more balance sheets than anyone else in the room, including the bank. He is going to make the best argument anyone makes all night, and he is going to make it quietly. He says he has voted for this line eleven times. He says Dana does the work and everybody knows it. Instead of raising his voice he takes off his glasses. The whispers stop. I can tell you what we spent, he says. Eleven budgets, add it up, it’s north of a million dollars. What I can’t tell you is what we bought. Samples got tested. Kids showed their steers. The phone got answered. And in those same eleven years this county lost four hundred people, the school consolidated with Ainsworth, and there are six buildings on Main Street you could buy for back taxes. So show me. I’m asking honestly. Show me the line where the county changed because we kept that office open in the basement. Nobody answers him right away. It’s a fair question, and the room knows it. The woman with the binder stands up. She has been waiting since item one. Name, Carol Ann Vasek. Her binder has a green clover on the front. Eleven years of papers she doesn’t need to read. She says her oldest showed hogs in that program, and judged livestock, and stood up at contests in Lincoln and talked to strangers with his hat off, and he is twenty-six now and he came back. He works cattle and he does the books for three neighbors and he coaches the judging team on Tuesdays. She says: you all keep asking what brings our kids back. I am standing here telling you the one thing that brought mine home: 4-H. A rancher named Albers takes the floor after her and talks for ninety seconds about the drought year, the hay that came off the Petersen place, the call he made at seven in the morning because something told him not to feed it. Nitrates. Dana sent a sample for a test that afternoon. He runs a hundred and forty pairs. He says: you want to know what the office does, it answered the phone, and I still have a herd. Hollis puts his glasses back on. He says gently that he is glad about the herd. That nobody is arguing Dana doesn’t answer the phone. He is asking a different question, and he’d like somebody to answer the one he asked. And then old man Rasmussen, who has been coming to these meetings since before Arlene kept the minutes, cuts through all of it. A hundred and nine years, he says. This county has paid for that office for a hundred and nine years, my dad paid it and his dad paid it, and I would bet anyone in this room a dollar that nobody can say why we started. Act I. Scene Two. Boll Weevils Nineteen oh three. Terrell, Texas. The boll weevil is eating the South. It crossed the Rio Grande a decade ago and it takes the cotton, farm by farm, county by county. Nothing anybody knows will stop it. The federal government has a man named Seaman Knapp who knows something nobody in Washington believes: farmers distrust everything Washington knows. And he has an idea. Knapp doesn’t mail out a pamphlet. He finds one farmer, Walter Porter, with seventy acres. He asks Porter to work part of his land a new way. Weevil-resistant practice, Porter’s own tools, Porter’s own hands, Porter’s own risk. The neighbors can watch or not watch as they please. They watch. The field pays. And the neighbors believe it, because it didn’t happen in a college or in a pamphlet. It happened in the real world, across the fence, to a man they shared Sunday supper with. Knapp says: what a man hears, he may doubt. What he sees, he may possibly doubt. But what he does himself, he cannot doubt. That is the whole invention. County extension. That is the office in the basement. Because the knowledge was real, and it was locked up. In nineteen fourteen, colleges know how to double crop yields, and the average farm has never heard of any of it. Yields are flat. Soil is failing. Young people are leaving rural America in numbers that frighten the government enough that a presidential commission studies the countryside and comes back warning that the movement toward the towns, left alone, will sterilize the open country. So Congress makes a bargain, and the bargain has three parties. Washington pays a share. The state college pays a share. And the county pays a share, because the men who wrote it wanted the knowledge to live where the farmers live, in the courthouse, down the hall from the assessor, behind a door you could walk to. A person, not a pamphlet. The work is one tool, instruction and demonstration, the Porter farm written into federal law. The gap between what was known and what was done was the whole problem. Close the gap and the country lives. For a long time, that was true. In the annex, Carol Ann Vasek is halfway through a sentence about the fair. Act II. Scene Three. The Annex …the fair, which her family has worked every July since her oldest was nine. The fair doesn’t die if the office closes, she says. But somebody at this table explain to me who teaches the kids how to show. What happens to the fair if the kids stop, she asks. She sits down. The commissioner on the chairman’s left, the one who made the motion, asks Dana about the field day in August. The soil health one, out at the research plot. Dana says four people came. She says it’s on page six. She reports everything: the nine hundred phone calls and the folding chairs and the field days, it all goes in the report. Somewhere in the minutes Arlene is keeping, this same item appears in March of nineteen eighty-six, and March of nineteen sixty-one, and every March back to when the minutes were kept in ink that no one has looked at for years. The chairman asks Dana if she wants to respond to Commissioner Hollis before the board moves on. Eleven years. North of a million dollars of the county people’s money. What did we buy. What difference did it make. She closes the annual report and stands with it. She says she can’t point to a line in the budget that says, because of this office, that family stayed, or that herd lived, or that kid came home. What she can hand him is a list of what stops on April first. Thirty-one applicator cards. That card is federal law. There’s an online course now, sixty dollars, if you’ve got broadband and the patience for it, and half the men holding those cards have neither. Without this office, the in-person clinic is three counties away. The 4-H clubs can’t hold a bank account or sign the fairgrounds contract or insure a livestock show without the university standing behind them, so you don’t end 4-H with a speech, you end it with paperwork. And the phone. She looks at Albers when she says the phone. Then she opens the report again, to the front page, and reads the sentence a second time. To aid in diffusing among the people of the United States useful and practical information, and to encourage the application of the same. She says: that’s the job you’re buying. That’s the whole job. The first time she read that sentence tonight, it sounded like a cornerpost. This time it sounds like an argument. The question underneath the budget. If the work works, why does the county still look like this. If it doesn’t work, why write this check a hundred and tenth time. Nobody says it that way. It comes out as line items and a long look at the fairgrounds bid. But those are the questions. Hollis raises a hand, not to interrupt, to get in line. He says Dana just made the best argument of the night and he’s not sure she knows it. Why are we here. He says his dad farmed through the fifties and he couldn’t have done it without that office’s help. Hybrid seed when half the precinct still called it a swindle. Terraces on the dust ground when terraces looked like a rich man’s hobby. The agent back then didn’t wait to answer the phone, he says. He rang it. I sold the insurance on half the acres that office improved, and I priced the risk lower because of it, and that’s not a story, that’s fact. So I’ll grant Rasmussen his history question and Dana her law. That office unlocked this county, once. Somebody tell me what changed. Act II. Scene Four. Hybrid Corn For a long time, it was true. Nineteen thirty-three. Greene County, Iowa. There’s a new seed. Corn that yields a fifth more, stands up to drought, stands up to the mechanical picker. And the farmers of Greene County will not plant it. Not because they haven’t heard. The seed men made sure everybody heard. But because the seed is a hybrid, it doesn’t breed true. You can’t save it back. You have to buy it new every year, cash money, in the middle of the Depression, on the word of a salesman. What moves it isn’t the salesman. It’s the fence line. One neighbor plants forty acres. The agent, the college’s man in the county, the one party in the deal with no seed to sell, walks the rows with anybody who asks. And it’s watching that forty come through a dry August that does it. Nine years, on average, from the first time a farmer heard of hybrid corn to planting the last open-pollinated acre. By the war, there’s hardly an open-pollinated acre left in the county. Two sociologists drove out to figure out how the idea had moved, and drew the curve, and every idea you’ve ever heard called viral got measured against corn in Iowa. The same machinery ran everywhere. Terraces on the dust ground. Cattle herd testing that cleared brucellosis out of the dairy counties, organized from offices like the one in the basement. It worked. Then look at what success did. A man who doubles his yield needs half as many neighbors. The tractor the agent demonstrated, the seed he validated, the fertilizer he calibrated, every one of them meant fewer hands per acre and more acres per man. Six point eight million farms in America in nineteen thirty-five. Two million now. The yields drove the prices down, and the prices drove the neighbors out. The packers followed the arithmetic. In nineteen eighty, the four biggest companies killed about a third of the fat cattle in America. Today it’s eighty-five of every hundred head. And when one of the four decides a plant doesn’t pencil anymore, the town underneath it finds out what it was to the ledger. A payroll with a zip code. You can see what happened in the schools. Nebraska had seventy-two hundred school districts once. Five hundred and thirty-four by the time Carol Ann’s boy started school. None of it was a knowledge problem. The knowledge kept arriving anyway. Into the basement. Onto the truck. Over the phone. To people who knew exactly what to do and couldn’t afford to act on it. In the annex, nobody has answered Ben Hollis. Act III. Scene Five. The Agenda The commissioner on the chairman’s left offers Hollis an answer. Maybe everything changed, he says. His grandson sits in the pickup and pulls up more agronomy on a phone than that office mailed out in fifty years. Free. Tonight. In the cab. He says it kindly, like a man closing a book. Maybe the county’s been paying for a door the world walked around. Then Carol Ann’s boy stands up. The one who came home. He gives Arlene his name for the minutes and holds his cap in both hands. He says the commissioner’s right about the phone. He can pull up a grazing plan standing in the parking lot. He went to Dana’s workshop three winters ago, on rotational grazing, and he’ll tell anybody it’s the best thing he ever learned. He does the books for three outfits besides his own, so he can tell this board exactly what every one of those places knows it ought to do and hasn’t done. Cross-fencing. Water lines. He penciled his own place at forty thousand dollars, give or take. He’s priced the new way too. A tower. Collars on every cow. A subscription every year forever. Slick as anything. And the water still has to get piped either way. Knowing how is free now, he says. Doing it costs more than it ever did. And before anybody tells me to see the bank, the bank’s in Ainsworth now too, and before anybody tells me to get a better price for my calves, there’s four buyers in this country and every one of them knows there’s four… The chairman says it gently. That’s not what’s before the board tonight. No sir, the boy says. It never is. He sits down. The room is quiet. The agenda is one page. A culvert. An easement. An ambulance. A roof. An office. Not on it? The price of calves. The rate on an operating note. What the packers pay and what the land costs and where the bank went. This county looks the way it looks, and no county commission ever voted to make it that way, because no board on the high plains controls those things. Neither does the office in the basement. It had one way to change things. In nineteen fourteen, it was the right one. Dana’s report. To aid in diffusing among the people of the United States useful and practical information, and to encourage the application of the same. You can teach a man everything, and encourage him all the way to the bank door. Hollis asked what changed. Not the office. The other half of the sentence. Act III. Scene Six. Roll Call There is no further discussion. The chairman reads the motion back the way he read the agenda, like a phone number, and asks for the roll. Three men at a folding table. A simple majority. A hundred and nine years on one side of the ledger and a hundred twelve thousand dollars on the other, and the reach of everything decided in this room stops at the county line. The rooms where the rest of it was decided were never in this county. Who decides was settled a long time ago, and not here. Arlene calls the first name. No, the first man says. Arlene writes it in the minutes, next to March, and calls the second name… Coda May, nineteen thirty-five. Washington. The new agency has offices in a mansion on Massachusetts Avenue. Marble fireplaces. Ceilings you could lose a kite in. Another of the world’s great moments of irony: the house used to belong to George Westinghouse, the electricity baron himself. The Administrator is an engineer named Morris Cooke. He spent a dozen years arguing that a mile of rural power line costs a third of what the utilities say it costs, and he has the figures. Nine farms in ten in this country are dark. Kerosene, and a pump handle, and dark. Cooke’s first plan is simple. The government will offer the power companies cheap money, and the power companies will build the lines. He calls the executives to a conference and makes the offer. In July they answer him. A committee of utility men sends a letter to the mansion, and the letter says there are very few farms requiring electricity for major farm operations that are not now served. Still. Nine in ten farms. Dark. So the new agency stops asking. It will lend the money instead. To the farmers themselves, organized into cooperatives they own, boards they elect, lines they hold the mortgage on. Twenty-five years to repay. The government’s own interest rate. The lawyers draft the loan papers under the ceilings of the house that electricity built. Nineteen fourteen, the law said the government would aid in diffusing among the people useful and practical information. Nineteen thirty-six, the law said the Administrator is authorized and empowered to make loans. Diffuse. Lend. Arlene calls the second name in Nebraska. Sources Primary sources for factual claims, listed in the order they appear. The county meeting and all named characters in this meeting (Fruehling, Hollis, Vasek, Albers, Rasmussen, Arlene) are fictional composites; the procedures, budgets, statutes, and history are real. Nebraska county commission procedure — open meetings, the guaranteed public comment period, and the required recorded roll-call vote are governed by the Nebraska Open Meetings Act (Neb. Rev. Stat. §§ 84-1407 to 84-1414). Nebraska Legislature, roll-call vote requirement (primary): https://nebraskalegislature.gov/laws/statutes.php?statute=84-1413. County clerk duties at board sessions: https://nebraskalegislature.gov/laws/statutes.php?statute=23-1302 The Smith-Lever Act of 1914 (38 Stat. 372) — the statutory purpose clause quoted by Dana: “to aid in diffusing among the people of the United States useful and practical information on subjects relating to agriculture… and home economics, and to encourage the application of the same.” Current codified text, 7 U.S.C. § 341 (primary): https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/7/341. Note: the modern code inserts “uses of solar energy with respect to agriculture” and “rural energy,” added by Congress in 1977–1980; the piece quotes the 1914 original. Congressional Research Service overview of the extension system and its federal-state-county funding structure, including the university-pays-educator, county-pays-operations split: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48071 Pesticide applicator certification — private applicators must be certified under FIFRA to purchase and apply restricted-use pesticides; in Nebraska, training and testing run through the UNL Pesticide Safety Education Program, with online and in-person options. UNL PSEP: https://pested.unl.edu. EPA, applicator certification under FIFRA: https://www.epa.gov/pesticide-worker-safety 4-H legal structure — clubs operate under charters authorized through the state extension office and 4-H National Headquarters; the charter underpins the tax-exempt group ruling, bank accounts, contracts, and event insurance. National 4-H: https://4-h.org The Porter demonstration farm, 1903 — Seaman Knapp, USDA special agent; seventy acres of Walter C. Porter’s farm near Terrell, Kaufman County, Texas; selected February 26, 1903; Porter’s own tools and labor, local businessmen’s indemnity fund (unneeded — Porter cleared roughly $700 over his old methods). Texas State Historical Association, Porter Farm (primary): https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/porter-farm. TSHA on Knapp: https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/knapp-seaman-asahel. University of Arkansas extension history, with the indemnity fund and Porter’s returns: https://www.uaex.uada.edu/extension-policies/history/. Knapp’s aphorism — “What a man hears, he may doubt; what he sees, he may possibly doubt; but what he does himself, he cannot doubt” — is quoted throughout Cooperative Extension centennial histories as the founding maxim of the demonstration method. The boll weevil — crossed from Mexico into Texas circa 1892, devastating the southern half of the state by 1903. TSHA: https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/boll-weevil The Country Life Commission, 1909 — appointed by Theodore Roosevelt, chaired by Liberty Hyde Bailey; the report’s warning, verbatim: the townward movement “tends to sterilize the open country and to lower its social status.” Full 1909 report (primary): https://www.fca.gov/template-fca/about/1909_Report_of_The_Country_Life_Commission.pdf Hybrid corn and the diffusion study — Bryce Ryan and Neal C. Gross, “The Diffusion of Hybrid Seed Corn in Two Iowa Communities,” Rural Sociology 8:15–24 (1943); fieldwork 1941 among 259 farmers in Jefferson and Grand Junction, Greene County, Iowa. Roughly 20% yield advantage, slow early-1930s adoption, the 1936 drought as catalyst, ~nine years from first awareness to full adoption, near-total adoption by the war. Journal record: https://www.proquest.com/openview/7de2b2276a089fe888071663de12b6a0/1. The study founded the diffusion-of-innovations paradigm (Everett Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations). Brucellosis and tuberculosis herd testing — the county-organized area testing plans of the early-to-mid twentieth century ran through extension’s local infrastructure. USDA APHIS, cattle disease eradication programs: https://www.aphis.usda.gov/livestock-poultry-disease/cattle Farm consolidation — U.S. farms peaked near 6.8 million in 1935 and stand at roughly 1.9–2.0 million today. USDA Economic Research Service, Farming and Farm Income: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/farming-and-farm-income Meatpacker concentration — the four-firm concentration ratio for steer and heifer slaughter rose from 36 percent in 1980 to 85 percent. USDA ERS, Amber Waves (primary): https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2024/january/concentration-in-u-s-meatpacking-industry-and-how-it-affects-competition-and-cattle-prices Nebraska school districts — from a peak of 7,264 districts in 1920 to 534 as of 2002. Wessels Living History Farm, K-12 & Consolidation: https://livinghistoryfarm.org/farming-in-the-1940s/k-12-consolidation/ Virtual fencing economics — base station, per-collar hardware or lease, and annual per-collar subscription; representative published pricing includes ~$10,000 base stations with ~$40/collar/year (Vence) and ~$250–300 collars with $5,000–6,000 stations (Gallagher eShepherd); water infrastructure remains a fixed cost regardless of system. Vendor cost overview with University of Arizona economic analysis: https://nodpa.com/n/9203/What-is-Virtual-Fencing. Peer-reviewed comparison of virtual versus physical fence economics, Rangelands (2025): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0190052824000415 Nitrate toxicity in drought-stressed forage — the acute drought-hay hazard on the high plains; extension facilitates rapid forage testing before feeding. UNL Extension beef resources: https://beef.unl.edu The Rural Electrification Administration, 1935 — created by Executive Order 7037, May 11, 1935; Morris L. Cooke appointed Administrator. America’s Electric Cooperatives (NRECA), history: https://www.electric.coop/our-organization/history. Cooke’s pre-REA engineering case that rural lines cost a fraction of utility claims, and his 1934 report to Ickes pricing full rural electrification near $200 million: https://arxiv.org/pdf/cs/0109064. Roughly one farm in ten had central-station electricity in 1935. The mansion — REA leased the James G. Blaine Mansion, 2000 Massachusetts Avenue NW, beginning in 1935; George Westinghouse owned the house from 1901 until his death in 1914. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_G._Blaine_Mansion The utility industry’s July 1935 answer — a committee of utility executives reported to Cooke, verbatim: “there are very few farms requiring electricity for major farm operations that are not now served.” Quoted across rural electric cooperative histories, e.g.: https://wemc.com/history/ and https://farmerselectric.coop/about-my-cooperative/who-we-are/ The Rural Electrification Act of 1936 (49 Stat. 1363) — Section 4: the Administrator “is authorized and empowered, from the sums hereinbefore authorized, to make loans for rural electrification…” to cooperatives and public bodies, self-liquidating within twenty-five years, at interest equal to the average rate payable by the United States on its long obligations. Original act text (primary): https://courseware.e-education.psu.edu/downloads/geog432/1936b.pdf Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe
June 23 · 14 min
The Art of the Deal
The shouts pass over the water to Lincoln. He sits there, silent. The man who, more than any other, overstepped his authority in a time of war. Habeas corpus suspended. A nation half at arms. And the question underneath all of it, whether any nation so conceived and dedicated could long endure. He broke the limit. But he never pretended he was above it. He answered to the Congress, to the ballot, to the cost, and he paid that cost in the open for the only stake that could justify it. The Republic. Real power accepts its limits. Performed power breaks them, and breaks the one thing we can’t rebuild: Our power to say no. Humidity on the night air. The statues of Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln and Roosevelt look down on the South Lawn of the White House. There, a cage. A hulking structure of steel and chain link named The Claw. Seven fights tonight. Men punching and kicking and choking each other on the grass where children roll Easter eggs in the spring, steps from the Oval Office. A million-dollar restoration commitment waited for the grass. Ruined by morning. The president comes out of the Oval and down the colonnade beside the man who runs the fights. Dana White is smiling. Behind them, four thousand people. Cabinet secretaries. Generals. The Secretary of Defense. The Vice President. Mark Zuckerberg. Active duty troops in the seats. The Zac Brown Band sings the national anthem. The Blue Angels and Thunderbirds come over the house low and loud, and the president raises his hand and salutes. A chant starts somewhere in the dark. U-S-A. U-S-A. The broadcast goes out on Paramount. Closed captioning brought to you by TrumpCoins dot com. Limited quantities available now. It is the fourteenth of June. The Republic is two hundred and fifty years old this year. The president is eighty years old today. He wrote a book about power called The Art of the Deal. In that book, the deal is the close. The handshake, the signing, the moment in the room with the cameras running. The deal is the thing they watch you win. The spectacle. The theater. The entertainment. There is an older book about real power. The loudest move on the board is the weakest one, and a man who has to show you strength has already lost it. The statues keep looking down. They knew the difference between the two books. It is why we carved them in stone. Act I. Two Books He saw his name on everything. On the towers. On the steaks. On the water bottles and the ties. On the airplane that brought him in. Gold letters. His letters. Big enough to catch the light. A thing was not his until his name was on it. Then it was his. Then all men knew it. That was the book he had written. The Art of the Deal. A deal was a hand coming out. A flash. Men leaning in so they would be in the picture. Hold it. There. That was the one. They hung the picture on a wall. But a picture on a wall is quiet. A quiet thing dies. So there had to be another one. Another hand. Another flash. Another tower. Another name in gold. A man was only as strong as the last picture. The last picture was already fading. So the man was always late. Always running. Always losing the thing he had just won. It was a loud way to live. Loud and bright and over. And it had to be seen. A handshake in private never happened. A name in the dark was no name. He knew this as other men know weather. He had never done a thing that did not need a witness. The other book had no gold on it. It did not shine. It was old and plain and small enough to put in a coat pocket. Another book of Art. Of War. It did not ask to be looked at. He did not like that about it. He opened it and read a little. The words were old. They had crossed too much time to be in a hurry. They spoke of ground and water and waiting. They spoke of the fight won before the fighting. They spoke of not striking when the shape of things was already moving for you. He shut the book. Outside, the river moved below the house. He went down and stood on the bank. The water moved without hurry. It didn’t strike the bank. It took the low places. It went around stone. It slid under the willow roots and carried leaves and silt and small sticks and the cold of the mountains. It was going the way he needed it to go. He could have let it go. There was no one there to see that. There was no flash. No hand to shake. No wall to hang the picture. The river made no speech. It did not say his name. He watched it and felt nothing happen. That was the trouble. Nothing happening looked like losing. Long later than any man could live, the water would have the rock. It would not take it in one morning. There would be no sound of surrender. No one would know the hour. The rock would simply be smaller. Then smooth. Then the canyon would be there, and men would stand at the edge and call it beautiful. The river would not have signed it. He looked back at the house. The two books were still on the table. One had his name on it, the other did not. He knelt and put his hand in the water. It was colder than he thought. He closed his fist hard and stood. The water ran out between his fingers. Act II. The Siege There was a real river, and it was running his way. By the winter of that year, Iran was coming apart from the inside. The money was worthless. A man’s wages on Monday would not buy his bread on Friday. The women walked bareheaded into the street. They had cut their hair and burned the cloth the state put between them and the world. Girls had done it too, in schoolyards, with the cameras watching and the men with guns close enough to come for them. The people went into the streets in numbers the country had not seen since the revolution that made it, in every province, and the regime answered the only way it knew, and still they came back the next night, and the next. A government that must shoot its own people is a failing one. No one had to push it. It was going down on its own, and all we had to do was wait on the bank and watch. The night before the strikes, a man went on television and said the word peace. The talks had been running for weeks, led by Oman. A deal was within reach. On the table: Iran would never stockpile the material for a bomb. Inspectors would have the run of the place. The enriched uranium already in the country would be blended down and turned to fuel and made irreversible. It was not signed. It was a hand, extended. The thing his own book is built on. A hand coming out, across the table, in the room. We did not take it. He reached into the water and he closed his fist. It came the next night, all at once. The supreme leader, killed in his house. His family with him. While the smoke was still going up, a message went out to the Iranian people, telling them the hour of freedom was at hand, telling them to rise up and finish it. Regime change, announced from a podium, as a thing we had come to do. The regime that was falling on its own, for free, we now had to knock down ourselves, in front of everyone, so that everyone could see who knocked it down. And then the water did to him what he could not see coming. Iran had cards left to play, and one was made of water. The Strait of Hormuz, a narrow throat, a fifth of the world’s oil moving through it. They closed it. We ran a blockade. We sent the Navy to walk the ships through by force and called it Project Freedom, and the oil did not move, and the price of everything climbed, and week after week we spent another show of force to hold a thing that yielded nothing. The man who could not believe that power was water was being beaten, now, by water. By a current he could not strike and could not reopen and could not sign. So he went to the table after all. Versailles. Iran set the terms. They handed us the plan in April. The nuclear question, the only one we ever said mattered, unanswered. The toughest question set aside for later. We released billions of dollars for them. We agreed to help rebuild what we had spent the spring destroying. In exchange they opened the strait they had closed, the strait that was only ever closed because we refused to wait on the bank. We had a better deal in February. We tore it up to get a worse one in June. And the man went out and told the crowd it was a big day for world peace. He held up his fist, dripping, to show them how much of the river he had caught. Act III. Curtain It cost a great deal and bought almost nothing. Iran is far away. They were never coming for us. The strait will open and the oil will move and the price of gas will fall and you will forget the name of the war by autumn. You’ll not lose any sleep. Here is the thing to keep you up. There is a room where they decide whether the country goes to war. The men who built it had just finished a war against a king, and they put the power to start the next one in the hands of the many, not the one, because they had seen what the one does with it. The room was empty. No one came to it before the bombs fell. No one stood in it and made the case to the people, the way you are supposed to make the case before you spend their sons. The president did not come. And the men and women who keep the room, whose whole job is to keep the room, let him go around it, and said nothing, and watched the water drain from his fist. Later, when it was safe, they voted. The war was already lost. The thing was already done. They didn’t vote on whether to do it. That vote would have had their names on it. They voted on whether to make him stop, a vote they had counted beforehand and knew would lose, and they cast it into the air where it could not land on anyone, and they went home and told their districts they had tried. So now the room stays empty. The next man knows the way around it. He watched. Once we asked a man to be king. He had won the war. The crowd was his. He could have kept it. He gave it back, and went home to his farm, and that is the only reason there is a country here to write about. He made himself small under the thing he served. The man on the lawn put his name in gold on the buildings and the steaks and the water and the planes. He looked for a thing big enough to stand under, and could not find one. Not even the Republic. The next one is watching. Taking notes. The grass is already ruined. Sources UFC Freedom 250, staged on the South Lawn of the White House on June 14, 2026. The South Lawn venue, the seven-fight card, the White House setting, the Paramount+ broadcast, and the Lincoln Memorial fight-week material are documented by the UFC Freedom 250 event page, Paramount+’s UFC at the White House page, Fox News event footage, and TIME’s photo essay from the event. TIME’s earlier interview with Dana White documents the June 14 date, Flag Day and the president’s 80th birthday, the South Lawn staging, the 4,000-plus spectators, the Ellipse fan-fest plan, the Oval Office walkout concept, the canopy over the Octagon, and UFC’s responsibility for damaged grass. See Sean Gregory, “How Dana White Took the UFC From the Fringes to the White House,” TIME, May 26, 2026. For the Blue Angels and Thunderbirds flyover during the national anthem, see AP’s photo gallery, “An octagon on the White House lawn for Trump’s 80th birthday,” June 14, 2026. For the reported $60 million event cost, “The Claw” nickname, closed-captioning sponsorship, invited crowd, military seats, and conflict-of-interest context, see Reuters, “White House’s UFC fights concentrate Trump’s sporting, political and economic power,” June 14, 2026. For lawn restoration, use the more cautious formulation “reported lawn-restoration costs” or “a restoration commitment” and cite Fox Business, “The science behind restoring the White House South Lawn after UFC Freedom 250”, which reports a $1 million ScottsMiracle-Gro restoration commitment, rather than relying only on the $700,000 figure. The federal conflict-of-interest lawsuit over the event. The lawsuit seeking to block UFC Freedom 250 on the South Lawn, alleging permitting, environmental-review, and conflict-of-interest problems, is reported here: Fox News, “Federal lawsuit seeks to block UFC Freedom 250 from being held on the White House South Lawn,” June 7, 2026. The captioning sponsorship should be sourced to Reuters, which reported that closed captioning for the Paramount+ stream was sponsored by Trump Coin. Reuters also links the event to Trump-family business interests and World Liberty Financial bonus money. See Reuters, “White House’s UFC fights concentrate Trump’s sporting, political and economic power,” June 14, 2026. The related Trump Coins product page is here: Trump Coins, “The Official Gold and Silver of UFC Freedom 250”. Donald J. Trump with Tony Schwartz, The Art of the Deal. Power as the close, the deal as the event in the room, the win that must be witnessed to count. Publisher page: Penguin Random House, Trump: The Art of the Deal. Sun Tzu, The Art of War. The treatment of force as the last instrument rather than the first, the supreme victory won before the fighting begins, and the image of the highest power as water, shapeless, patient, taking the low ground, wearing the stone without striking it. Composed in the fifth century BC and traditionally attributed to the military strategist Sun Tzu; the water passages appear chiefly in the chapters on “Weak Points and Strong” and “Tactical Dispositions.” Public-domain Lionel Giles translation, 1910: Project Gutenberg, The Art of War. Iran’s internal collapse, late 2025 into early 2026. Nationwide protests beginning December 28, 2025, the collapse of the rial, economic grievances, the lethal state crackdown, and the spread of unrest across the country are documented by HRANA, “The Crimson Winter: A 50 Day Record of Iran’s 2025–2026 Nationwide Protests,” February 23, 2026; the UK Home Office, “Country bulletin Iran: protests of December 2025 to January 2026”; Amnesty International, “What happened at the protests in Iran?” January 26, 2026; and Iran Human Rights, “At Least 3428 Protesters Killed in Iran; Serious Risk of Further Bloodshed,” January 14, 2026. Lead with HRANA-confirmed counts and institutional summaries. Do not state the “30,000 in 48 hours” figure as fact. The women-led resistance inside Iran. For the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising after Mahsa/Jina Amini’s death, the state’s continuing campaign against women and girls, and the wider moral meaning of compulsory veiling as a regime-control mechanism, see Amnesty International, “Iran: Two years after ‘Woman Life Freedom’ uprising, impunity for crimes reigns supreme,” September 2024, and Reuters, “Mahsa Amini’s death in Iran custody was unlawful, says UN mission,” March 18, 2024. The Omani breakthrough, the night before the strikes. Omani Foreign Minister Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi’s televised statement that a deal was within reach is available in the CBS transcript, “Full Transcript: Omani Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi tells ‘Face the Nation’ a U.S.