The Supreme Court denied the President’s stay application in Trump v. Cook on June 29, allowing Governor Lisa Cook to keep her seat. This was a 5–4 decision on an emergency-docket stay, not a final ruling on the merits, and it resolved far less than the headlines suggest.

What The Ruling Settled, and What It Did Not

The Court held that the President’s removal of Cook failed on narrow procedural grounds. He gave her no notice and no chance to respond before firing her. Nothing stops him from trying again. If he does, the underlying question of whether alleged pre-office mortgage fraud constitutes “cause” to remove a sitting Fed governor remains completely open, because the Court declined to spell out precisely what “cause” requires, leaving that question to be litigated the next time a president wants a governor gone.

The coalition that produced even this narrow holding is also not built to last. Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kavanaugh joined the three liberal justices to form the majority. 

The three dissents don’t agree with each other any more than they agree with the majority: Justice Thomas would eliminate for-cause protection for the Fed as unconstitutional; Justice Barrett objected mainly to the Court reaching a constitutional question the government never raised; Justice Alito (joined by Gorsuch) objected to deciding this much on an emergency-docket record the lower courts barely developed. 

A 5–4 majority that fragile, on a question this narrow, is not the kind of precedent that survives a change in the Court’s composition unscathed.

Independent of What, Exactly?

The majority’s defense of Fed independence leans on the Fed being “a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity” with a “distinct historical tradition,” language that treats independence as a kind of institutional mystique. Justice Thomas takes the opposite extreme view: the Fed wields executive power, so it should answer to the President like any other agency.

Yet the Federal Reserve was never independent of the government in any general sense. Congress created the Board; Congress alone can rewrite the statute that defines its powers. And the Fed chair testifies to Congress, not to the President, as a matter of statutory design. The President’s role was always a narrow one: nominate governors and remove them only for cause. In other words, execute Congress’s will. “For cause” protection is intended to insulate monetary policy decisions from a specific pressure: the incentive an elected official has to lean on monetary policy for short-term gain ahead of an election. That is a narrower and more defensible claim than either “the Fed is special” or “no agency should ever be insulated from anything.”

The Case for Insulating That One Thing

The dilemma is structural, not personal. You can have a skilled central banker serving under a president inclined to misuse monetary policy, or a poor central banker serving under a president who would never try to misuse it. The Constitution vests executive power in one person, by design, a single point of accountability, but also a single point of failure. 

Monetary policy, by contrast, is set by a committee whose members, in theory, have smaller, less coordinated, and mutually offsetting incentives to politicize decisions than a single elected official seeking reelection. Insulating that committee’s decisions from removal-by-displeasure doesn’t guarantee good policy. But it bounds how much damage one bad political actor can do to it. That is a more modest claim than the one usually made for central bank independence.

This ideal deserves a real-world caveat. A committee that votes together as often as the FOMC does is not perfectly diversified against shared error. The near-unanimous “transitory inflation” call of 2021–22 is a reminder that groupthink can exist in a body such as the FOMC as well. Insulation reduces correlated political risk. It does not eliminate correlated forecasting risk.

 What Does This Mean for Monetary Policy?

The ambiguity Trump v. Cook leaves unresolved exacts a direct cost on the very thing insulation was built to protect: the credibility of monetary policy itself. 

Modern central banking depends heavily on expectations (through forward guidance or otherwise): the Fed signals its future policy intentions to shape market expectations today. That only works if markets trust that the Fed’s signals reflect economic analysis rather than political accommodation. A Fed whose governors know they can be removed under a standard no court has defined, for reasons no statute limits, is a Fed whose forward guidance is conditional to presidential approval. The interest-rate path the Fed projects carries weight only if markets believe the governors on the Fed Board who help set it won’t be replaced the moment that path displeases the White House. Trump v. Cook does nothing to remove that asterisk. And the split vote is not very reassuring.

The Underlying Problem

Why did a case about an old mortgage application make its way to the Supreme Court? 

The Federal Reserve Board, which Congress insulated in 1913, set short-term interest rates, supervised member banks, and designed and executed monetary policy. That’s it. The Board that Cook serves on does much more. 

The Dodd-Frank Act, passed in 2010, gave the Fed consolidated supervisory authority over nonbank financial firms designated “systemically important” by the Financial Stability Oversight Council, and imposed enhanced prudential standards on every bank holding company above a statutory asset threshold. The same Board sets emergency lending policy under Section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act — an authority that let the Fed extend credit peaking at $710 billion in 2008 to keep firms like AIG and Bear Stearns from collapsing, and that backed a 2020 lending capacity exceeding $2.6 trillion during the pandemic, with Congress appropriating $454 billion to backstop it. In 2023, under its general safety-and-soundness authority rather than any specific congressional mandate, the Board ran a pilot climate scenario analysis (CSA) with six of the country’s largest banks; an example of how far that authority can stretch.

None of this is illegitimate; Congress authorized nearly all of it by statute. But Congress added each grant of power without revisiting whether the original case for insulating monetary policy has anything to do with insulating bank examinations, emergency lending, or systemic-risk designations, let alone climate change policies. 

The Court’s own discomfort with this gap is already on the page. 

A footnote in the majority opinion declines to bless Fed powers “attenuated from monetary policy.” As Alexander Salter has observed elsewhere in this publication, that footnote reads as a quiet acknowledgment that the Fed’s broader supervisory and enforcement machinery doesn’t sit easily with the Court’s own reasoning. Justice Barrett presses the same concern in dissent, asking whether all of the Fed’s current powers actually relate to monetary policy, and whether those that don’t are simply grandfathered in. Even within the majority, the tension surfaces: Justice Kavanaugh argued the Court had to settle the Fed’s categorical status immediately because leaving it open after Trump v. Slaughter would itself be too costly, and yet the same opinion left the definition of cause, the question every future removal fight will turn on, to be resolved case by case, indefinitely.

Cook’s case was never just about whether one governor said something untrue on a mortgage application. It was about who controls a Board that can move trillions of dollars and rewrite supervisory standards for the banking system, a far larger prize than the one the original insulation was built to protect, sitting behind the same undefined “for cause” standard. 

