I Believe

• Are Food Stamps Theft?

  Act 1. The First Food StampScene One: May, 1939. The Machinist and the SurplusOn the morning of May 16, 1939, Ralston Thayer stood first in line at Rochester, New York’s old post office. He was thirty-five years old. A machinist. A veteran of the Great War. He had been out of work for nearly a year. Newspaper reporters crowded around him. Photographers jockeyed for position. Thayer was making history, and they wanted a piece of the action. He walked up to the cashier window and handed over four dollars from his latest unemployment check. The clerk gave him four dollars in orange stamps and two dollars in blue stamps, free. The orange stamps could buy any food. The blue stamps could only buy whatever the Agriculture Department declared surplus. Eggs nobody wanted. Butter that wasn’t selling. The stuff farmers couldn’t move because nobody could afford to buy it. Grocers could exchange the food stamps of both colors at the bank for real dollars. The banks would then redeem the stamps with the US Treasury. Ralston Thayer became the first food stamp recipient in American history.Throughout that day, thousands of Rochester residents did as Thayer had done. They handed over cash and got back more purchasing power than they’d walked in with. That afternoon, they flooded the grocery stores with their crisp new booklets of orange and blue stamps. The grocers couldn’t believe their luck. By December, they were ecstatic. The government had sold more than a million dollars’ worth of orange stamps in Rochester alone. That meant hundreds of thousands in free blue stamps pumped directly into hundreds of grocery stores. It was a welfare program for retailers and banks as much as for families. But the question nobody asked in 1939 was why: Why was Ralston Thayer hungry?It wasn’t because there wasn’t enough food. American farms were producing too much food. The government was purchasing massive amounts of crops, transporting them, storing them, distributing them. The surplus was so large they didn’t know what to do with it. The grocery stores were full. The problem wasn’t scarcity.The problem was that the economic system had stopped working. The Depression had destroyed demand. Thayer had worked as a machinist his entire adult life. He had fought in France. He had skills, experience, discipline. Then the Depression hit, and the work vanished. Not because he was lazy. Not because he lacked ability. The entire circular flow of the economy had frozen solid.Three problems. Farm surpluses nobody could sell. Grocery stores with weak sales. Hungry citizens with seventeen percent unemployment.So the government created a solution. Tax citizens. Use that money to buy surplus crops from farmers. Give stamps to the needy. Let grocery stores profit from the influx of purchasing power. Then, banks could exchange the food stamps of both colors at the Treasury for real dollars. Supporters estimated the program would increase grocery sales by two hundred fifty million dollars a year. The grocers loved it. The banks loved it. The farmers loved it. Congress loved it. The surplus problem was solved.It was a brilliant emergency response. And it was temporary. Everyone knew it was temporary.The first Food Stamp Program lasted four years. From 1939 to 1943, it reached millions of Americans in half the country. Four million people at its peak.Then it ended. Not because Congress acted to end it. Because the conditions that created it disappeared. By 1943, America’s response to World War II had created full employment. Wages rose. People could afford food again.Many vilify President Franklin D. Roosevelt for his social programs. After all, he began food stamps in 1939. But President Franklin D. Roosevelt also ended them in 1943. Not because they didn’t work, and not by executive order. They ended because his administration made them no longer necessary. The economy had recovered. People had work. That work paid enough to buy food. The emergency was over. FDR restored the ancient principle that by the sweat of your face, you shall eat bread. This is the decisive point relevant to today. Ending food stamps is possible when people have jobs that pay enough to buy food. When workers could earn living wages, food stamps weren’t necessary. The government didn’t need to redistribute property through taxation because workers’ labor produced property. They could eat from the sweat of their brow. When we mix our labor with the dirt, what we create becomes ours. The Constitution protects this. Work and eat. Your labor produces your sustenance. It is the most basic property right in human civilization. Scene Two: 1961–1964. The ReturnBut then the food stamp program came back.President Kennedy revived the program in 1961. On May 29, Mr. and Mrs. Alderson Muncy of Paynesville, West Virginia, became the first recipients. They bought ninety-five dollars in food stamps for their fifteen-person household. Their first purchase was a can of pork and beans.Why did food stamps come back? Kennedy had campaigned in West Virginia and Appalachia. He was appalled by what he saw. Children in poverty. Families living on surplus lard and corn meal. But those families weren’t living on lard and corn meal because there was a famine. This wasn’t the Depression. The national economy was growing. Unemployment was falling. The problem wasn’t that the entire economic system had collapsed. The problem was that prosperity wasn’t reaching everyone. Entire regions had been left behind.President Johnson signed the Food Stamp Act of 1964 and declared it would be one of the most valuable weapons for the war on poverty. Johnson’s choice of the word ‘war’ is interesting. War is the continuation of politics with other means. Everything in war is simple, but even the simplest thing is difficult. A simple goal. Eliminate poverty. The challenge is setting conditions for success when you know that success will be fleeting. Victory is temporary. People adapt. Conditions change. So you set limited, measurable, achievable objectives. You define what winning looks like. You establish the conditions that will allow you to declare victory and go home.FDR understood this. His food stamp program had a clear objective: keep people from starving during an economic collapse. The conditions for success were equally clear: full employment and rising wages. When America met those conditions, the program ended. Mission accomplished.Johnson declared a war on poverty but never defined victory. No conditions for winning. No way to know when the war could end. We have never tried to figure it out.If we don’t set conditions for success, temporary relief becomes permanent. If we don’t define victory, emergency becomes normal. If we don’t make and achieve limited objectives, war becomes endless.That’s what happened to Johnson’s war on poverty.Scene Three: Today’s Constitutional FailureMore than sixty years later, we call the food stamp program SNAP. SNAP reaches forty-one million people nationwide. Ten times the peak participation of the original program. Half of American children will rely on food assistance at some point during childhood.Ralston Thayer needed food stamps because unemployment hit seventeen percent and the Depression destroyed the economy. What’s our excuse now?The problem in 1939 was no work. The problem now is work that does not pay.Ralston Thayer could not find a job. Today’s SNAP recipients have jobs. They work forty hours a week. They stock shelves at Walmart. They flip burgers at McDonald’s. They go to work, they sweat, they come home exhausted. But they can’t afford to buy food.A 2020 government report found that 70% of SNAP recipients worked full-time. The government still redistributes property through taxation. Grocery stores still profit. But now corporations benefit from cheap labor subsidized by taxpayers instead of unemployment checks.Businesses are not the villain here. They are doing exactly what businesses are supposed to do. Maximize profits within the rules Congress sets. The problem is the rules Congress set. Let’s follow the money. Businesses pay wages competitive enough to attract workers. Workers apply for SNAP. Taxpayers fund the benefits and support business wages. Workers spend SNAP benefits at businesses.This is not business corruption. This is the system working exactly as Congress designed it. Congress created the conditions where paying low wages and relying on SNAP makes perfect business sense. Any rational business would do the same.This is not a market failure. This is a constitutional failure.When a man works and cannot eat from the sweat of their brow, someone is stealing his property. The question is who.Act 2: The Government’s DutyThe answer begins with an agreement made before there were governments.Even before Adam and Eve, hands blistered from work, and children’s bellies ached for food that depended on that work. When we work, we are entitled to the bread we create. The oldest law of life itself. Older than the Ten Commandments by maybe fifty thousand years. This human condition is the foundation of all property rights. You own yourself. You own your labor. When you mix your labor with the world, what you create belongs to you. The American Founders built this philosophy into the Constitution.The Fifth Amendment says government cannot take your property without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment extends this protection against the states. But … what is property?Most people think property means things. Your house. Your car. Your land. The Founders saw it more deeply. James Madison, more responsible for the US Constitution than any other, wrote that a person has property in their opinions, in their religious beliefs, in the safety of their person. And most importantly, they have property in their labor.Your labor is yours. The wages you earn through that labor are your property. This is not a metaphor. It’s constitutional law. When you work, you are exercising a property right. Your employer pays you for property you have transferred to them. Your time. Your effort. Your skill.The government exists to protect this exchange. That is its first duty. We give up some freedom to live under laws to secure our property rights. This is the social contract. We consent to be governed in exchange for protection.So the government’s duty has two parts, but one comes first.First and foremost, government must protect the American people’s ability to acquire property through labor. A person must be able to work full-time and afford food. If they cannot, their right to their labor is violated. The government must create conditions where honest work produces enough to live. That isn’t redistribution. It’s preservation of the social contract.Second, it must protect citizens from government itself, from seizing property through taxation to benefit private interests. Congress cannot use taxation to pick winners and losers.These duties reinforce each other. When labor pays enough to live, redistribution becomes unnecessary. Property flows naturally from work to worker. The system functions as designed.But when government fails its first duty, the second duty is violated as a consequence. Workers can’t eat from their labor, so government redistributes through taxation. The constitutional failure isn’t SNAP itself. It’s the abandonment of labor that made SNAP necessary.We can’t end SNAP by cutting it first. We can only end it by making it unnecessary, by restoring the conditions where labor returns a fair value, where work yields enough to live.Ending relief before restoring wages isn’t reform. It’s theft. The same theft that created the need for relief in the first place.Act 3. 1939: The President and the Empty MillsSeptember 1, 1939. Germany invades Poland.Within weeks, Europe erupts into total war. Norway falls. Denmark falls. Belgium. France. By June 1940, the swastika flies over Paris.Across the Atlantic, America remains mired in the Great Depression’s final years. Unemployment hovers around 15 percent. Eight million people without work, nearly a decade after the initial crash. Factories sit dark. Steel mills run cold. In Rochester, New York, the federal government distributes food stamps to Ralston Thayer and thousands of others just to keep people fed. Some say World War II ended the Depression in America, but that hot take is short sighted. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s leadership ended the Depression. FDR saw something his contemporaries missed.He understood that food stamps addressed the symptom, not the disease. They fed people today. But he wanted to restart the American engine. Rebuild the connection between sweat and bread that the Depression broke.Roosevelt analyzed economic signs like a general reading battlefield terrain.The challenges in 1939 were not small. Seventeen percent unemployment. Agricultural surpluses rotting in silos. Private capital paralyzed by uncertainty. Congress unwilling to authorize deficit spending at scale. Roosevelt didn’t see these as discrete problems requiring separate solutions. He saw one frozen system. A failure of the institution that led to a lack of belief.The question wasn’t whether America could produce. The question was whether the American people could be made to believe that work led to wages, wages to food, and food to hope.Europe’s Collapse Became Roosevelt’s OpportunityThe world was fighting for its survival. It needed planes, engines, trucks, and wheat. America had the capacity, idle but ready. What we lacked was belief and consensus.In May 1940, Roosevelt revived the old Council of National Defense and created the National Defense Advisory Commission. He filled it with seven men, each responsible for a key piece of the economy: industry, labor, agriculture, transportation, raw materials, employment, and price control.He didn’t just work through government. He recruited from both sides of American power. He used business leaders for war planning. William Knudsen from General Motors. Edward Stettinius from US Steel. Sidney Hillman from organized labor. Later, the War Production Board with even broader authority.Academic elites miss that the state doesn’t need to nationalize production. It needs to create conditions to incentivize private business to voluntarily work toward national goals. Strategic institutional design.When Roosevelt asked Knudsen to serve, the man was making half a million dollars a year, roughly ten million today! Knudsen resigned and accepted a government salary of one dollar.Roosevelt offered defense contracts with capped profits. Enough to guarantee stability, not enough to encourage greed. He formed the War Labor Board to hold wages steady, prevent strikes, and protect jobs.The Institutional Design That Restored ProsperityRoosevelt offered defense contracts with guaranteed profit margins. Modest, predictable, and capped to prevent war profiteering. He established labor stability through the War Labor Board. Wage floors, minimal work stoppages, employment security. This was the invisible hand of institutional design. Government had to intervene. Laissez-faire market forces would not generate an economy to dominate our adversaries. Businesses knew they could invest in defense production without catastrophic loss. Labor knew it could work without exploitation or arbitrary dismissal. The economic machine fired up again, not because of fear but through incentives.By 1941, American industrial output began its historic expansion.Detroit’s automotive plants converted from making Buicks to bombers. Bethlehem Steel operated at capacity, pouring liberty ship hulls continuously. Women entered manufacturing labor markets in unprecedented numbers. The unemployment rate fell below 10% in 1941, the first time it had dropped below 10% since the Depression began. For the first time in over a decade, ordinary Americans could see economic progress.When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Roosevelt didn’t scramble to improvise a mobilization strategy. He accelerated the machinery already in motion.Roosevelt branded our transformation “The Arsenal of Democracy,” but the phrase hid the achievement.This was institutional engineering at constitutional scale. Roosevelt reconstructed the broken connection between property rights, labor compensation, and general welfare. No corporation earned a profit without expanding hiring. No one willing to work went hungry. Every wage, every contract, every loaf of bread became part of one living circuit. National incentive led to effort and to bread. That bread led to more effort, which generated national capability.By 1943, the transformation was complete.Industrial output doubled. National income tripled. Unemployment fell to 1.9 percent, what economists now call full employment.From 1942 to 1945, America made approximately 40 percent of global munitions. Aircraft production alone went from fewer than 6,000 planes in 1939 to over 85,000 by war’s end. Without America’s manufacturing might, the Allies would not have won World War II. The Department of Agriculture terminated the Food Stamp Program in spring 1943. The program ended as FDR’s leadership made it no longer necessary. In four years, it had served 20 million Americans. Now, those same citizens left relief rolls because work that paid a living wage replaced the need for social programs.War Destroys WealthYes, the war provided the catalyst. Europe’s desperation created demand for American production. But demand alone doesn’t end depressions. Other nations had demand during World War II and remained poor. What mattered was Roosevelt’s institutional design that channeled that demand into full employment at living wages.War destroys wealth. Steel that could have become tractors became tanks. Oil that could have powered industry was burned in battle. Labor that could have built homes was spent producing weapons designed to be destroyed.But Roosevelt didn’t just produce for war. He reconstructed the relationship between work and wages. He proved that strategic government action, not laissez-faire chaos, could restore the constitutional promise that honest labor produces property.He didn’t seize from one group to feed another. He built the conditions where every person could feed themselves through work. That is why food stamps ended in 1943. Not through budget cuts or political theater, but through prosperity that made them unnecessary.Social programs are warning lights. They flash when the connection between labor and sustenance breaks down. When work no longer earns bread. When we restore that connection, the warning light will go dark.We forgot this lesson. Since the 1960s, we’ve treated welfare as permanent infrastructure rather than emergency repair. We’ve funded the symptom while ignoring the disease.Ending SNAP tomorrow would solve nothing. Before we can withdraw relief, we must restore what made relief unnecessary in 1943: conditions where honest work puts heat in the house and food on the table.So…are food stamps theft?Yes, but not in the way most people think. The theft isn’t SNAP taking from taxpayers. The theft happened earlier, when government abandoned its duty to protect labor’s value. SNAP is just the cost of that original theft, paid over and over, year after year. We can end the theft. Not by cutting relief, but by restoring what was stolen: the dignity of work that feeds a family. Until then, every SNAP dollar is a reminder that we’ve given up on the oldest law: by the sweat of your brow, you shall eat bread.May God bless the United States of America.Music from Epidemic SoundArtist: RoofSong: The Grim Reaper Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

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• Should American Cattle Ranchers Sacrifice for China?

  A president offers to buy beef from a country we just bailed out. Argentina. American ranchers call it betrayal. Economists say it won’t lower prices. Everyone calls it stupid.But that same country just sold seven million tons of soybeans to China instead of us. And three-quarters of their beef exports go to China. And we just gave them twenty billion dollars. And their president is our president’s ideological ally.Maybe it’s not about beef. Maybe it’s about China.But the ranchers still get hurt. The consumers still don’t see lower prices. And we don’t know if Argentina will actually pivot away from China, or just take our money and keep selling to Beijing. Maybe we weaken China’s food supply. Or maybe we just weaken our own ranchers.So…Should American cattle ranchers sacrifice for China?Act 1. Nixon and the Beef Freeze: When Politics Meets MarketsMarch 29, 1973.President Richard Nixon had a problem.Actually, he had several problems. The Senate had just voted 77-0 to investigate Watergate. The cover-up was unraveling. John Dean was about to flip. Dean knew he was going to be the scapegoat in the scandal and chose to cooperate with investigators to save himself. But today, right now, the problem was beef.Beef prices were up 20% in three months. Housewives organized boycotts. One woman in Chicago told reporters she was pricing hamburger like filet mignon. Another said her family had switched to beans and rice.Fifty million people joined them. The largest consumer protest in American history.The evening news showed empty shopping carts and angry voters. Walter Cronkite was covering it. Which meant everyone was seeing it.Nixon’s economists told him to let the market work, and it would self-correct. George Shultz at Treasury. Herbert Stein at the Council of Economic Advisers. They said this was a supply problem. Bad weather. Reduced corn harvest. Feed costs up. Drought in the Southwest meant fewer cattle. Higher prices would drive the market to adjust and incentivize production. Give it time.But Nixon wasn’t interested in time. He was interested in the evening news.He’d already broken with Republican orthodoxy in 1971. Imposed wage and price controls. First peacetime controls in American history. Froze wages. Froze prices. Took the dollar off gold. His Treasury Secretary, John Connally, had sold him on it. 5% inflation doesn’t produce great election results. The controls had worked politically. Nixon won 49 states.But by early 1973, the controls were creating problems everywhere. Shortages here. Surpluses there. The price system was breaking down. Nixon didn’t care. Controls were decisive. Presidential. You announce something and prices stop going up. At least for a while. At least long enough.On March 29, Nixon made his decision.He would freeze beef prices. No more increases. Prices were locked at current levels. Which were already at record highs. The freeze would last indefinitely.Shultz and Stein thought it was madness. You can’t freeze one price in a market economy. Everything is connected. Freeze beef and you’ll create chaos.Nixon announced it anyway.The Ranchers RespondThe cattlemen understood the economics immediately.If beef prices were frozen but feed costs kept rising, you lost money every day you fed a steer. The math was simple. The response was simpler.Stop selling cattle.“Ranchers stopped shipping their cattle to the market, farmers drowned their chickens, and consumers emptied the shelves of supermarkets.”Within days, cattle auctions reported volume dropping. Thirty percent. Then forty. Then fifty. Ranchers held cattle off the market. Some waited. Others started culling herds. Selling breeding stock they’d normally keep. Getting out entirely.The packers had fewer cattle to process. They ran plants below capacity. Sent workers home. The cattle they did get, they couldn’t make money on. Frozen prices. Rising costs.Then came the shortages.Empty Meat CasesBy mid-April, grocery stores across the country had no beef.The beef that existed was lower quality. More hamburger. Less steak. Ranchers were liquidating herds instead of finishing premium cattle. Some stores limited purchases. Two pounds per customer. Others had empty display cases.Nixon had promised to solve high beef prices. Instead, he’d created beef shortages.The evening news showed housewives staring at empty meat counters. Before, they could buy beef, even if it was expensive. After the controls, there was no beef to buy at any price.The black market appeared fast. Ranchers who’d held cattle sold directly to restaurants. To butcher shops willing to pay above the frozen price. Cash transactions. Off the books. The official market was frozen. The actual market found a way.Restaurants got squeezed the worst. They couldn’t raise menu prices because of the controls. But their costs kept rising as they competed for scarce beef. Some switched to chicken. Others reduced portions. A few high-end steakhouses closed.Washington ReactsThe American National Cattlemen’s Association flooded Washington with members. Their argument was simple. They called Nixon’s approach “The Wreck.” The freeze was destroying the industry. Ranchers were losing money every day. If it continued, there would be massive liquidation. Breeding stock slaughtered. Herds dispersed. Ranchers bankrupt. Years to rebuild.The National Farmers Union backed them. Farm-state Senators backed them, Republican and Democrat alike.Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Herman Talmadge of Georgia called it the most short-sighted agricultural policy since Smoot-Hawley.The data supported them. Cattle slaughter was up 15% as ranchers liquidated. But beef production was falling. Ranchers were slaughtering younger, lighter animals instead of finishing them. More cattle killed. Less beef produced.Nixon’s political calculus was failing. The freeze was supposed to show action. Instead, it showed incompetence. Empty meat cases were worse than high prices.The ReversalSeptember 12, 1973. Five months after the freeze.Nixon lifted it.He didn’t call it a reversal. The announcement said the freeze had “served its purpose.” That “market conditions now warrant” flexible pricing.Everyone knew what happened. The policy failed.Beef prices immediately shot up. Higher than before the freeze. Pent-up demand. Disrupted supply chains. Liquidated herds reduced future supply.By year’s end, beef prices were 30% higher than when the freeze began.The freeze hadn’t stopped inflation. It deferred it and made it worse.The Long DamageBut the real damage took years to show.Cattle don’t turn on and off. A cow has one calf a year. That calf takes time to mature. If you’re building your herd, you keep the female calves so they can grow up and have calves of their own. Half your calves don’t go to market.When ranchers liquidated in 1973, they sold breeding stock. Fewer calves in 1974. Fewer yearlings in 1975. Fewer finished cattle in 1976.The hole in the pipeline lasted into the late 1970s. Prices stayed volatile. The cattle industry lost trust in government. They didn’t have much to lose.When Carter’s Agriculture Secretary tried cattle programs in 1977, ranchers told Washington to stay out.What Nixon Was Playing ForNixon froze beef prices for one reason: Political theater. He wanted the evening news to show him taking action on inflation. He wanted housewives to see a president who cared about grocery prices. He wanted voters to stop being angry.There was no strategy beyond that. No long-term economic plan. No foreign policy objective. No national security consideration.Just make the political problem go away before the next election.It didn’t work. Not even politically. The shortages were worse than the high prices. The reversal looked weak. The long-term damage was real.The LessonMarkets work, or they don’t. Agriculture markets are mature and connected.You can’t freeze one price without creating chaos everywhere else. You can’t solve a supply problem by controlling prices. You can’t make political time match cattle cycle time.Nixon sacrificed the cattle industry for short-term politics. He ended up with empty meat cases, angry ranchers, and a disrupted market that took years to fix.Fast Forward to 2025President Trump is proposing to use beef imports to lower prices. American ranchers are furious. Economists say it won’t work. People are calling it Nixon all over again.But there’s a difference.Nixon had no strategic objective beyond the next news cycle. What if Trump does? What if this isn’t about beef prices at all? What if it’s about China?Argentina just sold seven million tons of soybeans to China instead of us. China buys three-quarters of Argentine beef. We just gave Argentina twenty billion dollars. Their president is our ideological ally.What if the beef import offer is really about pulling Argentina out of China’s orbit? What if we’re trying to become their agricultural market so they don’t need Beijing? What if this is an attempt at strategic positioning disguised as price policy?Then it’s different than Nixon’s play. It’s something else.But American ranchers still get hurt, because cattle profits need to be high to rebuild herds. Consumers don’t see lower prices. And we don’t know if Argentina will pivot to America or just take our money and keep selling to China.Nixon sacrificed the rancher for politics and got nothing.Trump might be sacrificing the rancher for strategy. But what if the strategy doesn’t work? What if Argentina takes the bailout, accepts the beef deal, and keeps selling to Beijing anyway?Then we’ve disrupted our own cattle industry. For nothing. Again.The question stands: Should American cattle ranchers sacrifice for China?And the tougher question beneath it: What if they sacrifice and we still lose?Act 2. US Beef MarketsUS beef prices are at record highs. Steak prices are up 17% year-over-year. Ground beef up 13%. Beef roasts up 14%. USDA projects beef and veal prices will rise 12% in 2025, compared to less than 2% for pork or poultry.The average American family is paying hundreds more annually just for beef.The cause is the same as Nixon’s crisis. Supply.The July US cattle herd number is the lowest in recent history.And it’s going to have a hard time growing. Beef replacement heifers are the future breeding stock. Their numbers are falling. This is year twelve of the current cattle cycle. Most cattle cycles last 9-10 years. This is the longest contraction phase in 35 years. Industry analysts are calling it a “hypercycle.”Now the decisive matter. Prices drive cattle numbers in a free market. Tight cattle numbers mean low beef production, higher prices, and strong producer margins. Producers capitalize on strong margins. They retain more heifers, keep more cows, and expand. But from the time a producer decides to retain a heifer calf in the cow herd, it takes three years for her offspring to contribute to revenue. Why Isn’t the Herd Rebuilding?In a normal cycle, record prices would trigger expansion immediately. Calf prices are high. So why aren’t ranchers expanding?First: Drought. Cows need grass and water. But because of drought, nearly all US beef cows are in states with “very poor” to “fair” pasture. When ranchers have no grass and feed costs spike, they can’t afford to keep their cattle.Second: The incentive of high prices. Some ranchers are sending cows to market because they judge they’re worth more now than the calves they would produce will be worth in 18 to 24 months. Third: Demographics and debt. The average rancher is nearly 60. Should they sell today while prices are good, or take on debt at high interest rates to purchase expensive cattle and maintain infrastructure? Many are choosing to exit. Taking their profits. Not rebuilding.Then there’s New World Screwworm. It’s a parasitic fly eradicated from the US decades ago. Flesh-eating larvae that burrow into cattle and kills them slowly.Now it’s back at the Mexican border. The government banned live cattle imports from Mexico. In 2025, we imported 80% fewer cattle from Mexico.So the breeding herd is at a 75-year low from drought and liquidation. The normal supply of Mexican feeder cattle that would help is gone because of disease. And ranchers are selling heifers for slaughter instead of keeping them for breeding because current prices are too good to pass up.This is why beef prices are high. This is why they’ll stay high. The market is signaling strong demand, and low supply. Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina!October 14, 2025.Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a $20 billion bailout for Argentina. Presidents Trump and Milei are allies. Disruptors of government. Trump wants Milei to succeed. So we gave Argentina $20 billion.Within days, Argentina suspended its export taxes on soybeans.China saw the door open. They bought seven million metric tons of soybeans from Argentina. In the same timeframe, China bought zero soybeans from the United States. American soybean farmers were furious. We bailed out our direct competitor. Who immediately undercut us and sold to China.Then a week later, President Trump posed we could buy beef from Argentina to “bring our beef prices down.” The ranchers exploded. Wyoming-based Meriwether Farms addressed President Trump directly: “We love you and support you—but your suggestion to buy beef from Argentina to stabilize beef prices would be an absolute betrayal to the American cattle rancher.” Ranchers Know The Numbers Don’t WorkEconomists look at the proposal and see Nixon all over again. Government intervention to solve a political problem that won’t actually solve anything.Argentina currently accounts for 2% of total US beef imports. Even if we doubled Argentine imports overnight, it would be less than 0.7% of US beef consumption. Statistically invisible.But not invisible at the Argentinian polls. Argentine midterm elections were two days ago, October 26. Six days after Trump’s announcement. A US commitment to buy Argentine beef on top of the $20 billion bailout is a political gift. It signals American support. It gives Milei something to campaign on.The American rancher sees this clearly. We’re sacrificing their market stability for Argentina’s election prospects.Let’s remember that high beef prices are the market working. The herd is at 1951 levels and needs years to rebuild. Ranchers need high prices to recover. But Trump made a promise. Lower prices. Win midterms.Maybe this isn’t about beef at all. Act 3: The China QuestionWait. What if this isn’t about beef at all? Let’s look at the pieces again.Argentina just sold seven million metric tons of soybeans to China. Three-quarters of Argentine beef exports go to China. China is Argentina’s largest agricultural customer. And we just gave Argentina twenty billion dollars.What are we doing? China needs food. One-point-four billion people. Not enough arable land. Not enough water. They import massive amounts of protein. Brazil for soybeans. Argentina for beef and soybeans. China’s food security depends on South American agriculture. If we want to pressure Beijing without firing a shot, we threaten their food supply.What if the beef import offer isn’t about lowering American grocery prices? What if it’s about making Argentina an offer: “Sell to us instead of China. We’ll be your market. You don’t need Beijing.”If Argentina pivots toward the United States agriculturally, China loses access to a critical food source. They’d have to compete for Argentine exports instead of having guaranteed supply. That’s leverage. That’s strategic positioning.And if other South American countries see Argentina succeed by aligning with Washington instead of Beijing, maybe they reconsider their relationships too. Brazil. Chile. Uruguay. Suddenly China’s food security looks a lot more uncertain.But here’s the problem. American ranchers still get hurt. Smallest herd in seventy-five years. They survived drought. They liquidated herds. They held on through the worst of it. Now prices are finally high enough to rebuild and recover financially. High enough to make cattle ranching viable again.And the government is proposing to flood the market with foreign beef.The signal it sends is devastating: “We’ll undercut you to maybe achieve foreign policy objectives.”The ranchers who survived the drought need high prices. Not as profit-taking. As survival. As the financial foundation to rebuild herds over the next three to five years.If we artificially suppress prices now, even symbolically, we extend the recovery period. We punish the survivors. We signal that their industry is expendable for other priorities.And consumers? They still don’t see lower prices. Two percent of imports won’t move the needle on a twenty-eight-billion-pound annual market. The strategic play doesn’t help them either.The Hamilton-Jefferson SplitThis is one of the oldest arguments in American governance.Hamilton would say that national interests transcend business interests. If weakening China’s food security serves American strategic goals, we do it. Even if cattlemen get hurt. Even if it’s unpopular. Statecraft requires hard choices. The republic’s long-term security matters more than one industry’s short-term profits.Jefferson would say: The rancher is the backbone of the republic. We don’t sacrifice them for abstract geopolitical games. They feed the nation. They embody American self-sufficiency. When government chooses foreign allies over domestic producers, it betrays the people it’s supposed to serve.And there’s still a lot we don’t know. Might never know. Will Argentina actually pivot? Or will they take American money and keep selling to whoever pays most, which is China?Does weakening China’s food security actually give us strategic advantage? Or does it just make them more aggressive in securing alternative sources? More investment in