-Iran deal is ‘within our reach,’” February 27, 2026, and the CBS video, “Oman’s foreign minister says U.S.-Iran nuclear ‘deal is within our reach’”. The transcript supports the claims that Iran would accept zero stockpiling, full IAEA verification, down-blending of existing stockpiles, conversion into fuel, and full access for inspectors. The accurate framing is that this was a proposed framework, not a signed agreement, and that it still left limited low-level enrichment on Iranian soil. The United States position before the strikes. For Trump’s public frustration with the talks and Steve Witkoff’s maximalist demands, see Kelsey Davenport, Arms Control Association, “Analysis: U.S. Negotiators Were Ill-Prepared for Serious Nuclear Talks With Iran,” April 2026, and ABC News, “Trump envoy Witkoff reveals more details of US negotiations with Iran prior to war,” March 26, 2026. The February 28 strikes and the killing of the supreme leader. The joint U.S.-Israeli strikes, the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the uncertainty around early reports are documented by AP, “Iran’s supreme leader killed in major attack by US and Israel,” February 28, 2026, and Reuters, “US-Israeli strikes kill Khamenei and Iranian retaliation shakes Gulf — as it happened,” March 1, 2026. Do not cite the “900 strikes in twelve hours” figure unless independently confirmed. Regime change as a stated objective. The president’s address to the Iranian people, including “the hour of your freedom is at hand,” is available from PBS NewsHour, “Read Trump’s full statement on Iran attack,” February 28, 2026. For reporting that the address was understood as a call for Iranians to rise up or take over their government, see ABC News, “Trump says new call for regime change in Iran justified by ‘imminent’ threat,” February 28, 2026, and El País, “Trump urges Iranians to rise up: ‘Now is the time to seize control of your destiny,’” February 28, 2026. The Strait of Hormuz, the blockade, and Project Freedom. Iran’s closure of the strait, reduced shipping, the U.S. counter-blockade on ships entering or leaving Iranian ports, and Project Freedom are documented by CENTCOM, “U.S. Military Supports Launch of Project Freedom in Strait of Hormuz,” May 3, 2026; the House of Commons Library, “Israel/US-Iran conflict 2026: Reopening the Strait of Hormuz,” June 8, 2026; and USNI News, “Report to Congress on the Iran Conflict and Strait of Hormuz,” March 13, 2026. For the statement that the blockade remained in effect pending the agreement, see USNI News, “Naval Blockade to Remain In Effect Until Official Agreement is Signed by Iran, U.S.,” June 15, 2026. The agreement. The deal built off the mid-June framework to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, lift or ease sanctions, release frozen assets, and begin a 60-day process for nuclear negotiations. Use AP, “US and Iran sign initial deal to end war, ease sanctions and open strait as nuclear talks continue,” June 17, 2026; AP, “Iran’s nuclear program still must be negotiated after initial deal,” June 17, 2026; Reuters, “White House sends text of interim US-Iran agreement to US Congress,” June 18, 2026; and Financial Times, “What is in the US-Iran deal?” June 2026. The nuclear question was deferred to a later negotiation window, not resolved. The February framework offered clearer nuclear constraints before the war; the June agreement reopened the strait and deferred the hardest nuclear questions into a later window. The War Powers vote. The House passed H. Con. Res. 86 on June 3, 2026, by 215 to 208: Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives, Roll Call 199. The Senate vote on May 19 was a procedural vote to discharge or advance a war-powers measure, not final passage: U.S. Senate, Roll Call Vote 129, 119th Congress, 2nd Session. A later Senate effort failed 47 to 48 on June 16: AP, “Senate fails to advance war powers resolution on Iran war,” June 17, 2026. Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War. For Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus, the Merryman controversy, and congressional authorization through the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act of 1863, Library of Congress, “Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties in Wartime”, the National Constitution Center, “Ex parte Merryman and debates over wartime civil liberties”, and Federal Judicial Center, Ex parte Merryman. Lincoln overstepped; he did not pretend the limit did not exist. The Gettysburg Address. For “so conceived and dedicated,” and “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” Library of Congress, “Gettysburg address delivered at Gettysburg Pa. Nov. 19th, 1863”. George Washington’s refusal of further power and his handing it back. For Washington’s Farewell Address, Founders Online, National Archives, “Farewell Address, 19 September 1796”. For Washington’s resignation of his military commission, National Archives, “George Washington’s Resignation Speech, December 23, 1783”. Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe
June 16 · 18 min
Man Eaters
The mess. Mid rats. He came in a couple minutes early. He ate fast, at a table that became a hospital bed for the wounded, and then he cleared his tray and dishes and moved into the narrow passage with the pipes running low overhead, ducking his head around them. Up the metal stairs to starboard. A couple of minutes with the sea before the watch. The deck was nearly empty. In a few minutes the others would join him, shadowed faces moving through the dark. He stood at the rail to watch the sea under the dark sky. Clouds. Stars. The wake ran out like a long trail behind the ship, two glittering edges. In the morning he would commune with the sea again, and the wake would have a bright spine where the sun shone along it, further and further until the sea stopped being water and became sky. Forward of him a younger sailor stood the rail, eyes on the water, a phone cord running from his chest into the dark. The boy would relieve him. Then the watch. Below him the ship hummed, scopes and gauges and green light on men’s faces. Up here there was only his eyes and the water. He watched for the thing that would come out of the trail in the dark that the machines could not catch, and when he saw it he would call it down the wire to a man he could not see. He knew the man would answer. Nothing came for hour after hour. You stood there for a thousand nights so that you would be there on the one night it did. No thanks for the thousand. No one would know about the one. The wind crossed the swell and laid whitecaps on water. He smelled salt in the air. Act One. Brasada The brush did not care that he had left, or that he had come home. It just was, gray and low and thick, mesquite and blackbrush and cenizo that flowered purple after the rain but was not purple now. The ground under it, white dust that stayed on his boots. Nothing in the country was soft. The catclaw reached out and took his sleeve. He stopped and worked the thorn loose and then went on. By midmorning the heat had settled in. A caracara sat the fence post and watched him. To the south the river and past the river more of the same. He had stood the watch a long way from here. He had thought about this ground and what it would mean to come back. Now he was on it, hot and full of hooks, and he was glad to be here. His father was at the pens. He never asked the boy to help him do a job he could do himself, which was nearly everything. He did not ask how long the boy was home. He did not look up from the gate he was wiring shut. A plane flew overhead, low. “Cow’s calf is off in the tasajillo,” the old man said. “She’s bawling for it.” They found it in thick brush, in the only shade for a quarter mile, lying down. It was small and it did not get up. The son went down on one knee in the white dust and saw the navel and the wound. Wet and dark and moving. He knew. The wound was full of them, packed in tight and working deeper, head down, feeding, and the smell came up off it sweet and wrong and turned his stomach. He did not pull back. He looked at the small animal and the small mouths in it. He held the phone over the navel of the calf and took the picture and did not look at it. “Screwworm,” the old man said. Then he said, “We’ll doctor it,” and went for the truck. He cleaned it and picked them out and dressed it. The rider came up the road in the heat of the afternoon while they were still at it. Horses could go where you could not take a truck, and the rider wore leather to the knee against the thorns. He came this way every week, working the river and the ranches along it, looking at what crossed and what strayed. The watch. He looked down at the calf and at the navel they had cleaned, and his face changed, and he asked to see the picture, and the son gave him the phone. The rider looked at it a long moment. Then he made his calls, quiet, off to the side. He had hoped he would not have to. “Got word last week to watch the river hard,” he said. “Somebody south of here saw something.” He took some larvae from the dust. After that it moved fast. The sample went somewhere far north the old man had never seen. And then more planes. They came over low in the early morning, day after day, working a pattern above the brush, and the son stood out in the white dust and watched. He knew what they were carrying. Flies. Sterile. They would drop them out over the country by the millions so that the ones already here would breed to nothing and burn out. The cure and the sickness were the same bug, one barren and dropped from the sky onto the other. The son went back to the calf. It lived. First they fed it with bottles and then it got up on the fourth day and went to the cow. The wound dried and began to close. By the end of the week it ran from him along the fence and the old man watched it and was satisfied. “All that,” the old man said that evening on the porch. “Government flying airplanes around. Dropping bugs out of an airplane. Over one calf.” He drank his coffee. “And the calf’s fine. Hell, I doctored a hundred calves in my life and never needed the government to help me do it.” “You never saw one before,” the son said. “Never had to.” He finished the pot into his cup. “Man depends on a thing he can’t see and can’t fix, he’s not a free man anymore. He’s just waiting on somebody else to keep doing him a favor.” He drank. “I never wanted to be that man.” “You’re not wrong,” the son said. “The day they quit, we’re in trouble.” He watched the calf along the fence. “But the day they quit isn’t this day. This day the calf’s alive because a man in Panama didn’t quit. And a pilot you’ll never meet didn’t. The most you and I could do tonight was clean a wound. The rest of it we can’t do.” The old man thought about that and judged it foolish. “Hell of a thing,” he said. “Spend a man’s taxes on something that don’t happen.” He finished his coffee and went in to bed. The son stayed out on the porch. He had stood a great many watches full of things that did not happen. He knew what they cost and who paid for them. The cost wasn’t money. It was that a man who never stood the watch got to believe, his whole life, that there had never been anything out there in the dark at all. Act One and a Quarter. The Line Moscow. February. The cold came through the wall behind him. Someone in Washington had cabled a small question. Why do the men across the way behave as they do? He sat down to answer it. He filled one page and started another. The thing across the way did not hate them over this quarrel or that. Not the kind of quarrel men settle and forget. It hunted an enemy because it needed one. Take the enemy away and it would find another, because without an enemy it could not explain itself to its own people. He saw. Wrote it down. The answer ran too long for the wire. He broke it into five parts and sent them through one after another. The clerk worked the key deep into the night. Moscow to Washington. Piece by piece. He did not know if anyone would read it the way he meant it. He sent it anyway and went to bed. He said we could not beat the thing head-on. The trying would break us. He said we should stand at every place it tried to widen. Hold there. Wait. Let it spend itself against its own nature. The thing carried the seed of its own ruin and would rot from the inside if we only denied it room. Men on the far side had to hold too. They needed roads and radios and law. They needed officers who would answer when called, and clerks who would send the message, and pilots who would fly the route. They needed men who could see the thing when it came. We could not be their backbone forever, but we could bring tools and money and time, and we could leave them able to hold their own ground. He could not prove it and that was the trouble. Hold and wait looked like weakness to good men, and good men told him so. He could read the enemy one way and they could read it another, and no one could open the thing up and see who was right. He held it on faith and argued it the rest of his life and never got to be sure. Far south, another man chased an insect, and the insect gave him the proof the other man never got. He could not poison the screwworm off the land. It bred faster than he could kill it. It bore him no malice. It was hungry, and it would never stop being hungry. So he stopped trying to kill the ones in front of him. He took hold of one thread, even though other men laughed at it. The female mates only once in her life. He reared the flies by the thousand. Fed them gamma rays until they could not breed. Turned them loose to find the wild ones. The wild female spent her one mating on a barren male. Her young never came. The next brood came fewer. The one after that thinner still. The thing emptied itself out of a country without a shot, not from a blow of force, but from its own breeding turned against it. He tried it first on a small island two miles off Florida. He dropped the barren flies by the thousand and watched the count fall. Then the count quit falling. The island sat two miles out, and the mated females flew back across the water faster than the barren males could empty them. So close. It didn’t take. The line had a far side he did not hold, and the fly walked back across it from the country next door. So he looked for ground with no country next door. He found it forty miles out in the warm sea. He flew the same barren flies down from Orlando, packed in paper bags, and ran the same lines a mile wide over the brush, week after week. This time the count fell and kept falling. Four generations of it. Then one morning he read the trap and nothing answered. He read it again before he believed it. Here was the proof the other man died wanting. Hold the line, deny the thing room, and it ruins itself from the inside. Neither man knew the other. Neither knew their idea was the same, or that it would come back seventy years later, a thousand miles north, over a calf neither would live to see. Act Two. The River Morning. He liked to be early so he didn’t have to rush. He could drive the truck, but he wouldn’t find the cattle in the brush unless he was in the brush. He could drive the truck and park and walk, but that ended up with him as far from the truck as the barn. So he saddled the horse in the dark, a bay. He rode to the edge of the cenizo and waited for the light. No sense in pushing into somewhere he couldn’t see. Then the sun and the brush and the heat with it. He knew the cattle would be near enough to the water and rode out to look. He worked through the cows and their calves one at a time, lifting tails, checking navels and ears and the soft places where a wound starts. Even a tick bite would be large enough for the man eater to lay her eggs. Last week he had spent twenty minutes chasing a calf through the brush to inspect a scratch no bigger than his thumbnail. He felt foolish afterward. He was glad to find nothing but he did not trust it. He knew the thing came when you were not looking and knew that tomorrow he would look again. The land ran south to the river, low and brown. Past it more brush went on into the other country where the thing had come up from. It lived down there and it was not going to stop. You could not kill it because the man eater is hungry like anything else. What you did was hold it below a line and keep holding it, and the watch had no end. The plane came over while he sat the horse. It came low and worked its pattern. He watched it and knew what was falling out of it. The flies, barren, by the millions, drifting down onto the brush to find the wild ones and leave no young. Some of these sterile flies came up from Panama, where the line had been held in the jungle longer than he had been alive. Some from Mexico, just across the brown water. He sat there and thought that the flies over his father’s ground had crossed two borders to get there, made by men in other countries he would never meet, for a war his father did not believe was being fought. He thought that he had left the watch when he left the sea. He had only traded the water for the brush. Act Three. Altitude Engines hum. Boxes strapped down, cold coming off them to keep the flies dormant. They’re the same boxes they drop north of here, but the crew doesn’t think of that. They have flown the pattern for a while now. It’s a good job and the hours are steady. They fly it easy, talking about other things. None of them has ever seen the thing they fly to stop. The crew chief and his wife are expecting. The shower is today, back home. She is hoping for a girl. He is hoping for a healthy mother and a healthy baby and tells her he doesn’t need more than that. He means it. Below them the jungle is green and goes on green as far as the eye can see. The sun is up and full and lights up the river that runs through the trees, a bright spine on the water, the light running further and further until the green stops being land and becomes sky. It is a good morning. Clear all the way. The chute feeds. The flies go out cold into the warm air and wake as they fall, scattering, drifting down over the canopy, barren. These flies will have no offspring. The crew chief watches the load go out and thinks about the drive home and whether the icing will melt. The flies fall into the light over the jungle. No one below will ever know they came. Sources A literary nonfiction essay. Factual claims link below to a primary or reputable secondary source, current as of June 10, 2026. The pest. The New World screwworm is Cochliomyia hominivorax, the species name translates as “man eater.” Its larvae burrow into the living flesh of warm-blooded animals through wounds and body openings, including the navel of newborns, and untreated infestations are often fatal. * New World Screwworm — USDA APHIS * New World Screwworm Myiasis — CDC DPDx * Eradicating New World Screwworm with Sterile Insect Technique (fact sheet, PDF) — USDA APHIS The female mates only once in her life. This single biological fact is what makes the sterile insect technique work. * Deconstructing the eradication of New World screwworm in North America — Medical and Veterinary Entomology (PMC) Deterrence structure of the essay (the thousand nights for the one night, the watch that no one thanks) is sourced to the author’s personal background. The factual counterpart is the prevention paradox of the screwworm barrier: a permanent, forward-deployed effort whose success looks like nothing happening. The Panama-based biological barrier held the line at the Darién Gap for decades. * The New World Screwworm in the United States: A Narrative Review — Pathogens (PMC) — documents eradication by the 1960s and containment thereafter “by a Panama-based biological barrier.” The calf. The fictional calf newborn, a navel wound packed with larvae, found in South Texas brush, is the real index case. On June 3, 2026, USDA APHIS confirmed New World screwworm in a three-week-old calf with larvae in its umbilical area in Zavala County, Texas (La Pryor), roughly fifty miles from the Mexico border. A rancher noticed distress and called a veterinarian. It was the first confirmed detection in U.S. livestock in nearly sixty years. * USDA Confirms New World Screwworm in Texas (June 3, 2026) — USDA APHIS * New World Screwworm Confirmed in Zavala County Calf (June 3, 2026) — Texas Parks & Wildlife Department * First U.S. Cases of New World Screwworm Detected — American Farm Bureau Federation, Market Intel * First U.S. screwworm case confirmed in South Texas — The Texas Tribune The sample going “somewhere far north.” Confirmation is done at the USDA National Veterinary Services Laboratories (NVSL) in Ames, Iowa. * Texas Animal Health Commission — New World Screwworms The rider, the surveillance line, “somebody south of here saw something.” The forward-monitoring network: nearly 8,000 traps are jointly monitored along the border, with surveillance coordinated across the U.S., Mexico, and Central America. The pest reemerged in Chiapas, Mexico in November 2024 and moved progressively north, which is the “word from the south” the rider carries. * New World screwworm confirmed in United States — dvm360 * New World Screwworm: Rise, Fall and Resurgence — American Society for Microbiology The planes and the sterile flies. Eradication works by releasing sterile male flies that mate with wild females; because the female mates only once, she then lays unfertilized eggs and the population dies out. “The cure and the sickness were the same bug” is literal. Sterile flies were already being released aerially in the affected area at roughly four million per week before the detection. * New World Screwworm — USDA APHIS * New World screwworm confirmed in United States — dvm360 “Some came up from Panama... some from Mexico.” The only sterile-fly production facility in operation in North America is jointly managed and funded by USDA and Panama’s Ministry of Agriculture Development (MIDA) through COPEG, the Commission for the Eradication and Prevention of Screwworm. Dispersal facilities operate in Mexico and South Texas. * New World Screwworm — USDA APHIS — USDA–Panama (MIDA) joint facility through COPEG. * New World screwworm confirmed in United States — dvm360 — dispersal facilities in Mexico and South Texas. “Held below a line... the watch had no end.” The containment-not-elimination posture is the actual strategy: the parasite remains endemic in South America and the Caribbean, so the barrier must be held indefinitely. This is the structural fact under the essay’s deterrence argument. There is no morning the work is declared done. * The New World Screwworm in the United States: A Narrative Review — Pathogens (PMC) Edward F. Knipling, the sterile insect technique The single insight under the whole screwworm strand — that the female mates only once, so breeding sterile males into her range collapses the next generation — was conceived in the late 1930s by USDA entomologist Edward F. Knipling, working with Raymond C. Bushland at the USDA laboratory in Menard, Texas. Knipling grew up raising cattle with his father in Port Lavaca, Texas, where he saw firsthand what the screwworm did to the herds — the rancher’s son who left the brush, understood the enemy, and came back at it with something larger than one man’s hands. He and Bushland shared the 1992 World Food Prize for the technique. * Edward F. Knipling — National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir (PDF) * Edward Fred Knipling Papers — USDA National Agricultural Library, Special Collections * The Life and Vision of Edward F. Knipling — USDA Agricultural Research Service * Knipling, E.F. (1955). “Possibilities of insect control or eradication through the use of sexually sterile males.” Journal of Economic Entomology 48: 902–904. * 1992 World Food Prize: Knipling and Bushland The production scale and the new facility. USDA broke ground in April 2026 on a sterile-fly production facility at Moore Air Base near Edinburg, Texas, expected to produce roughly 300 million sterile flies per week once operational in 2027. A separate sterile-fly dispersal facility in Texas was announced at a cost of about $8.5 million. These figures ground the scale of the airborne effort the crew is flying. * New World screwworm confirmed in United States — dvm360 — Moore Air Base groundbreaking, ~300 million flies/week, 2027. * As USDA prepares to fight New World screwworm — University of Florida IFAS — $8.5M dispersal facility; 300 million flies/week. The cold-keeping of the flies. Sterile flies are chilled to keep them dormant in transit and released to wake as they warm. * Eradicating New World Screwworm with Sterile Insect Technique (PDF) — USDA APHIS Historical anchor The United States eradicated screwworm domestically by 1966 using the sterile insect technique, and eliminated a small Florida Keys outbreak in 2016–2017. The first field trial was on the island of Curaçao in 1954, where the fly was eradicated within four months. Since 2023, the pest has moved north again through Central America and Mexico, the reemergence that frames the present moment. * New World Screwworm — USDA APHIS * New World Screwworm: Rise, Fall and Resurgence — American Society for Microbiology * New World Screwworm Information — Oklahoma State University Extension The Philosophy The spine is Cold War containment debate: Kennan’s forward partnership against Nitze’s capability, with Niebuhr standing watch. George F. Kennan — the Long Telegram (February 22, 1946) The 5,000-word cable from Moscow that became the founding document of containment. Kennan’s true argument is not the cartoon of walls and patience but forward engagement: choosing points of resistance deliberately, building the strength and confidence of partners so the contest is held at the source rather than at home. * The Long Telegram — Teaching American History (full text) George F. Kennan — “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” (the X Article, Foreign Affairs, July 1947) The public expansion of the Long Telegram, published under the pseudonym “X.” This is where containment became doctrine, and where Kennan’s emphasis on the adroit, vigilant application of counter-force at constantly shifting points, not brute militarization, is most clear. Kennan spent the rest of his life objecting that the doctrine had been read as a call to arms rather than a call to forward, patient partnership. * George F. Kennan, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs (July 1947) Paul H. Nitze — NSC-68 (April 1950) “United States Objectives and Programs for National Security.” Drafted under Nitze, who had replaced Kennan as head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, NSC-68 is the capability argument in full: marshal overwhelming political, economic, and military strength rather than rely on restraint or the goodwill of others. The father’s porch speech, that a free man keeps his own ground with his own hands and does not wait on a favor, is NSC-68 compressed into one stubborn man. The Kennan-to-Nitze succession at Policy Planning is the seam the essay dramatizes. * NSC-68, 1950 — U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian (Milestones) * Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950, Vol. I, Document 85 (full NSC-68 text) — Office of the Historian * NSC-68 — Harry S. Truman Library & Museum Reinhold Niebuhr, the watchman’s conscience Niebuhr is the moral frame, not a single document: the insistence that a nation acts within history without ever seeing the full account, that virtue and self-interest are tangled, and that the honest posture is faith held before the verdict. His The Irony of American History (1952) is the closest single text, the argument that American power must act without the comfort of knowing it is innocent or that it will be vindicated. * Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (1952) — University of Chicago Press The unspoken ending is Habakkuk 3:17–19 — rejoicing though the fig tree does not blossom and the fields yield no food. The watchman’s faith before the outcome, which is the son on the porch and the crew over the jungle, neither told the wall holds. * Habakkuk 3:17–19 — Bible Gateway (KJV) Sources verified June 10, 2026. Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe
June 9 · 18 min
Latrines
Behold again the stars. The light. The stairs down. Down. There are no windows in the basement of the residence hall. The light comes from tubes that hum in the ceiling. It does not change, the same at five in the morning as at noon. He could work an entire spring semester down here and never once know what the sky was doing. He lets himself in with the key on the loop at his belt. The door shuts behind him. The hum of the fixtures, the only sound in the part of the building that is awake. He fills the bucket at the mop sink. Warm water. It will be gray inside the hour. He wheels the cart down the tiled row to the elevator. The squeaky casters have needed oil since before he started this job and he has stopped hearing them. He begins on the third floor at the far end, where the rooms are worst, because the morning can only get better after those. He works the stalls first. He doesn’t think much about what the weekend has left him. It’s the same every Monday. He mops. Wrings the mop. Sets the yellow sign across the door though no one will come for an hour. He does the work the way it needs done because there is no reason to do it the other way. A bathroom is clean or it is not. A great and shining institution cannot have filthy bathrooms, and so the bathrooms are clean. Who would clean them? And so he does. It’s not the hardened waste or urine on the floor or vomit or hair or broken glass or cups or mud or the smell that beats him. It’s the wall under the hand dryers. The hot air throws water off wet hands and the water carries what is on them, and over the years it streaks down into the paint, a yellow bloom low on the wall in the shape of everyone who ever made the mark and walked out. He scrubs. He has scrubbed since September. He found the cabinet with the stronger chemical and used the stronger chemical. The bloom lifts a shade. It’s the color of piss, but it’s been scrubbed clean. The supervisor is an older man who has been in the building longer than some of the faculty. He stops on his round and looks at the wall and tells him kindly to give it another go. The supervisor believes the wall comes clean. It is his building and his name on the schedule, and he cannot allow himself to believe it will never come clean. Even though he knows only paint will make the wall white again, the boy gets back to it. He works the brush in tight circles. The chemical bites the back of his throat. The musty heat of the room comes up through his jeans. Above him the dryers wait their turn. He scrubs it again. It does not come clean. Act I. No Windows Ten O’Clock. The boy’s hands, clean and resting on a table on the second floor, where there are windows. He showered. Changed his shirt. The cart back in its closet, yellow sign hung above the mop sink. None of the morning is on him now. Not the smell or the chemical, nothing a person could see. The room is comfortable in a way the basement was not. The light moves through clouds outside. He takes a seat where he can watch it. There are nine of them and the professor. They are reading Rawls. The professor asks a question he is fond of. Imagine you do not know who you will be. Rich or poor. Gifted or ordinary. This family or that one. You must choose the rules of the society before the curtain lifts and you are told which life is yours. He lets it sit. Would you choose this one? The boy across the table answers first. He almost always answers first. This boy’s room is on the third floor. A corner suite, good light, and two windows. The nearest bathroom to his is the worst room in the hall. The third-floor boy doesn’t know that anyone knows this. All he knows is that the room is clean when he wakes. He has never wondered who cleans it. No reason he would. The world arrives each morning already ready for his use, the way it always has. The loud boy says society is just. He speaks well. He says that the door is open to anyone and that the ones who walk through it do so because of who they are, not who they were. On the other side of the door is a place that doesn’t ask where you came from, only what you can do. No one hands you anything here. The boy who scrubbed his bathroom at five stays silent. He could say something. He knows the thing you would say. He read it in this very seminar, three weeks back. They had all read it. There are as many students here from the top percent of the country as from its entire bottom three-fifths. He knows which part he came from. He cleans bathrooms at five in the morning. He could lay it out for them now. He does not. The attention is not on him and he would rather keep it that way. He folds his hands. Watches the cloud move across the light. The seminar runs its hour. The professor is not cruel. Not one of them is lying. But the room cannot see. Up here, the room believes everyone here is equal. The corner room boy believes the door is open because when he walked through it, it was open. The professor believes the question is still a question. Only the boy with the mop sees both parts of the building, and he says nothing because there is nothing to say that the room will hear. The professor closes the book. The hour is up. The boy from the third floor gathers his things and goes, and does not look at him on the way out, the way you do not look at what you do not know is there. At five tomorrow, he will be scrubbing the wall again. At ten, he will be back in this chair. He is the only one at the table who is both, and no one at the table knows it, and that is the stain. Act II. The Dark Page There is a window. At night the window is a black square with his reflection in it, not a view. He sits at the desk in the dark so as not to wake his roommate. The light comes off the screen and the cursor waits on him. The assignment. Six pages. Take the veil of ignorance and test it against a life. He can finish the essay in an hour. He has it in his head already. He starts. “Behind the veil, not knowing whether we will be rich or poor, we would build a society that protects the worst off, since any of us might be the worst off.” True. He keeps going. He writes that protecting the worst off does not have to mean the dishwasher and the surgeon take home the same pay. It means the dishwasher’s kid gets a fair run at the surgeon’s job. He thinks of a runner’s analogy and writes that fast runners should be allowed to run. He believes a piece of it. After all, in a classroom, he is a fast runner and has always been. That’s how he came to be at this university. He has known since he was small that his mind closes on a problem faster than the room around him, and he cannot pretend otherwise. He also knows there are slower runners, and you can’t make a slow runner fast. He writes that the rules should clear the track so a man or woman willing to run can get somewhere. This is what justice owes a person. Not the finish line, but a fair run at it. He reads it back. It is clean. Correct. He cannot find a false sentence in it. And it is a lie. Not in what it says. In what it leaves out, which is the whole of his own life. He is fast. And he cleans the bathroom at five. Both. No one cleared the track for him; he ran it carrying a mop, at an hour the corner-room boy will never see, and he is going to make it anyway, and the essay he just wrote would say that proves the system works. The fast runner ran and won. It is a lie. He keeps at the philosophy and the philosophy keeps beating him. Reward the runner who’s willing to run. Fine. But who handed the runner the will? The ability to run with the pain in your side. The discipline to run the sprints, quarter mile after quarter mile. He didn’t build the part of himself that works. It came down to him, from a mother, from somewhere, set before he could choose it, the same as the fast came down to him. Praise a man for trying and you’re praising him for something somebody handed him. Turn it the other way, though, and it’s worse. If trying comes down to pure luck, then nothing is earned, by anyone. A world that hands the man who runs and the man who sits the same bread will get a great deal less running. He has seen it. He knows the difference between a man who works and a man who waits, even if neither one chose the engine he was born with. The philosopher can prove on paper that no one earns anything. The boy who cleans the floor at five has seen too much to believe him, and could not tell you why. The old king had it three thousand years ago and the seminar hasn’t caught up. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise. Not because the swift aren’t swift. Because the race was never the only thing happening. Time and chance happen to us all. It goes through his mind but he doesn’t write it down. The professor wants Rawls, not an old king. He looks at the clean, correct, lying page, and he does the only thing there is to do with a thing that will not come clean. He turns it in. Act III. The Stage The professor hands the papers back on a Tuesday. He saves the boy’s for last, and he means to discuss it. He sets it down and taps it and says it is good work, but that he lost the thread at the end. The connection to Rawls fell apart. Would the boy say a little more about what he was reaching for. The room glances at him. He could give them the quick easy version. He has it in his head already. But he can’t quite get to it. Instead he says he wasn’t reaching for anything. He says he was trying to write down what he already knew and couldn’t make sense of. He doesn’t say this out loud, but he knows it in his gut because he cleans the bathrooms, but putting it into words is…is… They wait. He knows it the way he knows the weight of a mop bucket, and they don’t. He says: you asked us to imagine not knowing who we’d be. He says he doesn’t have to imagine it. He says the man who wrote the question didn’t have to imagine it either. Rawls learned it somewhere the man beside him died and he didn’t, for no reason that made any sense to anyone, and he couldn’t afterward call the difference earned. That much comes out plain. He watches it land on nothing and keeps going anyway. He says everyone in this room was born on one side of the veil and has never seen the other. He looked. They didn’t have to. They know which cards life dealt them. They’ve known since they were small. The exercise asks them to pretend for an hour not to know, which is something a person can’t do. If your belly has never been empty, how can you pretend to know what hungry is? He says this university is the finest institution one could make and he means it. The professors teach well and no one is cruel and not one of them is lying. The question he can’t answer is: how you can build a thing this crooked while not doing a single thing wrong? They let him in and took his picture for the brochure, but he has to clean the bathrooms. He reaches for the last part. The part he wrote in the dark and deleted. Whose father’s name opens the door, and why the door has to stay this narrow to be worth walking through. He reaches for it, and it will not come. He says, finally, the only piece of it he can say plainly: that the building runs on the public’s money, and hangs the public’s oldest word over the door, and he has cleaned its floors at five in the morning and still does not know who the place is for. The ones who pay for it, or the ones who run it. Then he is done, because the rest of it will not come. For a moment there is a quiet that could go either way. A phone buzzes. A boy across the table drops his eyes to it under the lip of the table, reads, half-smiles at whatever it is, and is gone. Somewhere else now. The professor lets the quiet finish and nods. He says that is a rich response. He says it raises the distributive question Rawls cares most about, the difference principle, and that it would make a strong revision if the boy grounded it more firmly in the text. He says they are nearly out of time. He says good work again, and means it, and moves to the next paper. And that is all. Then, Spring, outside in the yard, in the late morning. They call his name and he crosses the stage. Shakes a hand. He is out of the basement for good, up the stairs, into the open air. He will not return. He finds his seat in the rows. The speeches run on and at some point he stops hearing them. That evening, the party. His parents are there, his friends from before. Some of them want him to go take on the world, to prove it could be done. His mother wants him home. And a few, the honest ones, know that a man who comes back from up here only makes the dark harder to sit in, and would not thank him for it. He cannot tell anymore whether he can’t go home or won’t. The sky opens up, and the first of them show. Somewhere, a wall waits under a dryer for somebody’s smartest child. He got out, and the getting out is what seals the next kid in. He looks up. Cold and far and indifferent. The same ones over everyone who ever got out and everyone who never did. Behold again the stars. Sources Primary sources for factual claims, listed in the order their material appears. Anthony Abraham Jack, The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students (Harvard University Press, 2019). The “Community Detail” work-study program. Low-income students cleaning the dormitory bathrooms of their wealthier peers, mopping up after weekend parties, is documented here, along with the segregated scholarship-ticket lines and the spring-break dining-hall closures. Publisher (primary): https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674248243. Harvard Educational Review, confirming the bathroom-cleaning program: https://www.harvardeducationalreview.org/content/89/3/509. The Chronicle of Higher Education profile of Jack, quoting the “Community Detail” passage and the student’s words directly: https://www.chronicle.com/article/can-this-man-change-how-elite-colleges-treat-low-income-students/ Raj Chetty, David J. Deming & John N. Friedman, “Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges,” NBER Working Paper No. 31492 (2023). Children from the top 1% are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college as middle-class applicants with comparable SAT/ACT scores; two-thirds of the gap is the admissions rate itself. Attending Ivy-Plus raises the odds of reaching the top 1% of earnings by roughly 60%. Full paper (primary): https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31492/w31492.pdf. Non-technical summary, Opportunity Insights: https://opportunityinsights.org/paper/collegeadmissions/ Chetty et al. (2017), “Mobility Report Cards,” for the income-share figure. At Harvard, ~15% of students come from the top 1%, roughly equal to the share from the entire bottom three-fifths of the income distribution. (38 colleges, including five Ivies, enroll more students from the top 1% than from the bottom 60%.). Opportunity Insights, college mobility data: https://opportunityinsights.org/paper/mobilityreportcards/ Peter Arcidiacono, expert report and testimony in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2018 trial; decided U.S. Supreme Court, 2023). The “ALDC” category, Athletes, Legacies, applicants on the Dean’s interest list, and Children of faculty/staff made up under 5% of applicants but roughly 30% of admits, and roughly three-quarters of white ALDC admits would have been rejected absent the tip. Supreme Court opinion, SFFA v. Harvard (2023): https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Harvard University Press, 1971; rev. ed. 1999). The original position and the veil of ignorance; the difference principle (inequalities are just only insofar as they benefit the worst-off). Publisher: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674000780 Rawls’s war (the unnamed soldier in Act III): Rawls served in the Pacific in WWII (New Guinea, the Philippines, occupied Japan), an experience widely tied by scholars to the moral intuition behind the veil. Thomas Pogge, John Rawls: His Life and Theory of Justice (Oxford, 2007): https://global.oup.com/academic/product/john-rawls-9780195136371 Ecclesiastes 9:11, King James Version. I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. Traditionally attributed to Solomon (”the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem,” Ecclesiastes 1:1). KJV, full chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+9&version=KJV Dante Alighieri, Inferno — the closing line, e quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle (”and thence we came forth to behold again the stars”), Canto XXXIV. Public-domain text, Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8789 Plato, Republic, Book VII — the Allegory of the Cave (the prisoner freed into the sun; the question of return). Public-domain translation, Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1497 Raj Chetty et al., “Social Capital I & II,” Nature (2022). Cross-class friendship (”economic connectedness”) is the single strongest predictor of upward mobility for low-income children. The value of the room is who is in it. Opportunity Insights, Social Capital Atlas: https://socialcapital.org/ Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit (2020). On meritocracy’s hubris in the winners and humiliation in the losers, even when it “works.” Publisher: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374289980/thetyrannyofmerit Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe
June 2 · 29 min
The Drought Sale
A man selling good cows is not happy about it. Wednesday morning in May. He pulls into the gravel lot at half past seven. The sun is up but the cold has not gone. Winter is fighting summer. Some days in May might reach the 80s, some days snow. His breath hangs in the air and catches on the bill of his hat. Jesse stands on the seat and watches the door. The lot is full. It should not be full. Wednesday is not a normal sale day in May. Today is a drought sale, and the trailers are lined up in rows he has not seen in this lot in years. Goosenecks and bumper-pulls. Plates from three states. Some of the trailers have cows in them with calves still wet at their sides. The market is so busy there aren’t enough pens to hold all the groups. The ranchers unload, and the cattle move straight through the alleys into the sale ring, then onto a different truck. A rancher does not haul a wet calf to a sale barn unless something is wrong. He kills the engine. Sits a moment. The check he is about to get is already in his head. The math is bad and the math is the math. Twenty-five head in the trailer. Cows he had not planned to sell for years. Good cows. Bred back. The snow and the grass didn’t come this winter and the hay he would need to carry them through summer is gone or priced past what the check from October will cover. Some years he might have been able to buy hay from Missouri and ship it, but fuel prices are way high because some strait on the other side of the world is closed, so that doesn’t pencil out. He has run the numbers a hundred times since April. There is no version where he gets to keep them and still make money. He steps down. The gravel crunches. Jesse, Bentley mark on her forehead, stays in the cab. The brand inspector is at his post off to the left of the building. Same man. Carhartt and a brown ballcap. He looks up and nods. He has been doing this a long time and he has never seen a Wednesday like this one. He does not say so. He does not need to. Inside, the pay window. Three ladies behind it. One of them smiles at him the way she has smiled at him for twenty years. He touches the brim of his hat. Through the door to the arena. The stairs are tall and the bleachers are full. Men he knows. Men he does not. Coffee in styrofoam. The smell of diesel and pine shavings and manure that his father knew and his grandfather before him. The auctioneer is already going. He climbs up. Finds a seat. Watches. The buyers are in the front row. He counts them. Three. There should be more. He drove four hours past Buffalo to get to a barn that has eight on a good day. Today there are three, and none of them are looking up. A heeler trots up the aisle. Red, with a bad left ear. She sniffs his boot. Moves on. The cows come through. Cow calf pairs, mommas still wet from calving with their calves in the pen behind them. A man two rows down has his hand over his mouth. The auctioneer’s chant rises and the gavel falls and rises and falls again. His turn comes. Twenty-five head out of the trailer. Black, good condition, papers clean. The gate opens and they come through in a knot, hooves and dust, and the man with the flag moves them into the ring. The chant starts. A nod from the buyer for the Nebraska feedlot. A nod from Oklahoma. The Colorado man does not look up. The pause. The gavel. The price is the price. He walks down. Goes to the pay window. The lady he knows slides a check across the counter. She doesn’t smile. He folds the check and puts it in his shirt pocket and thanks her and touches his hat and walks out. The trailer is empty when he gets to it. Jesse stands up on the seat and waits for him to open the door. He sits a moment before he turns the key. The lot is still full. Other men are still in the bleachers. Cows in the holding pens behind the building are bawling for the calves they came in with, the calves now in different pens behind different trailers belonging to men they have never met. He has played the game for thirty years. His father played it for forty. His grandfather homesteaded the ground. It was never designed for him to win. He starts the truck. Pulls out of the lot. Four hours home. He has all afternoon to think about it. On the drive home, he passes a sign for a high school football field. He doesn’t think about it. He should. Act I. Hope in the North A Sunday in January, a sports bar in Detroit, a man in a Lions jersey watched his quarterback take a knee. Jared Goff at quarterback. Three years before, the Lions and Rams had swapped quarterbacks. The Lions sent Matthew Stafford to Los Angeles. The Rams sent Goff to Detroit along with two of their best draft picks for the next two years to make the deal go through. The NFL holds one draft a year. Every team picks new college players in turn, worst team first, best team last, the rule that has built competitive balance in the league for ninety years. Los Angeles gave up its top picks in two of those drafts to get Stafford. Two years of the league’s best mechanism for building a future, handed over for one quarterback. The Lions took the deal because they hadn’t won a playoff game in thirty-two years and had nothing left to lose, and because the picks the Rams handed over were what they needed to build a team around the quarterback nobody else wanted. Then, 2022. HBO put new head coach Dan Campbell’s fiery speeches on ‘Hard Knocks’ and the city took to him right away. The team started one and six that year, and then won eight of their final ten games. A year later. On this Sunday, in the wild card round of the 2023 playoffs, the Lions were ahead of the Rams by three with two minutes on the clock. Goff dropped back. He threw a first down to Amon-Ra St. Brown, a fourth-round receiver every other team had a chance to take, a receiver Detroit had taken because the rules of the draft put him in their pile when nobody else wanted him. The first down moved the chains. The clock kept running. Then the victory formation. Goff under center. The snap. The knee. Clock running. The crowd on its feet. The man at the bar with his hand on his beer and his eyes on the television and his throat closed. The Rams fans somewhere far away, already gone. The man at the bar had grown up watching the Lions lose. His father had grown up watching the Lions lose. Thirty-two years. The Lions had been the worst-run franchise in American sports. The rock bottom of those years came in 2008 when they became the first team in NFL history to lose every game of a season. Detroit was the punchline of every joke about American decline and the people who lived there had been told by everyone who had never lived there that the city was finished. The man at the bar had not moved on. And on this Sunday in January, his team was taking a victory knee in a playoff game. The league was built for this. The teams had the same salary cap. The same revenue from the same national television deal. The same weighted draft order that gave worse teams better picks the next year. Rules written so that thirty-two years of losing could be ended by good drafts and good decisions and a fair chance. The Lions did not win the Super Bowl that year. They lost the divisional round the next week by three points, on a kick as time expired. The season didn’t need a trophy. The season had done the work. Detroit had been crushed by shuttered auto plants and fights between capital and labor. The Lions gave them reason to keep going. The man at the bar would carry that reason into his Monday morning. Into the rest of the winter, into the next season and the season after that. Whatever else the Lions did or did not do, the man at the bar had been given back the thing that had been taken from his city for thirty-two years. A country, like a city, has to be allowed to keep what it has earned. Our founding documents are our rules. The rules say we the people, for the people. They claim a kid born in a leaky trailer can raise her children in a warm house, with food on the table, in a good school district. They are either true, or they are the most spectacular lie ever committed to paper. Competition does not happen naturally. The principle is older than football, and the league did not invent it. It has to be designed. Enforced. Maintained, year after year, against the gravitational pull of consolidation, because consolidation is what every winning team and every winning company would prefer if the rules allowed it. The rules aren’t focused on the teams. They’re focused on the people. At the start of every season, any fan can believe their team can win a playoff game. The salary cap does not celebrate competition. It is an admission that without it, the Steelers and the Patriots and the Chiefs would eat everyone, and the product would die. The NFL’s design isn’t perfect. The Patriots ran the AFC East for two decades. The Chiefs have run the AFC West for most of the last ten years. The Packers under Lombardi won five championships in seven seasons. Talent clusters. Coaches and quarterbacks and general managers cluster with talent. The design can’t stop Tom Brady and Patrick Mahomes from being great quarterbacks. The design constrains the time over which a team can dominate everyone else. Imperfect is not the same as failed. And it took many years to build consensus. In February of 1936, Bert Bell, owner of the worst team in football, proposed that the league’s college player draft be run in reverse order. Worst team picks first. Best team picks last. The richest owners in the room would lose the freedom to outbid Bell for college talent. They would lose the path to permanent dominance. Bell argued that without the rule, the strongest teams would consolidate talent year over year, the weaker teams would fold one by one, and a league without competitive balance would lose its audience. The vote was unanimous. The first NFL draft was held two days later. The reverse-order draft has been the rule ever since. Twenty-five years later, in 1961, Commissioner Pete Rozelle proposed a single national television contract that would split the revenue equally among all fourteen teams. The richest teams would leave millions of dollars on the table. They agreed. Rozelle then took the deal to a federal court in Philadelphia, where a judge ruled it an illegal restraint of trade under the Sherman Antitrust Act. Rozelle had weeks to save it. He went to Congress, testified that professional sports could not function as ordinary businesses because no team in a league wants its competitors to fold, and asked for a law that would legalize what the court had just struck down. Congress passed the Sports Broadcasting Act in September. President Kennedy signed it. Every dollar of national television revenue the NFL has earned since has been split evenly among the franchises because a Commissioner persuaded the owners of the richest teams to share with the poorest, and then persuaded Congress to bless the sharing. We built the design for a game. We didn’t build it for beef or airlines or for the search bar in everyone’s pocket or the cloud the search bar runs on or the eyeglasses on the reader’s face or the seeds the farmer puts in the ground. In every one of those markets we did the opposite. We let corporations consolidate and shareholders cut costs. The products got worse and prices got higher and the people on the receiving end of those markets, like the rancher, the traveler, the searcher, the patient, and the farmer, got told it was the cost of efficiency. It is not the cost of efficiency. It is the cost of cowardice. Now, let’s not be naive. The NFL is a cartel. The salary cap is wage suppression. The draft is a restraint on the freedom of a young man to sell his work to the highest bidder. The revenue sharing is collusion among thirty-two owners who agreed to bind themselves to a common rule. The cartel produces something the free market does not. A Sunday in January in Detroit. A man at a bar with his throat closed. Hope in a city that everyone told to give up. The cartel produces the thing a country actually needs its institutions to produce. We built the rules for a game. We didn’t build them for the country. We still can. It’s been done before. Act II. Sir Robert Peel A century and a half before Bert Bell asked his peers to constrain themselves, a different man stood in a different chamber and asked the same thing of a different cartel. He had no Commissioner. No Congress willing to bless what he was about to do. He had only the office, the argument, and courage. His name was Robert Peel. He was a Tory. He was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, the most powerful office in the most powerful empire the world had ever seen. He had been born to a wealthy cotton manufacturer and raised to defend the interests of the rich men who had paid for his education. He did, for thirty years. He defended them in the House of Commons. He defended them as Home Secretary. He defended them as Prime Minister. The interests he defended included the Corn Laws. The Corn Laws were tariffs on imported grain. Tariffs are taxes on the poor. They had been passed in 1815 to protect the price of domestic British wheat against cheaper grain from mainland Europe and the United States. The men they protected were the landed gentry. The men they hurt were everyone who bought bread. In a country where the working class spent half its income on food, the new taxes stood between a man’s wage and his children’s supper. Peel defended them. He believed, as his father and his class had, that protecting domestic agriculture was the foundation of national security and social order. He was not wrong about either argument. A country that cannot feed itself is a country at the mercy of its enemies. A country with impoverished agricultural producers is a country with unstable political order. The arguments were serious. Peel made them seriously. Then the potato crop failed in Ireland. In the autumn of 1845, a fungus arrived in Europe and turned the Irish potato harvest into a black slurry in the ground. The crop failed again in 1846. And again in 1847. Ireland, a country of eight million people, lost a million of them to starvation and disease in five years. Another million left. The population of Ireland in 1851 was smaller than in 1841. The Corn Laws did not cause the famine. The blight caused the famine. But the Corn Laws were the laws under which a starving country could not buy cheap grain from abroad, because the laws made cheap grain illegal. The landed class was protected. The Irish peasant was not. Peel saw it. He had defended the laws his entire career, and he saw what the laws were doing in the autumn of 1845. He decided he had been wrong. Not wrong about the principle of national agricultural security. Wrong about tariffs levied on the people who were starving in real time. The arguments he had made for thirty years were no longer the arguments the moment required. The discipline of his career was to follow the evidence to the decisive point. He did. He decided to repeal the Corn Laws. His party would not follow him. His party was the Conservative Party. He had built it and supported the wealthy elites. He had defended their principles for three decades. Repealing the Corn Laws meant taking food off the table of the men who had funded his career and put him in his office. Two-thirds of his own party voted against him. He did it anyway. The Importation Act passed the House of Commons on May 15, 1846. The House of Lords passed it on June 25. Royal assent came the next day. The cartel of grain prices that had stood for thirty-one years was no more. The same night the Lords passed the repeal, a coalition of Whigs, Radicals, and protectionist Tories who had not forgiven Peel for his betrayal defeated his government on an unrelated Irish coercion bill. The vote was 292 to 219. Peel resigned the office of Prime Minister four days later, on June 29, 1846. He had spent his career as a Tory and ended it without a party. The Conservatives he had built would not speak his name without a curse for a generation. He gave three speeches before he resigned. The last was the one that mattered. On June 29 he stood in the chamber and defended what he had done. He didn’t apologize or hedge. He explained that he had repealed the laws because the laws had become unjust. That a country whose food was priced beyond the reach of its workers was a country whose government had failed in its first responsibility. That protecting the few at the cost of the many was not conservatism. It was privilege wearing the costume of conservatism. And that the conservative who refused to know the difference was conserving nothing worth conserving. And then he turned, in the last paragraph, to the country he was leaving. In modern words, he said: One day, families will sit in a warm house and share a meal. They will have earned that meal by the sweat of their brow, in work that paid them what their work was worth. The food on their table will not be priced past their reach by men they will never meet. They will not give thanks for the absence of injustice, because they will not have to know it was ever there. In those houses, perhaps, they will remember one who had the courage to lose his career so the cartel could be broken. One who had the discipline to follow the evidence past every argument he had spent his life making. One who had the justice to say out loud that a law written to protect the few at the cost of the many is not a law worth keeping. One who had the wisdom to know that a party which protects privilege is not conserving anything that deserves to be conserved. In those houses, they will remember him with goodwill, the way a family at a full table remembers anyone who made the table possible. Sir Robert Peel died four years later, in July of 1850. Thrown from a horse on Constitution Hill in London. It shied, threw him, and fell on top of him. He lived for three days in pain and died at his home in Whitehall Gardens. He was sixty-two. His party did not attend his funeral. The working men of Britain did. They lined the streets in numbers no one expected. They had not known him personally. They had never been in a room with him. They knew only that they were eating cheaper bread because of what he had done. The law that had taxed their suppers had been broken by a man who had been the most powerful man in the country. He had spent his career defending the system and then gave up his power to break it. We have his problem. Courage is not rare. It is common. What is rare is the willingness to pay its price. Act III. The Empty Pen North out of Torrington on 26, then west to Casper, then north again toward home. Jesse on the seat. The check folded in his shirt pocket. Empty trailer behind him. Afternoon sun on his left shoulder. He has driven this road a thousand times. He has never driven it after a sale like this one. The rain had come last week, too late to matter. The grass here was winter grass. The rain would make it green, but it grew in the winter, not the summer. It would not grow now. By July the pastures would be the color of straw. Twenty-five head. Good cows. Cows he had not planned to sell for years. Cows that would have raised calves in 2027 and 2028 and 2029. Three years of calves gone in one Wednesday morning. The calves those calves would have raised, gone with them. He had not just sold cows. He had sold the next decade of the ranch. If he could have kept heifers in 2026, the bull could breed them in 2027, calves in 2028. By the time those calves were on the ground and weaned and through the feedlot, that’s pretty close to the end of the decade. There isn’t anything anybody can change. We can’t build them out of spare parts. Biology is biology. A cow has one calf a year. A heifer takes two years to be ready. The herd can’t be rebuilt by want or policy or prayer. The herd can only be rebuilt by years of high prices that let ranchers afford to keep the females and breed them instead of selling them. The herd needs five years. The drought reset the clock to zero. His kids in three cities will be in middle age before the national herd is back to where it was the day before he was born. And prices will stay high until that day comes. North of Kaycee the Bighorns come up on the left in a long pale wall. Snow on the high peaks. The sage between him and the mountains, gray and patient. He knows what the country could do, if the country had the courage. The answers are not hidden. They are not even particularly hard. Break up the four packers. Enforce the Packers and Stockyards Act the way it was written to be enforced. Give him eight buyers in the front row at Torrington instead of three. Let the price the auctioneer calls be a price discovered in a real market, not a price set the day before on a board in Chicago by four companies that act like one. Label the beef. Country-of-origin, ranch-of-origin, USDA grade fed back to the cow-calf operator the way the data has been technically possible for ten years and politically possible for none. Let his good cows command the premium good cows are worth. Let consumers know what they are buying. Let the price he gets reflect the work he did. Tax the businesses that pay their workers below the wage that keeps them off social programs. Reward the ranches and the diners and the small operations whose employees do not need the taxpayer’s help to heat the house. Stop subsidizing corporations that pay their employees so little the government has to make up the difference. Stop treating corporations like disadvantaged small businesses. Build starter homes. Reform zoning. Let his son in Billings come home to a house his work can afford. None of it is theoretical. All of it has been written, debated, modeled, scored, and shelved. The reforms are sitting in committee files in Washington. They are sitting in policy papers from Heritage and Brookings. They are sitting in the books on his own nightstand. What is missing is the senator who will lose her caucus to vote for them. The congressman who will lose his district. The president who will lose his coalition the morning after the bill is signed. Courage is not rare. The willingness to pay its price is. He does not know if that person exists. He has not seen one in his lifetime. But he hopes, because the alternative means agreeing to the world as it is. The wicked prosper, injustice goes unanswered, the violent rule the meek. He does not agree. He will walk on the high hills. He turns off the highway onto the county road. Past the mailbox his father put up. The gate his grandfather hung. Jesse stands up on the seat. The kitchen window light is on. The wife is at her desk, writing. He walks out behind the barn, to the pens. They will be empty this summer. And next summer. Maybe the summer after that. Empty when his son in Billings decides whether to come home, or empty when his son decides not to. The wind moves through the aspens. A meadowlark sings from the pasture. The Bighorns catch the last of the light. A man selling good cows is not happy about it. Sources Kate Meadows, “Wyoming Ranchers Selling Off Cattle As Drought Tightens Grip Across State.” Cowboy State Daily, May 13, 2026. https://cowboystatedaily.com/2026/05/13/wyoming-ranchers-selling-off-cattle-as-drought-tightens-grip-across-state/ The May 13, 2026 special drought sale at Torrington Livestock Markets — 9,000 head, against a typical May weekly volume of 400 to 700 head. Co-owner Lander Nicodemus on the cause. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, “Cattle Inventory,” January 30, 2026.https://usda.library.cornell.edu/concern/publications/h702q636h Official USDA-NASS report. Total cattle and calves at 86.2 million head as of January 1, 2026 — lowest since 1951. Beef cow inventory at 27.6 million head. American Farm Bureau Federation, “Smaller Cattle Herd Creates Market Volatility.” https://www.fb.org/market-intel/smaller-cattle-herd-creates-market-volatility Farm Bureau analysis. Year 13 of the current cattle cycle, year 8 of contraction. Derrell S. Peel, “Drought Threatens the Herd Rebuild.” Cow/Calf Corner Newsletter, Oklahoma State University Extension, May 6, 2026. Republished by Angus Beef Bulletin. The White House, “Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy,” July 9, 2021. Official statement confirming the Big Four control approximately 85% of the beef market. The Fence Post, “100 years of the Packers and Stockyards Act: Modernization and enforcement,” August 20, 2021. Equitable Growth, “Protecting livestock producers and chicken growers: Recommendations for reinvigorating enforcement of the Packers and Stockyards Act,” 2023. https://equitablegrowth.org/research-paper/protecting-livestock-producers-and-chicken-growers/ Policy analysis of the Packers and Stockyards Act and current enforcement gaps. Pro Football Hall of Fame, “1936: The NFL’s First Draft.” https://www.profootballhof.com/football-history/nfl-draft-history/1930/1936 Official Hall of Fame history. Bert Bell’s proposal approved May 19, 1935. First NFL draft held February 8, 1936 at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Philadelphia. Jay Berwanger first pick. Federal Judicial Center, “NFL Television Broadcasting.” https://www.fjc.gov/history/spotlight-judicial-history/nfl-television-broadcasting Federal court history. Judge Allan K. Grim’s 1961 ruling that the NFL’s pooled CBS deal violated the Sherman Antitrust Act, and the legislative response. Sir Robert Peel, “Resignation of the Ministry,” speech in the House of Commons, June 29, 1846. Hansard, 3rd Series, Vol. 87, cols. 1043–1056. https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1846/jun/29/resignation-of-the-ministry The full resignation speech, in Peel’s own words, as recorded in the parliamentary record. The closing passage modernized in Act II of the essay is from this speech. Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England 1783–1846. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006. Standard academic history of the period including the Corn Laws repeal and Peel’s career. Norman Gash, Sir Robert Peel: The Life of Sir Robert Peel After 1830. London: Longman, 1972. The standard biography. Sourced for the death of Peel (June 29 – July 2, 1850) and the working men’s response at his funeral. Cormac Ó Gráda, Black ‘47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Standard academic history of the famine. Central Statistics Office of Ireland, “Population of Ireland 1841–2022.” https://www.cso.ie/en/statistics/population/Official Irish census data showing the population decline from 8.2 million in 1841 to 6.5 million in 1851 and below. National Famine Museum, Strokestown Park. https://strokestownpark.ie/national-famine-museum/ Documentation of the famine, mortality, and emigration. Habakkuk 3:17–19 (New King James Version). Though the fig tree may not blossom, Nor fruit be on the vines; Though the labor of the olive may fail, And the fields yield no food; Though the flock may be cut off from the fold, And there be no herd in the stalls — Yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation. The LORD God is my strength; He will make my feet like deer’s feet, And He will make me walk on my high hills. To the Chief Musician. With my stringed instruments. Habakkuk 1:2–4 (New King James Version), on injustice unanswered. Source of the prophet’s complaint: “the wicked surround the righteous, therefore perverse judgment proceeds.” Companion Pieces The rancher, the four-packer market, the kids in three cities, and the structural reforms named in Act III have been developed across the following pieces in this body of work: The Price Is the Price: A Letter to Raging Moderates. Both Fly. The Sand Trap. Should America Give Our Surplus Grain Away Every Year? Should American Cattle Ranchers Sacrifice for China? Do You Know Where Your Beef Comes From? Why Do We Treat Small Businesses Like Publicly Traded Corporations? Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe
May 19 · 24 min
We Are All Republicans, We Are All Federalists
Dr. Nick van Terheyden had bone pain that he could not explain. He was fifty-eight, a physician in Maryland. A specialist ordered a $350 blood test for vitamin D deficiency. The test came back positive. The deficiency was severe enough that if left untreated, it would lead to osteoporosis. Van Terheyden’s insurer was Cigna. They refused to pay for the test. The corporate medical director who signed the denial letter said the test wasn’t medically necessary. Van Terheyden read the letter, looking for the clinical reasoning. There was none. Only generic language, a response from a machine. He filed an appeal. A second medical director upheld the denial. To reimburse van Terheyden for the test that had come back positive, van Terheyden would have to prove he had a vitamin D deficiency before the test had been done. He kept investigating. Cigna used a system that flagged mismatches between billing codes and acceptable diagnoses. It let the company’s medical directors deny claims in batches without opening a patient’s file. Internal documents later showed that the doctor who rejected van Terheyden’s claim rejected roughly sixty thousand claims in a single month. Over a two-month window, Cigna physicians denied more than three hundred thousand payment requests. The average review took 1.2 seconds. It took seven months and an external medical review to force the insurer to pay the $350. Two years passed. On December 4, 2024, a man named Brian Thompson stepped out of a New York hotel and was shot dead on the sidewalk. He was the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare. Shell casings left behind were inscribed with three words: deny, defend, depose. Across demographic lines, Americans began telling their own stories. Denials, delays, bankruptcies, deaths. The shooter had read the same files Dr. van Terheyden had. So, it turned out, had millions of others. The event left a question America still cannot bring itself to ask out loud. What would it take to build a healthcare arrangement Americans can actually live with? Act I. The Body In Centerville, Ohio, Tim Anderson watched his wife die for three years. Doctors diagnosed Mary Anderson with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. ALS destroys motor neurons one at a time. The body loses the ability to walk, then to swallow, then to speak, then to breathe. The mind stays. The patient is awake for all of it. By the end, Mary could no longer move her arms or her legs. She could no longer eat without help. Her voice was going. Her physicians prescribed equipment to help her breathe and to help her speak. The Andersons were insured through UnitedHealthcare. UnitedHealthcare denied both claims. Tim Anderson appealed. The company denied the appeals. He appealed again. The denials continued. The medical necessity of the equipment was not in dispute among Mary’s doctors. The diagnosis was not in dispute. The progression of the disease was not in dispute. The only substance in dispute was whether the insurer would pay. The Andersons could not get coverage for the machines that would have helped Mary breathe or speak. Toward the end, Mary communicated by blinking when Tim held up pictures. The family relied on donations from a local ALS group to cover what their insurance had refused. She died in 2022. After the shooting on the sidewalk in New York, Tim Anderson spoke to a reporter. He said this: “The business model for insurance is don’t pay. When Mary could still talk, she said to me to keep fighting this. It needs to be exposed.” The Andersons live in red, rural Ohio. Tim Anderson is sixty-seven. He worked his whole adult life, paid his premiums, raised his family. He didn’t enter the healthcare debate through ideology. His wife’s battle brought him into it anyway. Eight hundred miles south, in Jefferson, Georgia, Luke Seaborn opened a shop to restore classic cars. Seaborn was fifty-four. He had been trained as a chemical engineer and had spent years in corporate work before leaving to do what he loved. The shop was small. The private insurance market for a small business owner in rural Georgia was punishing. For himself and his son, the premiums were close to impossible. In 2023, Georgia’s Republican governor Brian Kemp launched a program called Pathways to Coverage. It was a Medicaid waiver with a work requirement. Eligible Georgians could enroll if they could prove they were working, studying, or volunteering at least eighty hours a month. The program was designed as a conservative answer to Medicaid expansion. It tied coverage to personal responsibility. Seaborn enrolled. He believed in what the program said it was. He was grateful for the coverage. When the governor’s office asked him to film a promotional video, he agreed. He stood in his shop, surrounded by vintage Fords, and praised Pathways as a blessing. The governor used the footage to argue that work requirements foster independence. Then the program began to fail him. Seaborn logged his eighty hours every month, as required. In November, the state canceled his coverage. The state had quietly introduced a new form. It required enrollees to periodically re-enroll by re-entering the same information in a different format. Only an insurance executive Seaborn had met during the promotional shoot could restore his benefits. He had to call her directly. A few months later, a software glitch stopped his text alerts. He logged into the portal in March and discovered his coverage was set to terminate on April first. The state said he had missed an annual income statement. His policy was not yet due for renewal. He could not reach a caseworker by phone. He paid out of pocket for his family’s medications while he tried to fix it. The Pathways program had cost Georgia taxpayers more than eighty-six million dollars by then. More than fifty million had gone to Deloitte Consulting to build the portal. The program had enrolled barely three percent of those eligible. Seaborn said this to a reporter: “I am so frustrated with this whole journey. I did what I was supposed to. But that wasn’t good enough.” Two Americans. Different states. Different tribes. Different illnesses and programs. UnitedHealthcare denied Mary Anderson’s breathing machine. The State of Georgia’s Medicaid portal canceled Luke Seaborn’s coverage. One was private corporate denial. One was public administrative failure. They are the same failure. In both cases, a working American did what the system asked. Paid the premiums. Filed the forms. Logged the hours. Played by the rules of the arrangement. In both cases, the arrangement failed to honor its own terms. The diagnosis, the mechanism, the grief. These are not partisan. The conservative rancher’s widow and the conservative small-business owner are not the only Americans this happens to. The diagnosis runs the country. Healthcare administration, then, is not a debate. It is a machine. Act II. The Architecture In Holly Springs, Mississippi, Dr. Kenneth Williams runs the only hospital within twenty-five miles. Williams is a family physician and the chief executive of Alliance HealthCare System. Holly Springs is in Marshall County. Marshall County has about thirty-eight thousand people. The next-closest hospital is a long drive. Williams has been there since 1999. Sixty to sixty-five percent of his patients are on Medicare. When Medicare Advantage came into the program in 2006, the math of running his hospital changed. For five years before that, Alliance had been profitable. After Medicare Advantage took hold, the hospital lost almost two million dollars in a single year. Denials came in patterns Williams had not seen before. Insurers rejected treatments his physicians ordered. Insurers a thousand miles away shortened stays his physicians said were necessary. The denials killed a geriatric psychiatry program Alliance had built to serve the county’s elderly. The hospital had to close it. Williams was blunt about the system and the insurers. “I knew that our hospital couldn’t exist under the payment system it is under right now,” he said. About the insurers he went further: “They don’t want to reimburse for anything. Deny, deny, deny. They are taking over Medicare and they are taking advantage of elderly patients.” The hospital had already ended inpatient care in March 2023. Then they had to close the only emergency room in Marshall County in April 2024. Williams kept what he could: outpatient services, the clinic, the lab. The architecture had dismantled the rest of his hospital, floor by floor. When a reporter asked him who suffered from the closures, he answered in two words. “My patients.” Williams does not know Dr. Nick van Terheyden. He has never read the ProPublica investigation of Cigna’s algorithm. He has not seen the internal documents showing what 1.2 seconds per claim looks like on a corporate scorecard. He does not need to. He has watched the same gears grind his county for more than twenty years. He watched it kill a psychiatry program for elderly people in rural Mississippi. He watched it nearly kill the hospital itself. The Maryland physician saw the algorithm. The Mississippi physician saw the cemetery. This is the architecture America built. Whether by design or by negligence, we built it. A patient gets sick. A doctor orders a test or a treatment or a piece of equipment. A system designed to find reasons not to pay reviews the order. A doctor does not. The reviewing doctor, if there is one, does not open the file. The system issues the denial. A second reviewer hears the appeal and upholds the first. The patient appeals again, if the patient has the time and the literacy and the energy. Most do not. The question this architecture raises is older than the architecture itself. Who decides? Who has the authority to decide what shall be done with a human body? The person whose body it is, the doctor she has chosen to examine her, or a corporate medical director who has never met her and will not open her file? The American tradition has an answer. The patient and her physician. The body is the first property a person owns, and the right to decide what happens to it is the foundation of the right of liberty. No one has the authority to override that judgment. Not the state. Not a corporation. Not an actuary. The arrangement America built does this routinely. It is our business model. The question of who decides is only half of the moral architecture. The other half is older than the Republic. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise. Time and chance happen to us all. Mary Anderson did not choose ALS. The patients in Marshall County did not choose to be born into a county that lost the only mental health service it had. Time and chance fell on them, inside a system we built as if we believed time and chance did not exist. A healthcare arrangement worthy of the American tradition has to do two things at once. It has to preserve the liberty of the patient and the physician. And it has to provide a floor against the cruel net. The arrangement America built fails at both. It overrides patient and physician judgment through automatic denial, and it leaves people bankrupt when the net falls anyway. It violates liberty without providing security. It manages neither responsibility nor mercy. The country has lived with this long enough to recognize what it is doing. Tim Anderson knew when UnitedHealthcare denied his wife’s breathing machine. Luke Seaborn knew when Georgia’s portal canceled his coverage. Williams has known since 2006. Van Terheyden since 2021. This isn’t partisan. The architecture is the disease. The tougher question is, what do we do about it? Act III. The Long Walls In Big Sandy, Montana, Shane Chauvet was working his ranch when a windstorm came up. Big Sandy sits on the high prairie just north of the Missouri Breaks. Eight hundred people. One hospital. Twenty-five beds. The Big Sandy Medical Center is what the federal government calls a critical access facility. For the ranchers and farmers of that part of Chouteau County, it is what stands between a bad day and a fatal one. The wind that afternoon was strong enough to tear pieces of metal off the outbuildings. A sheet of it caught Chauvet as it flew. The cut nearly took his arm off. His wife loaded him into a truck. They drove to the hospital. They found the emergency room doors locked. The wind had knocked out the power across the county and the staff had moved to a side entrance to run the building on generators. Chauvet’s wife pounded on the doors while his blood pooled on the ground. Someone heard her. The medical staff at Big Sandy stabilized the arm. Then they put Chauvet in a ground ambulance and drove him eighty miles through rain and hail. Chauvet credits the hospital with saving his arm and his life. He told a reporter what he had learned. “I always would say, ‘Oh, they’re nice to have,’ but now I look at the hospital and say, ‘That’s essential to our community.’” The Big Sandy Medical Center may not be there in five years. Since 2010, nearly one hundred rural hospitals across the United States have closed. The reasons are not mysterious. Medicare Advantage and commercial insurers pay below the cost of providing care. The denials grind the margins to nothing. The closures begin with inpatient services, then the emergency room, then the doors. Marshall County, Mississippi, lived through this with Dr. Williams’ hospital between 2023 and 2024. Chouteau County, Montana, is one storm away from watching it happen to its own. When the cruel net falls on a working American in rural America, the architecture that catches him is fragile. The system that overrides his physician’s judgment when he is sick is the same system that dismantles the hospital that will keep him alive when the wind picks up. The architecture that is the disease is not in question. The country has known what its healthcare arrangement is doing for years. The tougher question is, what do we do about it? A national single-payer healthcare system makes sense. Lower administrative cost, universal coverage, the bargaining leverage to discipline pharma and provider pricing, and the elimination of bureaucratic violence. There’s nothing radical about people having healthcare, jobs, and education. We find money for what we prioritize. An America that wanted to make this transition could do it. And it will fail catastrophically if one party passes it 51-49, because half the country will spend the next forty years trying to dismantle it, and the instability of that fight will produce worse outcomes than the broken system it replaced. In May 2026, a prominent progressive leader vying for a presidential run described single-payer healthcare in a single word: forever. Presidents, senators, and elected officials come and go. Single-payer healthcare would outlast them all. This is the language of division. One tribe passes structural reform over the other and locks it in beyond the reach of reversal. And it is exactly the move that guarantees the reform’s failure. The Affordable Care Act is the proof. It passed in 2010 on a party-line vote; every Republican administration since has worked to dismantle it. Every Democratic administration has worked to expand it. Sixteen years later, hospitals cannot plan. Insurers cannot plan. Patients cannot plan. The rules change with every election. The instability is its failure. Now imagine that fight scaled to the entire healthcare economy. Every two years, every four years, the question reopened. A country that cannot agree on how to administer an insurance subsidy cannot administer a national healthcare system passed by half of itself over the other half. The alternative is consensus. Medicare is the proof. It passed in 1965 with substantial Republican support; seventy House Republicans, thirteen Senate Republicans. It has survived sixty years because both parties helped build it. Both parties campaign on protecting it. The durability of consent. Ancient Athens and its port lay four miles apart. The countryside between them belonged to no one in particular and to every army that crossed it. After the Persian Wars, during the half-century the Athenians later called the Pentecontaetia, the city built two parallel walls along the road to the sea. The walls connected the city to the port. They made the four miles between the city and the port indistinguishable from the city itself. An enemy could blockade the city, and grain could come in. Ships could be supplied. The city could not be starved out so long as the walls stood. The walls cost a generation of argument to build. Sparta opposed them. Athenian factions opposed them. The Athenians built them anyway because the men who remembered the Persian invasion understood that a city cut off from its port was already lost. They built across disagreement. They built because the alternative was a slow surrender to anyone who could control the road. The framers understood this. The Constitution that we have was the product of a long summer of argument, compromise, and the deliberate construction of an architecture meant to require ongoing consent rather than one-time victory. We argue about Senate representation and the Electoral College, but the small states would not have joined the Union otherwise. The whole document is an exercise in building across difference. Healthcare in America has to be built the same way, or it cannot be built at all. The arrangement we build cannot belong to one tribe. The progressive who calls single-payer forever and the conservative who calls all collective provision socialism are both refusing the harder work, which is the work of building something that survives them. The Republic does not run on wishes and mandates. It runs on consent. In March 1801, after one of the bitterest elections in American history, Thomas Jefferson stood on the Capitol steps and addressed a country that had nearly broken under the strain of the contest he had just won. We are all Republicans, he said. We are all Federalists. He was telling the country that the legitimacy of the new arrangement required incorporating the people who had lost the election, not ruling over them. Healthcare reform of any kind demands the same consensus from a generation that has mostly forgotten how to gain it. The architecture is the disease. We built it. We can build something else. We will not do it as Republicans. We will not do it as Democrats. We will do it as Americans, or we will not do it at all. Sources Patrick Rucker, Maya Miller, and David Armstrong, How Cigna Saves Millions by Having Its Doctors Reject Claims Without Reading Them. ProPublica and The Capitol Forum, March 25, 2023. The investigation that exposed the PXDX system, Dr. Cheryl Dopke’s sixty thousand denials in a single month, and Dr. Nick van Terheyden’s seven-month appeal for a three-hundred-fifty-dollar test. PBS NewsHour, UnitedHealthcare CEO Shooting Opens Floodgates of Americans’ Insurance Frustrations. December 2024. Primary source for the Tim and Mary Anderson story, including the denial of equipment to help Mary breathe and speak, and the pictures Tim held up so Mary could blink. Margaret Coker, He Became the Face of Georgia’s Medicaid Work Requirement. Now He’s Fed Up With It. ProPublica and The Current GA, May 14, 2025. The Luke Seaborn story, the Pathways portal failures, the Deloitte contract, and the three-percent enrollment figure. Gretchen Morgenson, ‘Deny, Deny, Deny’: By Rejecting Claims, Medicare Advantage Plans Threaten Rural Hospitals and Patients, Say CEOs. NBC News, October 31, 2023. Source for Dr. Kenneth Williams’s quote about Medicare Advantage practices. Anna Wolfe, Holly Springs Hospital Ends Inpatient Care. Mississippi Today, March 31, 2023. The 2006 financial losses at Alliance HealthCare System and Williams’s diagnosis that the hospital could not survive under the existing payment system. Anna Wolfe, Marshall County’s Only ER to Close. Mississippi Today, April 11, 2024. The April 2024 emergency room closure and Williams’s two-word answer to the question of who suffered. Dr. Kenneth Williams, The Future of Healthcare in Marshall County. The South Reporter, March 26, 2026. Williams’s own guest column to his community. The landlord-and-tenant framing and the January 2025 presentation to the Marshall County Board of Supervisors. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government. 1689. Chapter V, particularly section 27: “Every man has a property in his own person.” The foundation of the property argument in Act II. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty. 1859. The harm principle and the structural question of who has authority over the individual. Ecclesiastes 9:11–12, King James Version. The race, the battle, the bread, and the cruel net. Aaron Bolton and Arielle Zionts, Give and Take: Federal Rural Health Funding Could Trigger Service Cuts. KFF Health News and Montana Public Radio, March 27, 2026. The Shane Chauvet story, the Big Sandy Medical Center, and the Rural Health Transformation Program's risk to rural hospitals. University of North Carolina Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research, Rural Hospital Closures. The standard primary source for tracking rural hospital closures since 2005. Pocharapon Neammanee, AOC Responds To Assumptions Of 2028 Presidential Run. HuffPost, May 9, 2026. Representative Ocasio-Cortez at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics in conversation with David Axelrod: “Presidents come and go, Senate, House seats, elected officials, come and go, but single-payer healthcare is forever.” Social Security Administration, The Corning Years: Medicare Is Enacted. The official history of the 1965 Social Security Amendments, including the bipartisan roll-call votes that created Medicare. Seventy House Republicans and thirteen Senate Republicans voted yes. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War. Book I, sections 89–93, and Book II, section 13. The Pentecontaetia and the construction of the Long Walls between Athens and Piraeus. Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address. March 4, 1801. “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.” The constitutional move that named this essay. Companion Pieces Americans’ Unalienable Right to Life. Healthcare as a component of the unalienable right to life. The Declaration, the Wyoming Constitution, and the right of the competent adult to decide. Should the American People Fund Cancer Research at Harvard?. The same architectural critique extended to pharmaceutical pricing. Taxpayers fund the research, universities patent the discoveries, drug companies set the prices, and the constitutional test for public spending goes unanswered. The Price Is the Price: A Letter to Raging Moderates. The minimum wage essay. Lincoln, the Long Walls, and consensus as the precondition for structural reform. Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe
May 12 · 28 min
The Social Responsibility of Government is Sovereignty
The trailer’s loaded by four. Twenty-five head, sorted yesterday, the gate latched twice. The F-350 idles in the yard while he checks the running lights one more time. Jesse watches from the cab, ears up. The Bentley mark on her forehead catches the radio light. She is certain about the day. Buffalo to Torrington is four hours if the roads are dry. He pulls out of the drive at 4:17 and turns south on 25, coffee in the holder, the dog settled, the cattle quiet behind him. The dash reads twenty-six degrees. The eastern sky is still black. He’s made this drive many times over thirty years. His father made it before him in a different truck, but the math was the same. Raise them, feed them, haul them, take what you’re offered. The price is the price. He knows what he’ll get today, give or take. He knew last week. The packers’ bids move together. Four buyers act like one buyer because that's what four buyers do when they're the only four.. He’s run the numbers a thousand times. Grass, water, fuel, vet, the loan in 2022 when the rates were still reasonable. Every time, the numbers are the same. He needs the price to be a little higher than it’s going to be. The radio finds a station out of Casper. He turns it down but not off. Jesse walks a circle on the seat and lies down, chin on the console. Past Glenrock, the sky starts to come up gray. He thinks about their three kids. The oldest is in Denver. He and his wife have been trying to buy a starter house for four years. Every time they save up, the prices have moved. The middle one is in Cheyenne. She’s a nurse, her husband works for the railroad, and they want three kids but can’t afford for either of them to take a year off. The youngest is in Billings. After a year of work, he’s decided to give college a try, looking at the University of Wyoming for the fall. He doesn’t know what he might do after. The ranch needs him to come back and run things. There hasn’t been money for two households in a while. He passes a gas station outside Douglas. Diesel is up again from last week. By the time he hits Torrington, the sun is full up, and the lot is filling. Trucks from Goshen County, from the Panhandle, from up north like him. Men he’s known for years and men he’s never seen. They nod at each other and back their trailers toward the chutes. The auction starts at nine. The buyers are already inside, drinking coffee, looking at the sheets. He kills the engine and sits for a second. Jesse stands up in the seat. A beautiful morning. He’s not asking for anything. He’s done the work. The cattle are good. The truck runs. The loan gets paid. He’d just like the price to be the price his work is worth, in a market that is what it was supposed to be. He opens the door. The cold comes in. Jesse jumps down ahead of him, but she’ll stay with the truck. Act I. Scene 1. The Half of Friedman Everyone Quotes Fifty-six years ago, in September of 1970, the New York Times Magazine published an essay that has shaped American economic thinking ever since. Author Milton Friedman, a University of Chicago economist who would win the Nobel Prize six years later. The title was The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, about three thousand words long. Most people who quote it have read the title and a paragraph or two. This essay, more than any other, changed how business in America works. The commonly understood argument is straightforward. A corporate executive is an employee of the shareholders. His job is to make money for them, within the rules. If he spends company money on social objectives, such as reducing pollution beyond what the law requires, hiring quotas beyond what the market supports, or making charitable contributions beyond what serves the business, he is spending other people’s money on objectives those people did not choose. Taxing the shareholders without their consent. The phrase that survived is the one that was easiest to put on a coffee mug. The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. It became a motto, then a worldview. By the time Reagan took office in 1981, it was the dominant framework of American corporate governance. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it had become something close to common sense. Maximize shareholder value. Let the market sort the rest. Before Friedman’s thesis, many businesses believed they had a broad role to maintain an equitable balance among interest groups. Stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large. Friedman drew a different line. Businesses owed shareholders profits. Social objectives were the work of a different institution. His thesis cleared the way to dismantle the post-World War II structure. Businesses would have minimal obligation to workers, communities, and the country. Their obligation was money. Manufacturing went offshore. Industries consolidated. Productivity gains flowed to CEOs and shareholders instead of workers. Friedman’s thesis was the one people reached for when they needed cover. And the dagger…Friedman was right. The logic is sound. An executive who pursues social objectives with shareholder money is doing two things he is not authorized to do. He is making policy decisions that, in a democratic Republic, are supposed to be made through political deliberation. And he is taxing the shareholders to fund those decisions, without their vote, and without their consent. The objection most people raise to Friedman is that the framework is too narrow. Businesses operate in a society, depend on a society, and owe something back to the society. Treating the corporation as a profit-maximizing machine misses the human reality of what corporations actually are. These objections have weight. Businesses do operate in society and depend on it. But the objection misses the counterpoint. Friedman himself addressed this concern in the same essay. The part nobody quotes. Act I. Scene 2. The Half Nobody Quotes Friedman continued. A few hundred words after the line that became the coffee mug, he wrote that if anyone is going to pursue social objectives with public resources, that person has to be a civil servant. Selected through a political process. If anyone is going to impose taxes and spend money on those objectives, there has to be political machinery. Machinery to decide what taxes to assess. Machinery to decide what objectives to pursue. That’s the part nobody quotes. Friedman is not saying social objectives don’t matter. He is not saying businesses have no obligation to society. He is saying these obligations matter so much that they need a specific kind of institution to pursue them. That institution is not the corporation. That institution is the government. Friedman wrote a complete system. Two halves. The corporation does its job, which is profits. The government does its job, which is everything else the public decides matters. The two halves depend on each other. Social objectives matter. They don’t go away when business stops pursuing them. Without the government doing its job, business doing its job isn’t enough. Friedman knew we need both. He wrote it down. Published it in the same essay. The business disciples kept the first half. They have no role in the government half, so they dropped that part. The part about taxes assessed through deliberation. The part about objectives chosen through consent. The part about political machinery that the public controls. That’s the part that holds the whole system together. And because it had no champion, we lost it. So business profits increased. Industries consolidated. Wages stagnated. Housing got unaffordable. Then, instead of making the rules fair again, making the two halves fit together, we decided we would let business do whatever they needed to increase profits. Workers didn’t get their fair share of wages, but no matter. We would instead funnel money through our political machine to help people have enough money to live. How would we afford to pay for that? A great question. Act II. The Petrodollar The answer is borrowing. For fifty years, we have paid for things by borrowing money instead of raising taxes. That sentence is ‘History 101’ of federal finance since the early 1970s. We spend more than we collect. We make up the difference by selling government debt. Treasury bonds. A buyer hands us cash today, and we promise to pay them back with interest later. For most of those fifty years, the buyer wasn’t us. They were foreign. Specifically, the buyer was a government or a central bank in another country that had piled up dollars from selling oil and needed somewhere safe to put those dollars. American Treasury bonds were the safest place in the world. So the dollars came back to us. We borrowed them. We spent them. The deal worked because countries sold oil in dollars all over the world, and the dollars had to come home eventually, and home was the US Treasury. This arrangement has a name. Petrodollar recycling. Here’s how we built it. In 1971, Richard Nixon took the United States off the gold standard. Until that day, every dollar in circulation was backed by gold held at Fort Knox. After that day, the dollar was backed by nothing except the promise of the United States government. Nothing physical. Just a promise. That should have been a problem. A currency backed by nothing usually loses value. Other countries should have stopped accepting dollars and started demanding something more solid. They didn’t. Because three years later, in 1974, America made a deal with Saudi Arabia. The deal was simple. Saudi Arabia agreed to sell its oil only in US dollars. In exchange, the United States agreed to protect the Saudi regime and to let Saudi Arabia invest its oil profits in American debt. Other oil-producing countries followed. By the late 1970s, almost all oil in the world was sold in dollars. Every country that wanted oil had to hold dollars. Every country that sold oil ended up with dollars. And those dollars came back to the United States Treasury, looking for a safe place to sit. That’s the petrodollar arrangement. Oil bought and sold in dollars. Dollars recycled into Treasury bonds. America got to borrow cheaper than any other country in the world, because the world had no choice but to lend to us. When a government has to raise taxes to pay for things, the people feel it. They argue about it. Vote on it. They send representatives to a chamber to fight about what’s worth the tax and what isn’t. That’s the political machinery Friedman said was the whole point. It’s slow. Contentious. It’s how a free people decide what they want their government to do. When a government can borrow instead of tax, the people don’t feel it. The bill doesn’t come due today. The bill comes thirty years from now, paid by people who weren’t in the room when the decision was made. The argument doesn’t happen. The vote doesn’t happen. The political machinery doesn’t run. The dead exercise rights over the living. The petrodollar arrangement let the United States skip the political machinery. The petrodollar wasn’t the only reason we borrowed. Demographics shifted. Healthcare costs ran wild. Tax cuts went through without matching spending cuts. We went to war without war taxes. Recessions came and stimulus answered. The pressures pushing toward more debt were real, and they came from every direction. But every other country in the world faces the same pressures, in some form. And every other country eventually hits a wall. The bond market pushes back. Borrowing costs rise. The currency loses value. The politicians have to choose. America didn’t hit that wall. The petrodollar arrangement absorbed the pressure and dissolved it. We could borrow and keep borrowing, because the world had nowhere else to put its dollars. Want a transfer program? Borrow. Want