A governor’s protection from removal cannot apply to some of her votes and not others. There is an uncomfortable trade-off: either every part of the modern Board stays insulated together, and an unelected body runs a large slice of executive power outside the executive branch, or insulation comes off entirely and governors who need their monetary policy decisions to be independent from electoral pressure become removable at presidential pleasure. That choice only looks forced because it treats the Board’s expanded mandate as one indivisible office. It isn’t.

Only Congress Can Close Both Gaps

Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence ends with the right answer to half the problem: any further change to Fed independence “must occur through the legislative process.” He’s right that courts can’t durably settle whether the Fed gets to be independent.

The dilemma dissolves once you stop treating the Board as a single office. Keep “for cause” protection exactly where the original rationale justifies it: the governors who vote on interest rates and the money supply. Move everything else — bank supervision, systemic-risk designation, emergency lending — to a separate body whose officers answer to the President under the standard Slaughter, decided the same day, already set for ordinary executive functions (for better or worse). 

The Fed’s removal fight is still contested only because it does both kinds of work under a single, undefined standard. Separating them ends that.

Congress should therefore do two things. First, define “for cause” by statute for the seat that remains insulated, with notice and a hearing required before removal. Second, move the Fed’s non-monetary powers to a body that operates under the standard Slaughter already established, rather than letting the Fed borrow protection it was never designed to need. Protect the part of the job insulation was built for. Stop pretending the rest of the job needs the same shield.

At a Palo Alto, California, record store in September 1975, the latest issue of Rolling Stone caught the eye of local high school student Charles L. Ponce de Leon. Rock band the Eagles gazed out from the cover in youthful, long-haired glory. Inside was a story by Cameron Crowe, himself only 18 at the time.

De Leon bought the issue, sparking a lasting fascination with Rolling Stone that eventually culminated in his recent book about the magazine’s first two decades. According to de Leon, a cultural historian, writing Rolling Stone and the Rise of Hip Capitalism was “an opportunity to go back in time and think about my own intellectual development.”

It was also an opportunity to assess the magazine’s influence on American culture in the decades following the sexual revolution. “Hip capitalism” was originally coined as a slur for people profiting from the counterculture. In de Leon’s telling, however, it describes how businesses such as Rolling Stone, health food stores, head shops, and others carried 1960s values into mainstream America.

For my money, his argument does not go far enough. Rolling Stone is a perfect example of how entrepreneurs enrich themselves by enriching the lives of consumers. Unfortunately, the magazine’s left-leaning editorial stance rarely acknowledged that reality.

More than personalities or anecdotes, de Leon’s story focuses on the magazine’s content. There is more detail on individual writers, articles, and editorial coverage than some readers will want. Still, he makes a compelling case for how, to quote the book’s subtitle, “a magazine born in the 1960s changed America.”

The story begins on October 17, 1967, when the first issue of Rolling Stone went to press. Its founder, Jann Wenner, was a 21-year-old University of California, Berkeley, dropout. Like many of his peers, he was into marijuana and music. But he was also passionate about journalism. With help from his mentor, Ralph J. Gleason, who had hired him as a reporter for the San Francisco publication Sunday Ramparts, Wenner decided to try his hand at entrepreneurship. Inspired by Billboard, the British weekly Melody Maker, and low-budget fanzines such as Crawdaddy!, Wenner saw an opening for a new publication.

“It would be more discriminating than Billboard,” de Leon writes, “more substantive than the teen magazines or mainstream newspapers, and more lively than Crawdaddy!”

Wenner wanted to use journalism to legitimize the counterculture and its music. But like any entrepreneur, he first had to marshal economic resources. He raised $7,500 through a letter-writing campaign, created a mock-up, and began selling advertising.

The Entrepreneur Who Sold the Counterculture

Building Rolling Stone from the ground up, Wenner was an entrepreneur in the fullest Austrian sense. He identified a niche where his own passions intersected with unmet consumer demand. For all the disdain many young people in the 1960s expressed toward “square” America, the nation’s prosperity had given them more purchasing power than previous generations. They exercised that consumer sovereignty by buying everything from transistor radios to Beatles hair spray.

Soon they were buying Rolling Stone. By 1970, paid circulation had climbed to nearly 200,000. The magazine combined growing professionalism with fierce editorial independence. Its reviewers were unafraid to criticize work they disliked, even by revered artists such as Bob Dylan and Led Zeppelin. The coverage felt authentic, and readers responded.

Writers such as Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe soon joined the masthead. They were pioneers of “New Journalism,” which broke with the detached, objective style that had long dominated the profession. Thompson’s now-classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas first appeared in Rolling Stone in 1971. Wolfe’s 1972 article on the final Apollo lunar mission became the foundation for his later book—and the eventual film—The Right Stuff.

With work like this, Wenner expanded Rolling Stone beyond music into culture, politics, and crime through long-form coverage such as its reporting on the Manson murders. Circulation reached 466,000 by 1976. The following year, Wenner relocated the magazine’s headquarters from San Francisco to New York City, still the journalistic capital of the nation.

The 1980s brought cultural change and a new president, Ronald Reagan. Rolling Stone continued to evolve. A redesign transformed it into a traditional glossy magazine. Coverage expanded to include personal computers and even video games. Music coverage was briefly deemphasized before readers made their dissatisfaction known. Entrepreneurship is a continual negotiation between entrepreneurs and consumers, and consumers always hold the stronger hand. A business must continually earn their loyalty or be displaced by one that will.

One thing that did not change was Rolling Stone‘s politics. From the beginning, both the magazine and Wenner leaned reliably left. Even so, Wenner made one notable concession to the more conservative climate of the 1980s by hiring libertarian humorist P. J. O’Rourke as a writer and editor. A former dope-smoking longhair turned necktie-wearing Reaganite, O’Rourke was, in many ways, the Republican answer to Hunter S. Thompson. He quickly became one of the magazine’s most popular voices.

O’Rourke and Wenner also became friends. In the acknowledgments to All the Trouble in the World, O’Rourke thanked Wenner for allowing him “the latitude to rave and vociferate, although he disagrees with almost all my opinions.” He then vowed to make a Republican of Wenner yet.

