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.

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.

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.

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.

In 1845, Frédéric Bastiat (born on this day in 1801) wrote to France’s Chamber of Deputies imploring the National Assembly to protect the national industry of candle-making from the encroachment of a foreign rival.

This competitor dominated the market at such a low price that domestic candlemakers were “reduced to complete stagnation.” Was this rival the British? The Americans? Neither; it turned out to be “none other than the sun!” 

Bastiat’s Petition of the Candlemakers lays bare the absurdity of protectionism. Offering preferential treatment to less efficient domestic producers artificially raises prices, restricts consumer choice, and decreases exports. Tariffs harm consumers, workers, and exporters while failing to accomplish their stated goals: they fail to meaningfully shift the balance of trade or promote domestic industry and employment, and more generally harm everyone involved, including protected industries. Given these realities, it is no surprise that a negative opinion of tariffs has been a virtual consensus among economists for centuries — just ask Adam Smith:

“Such taxes, when they have grown up to a certain height, are a curse equal to the barrenness of the earth.”

–        Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

Agreement among economists has not, however, stopped the current administration from going gung-ho on protectionism, at least until late February, when the Supreme Court in a six-to-three ruling shut down three quarters of the tariffs Trump had unilaterally placed throughout 2025. With the Trump administration scrambling to find new ways to institute tariffs, it’s important to remind ourselves of the harm tariffs have done to the American economy, and the danger they present to economic freedom.

Throughout his first year in office, President Trump reiterated his belief that tariffs will improve the United States’ balance of trade, protect American jobs, and reshore outsourced jobs. However, despite what the President claims, other countries don’t pay for tariffs, working Americans do. Tariffs raise the cost of imported goods for obvious reasons, but also have an inflationary effect on domestic products, as American producers often purchase inputs from overseas, which are then subject to tariffs. These costs are then passed on to consumers through higher retail prices. This has already been occurring, as the prices of imported goods have increased by seven percentage points relative to the pre-tariff trend, with domestic goods costing nearly 4 percentage points more. More solid evidence of the harm of trade barriers comes from the first Trump administration. Raised trade barriers caused more than a $130 billion decline in annual imports, unsurprisingly increasing the domestic prices for goods. If Trump had his way, his second administration’s full slate of tariffs were projected to reduce after-tax income by nearly four percent for those in the bottom 50 percent of the income distribution, increasing the tax burden on middle-class households by at least $1,700 annually.

American producers also receive the short end of the stick. Trade barriers spike the price of inputs, raising the cost of production for domestic firms, especially ones that export goods. This effect only expands in the event of retaliatory tariffs, which in 2018 alone cost American exporters over $2 billion per month, greatly diminishing the value of American exports, and redirecting nearly $200 billion worth of trade. Domestic firms often respond to cuts in exports by laying off employees. Industries more vulnerable to tariff increases, such as manufacturing, see larger reductions in employment compared to non-affected industries precisely due to the increases in input costs. For example, the 2018 tariffs directly eliminated 75,000 manufacturing jobs. History seems to be repeating itself, as since 2025, Trump’s tariffs have cost automakers over $35 billion, and the manufacturing sector has continued to bleed tens of thousands of jobs due to uncertainty over tariffs providing unfavorable conditions for firms to hire new workers. That doesn’t sound like bringing manufacturing back.

Even the benefits that do go to domestic producers quickly evaporate because of retaliation from other nations. Tariffs antagonize other nations, stoking conflict and harming future economic cooperation efforts. In 2018, the United States placed tariffs on nearly $300 billion of Chinese goods, to which China responded by placing tariffs on over $100 billion of American goods. The European Union, Russia, Mexico, and Turkey soon retaliated with trade barriers that amounted to a 16 percent cut of United States exports, wiping out over half of the producer surplus generated from American tariffs. Altogether, by the end of 2018, tariffs were projected to have cost American consumers and companies who import foreign goods $3 billion per month in taxes and $1.4 billion in deadweight loss. American business owners and consumers are already overburdened with frivolous taxes and red tape; tariffs only make it harder for working Americans to do business.