a war? Borrow. Want to subsidize healthcare, housing, agriculture, energy? Borrow. We still hear these ideas today, in hidden words. How would we pay for healthcare for all? Universal basic income? EV tax credits? A $1.5 trillion defense budget? Tax cuts? The government will pay for it. How? With debt. So, business did its job, government skipped its job, and the bill went on a credit card foreign nations were happy to carry. The political machinery rusted. Deliberation stopped. We no longer needed consent, because we no longer felt the cost. That’s how we could pretend to afford to funnel money through the political machine instead of fixing the rules. We couldn’t afford it. We borrowed it. From people who weren’t in the room. To pay for objectives we never deliberated. Through a machine that rusted and seized up when the bill stopped arriving. Even though we didn’t have to pay the bill up front, we are still paying the cost. Act III. The Bill The arrangement is breaking. Not collapsing. Breaking. Slowly. A piece at a time, each piece small enough to ignore, the cumulative weight harder to ignore each year. Foreign central banks don’t buy as many Treasuries as they used to. China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, and Brazil are settling oil and other commodities in their own currencies more often. They’re buying gold instead of dollars. They’re building payment systems that route around the dollar. Each move is small. Together they’re a drift. The drift is twenty years old now, and it’s accelerating. What it means for us is simple. Borrowing costs more and will keep costing more. The bond market is starting to ask questions it didn’t ask before. The forty-year subsidy on American debt is wearing off. That’s the bill. It doesn’t arrive as a piece of paper with a number on it. It arrives as everything we put off, popping up in the lives of the people who inherited the deferral. The rancher’s been thinking about his kids the whole drive. The oldest in Denver. He and his wife have been trying to buy a starter house for four years. Every time they save enough for a down payment, the prices have moved. The last house they looked at was three-twenty. The bank qualified them for two-ninety. They decided to wait another year. The middle one in Cheyenne. She’s a nurse. Her husband works for the railroad. They have one child. They want three. But the cost of raising each one keeps going up faster than what they can save, and they can’t afford for either of them to take a year off when a baby comes. They decided to wait. The youngest in Billings. After a year of full-time work, he decided to give college a try. The University of Wyoming for the fall. He’s not sure what he’ll study. He’s sure that without the degree, the wage he’s been earning won’t earn the life he wants. The question he can’t answer is what the degree is going to cost. He doesn’t know how much he’ll have to borrow. He doesn’t know what he’ll earn when he graduates. The math is fuzzy. Three kids. Three good kids. Each one in a different city, in a different profession, running into a different version of the same wall. The oldest can’t afford the house his parents bought. The middle can’t afford the family her parents raised. The youngest can’t afford the path we told him would work. This is what the bill looks like when it lands in working lives. Three kids in three cities, deciding to wait. A house deferred. A child deferred. An adult life deferred. The bill is the gap between what their labor is worth and what their lives cost. The petrodollar arrangement let us paper over that gap for forty years by funding programs with deferred borrowing. The patches were transfer programs, and tax credits, and student loans, and housing subsidies, and all the downstream machinery that papered over what was happening upstream. The patches cost money. We borrowed the money. The bill came to the kids. They didn’t borrow it. They got handed the math. The rancher in the auction yard in Torrington. The lot is filling. He’s not angry at the kids. He’s not even worried about them, exactly. They’re working. They’re doing what they were told to do. They’ll figure it out, the way he figured it out, the way his father figured it out before him. But he can see the math. He’s been doing his own version of it for thirty years. Grass, water, fuel, vet, the loan. The price at the auction. The numbers that don’t quite work. He’s been a price-taker his whole life. His kids are price-takers too. Different markets, same lesson. That’s the bill. Not what comes due thirty years from now in some abstract Treasury auction. What comes due right now, in his oldest’s apartment in Denver, in his daughter’s hospital shift in Cheyenne, in his youngest’s tuition decision in Billings. If that’s the bill, how do we pay it? Act IV. The Work There are five things the government has to do. Structural things that set the conditions a working life can fit inside of. Energy. We pump our own oil, refine our own fuel, build the grid that carries our own power. Energy independence isn’t just a trade-balance number. It’s the only way out of the petrodollar arrangement that doesn’t require the world’s permission. We had to make a deal for oil in 1974. We don’t have to make that deal again if we don’t need to import. Reshoring. We bring the factories back. Not all of them. The critical ones. The ones that make the things a country has to make if it wants to be a country. Things like steel, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, inputs to our defense. Tariffs won’t do this on their own. Tax policy, regulatory policy, infrastructure investment, and serious industrial strategy do. Broad tariffs are theater that puts money into one man’s pocket. The work is harder than performance. Antitrust. The four packers. The three airlines. The two grocery chains in most American towns. The handful of tech firms that decide what most Americans see and hear. Markets don’t function when the buyers all act like one buyer. The rancher in Torrington knows this in his bones, and so does anyone who’s tried to start a business in an industry where the incumbent owns the supply chain. Government broke up Standard Oil in 1911 and AT&T in 1982. Government remembers how to do this. We just stopped doing it. Infrastructure. The real kind. The kind that lets a starter house get built in Denver. The kind that builds American tech training instead of hiring foreign workers on H-1B visas. The kind that lets a kid in Wyoming or Delaware go to college without inheriting thirty years of debt. We’ve spent forty years deferring investment in human capability infrastructure because borrowing for transfers was easier than building for capacity. The bridges are the visible part. The harder part is the public goods that make private work possible. Fiscal rules that survive elections. Not austerity. Not a constitutional amendment. The discipline of making each Congress face the cost of what it spends, in the year it spends it, before the bill goes to the bond market. Pay-as-you-go for new programs. Sunset clauses on tax cuts. Honest accounting on entitlements. The mechanics are technical. The principle is Friedman’s. If we want social objectives, we have to deliberate about them, vote on them, and pay for them. That’s the real work. None of it is easy. None of it is fast. All of it is upstream of the lives that are running into the wall right now. This isn’t austerity. It isn’t libertarian. It isn’t a plan to shrink government. It’s a plan for government to do its job. Build the conditions. Set the rules. Fund the commons. Then leave the citizen alone. Because the point of everything the government does, like antitrust, energy, reshoring, infrastructure, and fiscal discipline, is what it produces downstream. A market that’s a market. A wage that supports a life without taxpayer support. A house a family can save for. A college a kid can afford that trains them for a high-paying job. An adult life that doesn’t require deferral. The work is government’s work. But government doesn’t do work that citizens don’t demand. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. The political machinery doesn’t run unless we make it run. The rancher is pulling an empty trailer home. The check in the console. The price was the price. He didn’t get more than he expected. He didn’t get less. Past Glenrock. The sun behind him now, low on the right. Jesse asleep on the seat. The dash reads forty-one degrees. Here’s what the rancher knows. He’s done with voting for politicians who promised America first and didn’t deliver. And he’s done with politicians who raged against the other party, said they would make meaningful change, and failed to deliver for the American people. If the senator had a term and didn’t try to break the meatpacker monopoly, he’s done with him. If the congressman had a term and didn’t try to kick start the small house market, he’s done with her. If the president had four years and the deficit kept climbing while the patches kept failing, they lost their chance. He doesn’t care which party. He doesn’t care what they say next time. He cares what they did with the term they had. That’s not a program. It’s discipline. The kind the Republic requires from its citizens when the institutions have stopped requiring it from themselves. He thinks about the kids. The oldest, doing the math on a house. The middle, doing the math on a family. The youngest, doing the math on a degree. All three of them waiting. He’s not going to wait. His vote is the only lever he has, but at least he has one. He’s going to use it. Every cycle. Against any incumbent who didn’t try. The ranch is a long drive ahead. The Bighorns are catching the last of the light. He pulls onto the gravel. Kitchen window light on. Jesse is up now, ears forward. He kills the engine and sits for a second. The vote is his. And he’s going to use it. Sources Milton Friedman, The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits. The New York Times Magazine, September 13, 1970. The full essay, including the part nobody quotes about civil servants and political machinery. Frank Abrams, “Management’s Responsibilities in a Complex World.” Harvard Business Review, May 1951 (paywalled). The Standard Oil chairman’s stakeholder-balance framework, written nineteen years before Friedman pushed back. Frederick Douglass, West India Emancipation. Speech at Canandaigua, New York, August 3, 1857. Power concedes nothing without a demand. Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Madison, September 6, 1789. The earth belongs to the living letter. David E. Spiro, The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony: Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets. Cornell University Press, 1999. The standard academic account. Andrea Wong, The Untold Story Behind Saudi Arabia’s 41-Year U.S. Debt Secret. Bloomberg, May 31, 2016. The reporting that revealed the previously classified 1974 Saudi-Treasury agreement. Federal Reserve History, Nixon Ends Convertibility of US Dollars to Gold. Background on the August 15, 1971 announcement. U.S. Treasury, Historical Debt Outstanding. Annual gross federal debt by fiscal year, 1790-present. Congressional Budget Office, The Budget and Economic Outlook. Annual report on federal deficits and structural fiscal pressures. U.S. Treasury, Major Foreign Holders of Treasury Securities. Tracks the decline in foreign Treasury holdings as a share of outstanding debt. International Monetary Fund, Currency Composition of Official Foreign Exchange Reserves. Quarterly data tracking the dollar’s declining share of global reserves. World Gold Council, Gold Demand Trends. Central bank gold purchases, including the record buying since 2022. Derrell Peel, Oklahoma State University Extension. Weekly cattle market reports and analysis on packer concentration. Northern Ag Network, Beef Cattle: Market Concentration. May 5, 2026. United States v. Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey, 221 U.S. 1 (1911). The 1911 breakup, cited in Act IV as evidence that government remembers how to do this. United States v. AT&T, 552 F. Supp. 131 (D.D.C. 1982). The 1982 consent decree. The other example. Economic Policy Institute, The Productivity-Pay Gap. Tracks the divergence of worker compensation from productivity gains since the early 1970s. Joint Center for Housing Studies, Harvard, The State of the Nation’s Housing. Annual report on housing supply, affordability, and the first-time homebuyer wall. Federal Reserve, Consumer Credit Report (G.19). Total outstanding federal student loan debt and trends. Companion pieces The Sand Trap. The longer treatment of petrodollar recycling. The Price Is the Price: A Letter to Raging Moderates. The rancher, the four-packer cattle market, and the price-taker frame. Both Fly. The rancher on tariffs and Article I. Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe
May 5 · 29 min
Pursuit, not Happiness
The Open Door. October, 1723. Market Street Wharf in Philadelphia. A seventeen-year-old runaway stepped off a boat. Dirty from the journey, pockets stuffed with shirts and stockings. He carried his entire fortune on him, a Dutch dollar and about a shilling in copper. Food money for a few days and nothing else. He could not afford a room. The shilling went to the boatmen for passage down the Delaware. He had run from his older brother’s printing shop in Boston without permission and with no prospects. He knew no one in the city. He walked up Market Street looking for bread. He asked a baker for three pennies’ worth. The baker gave him three great, puffy rolls. He had nowhere to put them. He carried two under his arms and ate the third as he walked. A young woman watched him pass from her father’s doorway and decided he looked ridiculous. He probably did. Years later, after she had become his wife, they would laugh about it. Walking back toward the river, he came upon a woman and her child who had been on the boat with him from Burlington. He gave them the two rolls he had left. He was tired, friendless, nearly broke, and he had just given away two-thirds of his food. He drifted with the Sunday crowd into a Quaker meeting house near the market, sat down in the silence of unprogrammed worship, and fell asleep. When the meeting ended, a stranger gently woke him. He noted decades later in his autobiography that the meeting house was the first building he ever slept in in Philadelphia. The boy was Benjamin Franklin. The first house he slept in in his new city was a church, and the door was open. No guard checked his papers. No barrier to the kind of stranger Franklin was. Exhausted, unwashed, unknown. The door was open because we had not yet chosen to close it. That door is locked now. Most church sanctuaries in America are bolted on weekdays, and many even on Sundays. We claim good reasons. Security. Theft. Damage. And we’ve locked other doors a young person used to find open. The starter home. The trade. The boarding room. The open campus. Each lock added by someone defending what they had. Hear it again. The declaration of our belief is either true, or it is the most spectacular lie ever committed to paper. We tell ourselves we are dedicated to the pursuit of happiness. The phrase is familiar. National wallpaper. Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary of the English Language defined the words the Founders actually used. He defined “to pursue” as to hazard, to put to chance, to endanger. Pursuit was a verb of risk and motion. The Founders did not protect a state of contentment. They protected an action. Inherent in acting is a place to act, a door to enter, a runway from which to begin. A Republic that locks its doors against beginners has not protected the right to pursue happiness. It has protected the comfort of those who already arrived where the rest cannot follow. Act I. The Verb May, 1776. Three weeks before Jefferson sat down in Philadelphia to draft the Declaration of Independence. A Virginian named George Mason was already drafting the Virginia Declaration of Rights. The document he produced contains a sentence that Jefferson read carefully and then condensed. 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.” Four rights. The first two are life and liberty. Third, the “means” of acquiring property. We might call this ‘effort.’ We own ourselves first, and we labor. Our labor mixed with the world makes it ours. Fourth, the “pursuit” of happiness and safety. If property is the result of effort, happiness is in the pursuit, not the property. Life. Liberty. Effort. Pursuit. The Virginia Declaration is built around what citizens do, not what they receive. Jefferson tightened the language three weeks later. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Three rights, parallel and memorable, recited by schoolchildren two and a half centuries on. But our reading of the words changed over time. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language was the standard reference for the educated Anglo-American world in 1776. Johnson defined to pursue in terms a modern reader would not recognize. To chase. To follow with hostility. To prosecute. To put to chance. To endanger. Pursuit was a verb of motion that cost something. It implied risk, friction, a thing that might fail. A man who pursued happiness in 1776 was not asking the state to deliver it. He was hazarding his life to chase it, knowing the chase might end in ruin. And what was the happiness he chased? Not what we mean by the word now. Eighteenth-century happiness still carried Aristotle’s meaning. The word translated the Greek eudaimonia. Flourishing. An active life of virtue. The full exercise of one’s faculties in the world. Aristotle argued that happiness was not a feeling but the function of a human being living well, exercising reason, participating in the city, raising a family, practicing a craft. The proper end of human life. By Mason’s time, happiness in serious political writing meant the conditions under which a free citizen could flourish. Not a pleasant feeling or satisfied desire. Not guaranteed comfort. So the phrase Jefferson preserved, read in its original meaning, says something close to: the unalienable right to actively chase a life well lived. That is the right the Republic was founded to protect. Not contentment. Not security. Not even comfort. The action of striving, conducted by free citizens moving in an uncertain world. Now consider who this right is for. Pursuit is not evenly distributed across our lives. It is concentrated in the years we stake a claim in the world. We leave home, learn a trade, marry, have children, borrow money, build equity in our first home. How old are we? Roughly between seventeen and forty. The years before, we prepare. The years after, we steward. Pursuit belongs to the young. The state cannot guarantee the young’s success. But the state should not lock the doors. This is not a complaint about older Americans. It is an observation about the structure of human life. A citizen at seventy enjoying the fruits of a long career is not pursuing. They have already achieved what they will achieve. A citizen at twenty-five who is trying to start a business, buy a first home, or raise a child is pursuing. The Constitution does not name pursuit as a right of the young. But the right is exercised primarily by the young. A structure that blocks the young from pursuit fails to deliver on the right. A Republic that takes the verb seriously asks a structural question modern policy debate almost never asks. Are the conditions of pursuit available to those who are just beginning their pursuit? Are the doors open to the seventeen-year-old who arrives with a Dutch dollar and a shilling in copper? Can a young couple of ordinary means, working ordinary jobs, find a starter home in a place where they want to raise children? Can a young person enter a trade without paying for credentials they cannot afford? Can a young family form, take root, and grow? Or do we have good reason to lock the door? We claim so. Security. Theft. Damage. Who benefits when we change from a country where young people can pursue into a country that protects those who have pursued? What did we protect? Act II. A Table With One Short Leg Older Americans hold the wealth. Americans aged 55 and older hold roughly 73 percent of all household wealth in the United States. Americans under 40 hold less than 7 percent. The ratio is at its most extreme in modern American history. It’s a long-term trend that’s been building for forty years. This is not an attack on older Americans. When you’re young, you live in an apartment that’s barely a room. You show up on day one of a job, and you don’t have the money to buy the uniform, so they loan you one. On and on. You have tough choices when you’re young, and you don’t have the resources to solve your problems. Wealth concentrates in older groups, because older people have had more time to save, more years of labor behind them, more compounded returns on whatever they put away. The question isn’t whether older Americans have more than younger Americans. Of course they do. They worked for it and saved. The question is whether the structural conditions that built that wealth are available to the young. Small, modestly priced starter homes on small lots built the postwar middle class. Banks financed terms an ordinary working family could carry. The Levittown houses sold in 1949 for around 9,000 dollars against a median family income near 3,000 dollars. Three to one. Affordable. Then the government got involved. Today, those homes are zoned out of legality across most of the country. In coastal California, the price-to-income ratio is eight, ten, twelve to one. The home that an ordinary working couple bought in 1949 is illegal to build today. A similar problem in trades. A young person in 1950 could walk into a printing shop or a building site and apprentice. Today, there are credentials, intake caps, licensing fees, and waiting lists that ration opportunity. In 1950, roughly five percent of the American workforce needed a government license to do their job. Today, the figure is roughly 25 percent. Fivefold growth in seventy-five years. Two-thirds of that growth came from lawmakers adding new occupations to the licensed list, not from the economy changing. Each rule has its reasons. Some of the licensing protects public safety. Some of the zoning preserves neighborhood character. Some of the credentialing maintains professional standards. Looked at one at a time, each protects an important interest. Together, they are a closed door. A wobbly table with a short leg. The rules protect existing practitioners, existing homeowners, existing professionals. People built this table one rule at a time over decades. They already had what the rules would protect. They weren’t villains. They acted through ordinary politics and ordinary self-interest. Each rule looked reasonable when they wrote it. A young couple paying low prices for clothes and electronics is not in a better structural position than their grandparents who paid higher prices for clothes but could buy a house on one salary. Consumer surplus is not capital. The affordable starter home, the apprenticeable trade, achievable family formation: those are the conditions today’s young cannot reach. The table wobbles. The young are supposed to pursue, and they can’t reach the edge to pull themselves up. The old, who have already pursued, sit at the table that lawmakers tell them is level. Then there are the chains of debt. The federal entitlement system that includes Social Security and Medicare promises benefits we haven’t funded. We didn’t design a system where each generation pays for itself. We built a system where one generation makes promises, and the next generation funds them. Now the trust funds are running down. Social Security’s main trust fund is projected to run out in 2033. Medicare’s hospital insurance trust fund is projected to run out the same year. When that happens, the programs do not disappear. Payroll taxes still come in. Social Security would have enough money to pay about 77 percent of scheduled old-age benefits. Medicare’s hospital insurance fund would have enough money to pay about 89 percent of scheduled costs. Congress can prevent those cuts, but only by raising taxes, cutting benefits, borrowing more, or changing the structure of the programs. The debt is real. The obligation is real. Future workers will service that cost through future taxes, future inflation, future benefit cuts, or a weaker country carrying promises one generation used, passing the cost to another. The earth belongs to the living. No generation can rightly contract debts that the next must pay. No generation may build a country the next cannot live in. The dead have no right to govern the living. That is the moral problem. The people who benefit from this borrowing are not the people who will repay it. The benefit goes to one generation. The cost falls on another. The second generation never consented to the transaction. The structures that protect the wealth of those who have already arrived were built by people who are now dead. We enacted Social Security in 1935 and Medicare in 1965. Zoning rules between 1970 and 2000. Licensing regimes accumulated decade by decade. Lawmakers no longer in office voted for each rule on behalf of people who have since aged into beneficiaries or passed on. We never asked the young of 2026. But they are paying anyway. Payroll taxes fund benefits the programs cannot honestly afford. Housing costs inflated by zoning rules they never voted for. Credentialing fees fund barriers they didn’t choose to build. And we are passing them the federal debt we are adding to keep the system solvent. They are funding a feast for a generation that will not be alive to pay the bill. The dead have no rights over the living. You can argue that earlier generations paid for their elders, too. That’s true. But in exchange, they inherited a country where the basic conditions of pursuit were available to them. Affordable housing supply. Reasonable paths to good jobs without four-year degrees. Career ladders that began in mail rooms and ended in corner offices. The previous bargain was reciprocal even if not formally negotiated. Children paid into systems that supported their parents, and they received in turn a country that worked for their own pursuit. Today’s young face the obligation without the bargain. We need to open some doors. In place of the structural argument, lawmakers in our largest state are having a different one. Act III. The Crux On the November 2026 ballot in California is Initiative 25-0024. The measure would impose a one-time tax of five percent on the worldwide net worth of any California resident whose total wealth exceeds one billion dollars. Roughly 200 people meet that threshold. Together they hold somewhere around two trillion dollars. California projects the measure to raise approximately 100 billion dollars. Where do they intend that money to go? Ninety percent to the state’s healthcare program, Medi-Cal. Ten percent to public education and food assistance. SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West, the union representing the state’s healthcare workforce, sponsors and funds the measure. Proponents present it as a measure of generational and economic justice. The wealthy billionaire pays. The vulnerable Californian benefits. The political class argues that this is justice. Alongside union, order, defense, welfare, and liberty, justice is one of the six national goals named in the Constitution. How could we object? Let’s consider their argument. The wealth being taxed is held by Californians who have already arrived. Most are in their fifties and sixties. The 200 individuals subject to the tax are men and women whose pursuit is behind them. They built businesses, founded firms, accumulated capital, and now hold what their pursuit produced. Whether one approves of the scale of their accumulation is a separate question. The projected revenue will fund Medi-Cal. Medi-Cal is California’s Medicaid program, providing healthcare coverage to roughly 14 million residents. Look at where the dollars actually go. Children and working families are the largest enrollment categories. But seniors, who make up roughly 10 percent of enrollees, cost nearly twice the program average per person. Long-term care recipients who make up under 3 percent of senior enrollment consume roughly six times the next-highest senior care category. In 2024, California eliminated the asset eligibility test for long-term care. The program now subsidizes the long-term care of seniors regardless of their accumulated wealth or property. The wealth-transfer-at-death from one prosperous generation to the next is now structurally protected by the state’s healthcare program. So, what does this Billionaire Tax actually do? It taxes Californians whose pursuit is behind them. It funds healthcare consumption disproportionately benefiting Californians whose pursuit is behind them. It protects the inheritances of the children of wealthy seniors who would otherwise spend down their parents’ assets on care. It does little for the young Californian with no money striving to pursue. Nothing for the starter home she can’t afford. Nothing for the trade he can’t enter. Nothing for the family they can’t form because the median rent in the city where her job exists requires more than half their combined income. Nowhere does it propose what the alternative would actually require: small homes legal to build, lot sizes the market can clear, prices young families can afford, and healthcare for the children whose pursuit is yet to begin. This is not justice. This is intra-generational accounting, dressed in the moral vocabulary of justice. We cannot recreate the postwar economy. We can recreate the postwar bargain on housing. The small homes, ordinary financing, legal permission to build, without the racial exclusions that disgraced the original. Capital leaving the state makes the structural problem worse. A reported 700 billion to one trillion dollars in California-based wealth has left the state ahead of the January 1, 2026, residency snapshot date. That leaves a hollow tax base. The structural problem of locked doors, unaffordable homes, rationed trades, and bureaucratic accumulation remains untouched. It could be possible to have both redistribution and structural reform. Some redistribution is necessary. Some generational obligation is unavoidable. If the voter agrees to a wealth tax, the state could pair it with two structural reforms: preempt local zoning that prohibits affordable housing, and reform occupational licensing that blocks trade entry. That combination would serve both ends. The objection is not to wealth taxation in principle. The objection is to redistribution that ignores structural reform when the structural problems are within reach of policy. The argument here is not that redistribution is illegitimate. The argument is that redistribution disconnected from structural reform is not justice. It is political theater. The political class is using the word “justice” that could mean two different things. It helps to separate them. California’s meaning is transactional. A wealthy person has more than they need. A vulnerable person has less than they need. Move the surplus from the first to the second. This is the Billionaire Tax. A billionaire pays. A poor or sick or elderly Californian benefits. A transactional model of charity. A coin in the cup. The real meaning of justice is structural. It asks a different question. Not who pays whom inside the system, but whether the system works. Imagine you are designing the rules of a society. You will be a citizen there, but you don’t know where you will land in it. You don’t know whether you will be born wealthy or poor. You don’t know your race, your family, your intelligence, your health, your nationality. You don’t know which generation you will be born into. You don’t know whether you are the billionaire being taxed or the senior receiving Medi-Cal long-term care or the young Californian unable to afford a first home. Knowing none of these things, you sit behind a veil of ignorance and design the rules. Behind the veil, would you choose to inherit the system the United States runs in 2026? You would not. What rules would you choose? Behind the veil, you wouldn’t design a system that takes money out of someone’s pocket claiming to benefit the needy without first fixing the broken structural conditions. You wouldn’t call a one-time wealth tax justice while leaving every locked door locked. The Billionaire Tax sounds just in the first sense. It is a transaction that takes from the wealthy and gives to the vulnerable. Surely that must be justice. The Billionaire Tax fails the second sense entirely. It is a transaction in a system designed for structural injustice. The injustice was in the rules themselves. The zoning, the licensing, the unfunded promises, the locked doors. A measure that operates within those rules while leaving them untouched isn’t justice. It is the opposite of justice. It is a continuation of injustice in the service of the machine. Does this argument hate the poor and the elderly? Does it defend billionaires? Does it prefer that the vulnerable suffer rather than the wealthy contribute? It does not. We have an obligation to feed the hungry and clothe the needy, just as Ben Franklin gave two puffy rolls to the woman and her child. But the highest form of help we can give is not the coin in the cup. It is the restoration of the conditions under which a person can act, work, see, walk, and return to the table as a citizen rather than as an object of pity. The blind receive sight. The lame take up their bed and walk. The man at the gate goes home, returns to his work, and defends himself with his own voice. That is the deeper meaning of help. Not alms, even when they are needed. The removal of the condition that made the alms necessary in the first place. The Billionaire Tax is a transaction conducted around a broken system that it does not address. To insist on alms when restoration is possible is not the deeper love. It accepts the brokenness as permanent. It offers to soften the consequences while protecting the structures that produce them. To love the young is to give them sight. To open the doors. To restore the architecture of pursuit so that they need not depend on the alms of a generation that broke the system in the first place. Pursuit, not happiness. A Republic that takes the verb seriously cannot leave the doors bolted. It has to do the work. Let’s open some doors. Sources Benjamin Franklin’s account of his arrival in Philadelphia in October 1723. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Part One, 1771. Available through Founders Online at the National Archives. Samuel Johnson’s definition of to pursue and pursuit. A Dictionary of the English Language, first edition, 1755. Available through Johnson’s Dictionary Online. George Mason, Virginia Declaration of Rights, drafted at Gunston Hall, May 1776, adopted by the Virginia Convention June 12, 1776. Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence, drafted in Philadelphia between June 11 and June 28, 1776, adopted July 4, 1776. Aristotle on eudaimonia as the proper end of human life. Nicomachean Ethics, Books I and X, fourth century BC. W. D. Ross translation available through MIT’s Internet Classics Archive. John Locke on self-ownership and the labor theory of property. Second Treatise of Government, Chapter V, “Of Property,” 1689. Available through Project Gutenberg. Wealth distribution by age cohort. Federal Reserve Distributional Financial Accounts, quarterly release. Levittown 1949 home prices. Digital History at the University of Houston, “Levittown” entry. 1950 median family income. United States Census Bureau, Historical Income Tables, Families, Table F-7. Occupational licensing growth from five percent to twenty-five percent of the U.S. workforce since 1950. The figures appear consistently across sources from across the political spectrum: Council of Economic Advisers, Occupational Licensing: A Framework for Policymakers, July 2015. Issued under the Obama administration. Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, “The Rise of Occupational Licensing”, 2008. Mercatus Center at George Mason University, “Changes in Occupational Licensing Burdens across States”, 2018. The finding that approximately two-thirds of the growth in licensing comes from new occupations being added to the licensed list rather than from workforce composition shifts is from the Council of Economic Advisers report cited above. Social Security and Medicare trust fund depletion projections. Social Security Trustees, 2024 Annual Report (most recent at time of essay drafting). Medicare hospital insurance trust fund depletion projection. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Trustees, 2024 Annual Report. Mechanics of trust fund redemption being funded through federal borrowing. Congressional Budget Office, The Budget and Economic Outlook (annual report). Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, September 6, 1789. The phrases the earth belongs in usufruct to the living and the dead have no rights are from this letter, written from Paris during the early French Revolution. University of Chicago. Social Security Act of 1935 enactment date. Public Law 74-271, signed August 14, 1935. Available through the Social Security Administration’s history office. Medicare enactment date. Title XVIII of the Social Security Act, signed July 30, 1965, as part of the Social Security Amendments of 1965 (Public Law 89-97). Social Security Administration’s archive of LBJ’s Medicare signing. Initiative 25-0024. Full text available through the California Attorney General’s Office of Initiative Coordinator. The Preamble to the United States Constitution, naming union, justice, tranquility (order), defense, welfare, and liberty as the six national goals. Medi-Cal enrollment, expenditure, and demographic data. California Department of Health Care Services, Medi-Cal Statistical Brief. The findings that seniors at roughly ten percent of enrollment consume close to twice the program average per person, and that long-term care recipients at under three percent of senior enrollment consume roughly six times the next-highest senior care category, are derived from the most recent expenditure breakdowns published by the California Legislative Analyst’s Office. California’s 2024 elimination of the Medi-Cal asset eligibility test for long-term care. California Department of Health Care Services, “Asset Limit Changes for Non-MAGI Medi-Cal”, effective January 1, 2024. John Rawls, the veil of ignorance and the Difference Principle. A Theory of Justice, first published 1971, revised edition 1999, Harvard University Press. The thought experiment of designing rules behind a veil of ignorance is developed in Part One, Chapters 1-3. The earlier theological grounding for the argument appears in A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith, John Rawls’s 1942 Princeton senior thesis, published posthumously by Harvard University Press in 2009 with introduction by Joshua Cohen and Thomas Nagel. The healing of the man born blind. Gospel of John, chapter 9. The phrase one thing I know, that I was blind, now I see is from John 9:25. The healing of the lame man. Gospel of Mark, chapter 2, verses 1-12, and parallel accounts in Matthew 9 and Luke 5. The phrase take up thy bed and walk is from Mark 2:9. 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April 28 · 29 min