That never happened. But their friendship speaks well of Wenner’s openness to dissenting viewpoints. Perhaps he even recognized that his own career embodied many of the entrepreneurial principles O’Rourke admired. Either way, theirs was the kind of friendship — like that of Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg — that feels increasingly rare today. 

Capitalism, Culture, and Consequence

De Leon’s story of Rolling Stone ends with the publication’s twentieth anniversary in 1987. By that point, issues often ran over 100 pages, and paid circulation had surpassed 1.1 million.

The magazine’s story, of course, continued into the twenty-first century. But it became one of decline, and not only because of the usual challenges facing legacy print media. In 2014, more concerned with aligning itself with the cultural establishment than with getting the story right, the publication botched a now-discredited report of gang rape involving members of a University of Virginia fraternity. With that, Rolling Stone became “what it once claimed to abhor,” according to writer Mark Judge.

De Leon does not cover this episode. But in the epilogue, he does go somewhat starry-eyed for the sexual revolution values Rolling Stone helped mainstream. He connects capitalism to the ongoing victory of those values, a process he sees continuing until conservatives are left with “little recourse but to impose their increasingly unpopular social agenda through antimajoritarian and even authoritarian means.”

Some would argue that the political left is itself quite adept at such means. But de Leon gets this much correct: capitalism, rightly understood, can transcend politics. The progressive ownership of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream has as much right to earn a profit by appealing to consumers as the conservative ownership of Hobby Lobby does.

Rolling Stone is an example of the grassroots power of capitalism. It could not have emerged in an economy without individual initiative, private property, and free markets. And it made Wenner — who sold his remaining ownership stake in 2020 — considerably wealthy, powerful, and professionally successful.

Now 80, Wenner’s life has included plenty of faults. But in the end, the value he brought to the American economic table was both journalistic and entrepreneurial. And, as with free markets themselves, millions benefited from it.

Watching the branded Freedom250 celebrations in DC, I was reminded of the quote attributed to C.S. Lewis: “When I sat with my anger long enough, she revealed her real name was grief.”

Initially, I was angry to see this solemn remembrance of the greatest-ever attempt to operationalize Enlightenment values taken over by a pay-per-view spectacle, with its conspicuous advertisements for beer and energy drinks. I was troubled by taxpayer-backed Rededicate250 prayer rallies that claimed American citizenship should require Christian identity. And I’m deeply worried about a domestic military apparatus increasingly treating civil liberties and due process as inconveniences rather than first principles. The celebration isn’t just tacky — it’s hollow. We seem to have forgotten what, exactly, the United States is supposed to be about. 

Beyond my own misgivings, this summer is such a loss for my daughter. Her nuanced picture of the United States is not a people or a plot of land but a set of ideas, consecrated in a civil creed: that all men are created equal, and are endowed with inalienable rights; that unchecked power is a threat to liberty and just powers are constitutionally constrained; that governments derive their power from the consent of the governed, and govern best when they govern least. She is a little classical liberal, and largely shielded from the grim realities of our current political dysfunction.

An American Inheritance

Last July, on a family road trip, we prepared for this momentous anniversary together. A quarter millennium of human progress is hard to appreciate when your own age is in the single digits. We began in Jefferson’s study at Monticello, where he wrote the words that would transform the political vocabulary of the world. We talked about Jupiter Evans, the enslaved man who almost certainly was in Jefferson’s earshot at that moment and who, thanks to later edits made to Jefferson’s drafts, would not be included in “all men” for another ninety years. We walked the waterfront of Alexandria and stood in the assembly room of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, in the stifling heat, just as the founders did while haggling over the future of political relations. We bowed our heads at battlefields and war memorials, and we read those words — “all men are created equal” — as they now appear beneath the dome of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington. 

I want her to believe in America, the idea. Not the empire, with its overseas meddling and wars of choice. Not the extraction machine, with its scalpel blade slicing off a share of every dollar she’ll ever earn, spend, invest, or save. Not the incarcerator, with its web of police and administrative lawyers, feeding citizens into prisons after failing them in the schoolhouse. But the American ideal. The one we celebrate. 

And the project was always unfinished, imperfect. The Founders recognized that future generations would face new challenges and provided a path to amend the nation’s governing charter. Some of those amendments have strengthened, and some weakened, the principles the Constitution embodies, but each was adopted through channels built into the original. The system of laws and separated powers gave Americans a procedure to update the Constitution as practical need (Twelfth and Twentieth Amendments) and moral imperative (Thirteenth and Nineteenth) required. 

The constitutional order, despite its noble intentions, began to break down almost immediately. Humans are capable of aspiring to significantly higher standards than we are generally capable of meeting, compounding our shortcomings with hypocrisy. George Washington used the military to put down a violent tax rebellion, whose motivating claims uncomfortably echoed those that galvanized the Sons of Liberty a generation before. John Adams betrayed free speech by backing the Sedition Act, making it a federal crime to publish “false, scandalous, and malicious” speech against the government. Thomas Jefferson defeated Adams in the next election and pardoned those convicted, but then made the Louisiana Purchase, while privately acknowledging he lacked the authority. “An amendment of the Constitution seems necessary for this,” he wrote, but found it more expedient to use executive treaty power. And these champions of individual liberty, as is often noted, saw no pressing need to extend the same natural rights to the women, enslaved people, and indigenous individuals all around them. While many constitutional framers acknowledged that contradiction in private, few confronted it politically. They left that work to future generations.

The Long Work of Liberty

And future generations arrived to take up the American challenge. Frederick Douglass saw the Constitution as an anti-slavery doctrine and demanded inclusion in its liberties, asking, “What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?” After fully two percent of the US population died in a Civil War to decide the point, Thaddeus Stevens embraced the amendment process to help abolish slavery. Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise and “The Great Agnostic” Robert Ingersoll each appealed to the Constitution to insist on the rights of Catholics, Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, nonbelievers, and other religious minorities as full participants in the American project. Suffragists Alice Paul and Ernestine Hara Kettler lit fires outside the White House gate and went on hunger strike, enduring imprisonment and force-feedings to claim the promise of equal citizenship and representation for women. Martin Luther King Jr. famously described the Declaration and Constitution as a “promissory note” that had yet to be redeemed. Like suffragists before him, King wrote poignantly from behind bars, imploring the very nation that imprisoned him to fully embrace her own ideals: life, liberty, and equality before the law. These great American revolutionaries didn’t fight against her, but for her. They were constitutional radicals who insisted protections and promises apply to “all of us,” even as that understanding evolved.