In conclusion, the current administration’s trade policy is so frustrating primarily because of the blatant ignorance of the overwhelming evidence that tariffs have damaged the American economy. This mirrors a crucial misunderstanding of the benefits of trade. Protectionists regard imports as inherently harmful because they increase the trade deficit, making the United States more reliant on other nations. But imports are the benefit of trade. The fact that Americans can truck, barter, and trade with individuals and firms from nations all over the globe means Americans have access to the best and cheapest products. Restricting trade in the name of “self-sufficiency” is not desirable; it is impoverishing.

In September 1787, when asked what kind of government America would have, Benjamin Franklin famously answered, “A republic, if you can keep it.” As America approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, federal officials have lost the ability to budget responsibly. Can we keep a republic that has forgotten how to budget?

Kurt Couchman’s Fiscal Democracy in America: How a Balanced Budget Amendment Can Restore Sound Governance offers some possibilities. Couchman’s book is a serious contribution to the debate over debt, congressional dysfunction, and constitutional reform. His subject is a balanced budget amendment, but the book’s deeper concern is Congress itself. The federal budget process no longer disciplines tradeoffs, reveals costs, or gives most legislators meaningful responsibility for governing.

Budgeting as the Core Function of Congress

Couchman begins from a sound institutional premise. Budgeting is at the center of governing. Through the budget, elected representatives decide what the federal government will do, how much it will do, and how those activities will be financed. When budgeting breaks down, the damage is not limited to deficits or debt. Bad budgeting weakens Congress, empowers the executive branch, conceals tradeoffs, rewards special interests, and allows current officeholders to transfer costs to future taxpayers.

That framing gives the book more force than a conventional argument for fiscal restraint. Couchman does not present a balanced budget amendment as a partisan weapon, a slogan, or a shortcut to smaller government. He presents it as a constitutional commitment device. Ordinary budget statutes are too easy to waive, ignore, or rewrite. A constitutional rule would elevate balance as a governing norm and raise the political cost of evasion.

The book’s strongest argument rests on incentives. Legislators face steady pressure to approve spending, preserve tax preferences, and avoid the immediate pain of offsetting those choices. Organized interests press for concentrated benefits. The costs are diffused across taxpayers or shifted into the future through borrowing. Persistent deficits create fiscal illusion, making government appear cheaper than it is. Couchman’s balanced budget amendment is designed to reconnect benefits with costs.

His proposed amendment is deliberately spare. Expenditures and receipts must be balanced, though balance may occur over more than one year. Debt service and borrowing are excluded from the relevant definitions. Congress would have ten years after ratification to achieve balance. Emergency departures would require two-thirds approval in both houses, and debts incurred for emergencies would have to be repaid as soon as practicable.

That design reflects one of the book’s major strengths. Couchman understands why earlier balanced budget amendments failed. Annual balance would be too rigid, partisan supermajority rules would be politically fragile, and program exclusions would invite evasion. Couchman’s alternative is a neutral constitutional principle that Congress can implement through statute.

The phrase “principles-based” matters. Couchman’s amendment would not dictate the size of government or settle fights over taxes, entitlements, defense, or federalism. Those choices would remain political. Instead, the amendment would require that such arguments occur within a framework that forces members of Congress to acknowledge tradeoffs.

This is why the book should be read as fiscal institutionalism, not merely as a BBA brief. Couchman is trying to rebuild the operating system of federal budgeting. The constitutional rule is the anchor, but it depends on statutory complements. These include budget targets, credible enforcement, better treatment of emergencies, improved timing, automatic continuing appropriations, and a more comprehensive congressional budget process.

Rebuilding the Budget’s Institutional Foundation

Before reading Fiscal Democracy, I had read Couchman’s 2021 predecessor paper, Unified Budgets Can Help Revive Congress, which adds useful context. The unified budget proposal responds to Congress’s procedural failure. Couchman would put all spending and revenue in the same annual budget bill. Lawmakers would have to debate discretionary appropriations, mandatory spending, and tax expenditures in one fiscal forum. 