Africa, more pressure on Southeast Asia, more reason to invade Taiwan for its agricultural imports?Agricultural markets are mature, and they are globally connected. Food insecurity drove much of Japan’s expansion before World War II in the Pacific. Do we really think China would just accept it? And the hardest question. Let’s say it works. Argentina pivots. China’s food security weakens. We gain strategic leverage. Was sacrificing American ranchers worth it?Or is it more likely that American ranchers pay the price for nothing?The Question RemainsShould American cattle ranchers sacrifice for China?Not “sacrifice to help China.” Sacrifice to hurt China. To weaken China’s food security. To pull Argentina out of Beijing’s orbit. To strengthen American strategic position in South America.That’s the real strategy. And it’s not necessarily wrong, strategically speaking. A nation that can’t feed itself is vulnerable. If we can create that vulnerability for a competitor, traditional statecraft says we should.Hamilton would make that case. National security transcends one industry’s profits. The long game matters more than short-term pain. Yes, the ranchers suffer. That’s the cost of statecraft. Nations don’t survive by protecting every domestic interest. They survive by accumulating power and leverage.Even if Argentina keeps selling to China, we drive uncertainty. It forces Beijing to diversify, to hedge. A confident China is a bold China. Maybe the smarter play is to create enough uncertainty that Beijing has to think twice about Taiwan and the South China Sea. The ranchers are important, but temporary. American power is permanent. We can rebuild the herd in five years. We can’t rebuild strategic position if we lose it.Jefferson would say Hamilton is asking the wrong question. It’s not whether this particular strategy works. It’s what we become when we decide it’s normal to sacrifice the American people for abstract geopolitical advantage.A republic that asks its productive class to absorb the costs of power has already lost something essential. Not militarily. Not economically. Constitutionally. The rancher isn’t a resource to be expended for statecraft. The rancher is the republic. When government starts treating citizens as expendable for long-term strategy, we stop being a Republic and start being an empire.And America owes allegiance to no king.Yes, Argentina will probably keep selling to China anyway. Yes, the strategy is speculative. But even if it worked perfectly, even if Argentina pivoted and China weakened and we gained leverage, the cost would still be wrong. Because we’d have established the principle that your livelihood is acceptable collateral for our vision of power.If we accept that principle, where does it end? The next sacrifice is easier. And the one after that easier still. Until the Republic has sacrificed so much of itself in pursuit of power that there’s nothing left to be powerful for.Our question: Should American cattle ranchers sacrifice for China?The real question: Does statecraft justify the cost of destroying the American rancher? The answer is: not this time. Probably not ever.May God bless the United States of America. Music from #Uppbeathttps://uppbeat.io/t/dada/yatagarasuLicense code: 6IWGYQ0DNPHBJY6K Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

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  29:12
• The Packs Don’t Get Lighter

  A successful elk season has come and gone. Elk season isn’t just about the harvest, or packing heavy loads out of the mountains, though those activities are often involved.Elk season is communion. With the mountain, and with each other. It’s a time of remembrance. Checking on kids and wives. Eating and drinking together. You might hunt with someone you see often, or someone you haven’t seen in ten years.Nearly every hunter in the camps I frequent is a veteran. We tell old war stories, curse aging, lament losses. We help each other hunt. We carry heavy loads on our backs for each other. We share food, water, motivation.This year, like most years, military service comes up. Every member is proud to have served. Proud of the combat capability we generated for America.But we also talk about what’s changing. Fewer kids can pass a military physical. Fewer towns send their sons and daughters to serve. The gap between those who defend America and those who benefit from it keeps widening.So this week we’re sharing three stories we talked about in camp this year. Stories about opportunity, about standards, about the investment required to maintain both. No old personal war stories though. To hear those, you have to come to camp. The Story of Audie MurphyJune 1925. Hunt County, Texas. Audie Leon Murphy is born in a sharecropper’s shack outside Kingston. And when I say shack, I mean it had a dirt floor. No electricity. No running water. His father, Pat Murphy, was a sharecropper who worked other men’s land for a cut of the cotton crop. His mother, Josie, bore twelve children. Nine survived infancy.The Depression hits Texas like a hammer. Pat Murphy starts disappearing, for days at first, then weeks. He’s drinking, chasing work that doesn’t exist, abandoning his family in slow motion. Audie is the sixth child, small for his age, but he becomes the provider. At age twelve, he’s dropping out of school to pick cotton. A dollar a day if he’s fast. He hunts rabbits and squirrels with a borrowed rifle to keep his siblings fed. He becomes an excellent shot because he has to be. Every missed shot is a missed meal.Audie is sixteen. His mother dies of complications from malnutrition, exhaustion, and poverty. The family disintegrates. The younger children are farmed out to relatives and an orphanage. Audie and his older brother pick cotton and sleep in barns to survive. Pat Murphy is long gone, fully vanished now. Audie weighs maybe 110 pounds. He looks barely fourteen.December 7, 1941. Audie Murphy decides to enlist. He’s seventeen, has a fifth-grade education, and weighs 112 pounds soaking wet. He tries the Marines first. The recruiter takes one look at this skinny kid with hollow cheeks and laughs him out of the office. “Come back when you’ve grown some, son.”He tries the paratroopers. Rejected. Too small.He tries the Navy. Rejected.His sister helps him falsify his birth certificate to prove he’s eighteen. He tries the Army. June 1942. The recruiter is skeptical, but the Army needs bodies. They take him. Private Audie Murphy. 112 pounds. Five-foot-five. Baby-faced. Assigned to the 15th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Infantry Division.They ship him to North Africa in 1943. Then Sicily. Then Italy. The kid can shoot! Everyone notices immediately. He’s calm under fire in a way that unnerves the older soldiers. No hesitation. At Anzio, he kills two Italian officers attempting to escape, drops them both at distance with a carbine. His platoon sergeant gets wounded. Murphy takes over, leads the men through German positions, takes prisoners. He’s nineteen years old.Southern France, 1944. The 3rd Division lands at Saint-Tropez, pushes north. Murphy’s collecting medals now. Bronze Star, then another. Silver Star. His superiors keep promoting him. Corporal. Sergeant. Staff Sergeant. He’s still barely old enough to vote. His friends keep dying. He keeps replacing them, learning their names, watching them die, replacing them again.One night in the Vosges Mountains, Murphy’s best friend, a man named Lattie Tipton, gets killed by German machine gun fire, cut nearly in half. The Germans had been waving a phony white flag of surrender. His death hardens Murphy. By late 1944, Murphy has a Distinguished Service Cross and battlefield commission to Second Lieutenant. The sharecropper’s son from the dirt-floor shack is now an officer. He’s twenty years old and has personally killed approximately 240 enemy soldiers, though he doesn’t brag about it, doesn’t talk about it much at all.January 26, 1945. The Colmar Pocket, Alsace, France. Temperature near zero. Murphy’s company of 128 men gets orders to hold a position near the town of Holtzwihr against a German counterattack. Six Panzer tanks. Over 250 infantry. Murphy has about 40 effective soldiers left; the rest are wounded or dead.The Germans attack. Murphy orders his men to fall back to the woods. He stays forward with his artillery observer to direct fire. A German tank shell hits an American M10 tank destroyer near Murphy’s position. It catches fire, ammunition cooking off. The artillery observer is wounded and runs. Murphy is alone.He climbs onto the burning M10.Understand that the tank destroyer is on fire. Fuel tanks could explode any second. The Germans can see him, one man, silhouetted against burning metal. He grabs the M2 Browning .50 caliber machine gun mounted on the turret. It’s loaded.For the next hour, Audie Murphy stands on a burning tank destroyer and kills Germans.He’s wounded in the leg but ignores it. The radio headset lets him call fire missions to his artillery battery while he’s shooting. German infantry gets within ten yards. He kills them. The Panzers fire at him and miss. He swivels the .50 cal, rakes their supporting infantry, calls in artillery to adjust fire onto the tanks. Rounds are snapping past his head. The tank destroyer is still burning under his feet.Finally, his ammunition gone, Germans retreating, Murphy climbs down. He walks back to his men. Refuses medical attention until he’s reorganized the defensive line. The citation for his Medal of Honor says he killed or wounded approximately 50 German soldiers during that hour. Some historians think it was more.The war ends three months later.Audie Murphy, now Lieutenant Murphy, became the most decorated combat soldier of World War II. Twenty years old, three Purple Hearts, and the Medal of Honor.The Army sends him on a publicity tour. Life Magazine does a spread. In Hollywood, he meets James Cagney, who suggests Murphy try acting. He’s got the face for it, still baby-faced, unthreatening. Universal Pictures offers a contract.Murphy uses his GI Bill benefits to take acting lessons. He’s awkward at first, uncomfortable with the attention. But he works. Makes his first film in 1948. Over the next two decades, he appears in forty-four films, mostly westerns. In 1955, he plays himself in “To Hell and Back,” adapted from his memoir. It becomes Universal’s highest-grossing film until “Jaws” twenty years later.The military gave Audie Murphy what poverty never could. Training, discipline, purpose, opportunity. He buys a house in California. Invests in oil wells and breeding horses. Brings his siblings out of Texas, sets them up, breaks the generational cycle. The sharecropper’s children become middle-class Americans.But Murphy never pretends military service is easy or cost-free.He has nightmares. Sleeps with a loaded pistol under his pillow. His first marriage collapses; his wife says he wakes up screaming and unreachable. He struggles with what we now call PTSD, what they called “battle fatigue” or “shell shock” then. The VA doesn’t know how to treat it. Most veterans don’t talk about it.Murphy talks about it.He testifies before Congress. Uses his celebrity to advocate for veterans with psychological wounds. Pushes for better VA funding, better mental health care, better recognition that war doesn’t end when the shooting stops. He’s open about his own struggles in ways that are radical for the 1950s and ‘60s. A Medal of Honor recipient admitting he’s damaged, that he needs help.May 28, 1971. Murphy is flying from Atlanta to Virginia in a private plane. Bad weather. The plane crashes into Brush Mountain near Roanoke, Virginia. Audie Murphy dies on impact. He’s forty-six years old.They bury him at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors. His grave: Section 46, Grave 366-11, becomes the second most-visited site at Arlington after President John F. Kennedy’s. People still leave medals, coins, flowers. They leave notes thanking him.From a dirt-floor shack in Hunt County to Arlington. From a dollar a day picking cotton to Captain. From fifth-grade dropout to college courses on the GI Bill. From generational poverty to homeowner, breadwinner, advocate.The military didn’t just give Audie Murphy a paycheck. It gave him a ladder. And he climbed it all the way to the top.Murphy’s story isn’t unique in American history. The military has always been the most reliable ladder out of poverty America offers. Training. Discipline. Purpose. Healthcare. Education benefits. A path to homeownership. A chance to