The American miracle might be that its greatest reform movements demanded not the rejection of the nation’s founding ideals, but their fuller realization. The exceptionality of the American experiment was recognized, and often craved, by those who wanted to be a part of it. 

“I love America more than any other country in the world,” wrote James Baldwin, “and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” The idea of America is difficult. It requires struggle. Great victories in protecting and expanding the ideals of America have required great personal sacrifice. Citizens seeking to hold governments accountable to their stated purpose are often attacked by the very architecture that purports to protect them. 

Safeguarding the legacy of liberty we have inherited from the framers and later liberators feels foreign to a generation that grew up enjoying its fruits without effort. But we cannot rest. The threats to the people are perpetual: power consolidates, it tears down its constraints, it seeks to extract resources from the docile and imprison the dissident. Even now, tyranny is executed in the name of “liberty.” Privacy and dignity are gutted for “security.” Free people are subjugated and their wills and consciences violated constantly. 

More recent occupants of the White House may have more in common with Mad King George III than with the statesmen who crafted our constitutional order. But the American legacy isn’t perfection — it is self-correction. 

Responsibility and Redemption

So that has become my lesson to my daughter in the coming days and years. The United States is remarkable not because it has emerged victorious, but because it has continually struggled to live up to its ideals.

The American story is not simply the story of enduring principles, but of generations struggling to live up to them. Our greatest figures did not expand liberty by abandoning the nation’s founding, but by demanding that we fully honor its promise. Our American identity is forged not just of Washington and Jefferson, but of Frederick Douglass, Robert Ingersoll, Alice Paul, and whomever comes next.

And that, I realized, is what I want her to inherit. The real work of the American anniversary is commitment: to refuse to surrender liberty for expediency, to insist on the Constitution’s protections, and to shape institutions that pass that inheritance intact, for the next generation to improve. The nation isn’t perfect. We haven’t always — or ever — fully lived up to the true meaning of our creed. 

That commitment warrants neither hagiography nor cynicism. Every generation inherits an unfinished republic. By recognizing our responsibility to live up to the founding, we can rededicate ourselves to the principles that actually underpin the nation. Each of us has the chance — and the responsibility — to move us a little closer to the promise that all are created equal, that liberty belongs to everyone, and that government is the servant, not the master, of a free people.

When the Continental Congress approved the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, its immediate purpose was practical: to justify severing ties with Great Britain and explain to audiences both foreign and domestic why rebellion had become necessary. Yet the document’s historical importance extended far beyond the thirteen colonies. The American declaration not only created a new nation, but helped establish a new political language: a language rooted in natural rights, popular sovereignty, and the legitimacy of political self-determination. It was a language that would reverberate across continents for centuries.

The Declaration was not created in an intellectual vacuum. Many of its ideas had antecedents. English constitutional traditions such as the Magna Carta (1215), the English Bill of Rights (1689), and the political philosophy of John Locke had already challenged arbitrary power and emphasized limits on government. Earlier independence struggles, including the Dutch revolt against Spain in the sixteenth century and Switzerland’s gradual emergence from Habsburg domination, demonstrated that political separation from empires was possible. But these examples differed in important respects. Most sought restoration of ancient privileges or dynastic autonomy, rather than asserting universal rights applicable to all people.

The Declaration of Independence represented something different. Thomas Jefferson’s famous claim that “all men are created equal” and were endowed with “unalienable Rights” transformed political separation into a moral argument grounded in universal principles rather than tribal, dynastic, or exclusively territorial claims. Equally important was its assertion that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed,” and that people possess the right to alter or abolish destructive governments. That argument was revolutionary not merely because it justified American independence, but because it implied that political legitimacy rested within citizens rather than the divine or inherited rights of nobility.

The first major echo came in France. French officers who fought in the American Revolution returned home with firsthand exposure to republican ideals, while France’s own fiscal crisis intensified political tensions. The French Revolution of 1789 differed dramatically in temperament and outcome, but the language of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen unmistakably reflected that American influence, emphasizing as it did liberty, equality before the law, and sovereignty of the nation. Marquis de Lafayette, the French officer who had volunteered under George Washington, worked closely with Jefferson while drafting portions of the French declaration.

American independence also resonated powerfully in Haiti. Inspired partly by both American and French revolutionary ideals, enslaved Haitians launched the only successful slave revolt in modern history, culminating in Haitian independence in 1804. Although the Haitian Revolution exposed contradictions within colonial societies that proclaimed liberty while tolerating slavery, it was also a crucial extension of the language of rights and independence beyond its original context. Jefferson’s words, and the tradition he was adding to, could inspire oppressed peoples to demand equal treatment under the laws of their own lands.

Nowhere was the American example more influential than in Latin America. Revolutionary leaders such as Simón Bolívar, José de San Martín, and Francisco de Miranda studied the American founding closely. Between 1810 and 1830, much of Spanish America declared independence, producing constitutions modeled in part on the American experiment with republican government and written constitutions. Although many of these republics struggled politically or abandoned the economic implications of the American founding, the notion that colonies could become sovereign constitutional states had become increasingly imaginable post-1776.

Jefferson’s proof of concept expanded its influence through the nineteenth century. Greece’s war of independence against the Ottoman Empire in the 1820s, Belgium’s independence in 1830, and the revolutions of 1848 across Europe all reflected growing demands for national self-government and constitutional protections. Even when revolutionary efforts failed, the principle that governments required legitimacy from the governed gained ground. Written constitutions proliferated, and representative institutions gradually spread.