The Price Is the Price
Gravel lot. Friday morning in Torrington. The trailers are lined up in neat rows at the front, goosenecks and bumper-pulls together, dust still settling from the last one in. He pulls in at the end of the row and steps down from the cab. October cold. His breath hangs in the air and catches the low sun. He only comes on Fridays. The bakery is only open Thursday through Saturday, and there’s no sale at the market on Thursday or Saturday, so Friday it is. Sale at ten. Bakery by noon. Home by four. The brand inspector’s office is off to the left of the building. Proof of ownership for cattlemen who run stock on shared grazing land. A man there in a Carhartt and a good hat, checking papers, making sure nobody’s selling another man’s livelihood. The inspector nods. He nods back. They have known each other a long time. He walks in through the front door. The pay window is right there, three ladies behind it who will take his money if he buys and cut him a check if he sells. They know him too. One of them smiles. He touches the brim of his hat. Through the door to the arena. Tall stairs up to the bleachers. The seats are bench-style, worn smooth by forty years of men in Wranglers. Coffee in styrofoam. Diesel, manure, pine shavings. The smell is the same smell his father knew. A heeler mix trots up the aisle. Red with a bad left ear. She sniffs his boot and moves on. Somebody in the third row has a hot dog from concessions and the dog knows it. The auctioneer is already going. The chant. Workers below move the cattle through the arena, through the pens, out to the holding lots behind the building. From a walkway above you can watch the whole thing. The ring, the pens, the loading chutes, the vet’s shop in the back where the doc is never sitting still. His turn comes. Thirty steers out of the gooseneck that morning. Six-weight, good feed. He’ll come back a couple more times for sales, because his truck can’t pull them all in one go. The gate opens and they come through in a knot, hooves on concrete, and a man with a flag moves them into the ring. Three buyers in the front row. One for a Colorado feedlot. One for Nebraska. One buying for an Oklahoma stocker that ships to Tyson. They don’t look up. The auctioneer starts. The chant rises. A nod. Another nod. A pause. The gavel falls. The price is the price. Set on the board in Chicago before his trailer left the ranch. His cattle are in the pen. He can’t refuse this price without losing money. He goes to the pay window. The lady he knows slides a check across the counter. He folds it and puts it in his shirt pocket and thanks her and touches his hat again. Out the front door. The gravel lot is still full. The sun is higher now. The brand inspector is still at his post. Four blocks to the bakery. He can’t pull his gooseneck over there. Nowhere to park it. It’s only a ten-minute walk even if you don’t hurry, and he doesn’t. Small town. Brick storefronts. The bakery is the one with the line. Tight space. Warm. When he opens the door he has to push through the line. Flour in the air. Crusty French sourdough stacked on the shelf behind the counter. A mostly empty tray of cinnamon crunch croissants, crusty outside and soft in the middle, and whole pies behind the glass when the baker feels like it. His wife wants a pie. Partly because she likes the treat. Partly because she wants the bakery to stay in business. He buys the pie. Apple, because that’s what they have. A cinnamon crunch croissant for the drive. Coffee in a paper cup. He eats the croissant in the window seat and watches the street. The check is folded in his shirt pocket. It’s a good check and a thin margin both, and he knows which one will matter by spring. Nobody at the sale barn asked about his costs. What he paid his ranch hand. What the diesel was. He finishes the coffee. Picks up the pie. Walks back to the truck the long way. The gravel crunches under his boots when he crosses the lot. The trailers are thinning out now. Some of the men who came in this morning are already gone. He loads up. Starts the truck. The pie rides in the passenger seat where his wife would sit. Four hours home. He has all afternoon to think about it. Act I. The Goal, Maths, and Patterns The wage debate is asking the wrong question. What has to be true about the rest of the economy before a wage floor can do what its advocates claim? An Abraham Lincoln draft he wrote before taking his seat in Congress. “To secure to each labourer the whole product of his labour, or as nearly as possible, is a most worthy object of any good government.” Restated. A goal of good governance is that businesses pay workers a wage high enough that their neighbor doesn’t have to make up the difference for them to live. Jessica Tarlov and Scott Galloway make the case on their podcast Raging Moderates that America needs a twenty-five-dollar federal minimum wage. Galloway’s argument, developed over several years in his writing and in his 2024 TED talk, is that we’ve transferred America’s wealth from young to old over four decades, and raising the minimum wage is the most elegant tool to reverse it. Tarlov shares the position and carries it into the daily political conversation. Serious people making a serious argument. American workers are getting squeezed. The current federal minimum wage is a cruel joke. A country that can’t pay its workers enough to keep them off social programs is not the country it claims to be. I agree with them about the goal: If you work, your employer owes you enough money that your neighbor doesn’t have to give you extra money out of their pocket. A business that pays wages so low that the taxpayer has to fill the gap for you to heat your house and put food on the table isn’t a business standing on its own. It’s a business subsidized by every working American who files a tax return. The Lincoln standard, at minimum, is that the whole product of labor means the business pays for it, not the taxpayer. So let’s do some math. The federal Earned Income Tax Credit phases out for a single adult with no dependents at $19,104 in 2025. If that adult works a full-time job, that means 2,080 hours a year. Divide by 2,080 hours and you get $9.19 an hour. SNAP gross income for a single-person household tops out around $20,331, or $9.77 an hour. Medicaid in the forty states that expanded it under the Affordable Care Act cuts off for a childless adult at about $21,597, $10.38 an hour. Below these numbers, the single adult working full time is guaranteed to be on some form of federal assistance. The taxpayer is making up the difference. Call it ten dollars and some change, or even eleven. That is the subsistence floor for a working single adult with no dependents. It’s the wage below which the government takes money from your neighbor’s pocket to give it to you. The federal minimum wage today is $7.25. It hasn’t moved since 2009. Whatever else we argue about, no one should be allowed to pay less than the wage that keeps a working single adult off the programs designed to combat poverty. A business that cannot pay ten dollars an hour to a full-time adult worker is a business being subsidized by its neighbors, and neither party should defend that arrangement. Now run the same test the other direction. Twenty-five dollars an hour for a single adult with no dependents is $52,000 a year, well above every threshold in the hard welfare cluster. For that worker, twenty-five dollars is far more than self-sufficiency in large parts of the country. The neighbor is not making up the difference anymore. The wage has cleared the bar and then some. But twenty-five dollars isn’t enough for a family. The traditional American expectation is a family where one parent stays home with the children. The EITC threshold for a married couple with two children is $64,430. Divide by 2,080 hours and you get $30.98 an hour. That is the single-earner floor for a traditional family of four to get off the programs. For three kids, $33. One working parent has to earn over thirty dollars an hour to achieve self-sufficiency without taxpayer support. Twenty-five dollars isn’t enough. No politically viable national wage floor is enough. We have a systemic problem, and wages are only one part of it. We want passion. We want overt shows of strength. Strength is the dull, patient, unglamorous work of a Republic that understands the difference between strength and the appearance of strength. We saw this when the administration imposed tariffs on China and the rest of the world. The argument was that the tariffs would bring the factories back. We had hollowed out our domestic supply chains over forty years. They didn’t reappear when Washington wished them into being. We saw it with Iran. In June of 2025 we struck three nuclear facilities. Iran threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz. Diplomacy held. The administration called it decisive. The administration got lucky. Eight months later, Iran made a different choice. On February 28 we struck again. Iran closed the Strait. Energy prices jumped. We had no Jones Act reform, no pipeline to California, no buffer in the fuel supply chain. The infrastructure we hadn’t built in June was still not built in February. The lesson is that we should not have acted without first building the domestic capacity that made the action decisive. Restoring economic security to America’s youth is the same. Twenty-five an hour is acting with passion, without the right infrastructure in place. Lifting a single-earner family of four to self-sufficiency is structural work that a wage floor cannot achieve. A twenty-five-dollar national minimum wage imposed tomorrow would land on an economy whose supply side is as broken as America’s oil chain and the factory base was when the tariffs hit. Housing supply is inadequate. We aren’t building starter homes. Four packers process eighty-five percent of American beef. We have no national focus on making workers more valuable to their businesses through improved training. Yes. Wages are too low. But so is supply. If all we do is raise wages, we’ve signaled more demand without adding supply. More demand for the same houses means higher prices. The wage increase moves to the housing market. The house the young couple could almost afford at the old price goes up to the point where they can’t afford it at the new price either. The welfare threshold climbs with the cost of living. People still need food on the table and heat in the house. We raised the wage. We moved nothing. The conservative instinct is to wait. Build the supply side first, let wages follow. That idea has merit and zero viability. Indefinitely pause the wage increase and the wage increase never comes. Businesses have a social responsibility to increase profits, not pay workers. The progressive instinct is to raise wages now and build later, or not at all. The single-earner family is no better off than before. The cost of living rises with it because nothing on the supply side has changed. The young family who couldn’t afford the house at the old price still can’t afford it at the new one. The welfare threshold climbs. The single-earner family is no better off than before, and in some places is worse off because the businesses that employed them closed. We have to kick-start both at the same time. Wages and housing. Antitrust. Trade. Input costs. One can’t wait on the other. Ideally the supply side runs slightly ahead so that young people who get a raise don’t watch it burn. The minimum wage we need is the wage that keeps a working single adult off social programs. Ten dollars and some change. Peg it to whichever welfare threshold is actually binding for a single adult, EITC, SNAP, or Medicaid, and let it adjust automatically as those thresholds move. Take the politics out of it. Couple the wage floor to the subsidy so the two cannot drift apart again. Then build three more pieces in parallel. Tax structure. Conditional tax relief for businesses that pay every worker above the social program threshold for that worker’s household. Reward the businesses whose employees don’t need public assistance. Stop subsidizing, through the tax code, the businesses whose employees do. This protects small and mid-sized businesses that could pay more but don’t have the revenue to absorb the cost today. Housing supply. Put housing goals into the Small Business Innovation Research grants at USDA and HUD to incentivize builders to build first-time homebuyer homes. Reform zoning to allow higher density and smaller lots. Permit timeline reform to cut the months between a contractor driving stakes in the ground and getting approval to build. Close the gap between wages and the cost of living by pulling the cost down, not by pushing the wage up past what the economy can absorb. Market structure. Antitrust enforcement in the concentrated industries where price-takers have no lever. An example is the four packers. Tyson, JBS, Cargill, National Beef. Give the rancher more buyers in the front row. Extend this to every sector where oligopoly has captured pricing power from producers and workers. Let producers pay higher wages from their own revenue rather than requiring subsidies to close the gap. The right question is: What has to be true about the rest of the economy before a wage floor can do what its advocates claim? Until we build that infrastructure, an increase in wages in isolation does more damage than good in the places that can least absorb it. Act II. The Sale Barn Back to Friday morning. Torrington. Gravel lot. Thirty steers out of the gooseneck. Three buyers in the front row who don’t look up. The price of live cattle on that Friday was set on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange the day before. The CME has been the reference board for American cattle since 1964. Before Chicago, the trail herds came up from Texas or out west to the Kansas railheads in Abilene, Dodge City, Ellsworth, and rode east in stock cars to the slaughterhouses at Kansas City and Chicago. The stockyards at both cities closed decades ago. The board did not. The cattle stopped going. The price still does. Four packers process eighty-five percent of American beef. Tyson. JBS. Cargill. National Beef. Derrell Peel at Oklahoma State, the livestock economist whose Monday market report is read by every serious rancher in the country, wrote for years about what that concentration does. The packer pays what the four corporations agree to pay. Every link upstream prices off that anchor. The rancher takes what’s left. He is a price-taker on every input cost and a price-taker on the only thing he sells. He drove four hours to Torrington past a closer sale barn in Buffalo. Buffalo has two buyers on a good day. Torrington has eight. He sorted his best-looking thirty black calves, same weight class, and judged that Torrington made more sense. More buyers in the front row means better price discovery. The four hours of diesel is what he pays to find out what his year is worth. That is the thin edge of his agency. He cannot raise his price. He can only choose which room to walk into. Now put a twenty-five-dollar national minimum wage on this economy. Three stops, descending pricing power. A hedge fund in Manhattan pays its receptionist twenty-five dollars an hour and doesn’t blink. Labor is two percent of revenue. The floor is a rounding error on the expense side. Pam owns a diner in Chillicothe, Missouri. She raises the chicken fried steak from fourteen dollars to seventeen. Some regulars stay, some don’t. She has a bad choice, but she has one. She survives. Limping. The rancher at the sale barn has a different story. His costs are already rising. The tariffs were supposed to bring the factories back. They landed on a supply chain that couldn’t absorb them. Fertilizer is up forty percent. Diesel is up. Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz. The deeper reason is that nine administrations since the 1973 oil embargo failed to build the infrastructure that would have buffered the shock. And a twenty-five-dollar wage would raise every one of those costs again, because every supplier has workers too, and every supplier can pass the wage through to him, and he cannot pass it to anyone. The kid who used to ride fence along the north line, where the Bighorns come down to meet the sage, can make twenty-five at the McDonald’s in town. None of that flows into the check the auctioneer writes on Friday morning. He could refuse the bid. In theory. In practice the cattle are in the pen. The fuel to haul them home costs what it costs. The pasture is short, so if he takes them home he has to pay to feed them, and they eat the hay he needs to feed the cattle still on the ranch. Winter is coming. The ranch needs the check. The price on the board is the price he gets, because every other option costs him more than it saves. That is what it means to be a price-taker. It is not the absence of choice. It is a choice between bad and worse, made before he ever left the ranch. So the twenty-five-dollar wage lands differently in each of the three places. The hedge fund in New York absorbs it. Pam adapts. The rancher exits. His ranch hand loses the job. The kid who would have learned to weld and pull calves takes the fast-food job. Six months later the ranch sells to a corporation that has deep pockets and no grandchildren. The community loses both. The families the wage was supposed to lift end up on the programs it was supposed to get them off, in a town that’s a little emptier than before. A wage increase with no supply adjustment might lift some workers at the bottom. It displaces the worker in the middle. It concentrates the damage on the people with the least pricing power in the economy. The rancher and his wife have three grown children. None of them live within three hours of the ranch. The oldest is in Denver. He works in IT. His wife teaches. They’ve been trying to buy a starter house for four years. Every time they save enough for a down payment, the prices move. The last house they looked at was three-hundred-twenty. The bank qualified them for two-ninety. They decided to wait another year. The middle one is in Cheyenne. She’s a nurse. Her husband works for the railroad. They have one child. They want three but can’t afford for either of them to take a year off. They decided to wait. The youngest is in Billings. Not married yet. Dating someone serious. He told his dad over Thanksgiving that he doesn’t know when he’ll be able to afford a ring. Three kids in three cities. The same story runs in every direction. The nurse in Pittsburgh waiting on the second child. The factory worker in Youngstown trying to qualify for a house. The teacher in Memphis who can’t afford to live in the district where she teaches. The rancher looks out across the south pasture and does the math he never thought he’d have to do. He owns the land. His father owned it. His grandfather homesteaded it. The ranch is the thing that made his family possible for three generations. The same ranch cannot, on its current terms, make his grandchildren possible. He can leave them the ranch. One of them might take it. More likely it gets sold when he and his wife are gone, because his children’s lives are no longer in the Bighorns, because the towns that would have held them couldn’t support the jobs or the houses or the childcare that would have kept them here. A twenty-five-dollar wage doesn’t fix any of that. But a conditional tax break for the ranch he earns by proving every worker he pays clears the social program thresholds might let him raise the kid’s wage to twenty-five dollars an hour without losing the ranch. Enough to match McDonald’s. Enough to keep the fence mended and the calves pulled and the ranch viable for more years. Maybe enough to give the youngest son a reason to consider coming home to run it, instead of staying in Billings trying to afford a ring. Antitrust enforcement on the four packers gives him eight buyers in the front row at Torrington instead of three. A hundred dollars more per head. Seventy-eight head across three trips a year. Eight thousand dollars he doesn’t have today. Enough margin for new equipment. Enough margin to hire the kid full-time. Maybe another reason for his son in Billings to come home. A federal challenge to build starter homes under a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, the kind of thing the Small Business Innovation Research program was designed for, might put a house within reach of his oldest and his wife in Denver. Which might end the six-year wait. Which might give him another grandchild. The bridge would let the ranch and the bakery stay open long enough to pass to the next generation. The wage hike mandate lifts wages by a number that’s eaten by higher prices. The structural bridge would lift his family back into the life his grandfather built. Act III. The Long Walls A country that can’t build starter homes will not reform its tax code, break up its packers, and rebuild its housing market in the same legislative session. Not this year. Not next. Probably not in the decade it would take for the rancher’s grandchildren to be born. The policy is not the hard part. The country that could pass the policy is the hard part. That is not a reason to quit. Only a functional government could pass a twenty-five-dollar wage. Only a functional government could coordinate four structural reforms. We do not have a functional government. So the first work is not legislation. It is consensus. Dull, patient, unglamorous. An argument that enough Americans share eventually becomes unstoppable. Abolition took eighty years. The forty-hour week took seventy. Civil rights took a century. The Constitution itself took fifteen years of argument before it could be written at all. Each was won by people who understood that the work was longer than their lives, who did the work anyway. The wage debate is not a debate. It is the beginning of a conversation. This letter to Raging Moderates is an example of that conversation. I agree with them on the goal. I disagree with them on the mechanism. We are both working in the same direction. That is what a coalition looks like before there is a coalition. The consensus is national and local at the same time. It is built in forums like this one, and in bakeries that stay open because the rancher’s wife wants them to. The rancher in the Bighorns and the nurse in Pittsburgh and the teacher in Memphis don’t know that they share a problem. The work is to let them know. The slow accumulation of argument will eventually make the problem impossible to unsee. No bill will pass before enough Americans recognize their neighbor in the argument. Lincoln knew this. He spent the 1850s making the case against slavery, speech after speech, letter after letter, while the country caught up to what he was saying. By the time he took office, the argument was won. The war was the enforcement. Our work today is not the war. It is the 1850s. The bridge will not be built by the government we have. It will be built, slowly, by the country the argument makes possible. That country starts today, at every kitchen table where someone has the conversation with the person across from them. Sources The facts and figures in this piece are from the following. All were consulted directly; nothing has been paraphrased from secondary summaries. Anyone who wants to verify a claim can go to the original. Primary sources Lincoln, Abraham. “Fragments of Notes regarding a Tariff Discussion,” 1846-1847. The Papers of Abraham Lincoln. The full text of the “whole product of his labour” passage. Also collected in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler, Vol. I, pp. 407-416. Internal Revenue Service. “Publication 596 (2025), Earned Income Credit (EIC).” Authoritative source for the $19,104 single-filer threshold and the $64,430 married-with-two-children threshold. U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division. “Minimum Wage.” Confirms $7.25 federal minimum wage effective July 24, 2009. U.S. Department of Labor. “History of Changes to the Minimum Wage Law.” Full history of federal minimum wage rates since 1938. USDA Food and Nutrition Service. “SNAP Eligibility.” Federal SNAP income limits. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. “2025 Poverty Guidelines” (PDF). 138% of FPL for a single individual = $21,597. U.S. Office of the Historian, Department of State. “Oil Embargo, 1973-1974.” The foundational energy-policy event referenced in the piece. Congressional Research Service Congressional Research Service. “U.S. Strikes on Nuclear Sites in Iran” (IN12571). June 23, 2025. Official account of the June 2025 strikes on Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. Congressional Research Service. “Iran Conflict and the Strait of Hormuz: Impacts on Oil, Gas, and Other Commodities” (R45281). Updated March 2026. Meatpacker concentration The White House. “Trump Administration Cracks Down on Foreign-Owned Meat Packing Cartels.” November 7, 2025. Official statement confirming the “Big Four” meatpackers (JBS, Cargill, Tyson, National Beef) control 85% of the U.S. beef processing market, up from 36% in 1980. Farm Action. “Meatpacking: Four Corporations, Total Control.” Independent analysis of the Big Four’s 80-85% market control. Investigate Midwest. “Fact-checking Trump’s call for an investigation into meatpacking companies.” Verifies the 85%/36% concentration figures using USDA data. Cattle markets CME Group. Livestock Futures. Official exchange page for live cattle (traded since 1964) and feeder cattle (traded since 1971) futures. Cambridge University Press. “Paper Steaks: Live Cattle Futures Markets and the Financial Revolution of 1964.”Enterprise & Society. Academic history of the CME’s launch of live cattle futures. Encyclopedia of Chicago. “Union Stock Yard.” Authoritative history of the Chicago stockyards, which closed August 1, 1971. Derrell S. Peel, Breedlove Professor of Agribusiness, Oklahoma State University. Faculty page and weekly Cow/Calf Corner market commentary. Medicaid and Social Programs Kaiser Family Foundation. “Status of State Medicaid Expansion Decisions.” Confirms 40 states plus DC have expanded Medicaid; childless adults in expansion states qualify up to 138% FPL ($21,597 in 2025). Wyoming is a non-expansion state. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “The Earned Income Tax Credit.” Policy analysis of EITC structure and thresholds. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “A Quick Guide to SNAP Eligibility and Benefits.” FY2026 SNAP income thresholds. Scott Galloway and Raging Moderates Galloway, Scott. “How the US is destroying young people’s future.” TED 2024. Source of Galloway’s $25 minimum wage proposal and the “war on the young” framing. Galloway, Scott. “Doing the Minimum.” No Mercy / No Malice, September 13, 2024. Written version of the minimum-wage argument. Raging Moderates with Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov. Vox Media Podcast Network. Economic philosophy Friedman, Milton. “A Friedman Doctrine: The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” The New York Times Magazine, September 13, 1970. Original source of the “social responsibility of business” doctrine. Policy mechanism U.S. Small Business Administration. “Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program.” Federal program proposed in the piece as the vehicle for directing housing R&D toward affordable starter-home construction. Thanks for staying with me. If this piece said something true, share it with someone who needs to hear it said this way. That is how the 1850s work begins. Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe
April 21 · 31 min
Start With Why
The apartment is cold. Outside, sirens. Somewhere down the block, gunshots. This is Hunting Park, North Philadelphia. The sounds of Hunting Park don’t stop because a mother is trying to feed her children. At the kitchen table, two kids are eating. Whatever was in the cupboard, she put it on their plates. Her son is going blind and needs a doctor. Her daughter is small and hungry. She knows. She sits with them. She is holding a piece of paper. Sometimes a pizzeria menu. Sometimes whatever paper she could find. A flyer, a receipt, anything. She reads it. Studies the pictures, if there are pictures. Asks herself what she would order if she could. She calls this read eating. Her name is Barbie Izquierdo. Years later, she will tell advocates what this was. Her stomach had been empty long enough that the brain had learned to feed itself on images. “I was feeding my brain,” she said, “when I couldn’t put food into my stomach.” She had a job. A full-time job, through her advocacy work. She had done what everyone told her to do. Get off assistance. Get back to work. Climb the ladder. She climbed. Her paycheck put her two dollars an hour over the SNAP threshold. Two dollars. SNAP ended. The childcare subsidy ended. The cash assistance ended. The children’s free and reduced-price school meals ended. Three separate systems, each one operating according to its rules, each one executing those rules without error, collectively produced the outcome in the cold apartment with the pizzeria menu. No corruption. No villain. No malfunction. The machine worked just like all bureaucracy works. “Just enough,” she said, “to feel like you’re still poor but not homeless.” The neighbors sometimes brought a can of beans. A cup of rice. Whatever they could spare, which was never much, because they were her neighbors. This is not a story about a broken system. The system worked just like we designed it. That is the problem. This is a story about a country that wrote a pledge and forgot what it was for. A country that built machinery in the name of that pledge and then let the machine run without looking at it for so long that the machine stopped serving the pledge and started serving itself. A country that now finds itself so loud with argument about how the machine should run that no one remembers to ask why it exists. We are a country at war with itself over the how. We have forgotten the why. And in the space between those two things, a mother sits alone in a cold apartment in Hunting Park and reads a menu while her children eat the last of the food. If we want to fix what is broken in America, we have to go back further than the argument. We have to go back to the page those fifty-six men signed. We have to start with why. Act I. Four Score and Seven Years Ago In February of 2011, Simon Sinek walked into the Commandant’s hall at Nellis Air Force Base. A civilian. An author. A man who had spent years studying what made certain organizations inspire loyalty while others just sold product. Why some thrive while others fail. His thesis fit on a napkin. Most organizations, he argued, start with “what” they do. Great ones start with “why” they exist. The room is full of apex predators. Air Force Weapons School instructors. Fighter pilots. Weapon System Officers. Before they were students, they were the top officers in their squadrons. Selected, nominated, and sent to the toughest school in the Department of Defense. Six months of grueling hours and indifferent, violent intensity. The best of them graduate at the top of their class and are asked to train the next generation. Every fighter squadron in the Air Force has one. Almost every top officer in the Air Force is a distinguished graduate. Nothing on a military combat uniform is silver, except a Weapons School patch. A silver beacon with a black border. When a Weapons School instructor walks into a briefing room, every pilot in the room sits up straight. Sinek told a room full of Weapons School instructors to start with “why.” I was in that room. I was skeptical. I ran missions for a living. Missions are what. Brief, execute, debrief. Achieve the objective. If you failed, cut everything and everyone to the bone until you achieve it. The whole Air Force runs on what. Sinek was telling us to start somewhere else. Somewhere softer, slower. Somewhere the math was not immediately obvious. It took me ten years to break it down. No organization, movement, or country ever endured because of the what. It endured because of the why. The what changes. The how changes. The why holds. And the American why is written down. Fifty-six men signed it on a hot July day in Philadelphia, in a room that smelled of candle wax and ink and sweat. All men are created equal. The Almighty endows each of us with unalienable Rights. Life. Our breath and being. Liberty. To act. Speak. Grow. The right to pursue happiness. And at the bottom of the page, under the last paragraph, we agreed. We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor. A pledge. A contract signed in ink, and within months, in blood. Seventy-six years later, on the Fifth of July, 1852, Frederick Douglass stood in front of an audience in Rochester, New York, and asked a question about the grand national lie. What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? His answer, across pages of the most devastating rhetoric in the English language, plainly stated: The Declaration is either true, or it is the most spectacular lie ever committed to paper. Douglass was not asking a rhetorical question. He was demanding an answer. We either believe that we all share the same rights, or the document is a fraud and the