break the cycle.Nearly every veteran has some version of Murphy’s story. Maybe not Medal of Honor level, but the same trajectory: grew up poor, served, came out qualified for something better. The GI Bill. VA home loan. Skills that translate to civilian work. A network of people who’ve supported you along the way.The men around the fire this year talked about this openly. The financial benefits. The medical coverage their families needed. The education they couldn’t have afforded otherwise. The home they were able to buy. None of them are ashamed of it. They earned it. They carried loads, literal and metaphorical, that many Americans will never carry.But there’s a disconnect. We know this ladder works. We are living proof that it works. But back home, many of us see generational poverty, families stuck on social programs for decades, with no clear way out. The very cycle Audie Murphy was born into.Murphy’s transformation wasn’t an accident. It required an intervention. The Army was that intervention. It grabbed him, gave him structure, and demanded he meet a standard.This led to a hard idea we talked about in camp. If America is serious about willfully breaking the cycle of poverty for kids growing up on social programs, why would we leave the single most effective tool we have, military service, up to chance?The proposal that came up: What if we connect them? If a family receives federal assistance, the ladder of military service isn’t just an option, it’s the mechanism. Two years of service becomes the pathway to breaking that cycle for good.Not as punishment. As opportunity. As a deliberate investment. As the most proven pathway out of generational poverty America has. You get training. Discipline. Healthcare. Education benefits. A pathway to homeownership. The same ladder Murphy climbed.Service is never cost-free. Murphy proved that, too. The nightmares. The broken marriage. The PTSD he carried until the day he died. Some men climb the ladder and make it to the top. Some don’t make it at all.We shouldn’t pretend otherwise.But the alternative, generational poverty with no ladder at all, is worse. Murphy knew that. The veterans in camp know it.The ladder works. But Murphy’s transformation only worked because the institution he joined was uncompromising. The military didn’t just give him opportunity; it demanded capability. That transformation is only possible if the standards at the other end meet America’s needs.The Story of Chosin ReservoirNovember 1950. North Korea. The Korean War is four months old.General Douglas MacArthur has pushed north from the Pusan Perimeter all the way to the Yalu River, the border with China. He’s told President Truman the war will be over by Christmas. The troops will be home for the holidays.The 1st Marine Division, roughly 15,000 men, is deployed around the Chosin Reservoir in northeast Korea. It’s mountainous terrain, remote, brutal. The temperature is already dropping below zero at night.The Marines don’t know it yet, but 120,000 Chinese troops have crossed the Yalu River and are surrounding them. The Chinese have been moving at night, in complete silence, avoiding roads. American intelligence has no idea they’re there.November 27, 1950. Night. The temperature drops to 20 below zero. Then 30 below.The Chinese attack.They hit the Marines from all sides. Fox Company, Easy Company, positions all around the reservoir. Bugles blowing, whistles, human wave attacks. The Marines are outnumbered roughly 10-to-1, maybe worse in some sectors.The fighting is close, vicious, desperate. Chinese troops are pouring out of the hills. Some Marines are overrun in their sleeping bags. Others fight hand-to-hand in the dark. Machine guns jam in the cold. Rifle bolts freeze. Morphine syrettes freeze solid. Medics have to thaw them in their mouths before they can inject wounded men.The Marines hold. Barely.By morning, it’s clear: the 1st Marine Division is surrounded. Cut off. The Chinese control the roads, the high ground, everything. Major General Oliver P. Smith, the division commander, gets orders to retreat.Smith’s response: “Retreat, hell! We’re not retreating, we’re just advancing in a different direction.”What follows is a 17-day fighting withdrawal from Chosin to the port of Hungnam. 78 miles through frozen mountains, under constant attack, in temperatures that drop to 35 below zero.The LoadEvery Marine is carrying 80 to 100 pounds. In subzero cold. At altitude. While being shot at.Here’s what’s in that load:An M1 Garand rifle. Weight, 10 pounds, plus 8-10 pounds of ammunition. 80-100 rounds minimum, many carry more. Grenades. 4-6 fragmentation grenades, 1-2 pounds each. Rations: C-rations, frozen solid, 3-5 days’ worth. Water: their canteens freeze. Marines melt snow or carry water inside their jackets against their bodies. Cold-weather gear: a heavy, bulky sleeping bag, parka, wool layers, gloves, and extra socks. Frostbite kills men as fast as bullets. An entrenching tool: For digging fighting positions in frozen ground. Ammunition for larger crew-served weapons: Machine gun belts, mortar rounds. This is distributed among the squads. Medical supplies: Bandages, frozen morphine, sulfanilamide powder.And that’s just personal gear. The company also has to move:Crew-served weapons: 31-pound M1919 machine guns, 42-pound 60mm mortars, and ammunition for both. Radio equipment: radios and heavy batteries, essential for calling artillery and air support. The wounded: As casualties mount, Marines carry stretchers, drag sleds, and support bleeding men who can’t walk. Could They Have Carried Less?Sure. And more of them would have died.Every item in that load was survival. If you carry less ammunition, you run out during the next Chinese attack and die. Less food? You lose strength, can’t march, freeze to death, or get captured. Ditch the sleeping bag? You freeze to death overnight. Men are already dying of exposure. Leave the machine guns? You lose fire superiority. The Chinese overrun your position. Abandon the wounded? Not the Marines. They do not leave each other behind.The Chinese were traveling lighter. They have quilted uniforms, tennis shoes, a bag of rice. No heavy winter gear. Minimal ammunition resupply.And they’re dying in huge numbers. Freezing to death. Starving. Unable to sustain offensive operations because they don’t have the logistics, the ammunition, the food.The Marines’ heavy loads were their advantage.The MarchThe withdrawal is a continuous running battle. The Chinese attack at night, every night. They blow bugles, charge in waves, try to overrun Marine positions. During the day, the Marines move south, fighting through roadblocks, under sniper fire, in whiteout conditions.Fox Company, 240 men, holds a mountain pass called Fox Hill for five days and nights against repeated Chinese attacks. They’re surrounded, low on ammunition, taking casualties. Air drops resupply them, but the ammo comes in parachutes that drift into Chinese lines. Marines have to crawl out under fire to retrieve it.They hold the pass. Without it, the rest of the division can’t escape.The Chinese have blown a bridge at the Funchilin Pass, a critical choke point over a 1,500-foot gorge. Without a bridge, there is no way forward. The entire division is trapped.Engineers request an airdrop of Treadway bridge sections. Huge, heavy steel spans. C-119 Flying Boxcars drop them by parachute. The Marines assemble the bridge under fire, in subzero cold. It takes hours.They get the bridge up. The division crosses. Tanks, trucks, artillery, 15,000 Marines, and over 100,000 North Korean refugees fleeing with them.The WoundedCasualties are catastrophic. Roughly 900 Marines killed in action. 3,500 wounded. Over 7,000 non-battle casualties from frostbite, exposure, and exhaustion.The Marines carry their wounded. Every man. Stretchers, improvised sleds, men supporting men who can’t walk. They carry their dead too. Even had they wanted to, the ground is too frozen to bury them.On December 11, 1950, the 1st Marine Division reaches Hungnam. They’ve marched 78 miles in 17 days. Fought through 10 Chinese divisions. Brought out their wounded, their dead, their equipment.The Chinese suffered casualties as high as an estimated 60,000 trying to stop them. Some Chinese units cease to exist. Frozen, starved, combat-ineffective.Why Heavy Packs MatteredThe Marines survived Chosin because they had capability. Enough ammunition to win firefights every night for 17 nights. Enough food to sustain a forced march at altitude in subzero cold. Enough winter gear to prevent total casualties from exposure. Enough crew-served weapons to establish fire superiority. Enough radio equipment to call in air support and artillery. Enough discipline to carry the wounded and the dead. Could they have made the packs lighter? Sure, with better materials, lighter fabrics, and more efficient rations.But had their packs been lighter, the Marines would have filled that weight savings with more ammunition. More machine gun belts. More mortar rounds. More grenades. Because when you’re surrounded 10-to-1 in subzero mountains, you don’t want a lighter pack. You want more capability.The enemy gets a vote. The terrain gets a vote. Physics gets a vote.The packs will never be lighter because if gear gets lighter, we immediately carry more ammunition, more batteries, more capability. The weight isn’t arbitrary tradition. It’s what the enemy and terrain demand.The hard truth:Some argue we should lighten loads to expand who can serve in combat roles. And we should never exclude any man or woman capable of serving. But the load is determined by the mission, not by who we wish could do it. If you can carry the load, you can do the job. If you can’t, you can’t. The enemy doesn’t care about our recruiting goals.So the standards don’t change. The packs don’t get lighter. But that doesn’t mean we turn away any man or woman who can do the job. And we don’t turn away motivated kids who aren’t qualified yet. It means we invest in qualifying them.The Story of the CCC and Project 100,000Part 1: The Civilian Conservation Corps (1933-1942)March 1933. America is in the depths of the Great Depression.Unemployment is at 25%. Thirteen million men are out of work. Young men, teenagers, early twenties, are riding the rails, sleeping in Hoovervilles, stealing to eat. Entire families are collapsing. Fathers abandon their kids because they can’t feed them. Boys drop out of school to look for work that doesn’t exist.In rural America, it’s even worse. Farm foreclosures. Dust Bowl. Malnutrition. Kids who look fourteen but are actually seventeen. Underweight, undereducated, no prospects, no future.Franklin Roosevelt takes office and immediately proposes the Civilian Conservation Corps. It’s an emergency work relief program: take unemployed young men, put them in camps, give them jobs doing conservation work. Reforestation, soil erosion control, building roads and dams in national forests and parks.Congress passes it in nine days. Roosevelt signs it into law on March 31, 1933.By July, the CCC has 250,000 enrollees. By the end of 1933, over 300,000. Eventually, nearly 3 million young men will serve in the CCC over its nine-year existence.Who They TakeThe CCC isn’t selective. If you’re male, age 17 to 28 (later expanded), unemployed, and physically capable of manual labor, you’re in.Many of these kids wouldn’t pass a military physical. They’re malnourished: underweight, vitamin deficiencies, rotting teeth, untreated medical conditions. Some can’t read or write. Some have never held a job, never followed orders, never been away from home.The CCC takes them anyway.Here’s the structure:The camps are run by the Army. Reserve officers and NCOs supervise. The day starts at 6 AM. Reveille. Calisthenics. Breakfast. Then work details: eight hours of hard physical labor. Planting trees, building trails, stringing telephone lines, constructing fire roads.It’s quasi-military discipline. Work denim uniforms. Not military dress, but standardized. Formations and inspections. Chain of command. Organized barracks life. Rules and consequences.The food is controlled. Not restricted, because these kids need calories for the manual labor, but structured. Balanced meals, three times a day, more food than most have seen in years. Medical officers monitor nutrition. Underweight enrollees are given extra rations. Overweight enrollees are put on controlled portions and heavy PT.The average underweight enrollee gains 12 pounds in the first three months.The TransformationAfter six months in the