The twentieth century brought a new wave of independence movements shaped, at least indirectly, by the precedent of 1776. After World War I, Woodrow Wilson’s language of national self-determination drew on principles familiar to the American founding. Following World War II, anti-colonial leaders in India, Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East increasingly justified independence through appeals to self-rule and political rights. Ho Chi Minh explicitly quoted the American Declaration in Vietnam’s 1945 declaration of independence, while numerous postcolonial constitutions borrowed structural ideas from the US model. To be sure, many movements drawing upon or invoking the Declaration of Independence did so selectively, opportunistically, and at times disingenuously, employing its language more as a source of political legitimacy than as a genuine statement of principle or guide to action. 

Was July 4, 1776 truly unprecedented? In the strictest historical sense, no. Human beings had long resisted empires, revolted against kings, and sought personal and commercial autonomy. The American founding borrowed heavily from Enlightenment philosophy, English constitutional traditions, and older republican ideals. Yet in another sense, it was profoundly unprecedented. Never before had a colony articulated independence so explicitly through universal principles, justified revolution through natural rights, and successfully institutionalized those ideas within a durable constitutional order.

The Declaration’s greatest contribution may therefore have been not invention, but demonstration. It showed that a people could justify independence through ideas rather than ancestry, establish government by consent as opposed to inheritance, and sustain a republic based on written constitutional rules. In doing so, the American Revolution expanded the realm of political possibility.

For millions around the world, July 4, 1776 became more than an American event. It became evidence that liberty, having been declared, might also be achieved.

Many of our founding fathers are familiar names, but a few others’ contributions are largely unnoticed and underappreciated. John Taylor of Caroline is one such man.

Modern critics often dismiss the founders’ contributions because they were also slaveholders, which was true of Taylor, though he wrote of it negatively. His goals of freeing and “re-exporting” slaves to Africa to avoid violent revolt might strike modern readers as objectionable, but were fairly progressive for the time. With this context understood, it is most accurate to view Taylor as producing a defense of agrarian democracy.

Joseph Stromberg called Taylor “the philosopher and statesman of agrarianism” and “the most systematic thinker” among Virginia’s planter intellectuals. Jefferson likewise admired his work. Yet Taylor was more than an agrarian spokesman. Taylor developed a sophisticated critique of institutional arrangements and political privileges that encouraged cronyism — a critique that remains surprisingly modern.

Long before Buchanan and Tullock fully articulated the Public Choice school of thought and state capture had its name, Taylor warned that political power would attract organized interests seeking special privileges. Furthermore, in An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States, he argued that “faction” was not primarily caused by differences among people. Instead, it came from government-created opportunities for favored groups to profit through legislation. He also articulated how conflicts are fomented by government-granted economic privileges. These were the result of “mercantilist economic interference.” 

Taylor distinguished between wealth earned through production and wealth obtained through political favoritism. One of his most powerful ideas is his distinction between productive and political wealth. This foreshadows Franz Oppenheimer’s observation that there are only two ways of producing wealth: the political and the economic. The former relies on coercion, the latter on value creation. Both Oppenheimer and Taylor would oppose subsidized capital, privileged banks, and government-backed financial interests on moral grounds. But Taylor was ultimately concerned about the fate that would befall the rural, agrarian culture he so loved.

Taylor’s solution to these forms of political gain was not better rulers but less concentrated power. One of the most striking parts of the essay is his assertion that liberty depends on the fragmentation of authority. His views on federalism were clear: power should be divided so thoroughly that no institution could dominate society. Least of all a central bank and a debt-ridden treasury.

Taylor believed public debt was not merely a fiscal issue but a mechanism for creating a politically dependent class. He articulated grave concerns over debt-financed standing armies, which would encourage imperial sentiments, raise tax burdens, and lead to a “paper aristocracy” that grew wealthy through these processes, and that they represented a distinct faction or class, separate from productive agricultural citizens. Once established, he wrote, “it can as easily deprive nations of the right of self-government as it can rob individuals of their property.”

Many believe that class conflict is strictly a Marxist construct. But a long tradition of classical liberals has sounded the alarm over societal rifts that emerge through the processes that Taylor and Oppenheimer warned against. Taylor believed class conflict was generated less by markets than by political privilege. But contrary to Karl Marx, he blamed state privilege, whereas Marx blamed private ownership of the means of production. 

While Taylor’s agrarian concerns may belong to a bygone era, his distinction and warning about politically versus productively generated wealth still ring true. The modern administrative state has grown tremendously since the Progressive era and has given rise to numerous politically backed privileges within the American economic landscape. From certificate-of-need regulations in healthcare to protectionist tariffs, Taylor’s warnings have gone largely unheeded.

America’s 250th anniversary is an opportunity to recover forgotten founders and the stories of their lives. The greater opportunity, however, is to rediscover the ideas that made them revolutionary: that commerce and agriculture should be free from government-granted privilege. 

If the Founders were willing to pledge to each other their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor, then we, as their heirs, should summon the political will to dismantle the institutions and policies that have fostered the very kind of cronyism John Taylor warned against. 

Even at 250 years old, it is not too late to do so.

Speaking in January at Davos, US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said that President Trump’s protectionism revives the policy first proposed by Alexander Hamilton. Like countless attempts to justify US protectionism and industrial policy, Greer’s effort praises Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures (“Report“). 

More recently, Scott Bessent, now holder of a job first held by Hamilton — US Treasury Secretary — also boasted of the administration’s Hamiltonian creed. Given the fame of Hamilton’s Report, and Hamilton’s key role in America’s founding, a close look at his Report is warranted.

Impetus for the Report

Requested by the US House of Representatives in January 1790, Hamilton submitted his Report on December 5, 1791. It was the longest and most famous of four major reports submitted to the House by Secretary Hamilton.

According to Hamilton, the House requested that he devote attention to “the subject of Manufactures; and particularly to the means of promoting such as will tend to render the United States, independent on foreign nations, for military and other essential supplies.” He complied.

America’s Economy Should Have a Strong Manufacturing Sector

The Report opened by making the case that America would benefit from a larger manufacturing sector despite America being unusually rich in land. Without naming Thomas Jefferson, the Report‘s opening was a challenge to Jefferson’s conviction that America should remain a nation mostly of yeomen farmers.

