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.

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.

According to a late 2025 Heartland Institute/Rasmussen Reports poll, “58 percent of likely voters aged 18 to 39 support government-run grocery stores in every town in America.” Fifty-one percent of younger likely voters “say they would like to see a democratic socialist win the White House in 2028.”

It’s easy to see such numbers and fall into despair about America’s prospects. 

If you have ever been tempted to withdraw from public concerns and simply enjoy your own life, who could blame you?

Tom Paine would.

Paine and the Problem of Complacency

When we think of Paine, we think of his 1776 Common Sense, a book that made the case for independence. An incredible twenty percent of Americans at that time owned a copy.

Today, the challenge is not winning independence but preserving liberty. For that latter challenge, Paine’s The American Crisis offers valuable practical guidance.

The American Crisis is not a single book but a wartime serial of sixteen pamphlets, thirteen of which are numbered. Pamphlet 1, written in December 1776 when the Revolutionary War was going badly, opens with perhaps the most famous Paine line: “THESE are the times that try men’s souls.”

The opening paragraph of Pamphlet 1 is packed with poetic wisdom, including: “What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.”

Is this the source of the threat specific to America’s 250th birthday? Are we like the proverbial fish, asking what water is? Our liberty can seem less like an achievement to be defended than an inheritance too easily taken for granted. What is unknown and unvalued goes unguarded. 

Not knowing our precious heritage and the conditions under which humanity thrives may lead to apathy and leave liberty defenseless. Other people’s apathy toward the crisis facing us is no excuse for our own withdrawal from civic life. Paine wrote, “’Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.”

Panics as Moral Touchstones

“All nations and ages” are subject to panics. To Paine and others, a panic was a contagious, collective fear that swept through a population faster than reason could overcome it. 

Economic downturns were called panics in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. I fear we are one severe economic panic away from an American crisis that will widen partisan gulfs beyond repair and make the preferences expressed in the Heartland poll a dystopian reality.

Panics, Paine observed, “produce as much good as hurt,” adding that “their peculiar advantage is that they are the touchstones of sincerity and hypocrisy, and bring things and men to light which might otherwise have lain forever undiscovered.”

A touchstone was an instrument of a jeweler or merchant, a tablet of dark stone against which you rubbed a piece of gold or silver. If you merely judged the metal by its surface, you might be defrauded. So when Paine calls panic a touchstone, he means that a crisis is the “stone” people rub against, and the streak shows what they are actually made of, whatever they had appeared to be.

In good times, those truly committed to the principles of liberty and those who merely profess them can sound alike, because no crisis has yet arisen to separate them.

What Crises Reveal

Crucially, the crisis does not manufacture hypocrisy; it exposes what beliefs are already there but hidden. As Paine put it, panics “sift out the hidden thoughts of man, and hold them up in public to the world.” 

Untested virtue is unverified virtue. We cannot know whether our attachment to liberty is true metal or cheap alloy until it is tested against the stone, because until then, the two appear identical.

And I’m not merely referring to those on the “other side” of our own beliefs.

The COVID-19 panic revealed erstwhile champions of liberty clamoring for extraordinary government interventions they purport to oppose. Their professed principles should have made them more wary of concentrated power and emergency policymaking. When the cause of liberty needed their voice, they were in retreat. They were a modern-day version of Paine’s “summer soldier,” shrinking from the service of liberty.

Most people experience a crisis as pure loss. Paine sees something else in it. It exposes hypocrisy, reveals one’s true allies, and strengthens those who hold fast to their principles. Paine wrote, “The mind soon grows through them [panics], and acquires a firmer habit than before.” The summer soldiers reveal themselves.

Today, constitutional limits do not command much public reverence. We routinely elect candidates who promise policies that stretch or violate constitutional limits. The oath they swear to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” is treated less as a binding principle than as ceremonial language.

Meanwhile, the public drifts back to its favorite distractions as liberty continues to erode. In Common Sense, Paine identified this complacency as a grave threat to liberty: “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right.”

The republic is endangered wherever arbitrary power becomes normalized.

Another form of acquiescence to arbitrary power is the habit of helpless complaint—asking why things must be this way while forgetting that much of history is the struggle against precisely such conditions.

Virtue Under Pressure

In “On Providence,” the Stoic philosopher Seneca explains, much as Paine does, that what we label as bad things can be a gift of providence. 

Seneca urges us to think of adversity as training. What moral man, he asks, “is not hungry for honest work and ready to undertake duties at great risk?”

Demetrius, a philosopher exiled by Nero, is quoted by Seneca as saying, “Nothing seems to me more unhappy than someone to whom nothing adverse has ever happened.” These adverse events, Seneca argues, allow people to test themselves.

Seneca’s untested man is the philosophical twin of Paine’s “summer soldier.” Both thinkers understood that a life entirely shielded from friction produces a character lacking resilience. Adversity tests personal virtue and, on a societal level, reveals whether we truly value liberty.

Paine railed against the selfish, short-term thinking of a man who stood at a tavern with his child and said, “Well! give me peace in my day.” Paine argued the mindset of a “generous parent” must be forward-looking: “If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.” Preserving liberty requires accepting present friction so that future generations inherit a free society, rather than pushing the burden of conflict down the road.

Paine wrote, “I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection.” 

Liberty and the Long View

This is a mindset of liberty: the recognition that external conditions (the “crisis”) do not dictate one’s internal resolve. It is the conscious choice to meet centralized power or societal panic with calm, reasoned fortitude rather than despair.