CCC, these kids are different.Physically: They’re fit. Lean muscle from manual labor and PT. Proper nutrition. Dental work. Many get their first real dental care in the CCC. Medical treatment for chronic conditions. They can march, work all day, handle physical hardship.Mentally: They’re disciplined. They know how to follow orders, show up on time, work as a team. They’ve learned that effort produces results. That structure isn’t oppression. It’s stability.Educationally: Evening classes are offered. Reading, writing, arithmetic, vocational training. Many enrollees become functionally literate in the CCC. Some earn high school equivalency certificates. They’re taught skills: carpentry, masonry, equipment operation, forestry techniques.The CCC pays them $30 a month. The enrollee keeps $5. The other $25 is sent home to his family. It’s federal relief that requires work, builds skills, and maintains dignity.These young men are sending money home. Supporting their parents, their siblings. Keeping families together. Breaking the cycle.Transition to Military ServiceDecember 7, 1941. Pearl Harbor.The CCC suddenly becomes a pipeline to military service. And the CCC veterans transition at higher rates than their non-CCC peers. Why?Because they’re already conditioned.They know how to live in barracks, follow a chain of command, wake up to reveille. They’re physically fit, used to hard work, long marches, sleeping outside. They’re disciplined, accustomed to structure, rules, consequences. They’re literate. They can read orders, fill out forms, write letters home. They’ve been away from home, already made the psychological break from family and hometown.When a CCC veteran shows up to Army boot camp, he’s not starting from zero. He’s already halfway there. The drill sergeants notice immediately. These kids don’t quit. They don’t cry for mama. They don’t wash out in the first two weeks.Many CCC veterans become NCOs because they know how to lead men, how to work hard, how to endure discomfort.The CCC essentially was pre-boot camp. It didn’t graduate soldiers. It graduated young men who were ready to become soldiers.The program ends in 1942 as the war ramps up and unemployment disappears. The camps close. The enrollees enlist. Many go on to serve in World War II. Some die in Europe and the Pacific. Others come home, use the GI Bill, buy houses, start families.The CCC took broken kids from the Depression and gave them structure, nutrition, discipline, skills, and purpose. It worked.Twenty-four years later, another administration tried something similar. They got the idea right and the execution catastrophically wrong.Part 2: Project 100,000 (1966-1971)Fast forward to 1966. Vietnam War. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara has a problem.The war is escalating. Johnson is sending hundreds of thousands more troops. But the draft is unpopular. College deferments mean middle-class and upper-class kids aren’t serving. The burden is falling on working-class and poor communities.McNamara comes up with a solution: lower the standards.He launches “Project 100,000,” a program to accept men who previously would have been rejected for military service. Men with IQs below 85. Men who are functionally illiterate. Men who fail the Armed Forces Qualification Test. Men who are significantly overweight or underweight.The stated goal: The military will be a “remedial institution.” We’ll take these disadvantaged young men, educate them, train them, lift them out of poverty. It’s the Great Society in uniform.McNamara calls them “New Standards Men.”Everyone else calls them “McNamara’s Morons.”From 1966 to 1971, Project 100,000 brings 354,000 men into the military who would have been rejected under previous standards. About 40% are Black, double their proportion of the general population.The Promise vs. The RealityHere’s what was supposed to happen:These men would get remedial education, including literacy training, vocational skills, and extra support to bring them up to standard. The military would invest in them. Transform them. Send them back to civilian life qualified for good jobs, upward mobility, middle-class life.Here’s what actually happened:They got the same training as everyone else. Same boot camp timeline (eight weeks, not longer). Same Advanced Individual Training. Same deployment schedule.No extra investment. No remedial programs. No extended preparation.They were just thrown into the pipeline with everyone else and then sent to Vietnam.The ResultsThe data is brutal.Casualty rates: Project 100,000 men died at nearly double the rate of other servicemen. They were more likely to be killed in action, more likely to be wounded.Disciplinary problems: Higher rates of non-judicial punishment, court-martials, and dishonorable discharges.Combat effectiveness: They struggled. Couldn’t read maps. Couldn’t follow complex orders. Made mistakes that got themselves and others killed.Post-service outcomes: Lower rates of college attendance. Lower incomes. Higher unemployment. Many couldn’t even navigate the VA system to claim their benefits.One study found that Project 100,000 veterans had lower lifetime earnings than non-veterans from similar backgrounds. Military service made them worse off.Why It FailedProject 100,000 failed because it admitted men who weren’t qualified and then didn’t invest in qualifying them.McNamara wanted the optics without paying the cost. Extra training takes time and money. Longer boot camps require more drill instructors, more facilities, more resources.So they just lowered the bar and pretended it would work out.It didn’t.A kid who can’t read at a fifth-grade level can’t learn land navigation in two weeks. A kid who scores in the 10th percentile on cognitive tests can’t master radio operation, weapons systems, or small unit tactics in the same timeframe as everyone else.You can’t give him the same eight weeks as a high school graduate and expect the same output.And when you send him to Vietnam anyway, underqualified, underprepared, you’re not giving him opportunity. You’re sending him to die.The BetrayalThe cruelty of Project 100,000 wasn’t that it admitted unqualified men. The cruelty was that it admitted them without preparing them.The CCC worked because it invested six months to transform men before asking them to perform. It built the ladder, then helped them climb it.Project 100,000 pointed at a ladder these men couldn’t reach and said “good luck.”We told Project 100,000 veterans military service would be their pathway out of poverty, just like it had been for their fathers’ generation. They believed it. They enlisted or got drafted. But they ended up worse off than when they started.That’s not opportunity. That’s exploitation.The LessonThe contrast between the CCC and Project 100,000 is the entire argument:If we’re going to admit unqualified service members, we have an obligation to qualify them.That means longer training timelines. Remedial education. Controlled nutrition to meet physical standards. Medical and dental care. Extended PT and conditioning. Patient, professional instructors who understand the need for more time.It means higher cost per recruit. More drill instructors. More facilities. More investment.And it means accepting higher attrition. Some won’t make it through pre-boot camp. Some won’t make it through boot camp. That’s fine. We gave them the shot. The ones who graduate earned it.But the alternative, admitting them without preparing them, lowering standards to meet quotas, sending them into combat underqualified, is a betrayal.It gets them killed. And it produces a weaker military.The CCC proves transformation is possible. Project 100,000 proves what happens when you skip the hard work.America has a national obligation. Any kid who wants to serve should get a chance. But obligation runs both ways. If we admit them unqualified, we owe them the training to become qualified. Not the same boot camp timeline as everyone else. A longer pathway with additional preparation.The proposal is simple: two tracks, same finish line.Track One is for kids who meet standards on entry. They go straight to standard boot camp and graduate qualified.Track Two is for kids who don’t meet standards yet. They go to pre-boot camp first. Three to six months depending on how far they are from standards. Controlled nutrition and PT to reach weight requirements. Remedial education to achieve literacy standards. Basic discipline and military bearing. Medical and dental care.You graduate pre-boot camp when you meet the standards to enter regular boot camp. Then you go through the same boot camp as everyone else. Same drill instructors. Same PT tests. Same rifle qualifications. Same standards.This isn’t lowering the bar. It’s building a ladder to reach it.Higher attrition is probably the reality. Some kids won’t make it through pre-boot. Some won’t make it through boot camp after that. That’s fine. We gave them the shot. The ones who make it will have earned it twice.Yes, it will cost more. Higher investment per recruit. More drill instructors. More facilities. More time. But it breaks poverty cycles. It creates capability. It fulfills the promise that military service has always represented in America.Think about Audie Murphy. He probably would’ve been rejected under modern standards. Malnourished, underweight, fifth-grade education. But someone took a chance on him. The military made him qualified through training and structure. He became the most decorated soldier of World War II.We need to systematize that opportunity. Make it a pathway, not an exception. The CCC proved it works. Project 100,000 proved what happens when you skip the hard part.The veterans in camp this year understand this. They climbed the ladder. And they want that ladder to exist for the next generation of kids growing up the way they did. The Packs Don’t Get LighterMilitary service has always been America’s most reliable ladder out of poverty. Audie Murphy climbed it from a dirt-floor shack to Arlington National Cemetery. So did most of the veterans sitting around elk campfires this season. The benefits are real: training, discipline, education, healthcare, homeownership. A pathway that breaks generational cycles.But that ladder only works if we maintain it properly. Combat loads at Chosin Reservoir weren’t arbitrary. They were the minimum required to survive and win against a numerically superior enemy in subzero mountains. The packs will never be lighter because the mission demands more combat capability at every turn. Standards at the output end are non-negotiable. If you can carry the load, you can do the job. If you can’t, you can’t.At the same time, we have a national obligation to any kid who wants to serve. The Civilian Conservation Corps proved we can take unqualified young men and qualify them through extended training, controlled nutrition, remedial education, and discipline. Project 100,000 proved what happens when we skip that investment: higher casualties, lower effectiveness, betrayal.The answer is two tracks with the same finish line. Kids who meet standards go straight to boot camp. Kids who don’t go to pre-boot camp first until they’re ready. Then everyone faces the same drill instructors, the same tests, the same standards. The ones who make it will have earned it twice.It will cost more per recruit. But it systematizes the opportunity Murphy had. It builds the ladder instead of pointing at one these kids can’t reach. It breaks poverty cycles while maintaining the combat capability America needs.The ladder works. We just need to build it right and keep the standards at the top unchanged.May God bless the United States of America. Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

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• Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God