Offering this challenge, Hamilton relied on Adam Smith (also without naming him) to expose the errors of physiocracy — that is, the belief that net economic value is produced only by agriculture. Yet Hamilton went further, arguing that manufacturing can be more productive than agriculture. In making this argument, Hamilton was impressive; one might even sense in it an anticipation of some insights revealed by economists’ marginal revolution of 80 years later.

Regardless of how much or little Hamilton intuited of marginalism, he deserves credit for emphasizing the reality and significance of opportunity costs. To produce some increment of agricultural output requires that some increment of manufacturing output not be produced. And that increment of agricultural output is worthwhile to produce only if its value exceeds that of the foregone manufacturing output. Thus did Hamilton defuse the arguments of persons who believed that, to establish the case for keeping America an agricultural nation, it’s sufficient to point to the positive market value of agricultural output.

In this way, and some others, Hamilton revealed a keen ability to think insightfully about economic matters. Nevertheless, on a full assessment, Hamilton in the Report got more wrong about economics than he got right. Not content to support only the removal of artificial barriers in the US against domestic manufacturing, Hamilton argued strenuously that the government must actively promote American manufacturing. That promotion should consist chiefly of subsidies (“bounties”) supplemented by protective tariffs.

Hamilton Respected But Rejected Adam Smith

The renown of Smith’s Wealth of Nations obliged Hamilton to try to refute Smith’s argument that, in Hamilton’s summary, “industry, if left to itself … without the aid of government will grow up as soon and as fast, as the natural state of things and the interest of the community may require.” For Hamilton, what Smith called “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty” was too simple, at least for a young country without much industry. Here’s Hamilton:

Against the solidity of [Smith’s] hypothesis … cogent reasons may be offered. These have relation to — the strong influence of habit and the spirit of imitation — the fear of want of success in untried enterprises — the intrinsic difficulties incident to first essays towards a competition with those who have previously attained to perfection in the business to be attempted — the bounties premiums and other artificial encouragements, with which foreign nations second the exertions of their own Citizens in the branches, in which they are to be rivalled.

The first-mentioned impediment to American manufacturing was Americans’ alleged lack of entrepreneurship. Habit-bound and excessively risk-averse, too many Americans would stick with familiar agricultural pursuits and refrain from launching new manufacturing endeavors. Further discouraging Americans from venturing into manufacturing were the established competitors abroad who would out-compete upstart rivals. 

For Hamilton, simply being long-established was, in free markets, a nearly insurmountable competitive advantage. But in addition, foreign manufacturers might also practice what we today call “predatory pricing,” as well as enjoy their own subsidies. Therefore, Hamilton believed that manufacturing would arise and thrive in America only if the rates of return on these enterprises were boosted by the government.

Hamilton here forgot his own counsel to attend to opportunity costs. He simply presumed that whatever additional manufacturing activities were encouraged by the government would increase the net value of US economic output. He also ignored both the knowledge problem (How do politicians know which particular industries to encourage?) and the public-choice problem (With subsidies and protection being doled out by politicians, what prevents this doling from being distorted by interest-group politics?).

Hamilton also had a cramped understanding of economic competition. (In fairness, this understanding still infects economics textbooks today.) For him, competition consisted of firms producing a largely given set of outputs with largely identical technologies. Although he can’t be faulted for not reading Joseph Schumpeter’s 1942 work on creative destruction, even in 1791 evidence was growing that the major source of economic growth was entrepreneur-driven creative destruction. Such innovation introduced not only new products, but also completely new and improved means of producing existing products. 

In such an innovative economy, being long-established wasn’t the great advantage that Hamilton assumed it to be. Just ask, for example, the American millers whose traditional manner of milling flour was rendered obsolete starting in the 1780s in Delaware by Oliver Evans‘s automated flour mill.

Hamilton’s Curious Evidence

Attempting to augment his case for active government encouragement of manufacturing, Hamilton offered curious evidence. Responding to opponents who insisted that America’s economy was unfit for manufacturing, he boasted that America’s economy was already demonstrating an impressive ability to support manufacturing.

Writing about the prospects of profitable investment in manufacturing, Hamilton said that “it is certain that the United States offer a vast field for the advantageous employment of capital; but it does not follow, that there will not be found, in one way or another, a sufficient fund for the successful prosecution of any species of industry which is likely to prove truly beneficial.” He continued: In addition to America’s “multiplying” banks, another ready source of funding for manufacturing was foreign capital, which he wisely welcomed as “a precious acquisition.” Indeed, “the attraction of foreign Capital for the direct purpose of Manufactures ought not to be deemed a chimerical expectation. There are already examples of it.”

Question for Hamilton: If it was certain that the US offered vast opportunities for profitable investments in manufacturing, and if such investment was already occurring, why did such investment need to be further stimulated by the government? Hamilton’s inconsistency is evident.

Another example of Hamilton’s inconsistency is worth mentioning. When he argued for subsidies and protective tariffs for goods produced with iron, his evidence for the worth of such government assistance was the fact that such manufacturing had significantly grown in the US since the American Revolution and was flourishing. His argument was that this industry deserved protection precisely because it had proven itself capable and successful. Presumably, Hamilton would defend this inconsistency by maintaining that, without government assistance, this industrial growth — and that of other critical manufacturers — would stop short of its optimal point.

Here’s where Hamilton-as-economist faltered most seriously. He made the incorrect presumption that markets fail to generate optimal economic growth because, in the end, he didn’t appreciate just how effectively resources are allocated by market signals and incentives — by competitively determined prices, profits, and losses. 

At least for fledgling nations with relatively little industrial capacity, he believed that intervention from the top was required.

The Lasting Lesson

Studying the Report on Manufactures makes clear that Hamilton, contrary to the assertions of Greer and Bessent, was far from being a protectionist in the mold of Donald Trump. 

Not only was Hamilton’s case for protection confined to the need to stimulate industrial capacity in a country lacking such capacity, he also preferred subsidies over tariffs (because tariffs, unlike subsidies, reduce supplies of targeted goods), and he welcomed, rather than bemoaned, net inflows of foreign capital. 