country has no moral foundation. Douglass demanded that the country look at its own pledge and decide whether we had meant it. The Harlan brothers answered him. Two boys grew up under the same roof in Danville, Kentucky, in the early 1800s. The first, John Marshall Harlan, son of James Harlan, a prominent politician and slaveholder. The second, Robert James Harlan. Born a slave in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, on December 12, 1816. Brought to Kentucky as a boy. Raised in the Harlan household. Educated alongside James’s white sons. It was widely understood in the hushed, polite etiquette of slaveholding society that James Harlan was Robert’s biological father. John and Robert were half-brothers. The two of them ate at the same table. Studied the same lessons. Walked the same halls of the same house. One was free. One was property. The life of Robert Harlan, born a slave, tests our national “why” against reality. The test: given a fraction of the opportunity the Declaration promised, could a Black man match the free men who had kept him in chains? In 1849, he goes to the California Gold Rush. A Black man, legally classified as livestock, runs a business in a boomtown where the rules haven’t finished being written yet. Within eighteen months, he comes back east with a fortune — somewhere between forty-five thousand and ninety thousand dollars in gold and currency. Worth millions today. He returns to Ohio and invests in real estate. He opens a photography and daguerreotype gallery in Cincinnati. He purchases his freedom from the Harlan family. He sails to England. Spends nine years in the high-society horse racing circuit. The Kentucky style, taught in English jockey clubs by a man who had been born in chains. He comes back. Settles in Cincinnati. He opens the first school for Black children in the city. He becomes a trustee for the local Colored Orphan Asylum. He becomes the first African American member of the Ohio Republican State Central Committee. In 1872, he serves as a delegate-at-large to the Republican National Convention. President Ulysses S. Grant requests a private audience with him. They sit together and discuss international treaties with England, because Robert knows England better than most of Grant’s cabinet. They discuss the racial situation in the post-war South. The Cincinnati Commercial quotes Grant afterward: It is not every day that I have the pleasure of talking with someone of your race who can speak for them so well. Robert Harlan, born in Mecklenburg County in chains, in a private audience with the sitting President of the United States, discussing foreign policy. In 1878, President Rutherford B. Hayes commissions him a colonel. He raises a battalion of four hundred African American men — the Second Ohio Militia Battalion. Ohio’s first Black state militia. When his brother John Marshall Harlan’s music-loving older sister Elizabeth marries Dr. James Hatchitt, Robert buys her a magnificent handmade piano and ships it to her wedding. The piano arrives at the Harlan family home. Heavy. Polished. The weight of it is the weight of a Black man’s wealth in a country that hasn’t decided whether he is allowed to have it. The Declaration is either true, or it is a lie. If the premise in the Declaration is true and “all men are created equal” is a statement about human capability and not empty words, then a Black man born enslaved in 1816, given even partial opportunity, should be able to match or exceed the achievements of the free men around him. Robert did. Which means two things simultaneously, and they have to be held together: One: the why is true. Human equality is real. Robert proved it. Two: the how was a lie. Because the country that signed the pledge in 1776 spent the next century building laws, statutes, and court rulings designed to guarantee that what Robert achieved would remain the exception. Not because the pledge wasn’t true, but because acting on the pledge would have required the country to give up the economic, political, and social arrangements it had built on top of denying the pledge. This is the oldest American argument, compressed into two brothers. Not an argument about slavery. An argument about whether we believe a kid born in poverty has the same right to life, liberty, and the pursuit as a kid born in a mansion. The one we are still having. It brings us to the unfinished work. Act II. The Unfinished Work The Declaration is the “why.” The Constitution is the “what.” The Preamble outlines that we have six national goals. Union. Justice. Domestic tranquility. Common defense. General welfare. Liberty. Six goals. Written in 1787. Ratified in 1788. Not poetry. Not philosophy. A contract between the government and the governed. They specify what the machine seeks to achieve. The “why” is the moral premise. The “what” is the blueprint. The “how” is everything else. The laws, the agencies, the tax codes, the zoning boards, the benefit formulas, the eligibility thresholds. The how is where we live. The how is where we fight. The how is where we have gotten lost. There is a philosopher named John Rawls. He was a World War II combat veteran who came to hate war. He taught at Harvard University for over 40 years. He gave us a tool to measure whether the “how” is doing its job. He called it the veil of ignorance. Imagine you are designing America from scratch. You will write the laws, set the thresholds, and build the institutions. But you don’t know where you will land in the country you are building. You don’t know if you will be born in a mansion in Greenwich or a cold apartment in Hunting Park. You don’t know if you will be a senator’s daughter or the daughter of Barbie Izquierdo. Now build your system. No rational person behind that veil designs an economy where a mother works full-time and still can’t feed her children without help. No rational person behind that veil designs a benefits cliff. A cliff that claims to be a safety net for wages that punishes the worker for earning a dollar more of wages that were never high enough to live on. But we built that system. Not by malice. By bureaucratic machine. And the people making the rules have full bellies. Barbie Izquierdo is not an anomaly. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta built a model for this. They call it the CLIFF tool, the Career Ladder Identifier and Financial Forecaster. The Federal Reserve had to build a calculator to help Americans figure out whether a raise would make them poorer. Let’s hear that again. Same meaning. Slightly different words. Rather than spend time and resources to make sure every American benefits from the raises they earn, we spent time and resources to help Americans figure out when they should stay on social programs because more effort would make them more poor. We built a tool to help people figure out when to stop trying. The conservative looks at Barbie’s kitchen and hears that she needs to work harder. But the bureaucratic state punishes the work ethic. A system so tangled in its own rules that it traps the people it was built to free. The liberal looks at the same kitchen and reads that she needs more help. But rather than setting conditions to empower Barbie to succeed on her own, the safety net starves a working mother over a two-dollar technicality. A system so rigid it punishes the people it was built to protect. They are both right. She does need to work hard. Hard work is a part of life, and she is working hard. She also needs help. They are looking at the same kitchen. They agree on the disease. They fight about the treatment. And while we fight about the treatment, Barbie sits with a menu. We will never agree on the how if we cannot agree on the why. It’s the same question Douglass asked in 1852. We are still asking it in Barbie’s kitchen. It’s the how, untethered from the why. At Gettysburg, standing over the dead, Lincoln called it the unfinished work. The unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. The founders didn’t finish the work. The Civil War didn’t. Reconstruction didn’t. The Civil Rights Movement did not finish the work. The work is never finished. A mother feeds her brain with pictures of food because there isn’t enough for everyone. She gives the real food to her children. She is the measure. Not the machine. She is the unfinished work. We are divided. We are told the division is about politics. About parties. About policy. About trans rights or women’s rights or gay rights or whether men are still allowed to be men. It is not. Those fights matter. Every one of them is a fight about who the pledge applies to. But they are downstream of a deeper fracture. It is about the distance between the why and the how. We argue about the how. The tax rate, regulation, statute, court ruling, executive order. Because we have lost the thread back to the why. And when you lose the thread, the argument becomes self-consuming. It feeds on itself. The how argues with the how about the how, and no one in the room remembers to ask: Does a kid born in Hunting Park have the same shot at life, liberty, and the pursuit as a kid born in the Hamptons? That is the only question that matters. And it is not a question about policy. It is a question about whether we believe that we all share the same rights. If we don’t, our beliefs are a fraud. So what do we do? We course correct. It will not happen in Washington. Act III. It Is For Us The Living In the early nineties, a kid named Antong Lucky started the first Bloods gang in the city of Dallas. The state looked at him and saw a menace. The judge said so. The statute said so. The how processed him and sent him to prison. Another inmate named Willie Ray Fleming looked at him and saw something else. Young man, if you had the ability to lead these dudes to do wrong, you have that same ability to lead them to do right. You’re a leader. One sentence turned the key. After serving his sentence, Lucky walked out and met a bishop named Omar Jahwar. Jahwar had a theory, stated in biological terms. Anytime you’re trying to find a cure to a disease, you extract some of the virus for the antibody. The young men the system had written off weren’t the disease. They were the cure. Together they put former gang members into Dallas schools. Not as security. As mentors. Violence dropped. The state had never asked why. Fleming and Jahwar did. Then came July 5, 2016. Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Police killed Alton Sterling outside a convenience store. The next day, in Minnesota, Philando Castile was shot during a traffic stop. Five days later, on July 7, in downtown Dallas, a sniper opened fire on a police line at a peaceful protest. Five Dallas officers were killed. Ten days after that, on July 17, 2016, in Baton Rouge, another gunman ambushed officers responding to a call. Three officers were killed. Two of them, Brad Garafola and Montrell Jackson, left behind widows. For eighteen months, the country held its breath. Every community meeting was a referendum on who was to blame. On Martin Luther King weekend, January 2018, Jahwar and Lucky didn’t hold a policy summit. They didn’t invite the mayor. They didn’t invite cable news. They brought the family of Alton Sterling together with the widows of the Baton Rouge officers killed in the ambush that followed his death. Same room. Same stage. Breathing the same air. Sybrina Fulton, Trayvon Martin’s mother, had given them the line months earlier: Pain, no matter where it’s felt, feels the same. A mother who lost her son to a police bullet. A widow who lost her husband to a gunman’s rifle. Across a stage. In a room no one in Washington had built. Talking to each other. That is the how, restitched to the why. Not with a statute. In a room. There is an old line in Ecclesiastes. The writer was a king. A man who had tasted everything a life could offer. Wealth. Power. Wisdom. Pleasure. Everything. He wrote it all down and then he asked what a life was actually for. His answer was spare. To eat and drink, and to enjoy the good of all his labour. To eat with the people you love. To enjoy your work. To know that your day’s labor was worth something. That is the purpose. And it’s the same thing as “life, liberty, and the pursuit.” Which implies a home to eat in. A table to sit at. Food on the table. Work worth enjoying. An education that prepares a kid for work worth enjoying. A community to belong to. A neighbor who would bring a can of beans when the cupboard is bare, and a country that would not punish her for doing so. A country that keeps its pledge. Design the system so that a kid who grows up in a cold apartment in Hunting Park can grow into that life. A kid who grows up in a leaky trailer in rural Wyoming can grow into that life. A kid who grows up anywhere in America can grow into that life. That is the why. It is the only test that matters. Back to the Harlan brothers. 1883. Washington. Justice John Marshall Harlan, the son of a Kentucky slaveholder, the boy who had grown up beside Robert, sits at his desk. The Supreme Court has just struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Eight to one. The majority ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment only restrains the state, not private actors. A hotel, theater, railway car may discriminate by race as a matter of private liberty. The how has been used, with the clean logic of the machine, to destroy the why of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. The nation is re-segregating itself, one ruling at a time. Harlan resolves to dissent. For days he sits at his desk. The words will not come. He is the only man on the Court who understands what has just been destroyed, and his hand will not move. His wife, Malvina Shanklin Harlan, knows him. Years earlier, Harlan had purchased from the Supreme Court marshal the inkstand that had once belonged to Chief Justice Roger Taney. Taney had used it when he wrote the 1857 Dred Scott decision that declared Black Americans had no rights the white man was bound to respect. The vessel that held the ink of America’s original sin. Malvina had hidden it. She was afraid her husband might return it to the Taney family. Now, watching her husband fail at his desk, she retrieves it. She cleans it. She fills it with fresh ink. She places it squarely on his writing desk. Harlan sees it. And then, in Malvina’s own words, his pen begins to move across the page like magic. He writes: Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. He is using his own pen. He is dipping it into Taney’s inkwell. The vessel that had held the ink of Dred Scott is now giving up its ink, drop by drop, to draft the constitutional blueprint of the 20th-century Civil Rights Movement. The Court would not adopt the blueprint for seventy years. The same inkwell. A new hand. The same why. John Marshall Harlan could see it because he had grown up with Robert. Eaten at the same table. Watched him carry gold back from California. Watched him sit with President Grant. Watched him send a piano to Elizabeth’s wedding. The why wasn’t an abstraction for John Marshall Harlan. It was his brother. This doesn’t start in Washington. Our why is “by the people.” It starts with us. It is not an argument about slavery. It’s about whether we believe a kid born in poverty has the same right to life, liberty, and the pursuit as a kid born in a mansion. The machine forgets. That is the whole country. The unfinished work. We start with why. 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April 14 · 35 min
The Long Walls
They came for him in the night as men come for the things they fear. The house was small and made of stone and set against a hillside in a country not his own. He knew they would come. He had seen it in a dream. A woman. She had held his head in her arms and painted his face as though preparing him for the earth. He woke to the smell of smoke. The fire climbed the walls and found the timber roof and the room filled with a light that was not daylight. He rose and gathered the bedding and the cloaks and threw them on the flames but the flames took them and grew. Outside he could hear the men shifting in the dark. They would not come in. They knew who he was and what he had been and not one among them would face him in the close space of a burning room. He wrapped his cloak around his left arm. He drew his dagger with his right hand. He was forty-six years old and he had fought at Potidaea and at Delium and had commanded fleets and toppled governments and seduced a king’s wife and betrayed every city that ever loved him. He went through the fire. Through the door untouched. The flames behind him and the blade before him and the men scattered like dogs. Not one stood. Not one raised a sword. They fell back into the darkness and from the darkness they threw their javelins and their arrows. They killed him from a distance. Men who would not speak their names. The woman came to him after the killers had gone. She pulled the robes from her own body and wrapped him in them and buried him with what she had, which was not much. She had loved him. Athens had loved him. Sparta had loved him and feared him and Persia had sheltered him and all of them in their time had tried to use him and all of them in their time had sent him away. Now he lay in the dirt in Phrygia with a courtesan’s garments for a shroud and the empire he had broken was still breaking, three years after the ships went down. He had stood on the stone steps of the assembly and told a democracy that patience was cowardice. That what they had wasn’t enough. That strength meant reaching, always reaching. They believed him. They sent the fleet. And they spent the rest of their history trying to recover what they had already owned. Twenty-four centuries later, ships move through the Strait of Hormuz again. Slowly. Only with permission. Iranian armed forces watch from the coast and the ships that pass have paid to pass, a million dollars or more per crossing, in yuan and cryptocurrency, and the men who own them call it progress. A Greek-owned bulk carrier was the first through. Four hundred tankers waiting behind it in the Persian Gulf like cattle at a gate. There was a time when oil moved through the strait every hour of every day. A hundred tankers a week threading the narrows between Iran and Oman, and the arrangement that kept them moving was not a show of force. It was the quiet way. Patient. The way that asked nothing of the Navy and nothing of the taxpayer and cost no one a single life. At a moment of strength, we chose weakness. This is that story. Blood and salt. Salt and blood. Act I. The Beautiful Man Summer. 416 BC. A man named Alcibiades entered seven chariots in the races at Olympia. No private citizen had ever done this. No king had done it. His teams took first, second, and fourth. Euripides wrote him a victory ode. He fed the tens of thousands of spectators from gold and silver vessels he had borrowed from the Athenian state treasury. He did not ask permission. No one stopped him because no one in Athens could stop Alcibiades from doing anything. He was born into the highest family in the city. His father died in battle when the boy was three and Pericles himself took the child as his ward. He grew up in the house of the man who built the Athenian empire. He learned how power worked by watching it at the dinner table. He was beautiful. Plutarch says the beauty flowered out with each successive season of his life and made him lovely in boyhood and youth and manhood alike. He cultivated it. He knew what beauty was worth in a democracy where citizens voted with their eyes as much as their ears. He had a lisp. His r’s came out as l’s. The comic poets mocked him for it. The young men of Athens copied it. They copied the way he walked and the way he wore his robes and the way he let his cloak drag along the ground behind him. He set fashions the way a stone makes ripples. He did not follow anything. He bought a dog. An extraordinary animal, large and beautiful. He paid seventy minas for it. A working man in Athens earned one drachma a day. Seventy minas was seven thousand drachmas. The whole city talked about the dog and its price and the arrogance of the man who paid it. Then Alcibiades cut off the dog’s tail. His friends came to him in alarm. All of Athens is talking about this, they said. Everyone is angry. He laughed. That is exactly what I want, he said. Let them talk about the dog. Then they will not say something worse about me. He understood something about democracies that Pericles had understood before him but would never have exploited. A democracy is a creature of attention. Control what it watches and you control what it does. Give it a scandal it can chew on so it won’t notice the larger thing beneath it. Alcibiades wasn’t just vain. He was a propagandist of the self. Every outrage was calculated. Every scandal, a screen. The most complicated thing about him was Socrates. At Potidaea, in 432, Athens besieged the rebellious colony through a brutal winter. Alcibiades was young and serving his first campaign. The fighting was close and ugly, the kind of siege work where men die in ditches for a few yards of frozen ground. Alcibiades was wounded. He went down in the line and the enemy came for him and Socrates stepped over his body and fought them off alone. The philosopher in his threadbare cloak standing between his student and the spears. He saved the boy’s life and then he used his influence to make sure Alcibiades received the prize for valor. Not himself. The student. He thought that tying honor to the young man’s name might anchor the ambition to something worthy. Twelve years later at Delium Alcibiades repaid the debt. Athens lost the battle badly. The line broke and the men ran. Alcibiades on horseback. He could have ridden clear. Instead he found Socrates retreating on foot through the chaos, an old man with a shield and no horse in a field full of cavalry, and he refused to leave him. He rode beside the philosopher and kept the pursuing army off him until they were both clear. He loved Socrates. Not just love. He loved him and wanted to be him. In Plato’s Symposium, Alcibiades bursts into a dinner party uninvited and drunk and crowned with ribbons. He delivers a speech about Socrates that is half confession and half accusation. He says Socrates is the only human being who has ever made him feel ashamed of the way he lives. He says he knows he should listen. He knows the philosopher is right about the care of the soul and the dangers of ambition and the hollowness of public adoration. But he cannot do it. The roar of the crowd is louder than the voice of the philosopher. The people want him and he cannot say no to the people because the people are a mirror and in the mirror he is a god. Socrates could not save him. Athens would remember. When they put the philosopher on trial decades later, the ghost of Alcibiades was in the room. You were supposed to make him better. You were his teacher. Look what he became. Every democracy has an Alcibiades. The question is whether it listens to him. He grew up in the house that built the strategy. The Athens empire won by not fighting. The walls protected the corridor between the city and the port. The navy controlled the sea. Tribute paid for everything. The rule was simple. Do not overextend. Be patient. Sit in strength and let time grind the enemy down. It worked. By 421 the war with Sparta had lasted ten years and both sides had bled enough to stop. Sparta’s myth of invincibility died at Sphacteria when a hundred and twenty of its finest warriors surrendered rather than fight to the last man. Athens had lost its northern stronghold at Amphipolis. The hawks on both sides lay in the ground. A cautious old general named Nicias brokered a treaty sworn to last fifty years. It held poorly. Corinth refused to sign. So did Megara and Boeotia. The peace was a phantom. A truce built on exhaustion rather than trust. But Athens inside that phantom was formidable. The empire still functioned. The treasury held thousands of talents. Three hundred warships sat in the harbor. Their sacred reserve, a thousand talents and a hundred ships locked on the Acropolis, remained untouched. The Assembly had made it a capital offense to even propose spending it. The strategy wasn’t glamorous. It did not produce victory odes or feasts served on golden plates. It was the kind of strength that looks like patience and feels like restraint and wins by never having to fight. Alcibiades had watched it work his entire life. He had eaten dinner with it. He had grown up inside the house of the man who designed it. And he couldn’t stand it. He couldn’t see that strength isn’t fighting. Strength is not having to fight. In 2015, after years of quiet negotiation, Iran agreed to limit its nuclear program. Oman, Iran’s neighbor across the Strait of Hormuz, brokered the deal. It was imperfect. Iran was still hostile. Still funding proxies across the region. Still testing missiles. But enrichment was capped. Inspectors were on the ground. And the Strait of Hormuz was open. Twenty percent of the world’s oil moved through that corridor every day. The arrangement cost America nothing. No warships in the narrows. No coalition escorts. No tolls. Oil moved because diplomacy made the conditions for it to move. That was strength, even if it did not feel strong. It felt like compromise. Patience. The kind of thing that gets called weakness by people who don’t know what strength really is. The corridor open and unguarded is stronger than the corridor forced open at the point of a gun. Back to Athens. Spring, 415 BC. Envoys arrived from Sicily begging for help against Syracuse. They brought sixty talents of silver and stories of vast wealth waiting to be taken. The stories were lies. Alcibiades stood before the Assembly. An empire that does not grow, he said, will be consumed by those that do. Syracuse is becoming a rival. Sicily’s grain feeds our enemies. And look at us. The world believes we are invincible. Let us make it true. Nicias argued against him. He called it eros out of season. Eros. Not anger. Not strategy. Brazen want, like a dog in heat. The peace with Sparta would not survive the fleet’s departure. Even if Athens took Sicily it could never hold it. A power feared from a distance, he said, is stronger than a power that arrives and can be measured. Let Syracuse wonder. The wondering is stronger than the doing. They heard him. They respected him. They voted the other way. Then Nicias made his mistake. He didn’t want the expedition at all and tried to sabotage it. His plan was to make the requirements so absurdly large that the Assembly would look at the price and say it wasn’t worth it. It was a bluff. He bet that sticker shock would kill the thing he couldn’t kill with an argument. The bluff backfired catastrophically. Instead of recoiling at the cost, the Assembly heard “a hundred and thirty warships and five thousand infantry” and thought we’re so powerful we can afford that. The scale that was supposed to frighten them made them feel invincible. And because Nicias had now publicly defined what the expedition required, he couldn’t walk it back. He’d set the floor, and the Assembly held him to it. Then they made him command it. He was the man who argued hardest against the expedition, who tried to kill it with its own budget, who believed it was madness. They put him in charge. Sick, reluctant, superstitious Nicias leading an army he never wanted into a war he knew was wrong. The few who saw the madness were afraid to raise their hands. In a democracy on fire, prudence is treason. Socrates told his students it would end in ruin. Meton the astronomer set his own house on fire to keep his son off the ships. It was the sanest act in Athens that spring. The fleet sailed from Piraeus in midsummer. The entire city came to the harbor. The fleet sat in the water fully manned, bronze rams catching the light. The harbor smelled of tar and sweat and salt and the wood of three hundred ships baking in the sun. A trumpet sounded and the harbor fell silent. Every crew, every marine, every officer, and the thousands on the shore joined in prayer. Officers poured wine into the sea from gold and silver cups. The fleet rowed out through the harbor mouth and into the Saronic Gulf. Once clear they raced. Ship against ship across open water. The fastest ships in the world crewed by the finest sailors in the world, because they were Athenian and they were young and the sea was theirs and nothing could touch them. Athens believed it was invincible. Alcibiades had said so. Their eros made the saying true. Back to America. We walked away from the Iranian deal. Then we killed their Supreme Leader. The arguments were old. The deal was insufficient. Iran couldn’t be trusted. Containment was appeasement. Patience was cowardice. Strength meant striking. The crowd caught the same fire. Not reason. Appetite. The desire for action that feels like power. The ones who saw the madness did not speak. In a democracy at war, dissent is treason. The fleet sailed. It was made of different things. Stealth bombers. Aircraft carriers. More airplanes than ships. The cheering was in different rooms. But it was the same fleet. We believed we were invincible. Act II. The Fleet Before the ships reached Sicily, Athens destroyed itself. On the morning of June 7, the citizens woke to find that nearly every Hermai in the city had been mutilated in the night. The Hermai were sacred stone pillars of the god Hermes. They stood at every doorway and crossroads and boundary in Athens. Someone had smashed their faces and broken off their phalluses in a single coordinated sweep. Hundreds of them, between dusk and dawn. The city panicked. This wasn’t vandalism. It was a message. Only a large, organized, and fearless conspiracy could have done this. Suspicion fell immediately on Alcibiades and his aristocratic drinking clubs. Officials offered witnesses immunity. They came forward and testified that Alcibiades and his circle had been staging drunken parodies of the sacred Eleusinian Mysteries in private homes. Mocking the holiest rites in Athens for sport. Alcibiades demanded a trial before the fleet sailed. Clear my name now, he said. It would be madness to send a general to war with a death sentence hanging over his head. His enemies knew better. They knew he was popular with the army. They let him sail. They would wait until the troops were gone and the city was afraid and then they would come for him. The fleet reached Sicily. Alcibiades was establishing a base at Catana when a warship arrived from Athens with orders to bring him home for trial. He knew what that meant. A rigged trial. A terrified jury. If he went along, he would be executed. He agreed to follow the warship in his own ship. At Thurii, in southern Italy, he slipped away in the night. Athens condemned him to death in absence. Confiscated his property. The priests cursed his name publicly. Alcibiades, the most brilliant military mind in the Greek world, defected to Sparta. He told the Spartans everything. Where Athens was weak. Where to strike. He gave them two pieces of advice that would destroy the empire he had built. First: assign a permanent garrison to cut Athens off from its silver mines and farmland. Second: send a general to Syracuse immediately. One competent Spartan commander would change everything. They sent Gylippus. One man. It was enough. Following Alcibiades desertion, command of the Athenian expedition fell entirely to Nicias. The man who never wanted the war was now alone with it. The aggressive third in command died in an early skirmish. The weight of it all fell on Nicias, and he was sick with a kidney ailment that left him in constant pain. He was cautious by nature. The caution deepened into paralysis. Still, Athens had nearly won. They had Syracuse bottled up by land and sea. They were building a wall around the city to starve it into surrender. Syracuse was fractured, demoralized, on the verge of capitulating. Then Gylippus arrived. The Spartan slipped through a gap in the unfinished Athenian blockade with a small force. He rallied the defenders. Restructured their command. He began building a counter-wall that cut across the Athenian siege lines. The initiative shifted overnight. Nicias, who had almost won by patience, now found himself losing by the same slow arithmetic. He wrote desperate letters home begging to be recalled. Athens refused. Instead of cutting its losses, the democracy doubled down. They emptied the treasury and sent a second massive fleet under Demosthenes, one of their most capable generals. It was the same logic that had launched the expedition in the first place. They had too much invested to stop now. Brazen eros. Demosthenes arrived and saw immediately that the Athenians were losing a war of attrition. He launched a night assault on the high ground at Epipolae. The Athenians took a fort in the moonlight and pushed forward into the dark. Command disintegrated. Men could see armed bodies in the dark but couldn’t tell who was who. Panic. Friendly fire. Men killing men who fought for the same side. The night assault failed. But all hope was not lost. The fleet was still intact. The harbor was still open. They could still go home. Demosthenes wanted to leave immediately. Nicias agreed. They gave the order to evacuate. On the night of August 27, 413 BC, a lunar eclipse darkened the sky over Syracuse. Nicias consulted his soothsayers. His best seer had recently died. The men who remained told him what superstitious men want to hear: wait. Don’t move the army for twenty-seven days. Appease the gods. The omen demands it. Nicias obeyed. Twenty-seven days. Syracuse used every one of them. They blocked the harbor mouth with a chain of ships. When the Athenians finally tried to fight their way out, the confined space of the harbor negated their superior seamanship. Syracuse had reinforced their prows to smash head-on into the lighter Athenian ships. The fleet was crushed. Forty thousand men were now stranded on hostile ground with no ships, no supplies, and no hope of rescue. They abandoned their sick and wounded and marched inland. The Syracuse cavalry harried them day and night. Raining spears on the column. Picking off stragglers. Cutting off water. The army held together for days on discipline and desperation, and then it broke at the River Asinarus. The men were mad with thirst. The vanguard abandoned formation and rushed into the riverbed. They trampled each other trying to reach the water. They became tangled in their own baggage and weapons and bodies. Syracuse infantry stood on the banks above them and drove spears and javelins into the mass of men below. Troops waded into the shallows and butchered the living among the dying. The river ran with mud and blood and the Athenians who were still alive fought each other to drink it. Nicias surrendered. Syracuse executed the generals despite Sparta wanting to take them alive. They herded seven thousand Athenian survivors into the stone quarries of Syracuse. Roofless pits carved into the rock. They baked in the Sicilian sun by day and froze at night. The Syracusans fed them half a pint of water and a pint of raw grain per day. The men relieved themselves where they stood because there was no room to move. The dead were left to rot among the living. After eight months, Syracuse sold Athenian allies into slavery. They left the Athenians in the pits. A few were freed. Plutarch says the Sicilians loved the poetry of Euripides. Athenian prisoners who could recite his verses from memory were given food, water, sometimes their freedom. The empire’s last currency was its culture, traded line by line for a cup of water in a quarry. Few out of many returned home. Back to America. On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched a joint military offensive against Iran. They killed the Supreme Leader in the opening strikes. The stated objectives were to eliminate Iran’s nuclear capability and neutralize the regime as a regional threat. Within days Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, the most important shipping chokepoint in the world. They mined the waterway. The IRGC declared the corridor shut to all traffic and began attacking commercial shipping. Tankers burned off the coast of Basra. Drones struck port facilities in Oman. The insurance markets designated the entire Persian Gulf a war zone. Brent crude passed a hundred dollars a barrel. Then a hundred and twenty-six. California