  The Chicken TaxScene. It’s 1962. American farmers have cracked the code.We can raise chickens cheap. Like, really cheap. Industrial-scale factory farms, efficient as hell. We start shipping frozen chickens to Europe by the boatload. German housewives love it. French families love it. Half the price of local chicken. Maybe even tastier!European chicken farmers do not love it. They’re getting destroyed. So, France and West Germany do what countries do when their people scream loud enough. They slap tariffs on American chicken. Problem solved. Lyndon B. Johnson is President. He’s not amused. You slap our chickens? We slap back!In 1963, LBJ announced retaliatory tariffs. 25 percent on potato starch, dextrin, brandy. And … 25 percent on light trucks?The first three make sense. Targeted. Tit for tat. But light trucks? That was aimed at one company: Volkswagen. Their vans and little pickups were selling like crazy in the States. Detroit hated it. Johnson just gave them what they wanted: A 25 percent wall against the competition.Here’s the thing about the Chicken War. It ended fast. Europe backed down on chicken tariffs. Trade negotiations happened. The fight over poultry faded into the history books.But the truck tariff? That one never came down. Sixty-two years later, it’s still the law of the land.First, let’s clear something up. A tariff isn’t some clever penalty on foreign companies. It’s a tax on us. American importers pay it. Then they pass it along to businesses. Then businesses pass it along to you. At the dealership. At the grocery store. That’s what tariffs are. A tax on Americans buying foreign goods.That 25 percent wall around light trucks was supposed to be temporary leverage, but it stuck. It became a hidden tax we’ve been paying for six decades.And with foreign competition locked out, American trucks transformed. They got bigger. Heavier. More luxurious. Way more expensive. The Ford F-150 became the profit machine that drives Detroit. Not because it had to compete on price, but because it didn’t. Roll back the tape for context. An early 1980s F-150 had a base MSRP under six thousand dollars, roughly nineteen to twenty-four thousand in today’s money, depending on the exact model year and adjustment method. Even after inflation, trucks have leapt to a very different price tier. Now, seventy grand for a well-equipped pickup.Why would Ford lower prices when the moat was there? Why would GM? They wouldn’t. That’s not how business works.What started as a spat over frozen chicken became the permanent business model for America’s most popular vehicle.Harvard PhD Economist Milton Friedman would have loved the Chicken Tax story. The social responsibility of a business isn’t charity. It isn’t fairness. It isn’t “doing good.” It’s one thing: increase profits. That’s it. Maximize shareholder value. The sacred duty of a business is to make money.From that view, what Ford and GM did wasn’t shady. It wasn’t corruption. It was textbook. If consumers will pay $70,000 for a truck that costs half that to build, your duty is to keep charging $70,000. Dropping the price voluntarily isn’t noble. It’s malpractice. You’re throwing away profit that shareholders hired you to capture. It might even be wrong for a business to reduce prices. Voluntarily reducing prices reduces profits. And their duty is to maximize profits. Now, you can overturn a tariff in court. You can roll back a policy. You can refund the tax.But you can’t un-ring the bell. You can’t un-teach the consumer what they’re willing to pay. You can’t force a company to charge less when charging more is their duty.The Supreme Court might rule the tariffs unconstitutional. They probably should. The president doesn’t have the authority to enact sweeping tariffs. It’s about whether one man can impose the largest tax hike on the American people since 1993 without Congress. But even if the Court strikes them down, even if importers get refunds, your grocery bill isn’t going back to 2024 prices. Your furniture costs aren’t dropping. The new floor is set.That’s the lesson from the Chicken Tax. Tariffs might be temporary. But once prices go up, they don’t come down. The damage is permanent. It begs the question: What’s the purpose of these taxes?Why Congress, and Not KingsWhy do we tax ourselves at all?For most of human history, we didn’t. Early humans lived in bands of fifty, maybe a hundred. Small enough that everyone knew everyone. Cooperation was personal. You helped me hunt, I shared the meat. You watched my kids, I watched yours. No roads. No armies. No infrastructure. No need for taxes, because everything was face-to-face.Then came agriculture. Cities. Suddenly, humans lived with thousands of strangers. Tens of thousands. Millions. Our brains didn’t evolve for that. We evolved to cooperate with people we know. People we see. People in our tribe.How do you get a million strangers to cooperate? To build roads none of us would build alone? To fund armies that protect people we will never meet? To create systems like courts, schools, and infrastructure that benefit everyone but cost everyone? We told stories. Stories big enough that strangers could believe them together. Nations. Laws. Religions. The story of money we all believe is that a one-hundred-dollar bill is worth more than the cotton paper it’s printed on, that invisible numbers on a piece of plastic are worth anything at all. Taxation is one of those stories. The story says we’re not just strangers, we’re a people. Americans. Because we’re a people, we pool resources. We choose to tax ourselves, to build what none of us could build alone. Interstates, the power grid, the military, the internet.And tariffs? They’re not some foreign penalty. They’re taxes on us. American importers pay them. Then businesses pass them down. And right now, Americans are paying hundreds of billions through these tariffs. By the time the Supreme Court rules, the total bill could top a trillion dollars.When one person can tax us without consent, we no longer believe the story. We’re not citizens anymore. We’re subjects.The American Founders knew this. They’d lived it. James Madison, the architect of the Constitution, said, “Give all power to the many, they will oppress the few. Give all power to the few, they will oppress the many.”The British Crown taxed the colonies. The colonies had no representatives in Parliament. No voice. No vote. Just the bill. Taxation without representation.So when the Founders wrote the Constitution, they made a choice. A radical choice for 1787. They gave the taxing power to the American people’s representatives: Congress. Not the President. Article I, Section 8 declares Congress has the power “to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises.”That’s the philosophy of taxation in a republic. We don’t tax because a king demands it. We tax because we agree, through representation, to build something together.The Founders believed in something higher than the Crown. They believed in natural law. Rights granted by God, not kings. Life. Liberty. Property.Benjamin Franklin proposed a motto for the Great Seal of the United States: “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”That wasn’t a flourish. It was philosophy. If rights come from God or nature, no human has the authority to strip them away. So when a king taxes without consent, it isn’t just unfair, it’s illegitimate. Resisting isn’t rebellion. It’s duty.So, our choice. Citizen or subject. Representation or tyranny. Republic or monarchy.America owes allegiance to no king.Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.But the Matter Isn’t Settled…Of course, Congress has delegated some authority to the President over trade. In 1977, they passed the International Emergency Economic Powers Act for times of genuine crises. Freeze terrorist assets. Sanction rogue nations. That kind of thing.But hundreds of billions in new taxes on American importers, passed straight to American families because of trade deficits? Is that a threat to national security?The courts didn’t buy it. Not one. The Court of International Trade ruled the move illegal. Another federal court agreed. Then the Court of Appeals, three judges, unanimous, said the same thing. All concluded the law was written for emergencies, not long-standing trade policy. Letting the President tax unilaterally would rewrite the Constitution.Congress gave itself authority to tax in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution for a reason. If Congress wanted to give the President authority to impose hundreds of billions in new taxes, they have to say so explicitly. The Emergency Powers Act doesn’t do that. It authorizes responses to specific emergencies. Not permanent, sweeping taxation of the entire economy. Letting presidents declare trade deficits “emergencies” and impose massive tariffs would essentially rewrite the Constitution. It would transfer the taxing power from Congress to the executive branch. We don’t amend the Constitution through executive order and creative reading of a 1977 statute.So the tariffs are illegal. Case closed, right?Hold your horses, cowboy!The administration appealed. The appeals court paused its own ruling. Meaning the tariffs remain in effect while the case goes up to the Supreme Court. The government keeps collecting the tax. You keep paying it. Even though three separate courts have ruled it’s unconstitutional.The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. Oral arguments are scheduled for November 5, 2025. We’ll have a decision probably by year’s end. Maybe early 2026.In the meantime, the government keeps collecting. Importers keep paying. And we keep paying. By the time the Court rules, the total tab could top a trillion dollars.If the Court strikes them down, the companies that paid the tariffs will get refunds. Ford. Walmart. Target. Amazon. Every business that imported goods and paid the tax. They’ll get their money back. But the consumer? We already paid. And even if the Supreme Court strikes down the tariffs, our prices aren’t coming down. Businesses have a solemn duty to make profits. Once they’ve established that consumers will pay $70,000 for a truck, why would you drop it to $60,000 just because your costs went down? You’d be leaving money on the table. Shirking your duty to shareholders.The market has already adjusted. The new price floor is set. Consumers have demonstrated they’ll pay it. So prices stay high.The Supreme Court can rule on constitutionality, but it can’t undo the price increases. It can’t force companies to lower prices. It can’t give us back the purchasing power we’ve already lost.Is It a Win or a Loss for America?The Court will decide whether the President had the authority to impose these tariffs. The answer, based on every lower court ruling, is probably no.If the Supreme Court strikes down the tariffs, it will reaffirm a principle that’s stood for 237 years. Congress controls taxation. The President isn’t a king. We govern ourselves through our representatives, not by executive decree.That’s a win for the Republic. But it’s a hollow victory for our bank accounts.Even if the Court rules correctly and the system works exactly as Madison designed it, our grocery bills stay high. The damage is done.The constitutional principle survives. Our purchasing power doesn’t.And here’s the thing: Tariffs don’t even solve the problem they claim to address.China controls about 90% of the world’s rare earth element processing. These elements are critical minerals used in everything from F-35 fighter jets to smartphones. Last week, China expanded restrictions on rare earth exports, and the administration threatened 100% tariffs in response.But raising taxes on Americans doesn’t get us rare earth elements. It just makes Americans poorer while China still controls the supply.Want to solve the rare earth problem? Build partnerships with Denmark and Greenland, which hold substantial untapped reserves of rare earths and other critical minerals. Work with our NATO ally to develop Greenland’s mining capacity. Invest in domestic processing facilities. Create real alternatives to Chinese supply chains.That takes diplomacy. Investment. Strategic partnerships. Long-term thinking.Tariffs? That’s just taxing ourselves and calling it foreign policy.So is it a win, or a loss, for America?Jefferson already answered that question.Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.Not rebellion with rifles. Rebellion with accountability. Rebellion by demanding our representatives actually represent us. We fire the ones who let presidents tax us without a vote. We pick someone else, even if they are from the same party. We insist that we tax ourselves only by agreement of the people. Consent of the governed. Taxing power stays exactly where the Constitution put it: with Congress. With us.The system Madison and others put in place is resilient. But only if we defend it.America owes allegiance to no king.Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.Music from #Uppbeathttps://uppbeat.io/t/monument-music/betrayalLicense code: NGQCJSWK1IRUMRBE Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

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• Do We Trust Every Future President?