Nevertheless, Hamilton ultimately had too little confidence in free markets. The late Gordon Wood’s assessment of Hamilton-as-economist is accurate:

Hamilton was so wedded to a hierarchical view of society that he could only imagine industrial investment and development coming from the top down. Thus he was incapable of foreseeing that the actual source of America’s manufacturing would come from below, from the ambitions, productivity, and investments of thousands upon thousands of middling artisans and craftsmen who eventually became America’s businessmen. Hamilton’s historical reputation as the prophet of America’s industrial greatness therefore seems somewhat exaggerated. He certainly wanted a powerful and glorious nation, but he was no more capable of accurately foretelling the future than the other American leaders.

State lawmakers are limiting the special advantages that let teachers’ unions lobby on the public dime.

Teachers’ unions have long enjoyed access to public payroll systems and facilities that no private entity receives. Recent legislation in three states demonstrates a better path: public funds are redirected toward improving student outcomes, not strengthening union infrastructure.

Idaho got the ball rolling on April 10, when Gov. Brad Little signed House Bill 516a. The law prohibits the use of public resources and facilities for union activities. Districts are now barred from collecting dues through payroll systems, hosting union meetings or trainings at school sites during work hours, or granting paid leave for political advocacy. The bill’s supporters argue that public resources should be directed toward educational functions rather than union operations.

Florida was next: Gov. Ron DeSantis signed Senate Bill 1296 on May 1. Beyond requiring meaningful participation thresholds for union certification and recertification elections, the legislation held teachers unions accountable by stopping taxpayer-funded union time for political activities.

Unions must now show genuine support from members rather than relying on automatic access to public payroll and facilities. These changes promote transparency, reduce unions’ reliance on public administrative systems, and require them to demonstrate support through voluntary member participation.

Now it’s Arizona’s turn. Republicans there passed House Concurrent Resolution 2040 on June 12. Because the measure proposes a constitutional amendment, it bypassed Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs and heads directly to voters in November. HCR 2040 would add language to Article XVIII of the Arizona Constitution prohibiting school districts from using any public monies or public resources to support the operations of a labor organization.

Specifically, it bars the use of school email systems and equipment to recruit members or distribute union materials, ends automatic payroll deductions for union dues, and prohibits union meetings on school property during school hours when students are present. Taxpayer-supported institutions should be neutral, not used as union organizing hubs that lobby the same government that funds them.

This concern predates contemporary debates over education policy. Decades ago, a leading progressive articulated the fundamental conflict of public sector unions, as taxpayers occupy both sides of the negotiating table. In a 1937 letter to the president of the National Federation of Federal Employees, Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote: 

All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. 

Public-sector unions differ fundamentally from private-sector ones because the employer is the taxpayer. Collective bargaining in government pits employees against the public, rather than against private profit motives. Roosevelt continued:

The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations.

Opponents sometimes argue that restricting taxpayer support for union activities violates teachers’ First Amendment rights. The claim does not hold. Teachers retain full freedom to form voluntary associations, pay dues from their own pockets, and engage in political speech on their own time and with their own resources. No constitutional provision grants any group the right to extract compulsory subsidies from the general public or from non-members through government payroll mechanisms. Ending forced taxpayer support simply restores voluntary association and government neutrality.

Teachers unions have increasingly served as reliable extensions of the Democratic Party agenda. The National Education Association killed a resolution in 2019 that would have rededicated the organization to increased student learning as its central priority. In 2025, the same body adopted numerous political resolutions that functioned more as attacks on the Trump administration than as statements about classroom practice.

The political flavor of the organization’s actions is pronounced: NEA President Becky Pringle remains an at-large member of the Democratic National Committee. In the most recent election cycle, over 98 percent of the NEA’s political contributions flowed to Democratic candidates and causes. The pattern doesn’t look like independent advocacy on behalf of educators.

The issue is not unique to teachers unions. Whenever a public institution provides resources to an organization that seeks to influence public policy, a principal-agent problem emerges. Taxpayers fund the institution, but its leaders may use public resources to advance the interests of the narrow group, rather than those of the broader public.

Similar patterns appear at the American Federation of Teachers. Its president, Randi Weingarten, reportedly directed more than $1.4 million in union resources toward promoting her book — which brands mainstream conservatives as “fascists.” She also leveraged the union’s substantial pension fund holdings to pressure retailer Target into publicly opposing federal immigration enforcement. Using retirement assets accumulated from teachers’ paychecks to pursue unrelated political objectives constitutes a clear departure from fiduciary responsibility.

Every state could replicate Idaho’s approach, requiring government to remain neutral, not backing specific advocacy organizations with public funds. Taxpayers already finance public schools: a trillion dollars in total per-pupil spending. They should not be compelled underwrite the political operations of organizations that consistently prioritize partisan influence over measurable improvements in student achievement.

The question is not whether teachers unions should exist, but whether taxpayers should subsidize organizations that subsequently seek more taxpayer subsidy, often for actions the taxpayer wouldn’t otherwise support.

Removing public subsidies forces unions to rely on voluntary member support, increases accountability, and keeps government resources focused on their proper purpose: educating children. The reforms in Idaho, Florida, and Arizona mark the beginning of a necessary correction.

Why did the American Revolution succeed while the French Revolution failed? It’s an excellent question that comes up almost every time anyone lectures on either — or both — of these fateful events. The answer requires a tour through philosophy, character, religion, and politics.

First, let’s establish the premise behind the question itself.

The American Revolution achieved the goals its instigators intended: independence from Great Britain, a constitutional republic, and a limited government focused on defending individual liberty, enterprise, and property. We are still living under that system — and celebrating it — 250 years later.

The French Revolution appeared promising at the outset. Bridging the two upheavals, the Marquis de Lafayette even wrote (with Thomas Jefferson’s assistance) the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen just days before the storming of the Bastille in July 1789. But three years later, Lafayette was on the run as the Revolution descended into cataclysmic violence and oppression. Instead of peace and freedom, France welcomed war and dictatorship under Napoleon Bonaparte. When he was finally defeated, the country reverted once again to monarchy. Ending up with little to show for their bloody adventure, the French suffered a death toll estimated at thirty to forty times that of the American Revolution.