People who inherit liberty cannot know whether they still deserve it until liberty is put in jeopardy. Each of us answers, rubbed against the touchstone. 

The summer soldier still has time to become something else. That, and not despair, is Paine’s message for America at 250.

In the coming days, the Supreme Court is expected to rule in Trump v. Cook, the case testing whether President Trump can remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook over allegations of mortgage-related misconduct that predate her time on the Board. The stakes are concrete. Of the Board’s seven seats, three are Trump appointees: newly installed Chair Kevin Warsh, Governor Christopher Waller, and Governor Michelle Bowman. Losing Cook’s seat to another Trump pick would give the administration a working majority on the Board. 

Whichever way the Court rules, the underlying problem of Fed independence will remain, for reasons that have less to do with the case than with how the Fed has operated for the past year. 

The Independence Dilemma

The case for central bank independence rests on a narrow problem: elected officials face short election cycles and a standing incentive to lean on the central bank for looser money before a vote, whether or not economic conditions warrant. If the public expects political pressure to win out, then the public assumes higher inflation as the norm — seriously compromising future monetary policymaking.

Congress’s fix to this problem was long and staggered terms for Fed Board members, with narrower limits on their removal from office “for cause” only, rather than being at-will political appointments. Over the past year, the boundaries of that limit have been tested with threats of removal, litigation, and informal arm-twisting. 

The combined effects have led to a monetary policymaking dilemma: are monetary policy decisions being made to counter political pressure, conform to it, or because they are really the right policy moves for the nation? If Fed officials are operating under constant political threat, the institution’s own decisions become illegible. If political pressure for, say, lowering rates points in the same direction as the Fed’s technical analysis, then lowering the rates can be read as technical independence or capitulation to political pressure.

When the Right Call Looks Political

From the outside, it’s impossible to tell if the Fed is conducting monetary policy according to what it believes is right or knowingly doing something else to protect its credibility, or worse, caving to political pressure. Two recent episodes show the damaging effects of this dilemma in practice.

For most of 2025, the Fed refused to cut rates despite extreme public pressure from Trump. The data backed holding rates steady, but that’s exactly the problem. A Fed holding the line when it already agrees with holding the line cannot prove it would have done the same thing absent the pressure. Former Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s repeated public refusal to cut rates might have been the correct policy call, institutional defiance, or some mix of both. The public has no way to tell which. 

The same illegibility now follows Kevin Warsh. Can the public trust Warsh’s claims of independence, given that Trump endorsed him in part because he expects Warsh to deliver lower rates? 

Trump reportedly trusts Warsh enough to give him room to act. While Warsh built part of his case for the top Fed job on the argument that productivity gains could justify cutting rates, at his first meeting as Fed chair this month, he signaled essentially the opposite. 

The Warsh-led Fed cut the FOMC policy statement to roughly a third of its previous length. It dropped language signaling a bias toward rate cuts; the same language three regional Reserve Bank presidents pushed to remove at April’s meeting. And the FOMC’s projections shifted toward a possible hike, not a cut, for 2026. Warsh himself declined to submit a projection at all. 

That hawkish opening would normally count as evidence of independence. But in light of the past year’s experience, it could also just be a pretense of independence from someone who will try to deliver low rates at a later point. If the president’s trust survives this apparent defiance, the decision was never much of a test of Warsh’s independence.

Why the Court Can’t Settle It

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. Cook is very unlikely to solve this dilemma, regardless of the outcome. 

In oral arguments back in January, the administration contended that the President’s decision to remove a Fed governor for cause is essentially unreviewable, while Cook’s side maintained that “for cause” has historically implied misconduct in office, with an associated review process. 

A ruling for Trump would tell every future Fed governor that “for cause” means whatever a president decides it means. Justices seemed alert to the drawbacks of that possibility. Justice Kavanaugh observed that “history is a pretty good guide” and that “once these tools are unleashed, they are used by both sides,” regardless of which party wields them first. 

A ruling in favor of Cook, on the other hand, still may not provide the clearest jurisprudence on what it takes to remove a Fed governor. 

In the Supreme Court’s May 2025 ruling in a different case related to independent agencies, the Court exempted the Fed from its general removal-power decision, describing it as “a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity” with a “distinct historical tradition” separate from other independent agencies. Having carved out the Fed from that decision and protected its officials from removal, the justices may now prefer to rule narrowly in Cook on case-specific grounds. The result: what justifies “for cause” removal remains murky and subject to future litigation. 

A narrow ruling protects Cook. It does nothing for the next Fed governor that a future president decides to target. 

If every future governor is faced with the threat of being fired and needs to lawyer up on a case-by-case basis, central bank independence will de facto erode. So, too, its credibility, as every monetary policy decision can be second-guessed as to whether it was the right call for the broader economy or only for the politically connected.

Congress Must Fix the Fed’s Independence Ambiguity

Central bank independence is not a claim that politics has no place in monetary policy in a democracy. But independence and accountability sit on a single dial, as my colleague Alex Salter has pointed out. Where Congress sets it is a revisable policy choice. 

If Congress wants to insulate the Fed from political cycles, then it should remove the ambiguity in statute and define “for cause” as issues with conduct or job performance, and ensure notice and a chance to respond before removal. This approach would put less reliance on the court’s interpretation and avoid future disputes over removals. It would also remove the ambiguity shrouding the motivations for monetary policy decisions. Congress created the original ambiguity. Only Congress can close it definitively, and do so proactively, to bring an end to the Fed independence dilemma.