  The Six-Hour Bomb: When Alexander Hamilton Almost Killed the ConstitutionJune 18, 1787. Philadelphia. The temperature in the Pennsylvania State House had already hit 85 degrees. Fifty-five men in wool coats and powdered wigs sat trapped in a room with the windows nailed shut and doors guarded for secrecy. The delegates chose privacy over performance so they could speak freely. They had been arguing openly for three weeks about how to build a government. Nothing was working.Alexander Hamilton finally stood. Brilliant, abrasive, born a b*****d in the Caribbean. He’d watched the Continental Congress dither while soldiers froze at Valley Forge. He’d seen New York burn while thirteen states bickered over tax policy.He had been quiet, boxed in by his own New York colleagues. Then he said the hard part out loud. “I have well considered the subject,” he began, “and am convinced that no amendment of the confederation can answer the purpose of a good government, so long as state sovereignties do in any shape exist.”In short, there could be no fix to the Articles of Confederation, the governing document that existed before the Constitution. Maybe it was the heat. Or frustration from the gridlock. But Hamilton was done with democracy’s inefficiency. State sovereignty would always gridlock national purpose. He rejected the proposals on the table from Virginia and New Jersey and aimed higher.He spoke for six hours. All day. The room heard a full design for a national government.What Hamilton wanted: A president elected for life. Absolute veto over all state laws. Power to appoint every governor of every state. Senators serving for life. A government that Madison judged to be suspiciously like the monarchy we had just defeated in a prolonged war.Madison noted, “Give all power to the many, they will oppress the few. Give all power to the few, they will oppress the many.” In the end, America would owe allegiance to no king.Hamilton’s model pushed far past what most men in the room would accept. Delegates from Connecticut started whispering to each other. The Virginians exchanged glances. By hour three, some walked out. By hour five, even his allies from New York looked uncomfortable. Benjamin Franklin, 81 years old and sitting near the back, closed his eyes, unclear whether from boredom or horror.No one took it up for a vote. The plan was never seriously considered. His audacity branded him a monarchist to some. The day after, the Convention went back to the real fight over representation. But something had shifted. The center of gravity slid toward Madison’s national vision because Hamilton had stretched the frame.What happened next tells you how the room felt. Hamilton left Philadelphia on June 29. He drifted in and out. He returned briefly in mid-August and early September. Fleeting presence meant little influence.In the end, Hamilton signed anyway. He was the only New Yorker who did. On signing day, he told the other delegates: sign it, even if it’s not perfect. The country needs this.Then he went home and did something remarkable.New York wouldn’t ratify the Constitution. The state legislature hated it. Too much federal power, they said. Too much risk of tyranny. So Hamilton spent seven months writing essays in New York newspapers under the pen name “Publius.” He wrote fifty-one of them. Madison and John Jay wrote the rest.These became The Federalist Papers. The most important commentary on the Constitution ever written.Hamilton’s task was to convince New Yorkers that a strong executive wasn’t a king. That energy in government didn’t mean tyranny. That the Constitution he’d argued against in private was actually the best hope for the republic.He lost the room in Philadelphia. But he won the argument in the newspapers. New York ratified. Barely. By three votes.Hamilton defended a Constitution that rejected his vision because he understood something crucial: a flawed republic beats no republic at all.Read Madison’s notes closely, and you see he understood the logic of the six-hour speech, even though he disagreed. Hamilton believed human passion would wreck any loose confederacy. He feared both gridlocked democracy and entrenched kings. His cure was durability: long terms, firm vetoes, national supremacy over state mischief. He said the British constitution best united strength with security. Now, the decisive matter. America’s founders did not fear a British king. They feared an American one. They feared what would happen when blind ambition gathered enough levers to bend the entire machine. They wrote a Constitution that mixes energy with friction so no single person or group could run away with the Republic. The secrecy and sealed windows were tools to make that compromise possible, not symbols of elitism.Hamilton lost the day, but not the argument. His extreme plan made the moderate path possible. But ideas never really die. His left a permanent temptation on the table: trade our Republic’s checks and balances for speed, trade gridlock for efficiency, trade debate for decisiveness. The room said ‘no’ in 1787. That decision created the Republic of the United States of America.Hamilton lost, but his argument never died. It waits for every moment when efficiency and allegiance sound better than divided power. That moment is now.The Shutdown’s Shadow. When the President’s Memo Becomes a WeaponOctober 1, 2025. Midnight. The lights went out across Washington. The federal government shut down for the first time in six years. Congress couldn’t pass a budget, and now 2.1 million civilian employees brace for days without pay. National parks lock their gates. Passport offices close. Air traffic controllers work without paychecks. Food stamp checks bounce in rural counties.This is the machinery of America, seized. Gridlock isn’t the problem. We have no king. But this shutdown isn’t like others. Back in Washington, Russell Vought, Project 2025 author and now head of the Office of Management and Budget, directed federal agencies to prepare “reduction in force” notices. To fire employees whose programs don’t match “the President’s priorities.”Not illegal programs. Not wasteful ones. Programs the president doesn’t like.It begs the question: Does the power of the purse still reside in Congress, or has it quietly migrated to the White House?Hamilton wanted the president to veto laws. The room in 1787 said no. This week, we’re watching what happens when Congress gives up.The shutdown impacts real people, but the crux of the matter is not the impacted programs. It’s not whether the EPA should exist or the CDC deserves its budget. It’s not even whether these firings save money or waste it.The crux is Hamilton and Madison.Hamilton wanted a king, or close enough. A president who could veto laws or Congressional policies they found distasteful. Not just unconstitutional laws. Not just illegal spending. Policies the executive simply disagreed with.Madison said no. He built a system where Congressional power over spending was sacred. Where the president couldn’t just refuse to execute laws because he thought they were bad policy. Where gridlock wasn’t a bug. It was the entire point.The question in 1787: What happens when the legislature passes something the executive hates? Does the executive get to ignore it? Does one person’s judgment override the people’s representatives?The Convention answered: No. The president executes the laws. Congress controls the purse. If you don’t like what Congress funds, you veto the bill before it becomes law. Once it’s law, you follow it.But what we’re watching now is Hamilton’s vision, 238 years late. A shutdown that becomes a veto. An executive using Congressional paralysis as permission to act. Not just managing the crisis. Reshaping government during it.This isn’t about President Trump. It’s about whether America still believes what Madison wrote in 1787: that ambition must check ambition. That we must divide power to limit power. That even good policy imposed by one person is tyranny.Hamilton lost that argument. But his idea never died. It keeps popping up, waiting for the right moment.Nixon’s Impoundment Crisis: When a President Tried to Be His Own CongressRichard Nixon looked at the federal budget in 1972 and saw waste. Not illegal spending, just programs he thought were stupid. He blamed the Democratic-led party for excess spending. Water treatment plants in Democratic districts. Rural development funds. Clean water grants.Congress had passed these appropriations. Nixon had even signed some of the bills. But he decided: I’m just not going to spend this money.He called it “impoundment.” What it meant: The president can refuse to spend money Congress allocated if he thinks it’s a bad idea.By 1973, Nixon had impounded over eighteen billion dollars, about twenty percent of controllable federal spending. Clean Water Act funds. Highway construction. Housing assistance. Food stamps.When Congress asked why, his answer was simple: These programs are wasteful. I’m protecting the economy.Nixon’s position was that the president has inherent constitutional authority to refuse to spend money he deems unnecessary, regardless of what Congress wants.Congress sued. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled against Nixon in Train v. City of New York. The law said money “shall be allotted,” not “may be” or “at the president’s discretion.” Shall meant shall.The courts said clearly: The president cannot refuse to spend appropriated funds based on policy disagreement.Congress passed the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. The law was simple: The president cannot permanently cancel spending that Congress appropriated. To rescind funds, the president had to ask Congress. Both chambers must approve within forty-five days. If they didn’t, the money must be spent.The president can temporarily delay spending, but must notify Congress. Congress can force immediate release anytime.The law was bipartisan. Senate Republicans joined Democrats. Because they understood: If a Republican can do this, so can the next Democrat. This guts Congress’s power permanently.America need not fear a British king. We should fear an American one. The power of the purse is the power of the people. If we surrender it to the executive, we surrender the Republic itself.Nixon resigned in August 1974. Every president since has operated under the Impoundment Control Act. They’ve all chafed against it. But they generally followed the process: propose rescissions, let Congress vote, spend the money if Congress says.Until now. We’ve seen this before. Canceling foreign aid, withholding domestic spending, using shutdown authority to cut programs. It’s Nixon’s playbook.The argument is similar. These programs are wasteful. The president has inherent authority to manage the executive branch. The Impoundment Control Act itself might be unconstitutional.The question is the same question from 1787:Does the president execute the laws Congress passes, or does the president decide which laws are worth executing?Hamilton said the executive should have that discretion. Madison said no, that’s monarchy. Nixon tried to claim it. Congress and the courts said no.Now we’re asking again.Congress Built This TrapHere’s the uncomfortable truth: Congress created this problem.Not President Trump. Not Russell Vought. Congress did this by refusing to do their job.The Constitution gives Congress one primary measure against executive overreach: the power of the purse. Article I, Section 9. Every dollar spent must be “in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” Congress decides what gets funded. The president executes those decisions.For decades, Congress has punted. They pass continuing resolutions instead of budgets. They kick hard choices down the road. They let government lurch from crisis to crisis because making actual spending decisions requires something they can’t muster: consensus.And when Congress won’t decide, someone else will.When the legislature abdicates, the executive fills the space. Not because presidents are tyrants. Because someone has to keep the lights on.Obama used executive orders when Congress wouldn’t act on immigration. Bush claimed war powers when Congress wouldn’t debate authorization. Every modern president pushes boundaries because Congress left the boundaries undefended.Both sides have constitutional arguments.Advocates for presidential power claim the Unitary Executive position. Article II vests “the executive Power” in the President. Executing laws includes discretion over how and when to spend. The president has inherent authority to decline spending he deems wasteful.Advocates for congressional power claim the Congressional Supremacy position. Article I gives Congress the power of the purse. Appropriations are laws. The president’s duty is to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” The Framers rejected a presidential line-item veto by design.Both can cite Founders. Both can find judges who agree. This debate only happens because Congress stopped defending its own power.The Framers created friction deliberately. Madison designed it that way. Ambition to check ambition. The government grinds to a halt when consensus breaks down because gridlock is the price of divided power.Here’s the originalist paradox: If this executive power existed all along, why didn’t presidents use it for 184 years?From Washington to Nixon, presidents generally spent what Congress appropriated. Not because they lacked ambition. But because they understood the constitutional bargain.When Nixon broke that norm, both parties slapped him down. Republicans joined Democrats on the Impoundment Control Act because they understood: If Nixon can do this, so can the next Democrat.That’s the test. Not “Do I trust this president?” but “Do I trust every future president?” We can’t complain about executive overreach if Congress won’t exercise legislative power.Do We Trust Every Future President?Hamilton wanted a king. The room said no. They built a system where Congress could check the executive through the power of the purse.But that check only works if Congress pulls the lever.Madison’s design assumed ambition would check ambition. That Congress would jealously guard its powers.He didn’t account for a Congress that would rather avoid hard votes than defend its constitutional role.What’s happening now looks like Hamilton’s vision. But Madison’s system didn’t fail. Congress is failing Madison’s system.The Founders gave us the tools. Congress just refuses to use them.So, again. Do we trust every future president?May God bless the United States of America. Music from #Uppbeathttps://uppbeat.io/t/peter-cavallo/spinning-aroundLicense code: KE8Y1OQ8TZ4BNQXU Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

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