That idea strengthens the book’s central claim. A balanced budget amendment without a functioning budget process would risk frustration, evasion, or symbolic compliance. Congress cannot balance the budget responsibly if most of the budget runs on autopilot and most members have little role in setting priorities. Unified budgeting would force lawmakers to compare programs, tax provisions, and spending categories against one another. It would make tradeoffs harder to avoid and easier for voters to understand.

It would also change incentives facing unelected officials. Agencies, trust funds, government corporations, and quasi-public entities operate within institutional settings that reward mission creep, budget growth, personnel expansion, and discretionary authority. Fragmented budgeting strengthens those incentives by allowing each program or entity to defend its activities apart from the broader fiscal tradeoffs. Unified budgeting would not eliminate bureaucratic self-interest, but it would make administrative government more visible by requiring those claims to compete in a single fiscal forum. 

Colorado’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights, discussed in the book, offers a useful test case for Couchman’s framework. TABOR constrains revenue and expenditures but does not stop the growth of government by other means. Exemptions, federal funds, public enterprises, user fees, unfunded liabilities, and regulatory expansion. Fiscal rules can matter, but they must be paired with comprehensive budgeting and regulatory discipline.

David Hebert’s critique of balanced budget requirements sharpens the same point. Budget numbers are constructed through baselines, scores, accounting rules, timing conventions, and classifications. A rule requiring expenditures and receipts to match does not automatically constrain the underlying fiscal reality if lawmakers can redefine, delay, or reallocate the relevant costs.

This is the main challenge to Couchman’s project. A fiscal rule is only as strong as its definitions, measurement conventions, and enforcement mechanisms. Judicial enforcement offers no easy answer. Courts are poorly suited to managing federal budgeting, and judicial control over fiscal policy could create its own constitutional problems. Couchman’s more plausible path is political and congressional enforcement, supported by implementing legislation and public accountability. That may be the right answer, but it leaves a persistent difficulty: Congress would still be policing itself.

Couchman’s best answer is that the amendment is only one part of a larger institutional package. A constitutional rule can set the norm. Unified budgeting can widen the budget’s field of vision. Together, those reforms could make evasion more visible and politically costly.

Chronic deficits are failures of consent across time. Current voters and officeholders authorize benefits that future taxpayers must finance. Some borrowing is defensible, but structural deficits allow the political class to promise government without admitting what government costs.

The book also has a broader constitutional theme: Congress must reclaim responsibility. When Congress fails to budget, power migrates elsewhere. The executive branch gains discretion, leaders substitute closed-door deals for committee work, and rank-and-file members lose the ability to represent their constituents in meaningful budget choices.

The book’s value lies in insisting that budgetary choices must be made openly, repeatedly, and under rules that prevent indefinite postponement. Couchman’s contribution is to take that institutional problem seriously and to propose a constitutional rule embedded in a broader reform architecture.

Fiscal Democracy in America is a serious defense of a principles-based balanced budget amendment and of rebuilding Congress’s capacity to govern. Whether the proposal succeeds depends less on the phrase “balanced budget” than on the institutional machinery built around it.

On the same morning, in two opinions both written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court tripped over itself. In Trump v. Slaughter, SCOTUS removed the protections that had shielded the heads of independent agencies since 1935, overruling Humphrey’s Executor and reaffirming that those who wield executive power answer to the executive. At the same time, in Trump v. Cook, it declared that the Federal Reserve gets an exception. President Trump’s hands are procedurally tied; Fed Governor Lisa Cook keeps her seat for now. The Roberts Court gave with one hand and took back with the other.

The Court split five-to-four in Cook, with Roberts and Justice Kavanaugh joining the three liberal justices. Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Barrett dissented. The dissenters had the better of the argument, and Justice Thomas had the best of it.

The majority did not pretend the Fed is constitutionally ordinary. It conceded that the usual rule cuts against Cook and reached for an exception “sanctioned by history.” The Fed, we are told, stands in “a distinct historical tradition of central bank independence that has long coexisted with Article II.” Apparently, because the Fed is old and important, it does not have to respect constitutional principles.