gas crossed five dollars a gallon. Dubai crude hit a hundred and sixty-six, its highest price in history. The largest disruption to global energy supply since the 1970s happened in weeks. Fertilizer prices climbed twenty percent. Aluminum. Helium. Sulfur. The invisible supply chains that hold the modern world together depend on that corridor, and the corridor was gone. A man in Wyoming paying more for diesel to run his tractor. A woman in Ohio paying more for groceries and not knowing why. The price of the eros, arriving at the kitchen table. Four hundred and twenty-six tankers sat in the Persian Gulf with nowhere to go. Nineteen LNG carriers. Thirty-four LPG vessels. Hundreds of container ships. Their hulls ticked in the heat. Rust bloomed along the waterlines where the salt had done its work for six weeks with no one to stop it. Then the ceasefire. Both sides claimed victory. Missiles were still launching hours after the deal was announced. Israel said it didn’t include Lebanon and kept striking. Iran said passage through the Strait would require coordination with its armed forces. The terms contradicted each other before the ink was dry. Ships began to move. Slowly. A Greek-owned bulk carrier was the first through, creeping past Larak Island under IRGC escort. Then another. They paid to pass. Up to two million dollars per crossing. In Chinese yuan and cryptocurrency. The IRGC watching from the coast. Iran’s parliament began codifying transit fees into permanent law. Iran and Oman started drafting a bilateral protocol to formalize joint governance of the waterway. The Strait of Hormuz would not return to its pre-war status. The ceasefire holds, or it doesn’t. It doesn’t matter. Iran holds it hostage. Athens didn’t die immediately after Sicily. The city unlocked its sacred reserve. Launched ships they had sworn never to touch. They fought on for nearly a decade. They won battles. But at a moment of strength, they chose weakness. The position they held before the fleet sailed, treasury full, empire intact, strategy working, was gone. It would never come back. Everything after Sicily was scrambling. Spending what should never have been spent. Fighting wars that were never necessary. Trying to recover what they had already owned. We are in that scramble now. Before our attacks, Iran had a Supreme Leader with the last name Khamenei, no nuclear weapons, and the Strait was open. Now, Iran has a Supreme Leader with the last name Khamenei, no nuclear weapons, and Iran gets a million dollars for every ship that passes through the most important shipping chokepoint in the world. The deal we had cost nothing. The deal we are making will cost something every day, forever, and the price will go up, and it will be paid at every gas pump and every grocery store and every fertilizer depot in every country on earth. Act III. The Strait The Strait of Hormuz is fourteen miles wide at the narrows. Every ship that passes through it today pays tribute to Iran. Before the war, oil moved the way water moves through a pipe. Unnoticed. The infrastructure of global commerce so ordinary that no one thought about it, the way no one thinks about electricity until the lights go out. Iran is building something permanent. Their parliament is codifying transit fees into law. They are drafting a bilateral protocol with Oman to formalize joint governance of the waterway. The IRGC collects payment at Larak Island in Chinese yuan and cryptocurrency. A million dollars. Two million. The price is whatever they say it is, because the ships have no other way through and everyone at the table knows it. This is not a crisis. A crisis ends. This is a new condition. The Strait of Hormuz will not return to its pre-war status. Every barrel of oil that moves through that corridor now carries a tax that did not exist eight weeks ago. That tax doesn’t stay at the Strait. It moves through the refinery and onto the tanker truck and then the highway and the gas station and onto the receipt and into the kitchen. Diesel in Wyoming. Groceries in Ohio. Fertilizer in Kansas. Propane in Minnesota. School lunches in every district that buys food moved by trucks that burn fuel that carries the toll. The man who has never heard of the Strait of Hormuz is paying for it every time he starts his truck. The woman who has never seen a tanker is paying for it every time she feeds her kids. Oil has fallen below a hundred dollars a barrel since the ceasefire, but it is far from the seventy dollars it was the day before the strikes. The best outcome for us now is worse than what we had for free before the first strike landed. That is the price of eros. The wanting. The appetite that felt like power and bought us a toll road instead of the free highway we had. The eros will come again. It always does. And it will feel like strength. The next Alcibiades will stand on the steps and tell the democracy that patience is cowardice. The crowd will catch fire. The few who see the madness will be afraid to raise their hands. The only answer to that is to build something the eros cannot break. There is a pipeline that does not exist. It would run from the Gulf Coast of Texas to Southern California. Right now, California imports crude oil from the Persian Gulf. Every barrel pays the toll. Every barrel crosses fourteen miles of water controlled by a country we just bombed. Meanwhile Houston sits on more oil than it can move. The Jones Act, a law passed in 1920, requires that goods shipped between American ports travel on American-built, American-crewed vessels. It is cheaper to ship oil from the Middle East to Los Angeles than to ship it from Houston. We need to hear that sentence twice. It is cheaper to ship oil from the Middle East to Los Angeles than to ship it from Houston. There are pipelines that do not exist through Saudi Arabia to the Red Sea. Port capacity that does not exist at Fujairah in the UAE, on the far side of the Strait, beyond Iran’s reach. Infrastructure across the globe that would make the Strait of Hormuz irrelevant. None of it is ready. All of it takes years. Every year it takes, the toll architecture becomes permanent. We have known this for fifty years. Since the oil embargo of 1973. Since the first time a foreign power used energy as a weapon and we stood in line at gas stations and swore never again. We swore. We did not build. Pericles built the Long Walls. Two limestone corridors connecting Athens to its port at Piraeus. They were not beautiful. They were not heroic. No one wrote victory odes about them. But they made Athens immune to siege. They guaranteed that the navy could be fed and the treasury could be filled and the empire could function no matter what any enemy did on land. They were the dull, patient, unglamorous work of a democracy that understood the difference between strength and the appearance of strength. Jones Act reform is a Long Wall. A pipeline to California is a Long Wall. A port at Fujairah is a Long Wall. Saudi pipelines to the Red Sea are Long Walls. They are limestone and labor and the boring work of building something decisive whether our Republic is wise or foolish. That is not a strategic failure. That is a failure of stewardship. We owed it to the man in Wyoming filling half a tank. The woman in Ohio staring at a grocery receipt she cannot explain to her children. To every American whose daily life is tethered to a fourteen-mile corridor on the other side of the world that we never built around because the oil was cheap and the Strait was open and the future was someone else’s problem. The future is here. If we choose to do nothing it will be denominated in yuan. I commanded a nuclear weapons strike squadron. We trained our crews for a mission we prayed we would never fly. The strongest thing we ever did in uniform was stand the watch over America and her allies. Patient. Ready. The quiet discipline of decisive capability held in reserve. We are strongest when we rest in strength. When we have power and choose not to use it. When the pipelines are built and the corridors are free and the oil moves and no one has to rescue downed Strike Eagle pilots because the infrastructure made bravery unnecessary. Build the Long Walls. Blood and salt. Salt and blood. I believe in America. Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe
April 7 · 31 min
The Neighbor
The shingles were hot enough to burn through his knees if he stopped moving. July in Leavenworth and the sun hit the roof and the heat came off in waves you could see rising like water that wasn’t there. He was skinny. Wiry. The kind of thin that doesn’t come from a gym. It comes from being on a roof in Kansas every day for years until the work carves you down to what’s essential and everything else burns off. He moved well up there. You don’t notice a good roofer until you watch one. The way the body knows where the pitch changes, the way the hands find the nail gun without looking. He was good at his work. You could see that from the ground. He lived above the great river. In the evening, he walked down the giant hill to the beer store. Not drove. Walked. He came back with a couple of tall boys, and he sat in the symphony of cicadas and evening glow and drank them. In the morning he went up on somebody else’s roof. Six days a week. Before I lived next to him, and after I left. He was a good neighbor. Quiet. Didn’t bother anybody. Had the sense not to drive after he’d been drinking. I never asked for his papers. It didn’t occur to me to. Little kids would play around his yard. He would drink his beer, listen to the cicadas, and go back to work. Some nights he dreamed. I don’t know what about. Probably the things men dream about when they’re far from where they started. I knew what I needed to know about the man. I don’t know where he is now. Maybe still in Leavenworth. Maybe he went home. Maybe ICE pulled him off a roof last year and put him on a plane. I think about him sometimes. Not because his story is tragic. It isn’t. His story is the story of the purpose of life. Eat and drink with those you love, and enjoy your work. A man who does hard work and drinks a beer after and goes to bed and gets up and does it again. There are millions of stories like his, and that’s the point. The tragedy isn’t his. It’s ours. Act I. The Roofer We have a wound. It’s been open for forty years. It’s rot. Gangrene. We want the roofer on the roof. We want the cheap shingles. We want the restaurant meal and the picked lettuce and the framed house. We won’t decide what we owe the people who do the work. Do we look at him drinking his beer in the evening and ask what we owe him? Want his kids in our schools? Hospitals? Do we count him in the census or plan for his kids or acknowledge that he’s been here for forty years and he’s our neighbor? Do we punish the businesses that hire him? In 1986, a young man crossed a border. Maybe he walked. Or rode in the back of something. He was thin even then, probably. Nineteen or twenty. He found work on roofs because nobody asks for papers on a roof. The sun and the shingles and the years carved him down to what you saw from the ground in Leavenworth. A man made of wire and work. That same year, a president looked at three million people just like him and said the honest thing. They’re here. They’re being abused. Anybody who’s here illegally is going to be abused in some way, either financially or physically. Those are the words of a conservative Senator, talking about a Republican president. Reagan treated the wound. He signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act. Offered legalization. Toughened employer penalties. It was imperfect. It was unpopular. Maybe the roofer got his papers that year. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he didn’t understand the process or didn’t trust it or couldn’t get to the office or didn’t know the window was open. Three million people and not all of them made it through the door. But the door was open. That was the last time. Forty years ago. The wound was three million people. Nobody treated it again. Not the next president or the one after that or the one after that. Every Congress looked at it and saw how unpopular it read in the papers and said later. When we break it down, there is no Congress. There is ‘we.’ ‘We’ are the people. We are Congress. We need courage. The easy thing was to talk tough or talk compassionate depending on the audience and do nothing real. So the wound grew. Six million. Eight million. Eleven million. The flesh going gray at the edges. The roofer kept working. He got older the way men who work outside get older. Not soft. Stiff. The sun took the back of his neck first and then his forearms and then everything the shirt didn’t cover turned to leather. His knees learned the pitch of every style of roof in eastern Kansas. Some mornings they wouldn’t bend right until he’d been up there an hour and the heat worked into them. He stayed thin because the work kept him thin. The weight never came because there was nowhere for it to go. The body was still doing what it was built for. It just cost more to do it. He didn’t need the country to decide. He’d already decided. He was staying. He was working. He was living the purpose of life. The country was the one that couldn’t make up its mind. And a wound you won’t decide to treat is a wound that decides for you. Act II. The Surgery And then we tried to amputate. The largest deportation effort in American history. The most money. The most agents. The most political will any administration has ever brought to this. We doubled the ICE workforce. Twelve thousand new agents. Over 1,200 agreements with state and local law enforcement. Detention capacity pushed to nearly 70,000, the highest America has ever seen. National Guard deployed. Door-to-door operations announced. Billions committed. We swung the blade. Here’s what it hit. The Brookings Institution tracked the results. Actual deportations in 2025 came to roughly 310,000 to 315,000. Under Biden’s final year, the number was 285,000. The largest enforcement operation in American history moved the needle about thirty thousand people. The administration claimed 2.2 million self-deported. Internal government figures obtained by CBS News showed official tracking recorded about 13,000 in the first six months. Brookings estimated somewhere between 210,000 and 405,000 left voluntarily above the normal baseline. Be generous. Call it half a million to 700,000. Deportations and voluntary departures combined. We started with around eleven million undocumented immigrants. Ten million people are still here. The roofer is probably still here. The wound is still open. We spent billions to move the needle thirty thousand deportations beyond what the previous administration achieved without the raids, without the National Guard, without the door-to-door operations. Without the Americans shot in the streets. Thirty thousand. On a population of eight to ten million. That’s no more than a rounding error with a budget. But the cost wasn’t only money. The blade didn’t just miss the target. It cut the wrong tissue. ICE arrests quadrupled. But arrests of people without criminal convictions increased sevenfold. The machine we built to find dangerous criminals like the cartel operatives, the traffickers, the genuine threats, pointed itself instead at roofers and dishwashers and farmhands. Not because those people were dangerous. Because the operation needed bodies to justify its scale, and the roofer is easier to find than the cartel operative. The roofer is at work. On a roof. He’s where he always is. He’s not hiding. We chose weakness. We fought the wrong enemy on the wrong ground. Every agent who pulled a roofer off a job site was an agent not chasing a trafficker. Every bed in a detention facility occupied by a dishwasher was a bed not holding a threat. We had limited resources and we spent them on the people who were never the problem, and the people who were the problem watched from wherever they watch. Federal judges found that ICE violated hundreds of court orders. Missed deadlines. Deported people after courts issued injunctions. Transferred detainees in defiance of judicial rulings. The Board of Immigration Appeals was shrunk by nearly half and packed with appointees who ruled for the government in all but one of twenty-one published decisions in 2026. The one they lost involved an immigrant withdrawing his own appeal. We sent people to countries they’d never seen. A Guatemalan man was deported to Mexico two days after telling a court he’d been abducted and raped there. Eight men were told they were being transferred between facilities in Texas and Louisiana. The plane flew to Djibouti. A Senate report found we were paying more than a million dollars per person for some of these third-country deportations to nations with documented records of corruption, trafficking, and abuse. An eleven-year-old girl in Gainesville, Texas, killed herself after classmates told her ICE was coming for her family. A thirty-year-old man named Wael Tarabishi, diagnosed with Pompe disease, died after ICE detained his father, who was also his primary caregiver. The family pleaded for his release. Wael died on January 23, 2026. Nearly half of all immigrants surveyed, including naturalized citizens and legal permanent residents, said they feared detention or deportation. Fourteen percent stopped going to church. Ten percent stopped taking their children to school. Five percent stopped going to work. The fear didn’t stay in immigrant homes. It reached into the homes of citizens. Into families with mixed status. Into neighborhoods where people stopped answering the door. That’s what gangrene does. It doesn’t stay where it starts. So the surgery failed. The blade missed. The wound is still open and now there’s new damage from the cutting. Why? Not because the agents didn’t work hard. They did. Not because the courts blocked everything. The courts did what courts exist to do, which is hold the government to the Constitution. It failed because we tried to cut away the symptom without diagnosing the disease. Milton Friedman said it plainly forty years ago. We can have free immigration. Or we can have a generous welfare state. We cannot have both. Before the New Deal, before the Great Society, before Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid, immigrants came and nobody argued about it much. They came, they worked, they sank or they swam. There was no public resource pool to strain. No safety net to access. The math worked because the equation had two variables: labor in, labor out. The social safety net added a third variable. Now there are public systems supporting healthcare, education, housing, and food assistance, that cost money and serve populations. And a person who works and pays sales tax and property tax through rent but doesn’t have a Social Security number doesn’t fully enter the tax base that funds those systems. The community bears the cost and can’t plan for it because it can’t count the people. Before you turn off and say it’s hateful, we are going to get past it. But it’s real. Not nativist. It’s arithmetic. And the people in border communities who feel that strain aren’t imagining it. But the answer to the equation isn’t deportation. You don’t solve a math problem by pretending one of the variables doesn’t exist. The roofer exists. Eight to nine million people exist. They’re in the economy. In the schools. On the roofs and in the kitchens and on the job sites. You can’t deport your way to a balanced equation. We spent billions this year to deport people and achieved nothing. The answer is to solve the equation. Account for both sides. Design a system where the people who do the work enter the tax base fully, where their contribution is counted, and their cost is planned for, and the math works for the communities they live in. Nobody has done that. Not because it’s impossible. Because it requires the one thing we’ve refused for forty years. The courage to make a decision. The roofer didn’t ask for a welfare state. He didn’t ask for Medicaid or food stamps or housing assistance. He asked for a roof to work on and a beer store within walking distance. He held up his end. He worked. He paid sales tax every time he bought those tall boys. He paid property tax through his rent. He probably had payroll taxes taken from a check written to a Social Security number that wasn’t his, paying into a system he’ll never draw from. He held up his end. We didn’t hold up ours. Our end was to decide. To look at the equation honestly and legislate an answer. To say: you’re here, you’re working, here’s what you owe and here’s what you’re owed. To open a door like Reagan opened a door and do the hard, unpopular, courageous thing that governing requires. We didn’t do it. Not because we couldn’t. Because we wouldn’t. And now the wound is eleven million people deep and the gangrene is past the knee and we’re still lying on the cot, cataloging excuses. There is a door we could open. We could actually solve the problem. It won’t be popular. It wasn’t popular in 1986 either. Act III. The Door There is a door we could open. But before we open it, we have to say the thing out loud that nobody in Washington will say. They’re here. They’re staying. Not because we agree that we want them to. Not because we’re giving up. Because we tried everything else. We spent the money. Hired the agents. Built the beds. Doubled the workforce and deputized local police and flew people to countries they’d never seen and violated court orders and sent the National Guard and announced door-to-door operations and did every single thing that was promised. And more than ten million people are still here. This is not a policy preference. It’s a physical reality. You cannot move ten million people who are embedded in the economy, in communities, in families with American-born children. You cannot do it with 70,000 detention beds when there are ten million people. You cannot do it with 310,000 deportations a year when the population replaces itself through birth and arrival faster than you can remove it. The math does not work. It has never worked. No nation in human history has achieved it without methods Americans will not and should not tolerate. So the choice is not between deportation and something else. Deportation is off the table. We took it off the table by failing at it as completely as a nation can fail at something. The choice is between the status quo of ten million people with no status, no number, no legal existence, invisible and exploitable and uncountable, and something honest. We don’t have to open the door because we’re generous. Every other door is painted on the wall. Our choice is to sit in the dirt and cry, or open it. The door starts with a number. A real one. One that says: you’re here, you’re working, we can see you. Not amnesty. Not citizenship. Not a reward for breaking the law. A decision. The decision we’ve refused to make for forty years. We could call it legal economic residency. A new category for a reality that already exists. Because the roofer already lives here. Already works here. Already pays taxes here. The only thing he doesn’t have is a status that matches his life. We’re not changing his reality. We’re catching the paperwork up to it. Here’s what it means. A legal status and a tax ID. His own Social Security number. A real one, in his real name. Payroll taxes withheld like any other worker. Full protection under labor law. OSHA covers him. He can go to court. An employer can’t hold deportation over his head to keep him at slave wages. He’s visible. Countable. Communities can plan for him because they can see him. Here’s what it doesn’t mean. Not citizenship. Not voting. Not a fast track ahead of anyone who followed the legal process. And for ten years, no access to the social programs that make the Friedman equation unsolvable. No Medicaid. No food assistance. No housing assistance. No Social Security benefits. For ten years he pays in and doesn’t draw out. After ten years of economic residency, ten years of showing up, paying in, following the rules…then he can apply for permanent residency through the normal legal process. At that point, his Social Security credits start accumulating. Forty quarters from there. Another ten working years to vest. Twenty years. Ten to prove he belongs here. Ten to earn the same benefits any worker earns. Is that fair? No. None of this is fair. It wasn’t fair when he crossed at nineteen because there was no work where he was born. It wasn’t fair when the door opened in 1986 and closed before he got through. It wasn’t fair when he paid into Social Security for forty years under someone else’s number and will never see a dime of it. But it’s honest. And it’s not unusual. In France, a foreign worker needs ten years just to qualify for a partial pension and forty years for a full one. And if your paperwork isn’t in order when you apply, they deny you everything, no matter how many years you paid in. Our deal is more generous than what the French offer, and nobody calls France cruel on immigration. The roofer is fifty-eight. Under this system, he’d be sixty-eight at permanent residency and seventy-eight before he vests into Social Security. He probably never sees a full retirement check. He knows that. He’d take the deal anyway. Because the deal isn’t about retirement. It’s about his name. His real name on a real number in a country that finally stopped pretending he wasn’t there. Twenty years is a long time. But it’s shorter than the forty he’s already waited for a country to make up its mind. So, you’re right. It’s not fair. Fair left the arena a long time ago. What this is, is honest. It’s the Friedman equation solved on paper. Millions of people paying into Social Security and Medicare for a decade before drawing anything out, at exactly the moment those systems are headed toward insolvency. That’s not a cost. That’s a net contribution. The roofer doesn’t drain the safety net. He funds it. For ten years, he funds it with no return. The fiscal hawks need to hear that number. Run it. Eight to nine million people entering the payroll tax system with a ten-year delay on benefits. It might solve the Social Security funding problem on its own. The Congressional Budget Office can model it. I’ll wait. To the people who say it’s not fair to the roofer. You’re right too. But the roofer has been paying in for forty years and getting nothing. At least this way he’s paying in under his own name, with legal protection and a date on the calendar when the account opens. That’s more than he has now. More than he’s ever had. But ten years is a long time. And we need to let some people choose to serve and earn it faster. Between ten and fifteen percent of immigrants are military veterans. All of them raised their right hand and sworn an oath to the Constitution. Some of their parents spoke poor English or no English at all. But their children stood in uniform beside me and served the nation. There is a long tradition in this country of earning your place through service. Not just military. The Civilian Conservation Corps put three million young men to work during the Depression building roads and bridges and parks, and nobody questioned whether they belonged afterward. They’d built the country with their hands. The country was theirs. Economic residency is the baseline. Ten years. But national service is the accelerator. Six years of qualified service, meaning military, infrastructure, conservation, disaster relief, rural healthcare, or elder care count as ten. You’ve served the soil. That phrase isn’t a metaphor. It connects to the deepest constitutional logic we have. Jus soli. The right of the soil. The principle that American identity is rooted in the land. Born on it, bound to it, willing to work it and defend it and build on it. We wrote it into the Fourteenth Amendment. We wrote it into the requirement that only natural-born citizens can serve as president. The soil endows rights. And service to the soil earns them. Not by blood. Not by birth. By work. By showing up for six years and building roads or caring for the elderly or clearing disaster debris or staffing a rural clinic that can’t find enough hands. The roofer has been serving the soil for forty years, one roof at a time. Give him credit for it. Now the employer. This is the part nobody wants to talk about and everybody needs to hear. The roofer didn’t hire himself. Someone handed him a nail gun and paid him cash or paid him through a number that wasn’t his and looked the other way. That someone benefits from the arrangement. Cheaper labor, no benefits, no questions asked. And that someone has been doing it for forty years while we argued about the roofer on television. Agriculture. Meatpacking. Construction. Hospitality. Entire industries built on labor they won’t legalize. Everyone knows it. The left knows it. The right knows it. The donor class on both sides profits from it. This is why the equation never gets solved. Not because it’s hard, but because the people who write the checks don’t want it solved. The shadow economy is cheaper than the legal one, and cheap has a constituency. So here’s the deal. A twelve-month window. Every employer in the country gets one year to register their undocumented workforce and transition them to economic residency payroll. Real names. Real numbers. Real withholding. Full labor law compliance. During that window, no penalties. It’s an amnesty for the employer, not the roofer. You looked the other way for forty years? Fine. The window is open. Get to it. After twelve months, the window closes. And what comes through the other side is criminal. Not fines. Not paperwork. Criminal penalties for hiring undocumented labor. Steep enough to change the math. Whistleblower protections strong enough that the dishwasher can report the restaurant without fear. Enforcement funded and relentless. You want to reduce undocumented immigration? This is how. Not by chasing the roofer across Kansas. By making it impossible for the business owner to profit from his invisibility. Turn off the demand and the supply adjusts. One more piece. The burden can’t stay where it is. Right now, border states absorb the weight. Texas. California. New York. Arizona. The roofer might live in Kansas, but millions like him are concentrated in states that bear the cost of services, education, and emergency healthcare. The real cost of a population they can’t plan for because the people have no status and no number. That’s a geography problem, not an immigration problem. And we can solve geography problems. State-level sponsorship compacts. Wyoming needs ranch hands and energy workers. Iowa needs labor in meatpacking. North Dakota needs bodies in the oil fields. States opt in based on their own labor needs, set their own caps, define their own integration requirements. Language benchmarks, civic education, whatever the state decides. Economic residents can move to where the work is and where a state has agreed to receive them. This is state’s rights. The real kind, not the kind people invoke when they want to complain about Washington. States making decisions for their own communities based on their own needs. Your governor knows what Wyoming needs better than an ICE agent in Washington does. And it solves the distribution problem. Not by federal mandate. By economic logic. The roofer goes where the roofs are. The ranch hand goes where the cattle are. The work distributes the people, the way work has since before there were borders. None of the process to make legal immigrants is easy. Legalize the roofer and the people who elected a president to deport him will be furious. Deny benefits for ten years and the people who want immediate justice will say it’s cruel. Enforce employer accountability and the donor class will fight it with everything they have. Distribute the burden to all fifty states and governors who’ve never dealt with immigration will scream about federal overreach. Fund the courts and the deficit hawks will ask where the money comes from. We don’t need comfort. We need courage. We’ve been comfortable for forty years and look where it got us. Comfort is the gangrene. Every hard thing we refused to do became the mess we have now. Let’s take a moment to focus on what’s important. What do we owe the people who aren’t citizens? The Constitution answers part of it. The Fifth Amendment says “person.” Not citizen. Person. Due process of law for everyone on our soil. The founders chose that word. Every state in the union ratified it. A word that represents the accumulated wisdom of the men who built this country. You don’t discard it because it’s inconvenient. You honor it precisely because it’s hard. But the law is the floor, not the ceiling. What do we owe him as neighbors? We owe him a decision. That’s what we owe him. After forty years we owe him the dignity of being seen. Of having a name in the system and a place in the country he already lives in. We owe him the thing we’ve owed him since 1986 and refused to give. Not charity. Not a shortcut. Not a free ride. An answer. The roofer is on a roof right now. Somewhere in Kansas or somewhere else, it doesn’t matter. The sun is doing what the sun does and the shingles are hot and his knees cost more than they used to but he’s up there. He’s always up there. He was up there before we started arguing about him and he’ll be up there after we stop. He’s not waiting for us. He stopped waiting a long time ago. He just works. But we could decide anyway. Not for his sake. For ours. Because a country that won’t decide what it owes its neighbors is a country that’s lost something worse than an argument. It’s lost the thing that made it worth building in the first place. Some nights the roofer dreams. The same dream. There’s a door and he’s walking toward it and it’s there and then it isn’t. The way dreams work. Maybe this time the door is real. I believe in America, and my America has courage. May God bless the United States of America. Sources Act I * Library of Congress, “1986: Immigration Reform and Control Act” — guides.loc.gov * NPR, “A Reagan Legacy: Amnesty for Illegal Immigrants” (2010) — npr.org * Reagan Library, “Statement on Signing the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986” — reaganlibrary.gov * Immigration History, “Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) (1986)” — immigrationhistory.org Act II * Brookings Institution, “Macroeconomic implications of immigration flows in 2025 and 2026: January 2026 update” — brookings.edu (310,000–315,000 removals; 210,000–405,000 voluntary departures; Biden-era 285,000 comparison) * CBS News, “Have 1.6 million undocumented immigrants left the U.S.?” (Aug 2025) — cbsnews.com (13,000 self-deportations in first six months per internal government figures; 2.2M administration claim) * Migration Policy Institute, “A New Era of Immigration Enforcement” (Jan 2026) — migrationpolicy.org (1,200+ local law enforcement agreements; estimated ~340,000 ICE deportations FY2025) * NBC News, “Deportations, ICE street arrests are way up — and so are arrests of immigrants with no criminal convictions” (Jan 2026) — nbcnews.com (sevenfold increase in arrests of people without convictions) * Cato Institute, “5% of People Detained By ICE Have Violent Convictions, 73% No Convictions” (Nov 2025) — cato.org * FactCheck.org, “As ICE Arrests Increased, a Higher Portion Had No U.S. Criminal Record” (Jan 2026) — factcheck.org * American Immigration Council, “Immigration Detention Expansion in Trump’s Second Term” (Jan 2026) — americanimmigrationcouncil.org * Detention Watch Network, press release (Aug 2025) — detentionwatchnetwork.org * NPR, “An immigration court few have heard of is quietly shaping policy behind the scenes” (Mar 2026) — npr.org * NPR, “Judge orders the Trump administration to return a Guatemalan man to the U.S.” (May 2025) — npr.org * The Intercept, “ICE Said They Were Being Flown to Louisiana. Their Flight Landed in Africa.” (Jul 2025) — theintercept.com * CNN, “Chatter and rumors about ICE went on for days at school of Texas girl who died by suicide” (Feb 2025) — cnn.com * CNN, “A Texas man detained by ICE was his disabled son’s sole caregiver” (Jan 2026) — cnn.com * KFF/New York Times, “2025 Survey of Immigrants” (Nov 2025) — kff.org * Center for Migration Studies, “The Two Million Deportation Myth Explained” (Jan 2026) — cmsny.org Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

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