Didn’t France abolish slavery in its colonies in 1794? Yes — but only to reinstate it under Napoleon eight years later. A revolution is hardly a success if, on the heels of a paroxysm of savagery, its major achievements evaporate. The sad fact is that France moved from one monarchy to another, taking a deadly detour through one of history’s bloodiest episodes of depravity.

The Battle of Ideas

America certainly benefited from more than a century of British “salutary neglect” before King George III and Parliament began their mischievous intrusions in the 1760s. Beginning with the Mayflower Compact in 1620, the American colonies developed a substantial tradition of local self-government, electing officials, serving on juries, and participating in town meetings. The French, by contrast, had lived under absolute monarchy for as long as anyone could remember. Some measure of the chaos that followed their Revolution can surely be attributed to a lack of political experience. I suspect, however, that even more consequential forces were at work.

Among the most important differences between the two revolutions was philosophy. What were the revolutionaries and their sympathizers thinking in America in 1776 and in France in 1789? What ideas — and whose ideas — motivated them to take up arms?

In many respects, the answer comes down to a contest between two giants of the Enlightenment: John Locke of Britain (1632–1704) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau of France (1712–1778). 

An Ideology of Terror

In his 2007 book Liberal Fascism, commentator Jonah Goldberg offers this observation:

…[W]hat truly makes the French Revolution the first fascist revolution was its effort to turn politics into a religion. In this, the revolutionaries were inspired by Rousseau, whose concept of the general will divinized the people while rendering the person an afterthought.

Philosophically speaking, the French Revolution undermined itself almost from the start. To the extent it drew from Rousseau, it was at war with human nature as much as it was in conflict with the aristocracy.

Consider the stark contrasts between the leaders of the American Revolution and those of the French Revolution, and it is easy to see which country was blessed with greater personal character. If France had a George Washington, it would be the Marquis de Lafayette — but he defected early, just in time to avoid the guillotine. The other major figures of the French Revolution were monsters soaked in blood. Though war occasionally brought out the worst in a few, America had no counterparts to the French revolutionaries of the 1790s: Robespierre, Babeuf, Saint-Just, and Marat. Nor did it have a cynical Committee of Public Safety dispatching thousands to the national razor.

Can you imagine any of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence uttering the spine-chilling rhetoric of Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, Robespierre’s right-hand man, known as the “Archangel of Terror”? He declared:

You have to punish not only the traitors, but even those who are indifferent; you have to punish whoever is passive in the republic and who does nothing for it… The vessel of the Revolution can arrive in port only on a sea reddened with torrents of blood… A nation generates itself only upon heaps of corpses.

When resistance to the Revolution arose in the western French region known as the Vendée, Paris dispatched troops to crush it. The result was a massacre; at least 170,000 people were killed.

Why America Took a Different Path

Would Washington, Adams, or Franklin have countenanced such a holocaust? It is difficult to imagine.

It is unlikely the French were simply bad people as a rule while Americans were uniformly virtuous. But in the decades leading up to 1776, the American colonies were steeped in the moral and religious currents of the Great Awakening, a Christian revival that emphasized self-examination, personal responsibility, and restraint.

Protestant values of self-improvement through hard work, private enterprise, and thrift helped shape early American development. In France, by contrast, the Revolution elevated men who sought power for the purpose of remaking society itself. That self-indulgent impulse to reshape others at any cost did not take root in early America as it did in France. The United States did not empower men with the apparatus of concentrated, legalized force and then expect them to behave modestly with it. Early America did not entertain the notion that society could be perfected through coercion.

From its inception, the American Revolution was narrower in scope than the French Revolution. Americans focused on a lofty but comparatively limited objective: independence from British rule and the restoration of local self-government. Indeed, the Founders generally viewed the new nation’s mission as counter-revolutionary in spirit. They sought the traditional rights of Englishmen — rights they believed they already possessed but which had been eroded by Crown and Parliament.

The French Revolution, by contrast, pursued far more ambitious aims. Its leaders sought to “reform” everything and everyone. The revolutionaries of Paris even abolished the calendar. Their ideological descendants in the twentieth century, the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia, would do the same, replacing “1975” with “Year Zero.”

The revolutionaries in France also assaulted Christianity, killing priests and sacking churches across the country. They viewed the Catholic Church as an instrument of royal tyranny. In that judgment, they were at least partially correct. In America, where a wide range of denominations flourished, the ties between church and state were far weaker. The Founders never saw the need to compel belief or subdue religious institutions by force.

From his vantage point as a British parliamentarian, Edmund Burke applauded the spirit of liberty that animated the French upheaval but quickly recognized where it was headed. The revolutionaries, he wrote, were:

…the ablest architects of ruin that had hitherto existed in the world. In that very short space of time they had completely pulled down to the ground their monarchy, their church, their nobility, their law, their revenue, their army, their navy, their commerce, their arts, and their manufactures… [there was a danger of] an imitation of the excesses of an irrational, unprincipled, proscribing, confiscating, plundering, ferocious, bloody and tyrannical democracy.

Lest the reader be tempted to dismiss Burke as a foreign critic predisposed against France, consider the French observer Joseph de Maistre. In Considerations on France (1796), widely regarded as one of the most penetrating contemporary analyses of the Revolution, he wrote — despite his hostility to Enlightenment ideas — that:

What distinguishes the French Revolution and makes it an event unique in history is that it is radically bad. No element of good disturbs the eye of the observer; it is the highest degree of corruption ever known; it is pure impurity… In order to bring about the French Revolution, it was necessary to overthrow religion, outrage morality, violate every propriety, and commit every crime. This diabolical work required the employment of such a number of vicious men that perhaps never before had so many vices acted together to accomplish any evil whatsoever.

Both the American Revolution and the French Revolution promised “power to the people.”

In the end, it was the former that delivered it. The latter produced far more blood and chaos than liberty, equality, or fraternity.