This is deeply troubling. Central bank independence in Roberts’s sense is unaccountability, plain and simple. 

An exception carved for a single institution is not law in the proper sense of the term. Law is general; it applies the same rule to like cases. A doctrine that subjects every agency to presidential control — with “no ifs, ands, or quasis about it,” as Slaughter put it — and then exempts the most powerful agency of all is not based in principle. It is a preference. Justice Barrett, no firebrand, named the contradiction directly: “How can history support both a categorical rule and a carveout?” The majority never answers.

Justice Thomas took up the question the majority dodged. The Fed is a federal agency that wields executive power. The Board writes rules carrying the force of law, examines private financial institutions, levies fines, and bars individuals from the banking industry on pain of civil and criminal penalty. Its monetary and credit powers are similarly executive powers, carrying out as delegated functions from Congress. Under our Constitution, executive authority is vested in the president, and subordinates who exercise it are properly removable by him.

That is the heart of the matter. The majority could not deny it. In a revealing footnote, the Court declined to bless the Fed’s regulatory powers “attenuated from monetary policy.” This is a quiet admission that the supervisory and enforcement machinery the Court shielded sits uneasily with the logic of its own decision.

President Trump’s motives are beside the point. Whatever one thinks of the case for removing Cook, the Chief Executive decides to whom he delegates power. The prerogative does not depend on the wisdom of any particular exercise of it. That is what it means for the executive power to be vested in one accountable officer, rather than parcelled out among insulated technocrats. Justice Thomas plainly got it right.

The majority’s history is as shaky as its law. To explain why the country supposedly needed an insulated central bank, Roberts points to a century of “ruinous financial panics” from 1837 to 1907, which he attributes, citing the journalist Roger Lowenstein, to Andrew Jackson’s destruction of the Second Bank of the United States. Meddle with the central bank, the story goes, and chaos follows.

This gets cause and effect backwards. America’s recurrent panics were not because it lacked a central bank. They were the predictable product of how the government chose to regulate banking. 

Two design defects stand out. First, restrictions on branching left the nation with thousands of small, undiversified, undercapitalized banks, each dependent on a single local economy. Second, the law tied note issue to holdings of government bonds, so the currency could not expand to meet seasonal demand. The resulting currency inelasticity turned every autumn harvest into a potential liquidity crunch. Banking economists Charles Calomiris and Stephen Haber have a phrase for a system built this way: fragile by design.

These were features of the antebellum state systems. Eventually they were federalized, but not repaired. The National Banking System of the 1860s was, at bottom, a Civil War financing strategy. It created demand for federal war debt by requiring national banks to back their notes with Treasury bonds. The system transferred the same fiscal prerogatives from the states to Washington and reproduced the same fragility on a national scale.

The Court’s majority almost perceives this. Its own opinion laments that the country had “no elastic currency that could expand to meet demand.” That’s right. But that inelasticity was a regulatory choice written into the banking acts, not a void waiting for an independent technocracy to fill. For proof, look north: Canada, which permitted nationwide branch banking and a flexible note issue, escaped most of America’s panics. It did not create its central bank until 1935. Stability came from sound banking structure, not from an unaccountable monetary authority.

Strip away the romantic history and the Fed’s exemption is exposed as a special dispensation with no footing in the Constitution. The Fed’s power, prominence, and importance cannot be an excuse for legal ad-hockery. The more concentrated power an organization possesses, the greater the need for it to answer to the public.

There is still room for hope. The Court ruled narrowly. It did not hold that Cook’s alleged misconduct fails to justify removal, did not vindicate her on the merits, and did not condemn the president. It found only that he owed her notice and an opportunity to respond before acting, leaving him free to try again.

SCOTUS’s constitutional carveout in Trump v. Cook simply does not mesh with its same-day decision in Trump v. Slaughter. Frankly, the findings are irreconcilable. Either for-cause removal protections violate the separation of powers by unconstitutionally limiting the president’s authority, or they don’t. The Court cannot indulge that contradiction forever. When it is finally forced to choose, the Constitution, not the Fed’s mystique, must decide the matter.