Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us
The US Constitution is perhaps the most significant historical and governmental document in a millennia. It established the modern conception of the western Republic, along with true representative government designed to answer to the people rather than rule over the people.
The Bill of Rights outlined clear restrictions on federal and state powers to legislate away the inherent and God given freedoms of the citizenry; an accomplishment which had been attempted in the past but was never truly realized until the war for independence and the creation of the United States. Until that moment, the idea that common men answer to authority and authority answers to no one was the accepted norm.
It’s a document and an ideal that gave birth to an epoch.
However, our constitutional republic was created based on conditions that, frankly, no longer exist. The American population was 95% Christian. The implementation of “patriarchy” was widespread and embraced as the most solid foundation for society. Meritocracy was absolute. Cultural identity was rooted in western civilization without any deviation or distraction.
Marxism did not exist. Atheism was rare. Degeneracy was shunned or punished. Shame was an effective social tool. Psychopathy was easy to identify and remove from within the smaller population. Women were expected to raise families and care for the home. Men were expected to feed and protect those families; perhaps even die for them.
Voting was for land owners and people with an actual stake in the success or failure of government policies. Women did not vote until a hundred years later in 1920 (many commentators have offered compelling arguments that the country quickly went downhill from there).
In 2026, many Americans still treat the notion of representative democracy as sacrosanct and untouchable, even though they don’t really know why. They just think it’s about freedom, but, they are basing their devout reverence on a system that used to work because it heavily restricted who was allowed to participate.
As John Adams sated in 1802:
“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other…”
Like many conservatives, I started out as predominantly libertarian. Millions of us of us launched our political lives in the era of the Ron Paul Revolution. That said, whenever I hear libertarians wax romantic about the Constitution and why we must strictly adhere to it today regardless of the circumstances, I have to remind them that if the system today looked like it did when the Founders were in charge, most people would not be voting.
I’m not saying this is a bad thing. In fact, the central question I want to ask is, would that actually be a better way of governing than what we have now? Should we return to the idea of restrictions on civic participation for people who have a habit of causing harm? In our liberal drive to create total democratic inclusivity, did we end up destroying the social structures and expectations that made our country and elections work in the first place?
Hell, in 2026 we are actually fighting for our lives just to get voter ID laws in place to prevent foreigners from influencing election outcomes. Around 80% of the country supports this policy, yet, the Senate refuses to pass it and 20% on the radical left are viciously opposed because they WANT illegal migrants to be able sneak into the vote.
As if it wasn’t already obvious, this proves the fact that Democrats and Neo-Con politicians have no regard for “democracy” – They cry about majority rule all the time but when there’s a clear case of an overwhelming majority in favor of secure elections, they do the opposite.
The top 0.2% and the bottom 20% work in tandem to make life miserable for everyone else.
Is representative democracy even possible when a large portion of the population is actively fighting to burn our republic to the ground by any means necessary? How can our elections and our government maintain integrity when people who want to destroy everything are allowed to vote or take political office?
Maybe that 20% of militant leftists and Neo-Cons should NOT be allowed to vote. Maybe they should be denied participation in government. Maybe they should be kicked out of the country. It’s what the Founding Fathers would have done…
During and after the Revolutionary War, many states required oaths of allegiance to the new American cause. Refusal (often by Loyalists/Tories who supported Britain) led to disenfranchisement, property confiscation, banishment, etc. These rules and restrictions were explicitly ideological – punishing pro-British or “neutral” political views. Pennsylvania, New York, and other states used such tests and the Founders saw this as necessary for security.
The idea that every American citizen should be allowed to have a hand in national matters despite their dubious background or belief system is a foolish fantasy. The Founders were correct to make distinctions.
That said, is the system so broken by corruption and delusion that it cannot be mended? How do we fix this situation? Do we merely sit back and allow the country to deteriorate in the name of liberal hedonism? Because that’s not an act of freedom. Rather, it’s the attitude of anarchy and it’s important to understand the difference.
Anarchy is freedom without accountability; the abandonment of any personal responsibility for the future. It means national suicide.
This week, the Trump Administration released classified information which they argue is proof of election manipulation in 2020. In response, the legacy media has refused to air Trump’s speech addressing the issue. Many outlets “fact checked” Trump’s arguments online as false without having time to read the reports and classified documents he offered.
I’m not saying that 2020 was unequivocally rigged, but, I’m willing to look at the evidence and clearly the political left and the media are not. This tells us all we need to know about them.
Everyone remembers the “hockey stick” graph and the impossible voting numbers for Joe Biden in the early morning hours of November 4th. Even the skeptics found it hard to come up with a believable rationale. To this day, Democrats are unable to explain how Biden got 81 million votes, the highest raw vote count for any presidential candidate in US history, in the middle of a pandemic.
In 2024, Kamala Harris fell short of Biden’s totals by over 6 million votes. It shouldn’t be possible, but it happened. The recent rigging revelations, if accurate, help us to understand why the Democrats (and some Neo-Cons) absolutely refuse to pass voter ID laws and limits on mail-in ballots despite the vast majority of Americans in favor.
But ballot rigging and illegal migrant voting are only two threats among many to our country’s elections. Let’s not forget:
1) The mentally ill still get a vote. Over 23% of all US adults report having at least one mental illness. Meaning 1 in 4 US voters many not have the mental stability required to make reasonable or logical decisions. Nearly 20% of US adults are on some form of prescription medication for mental health issues. The number of women on medication is double the number of men on medication.
2) Low IQ people get to vote. Around 10% of the population has an IQ under 80, which is 20 points below the average. An IQ of 80 or less is associated with poor impulse control, extreme aggression and an inability to maintain normal day-to-day responsibilities. Should such people be allowed to vote?
3) Psychopaths and sociopaths get to vote. Around 4% of the population has these dangerous psychological traits. Yet, they can vote, run for office, and get jobs within the bureaucratic system. There is certainly some nuance to consider here (for example, some sociopaths are highly functional and are not a threat when operating ion positions of authority), but I would argue that all candidates should be tested openly for these issues before they’re allowed to enter government office.
4) Finally, how do we bring transparency to a government that is built around a bureaucracy that has no term limits and few checks and balances? To Trump’s credit, he has been attempting to dismantle this “deep state” edifice and has had a few successes, including the shutdown of the nefarious USAID. But it would take multiple presidencies to accomplish any long-lasting changes to this entrenched secondary government.
The efforts of DOGE showed us that the bureaucracy has always been the true base of power – protected by an array of corrupt politicians, judges, journalists and NGOs. It doesn’t matter who ends up in office because the people managing the bureaucracy usually keep their jobs for life, and when a confrontational administration leaves, they simply change everything back to the way things were.
Should we ignore constitutional protocols and remove the vast majority of these people from their jobs? The courts are doing everything in their power to prevent these people from being fired. What if we ignored the courts and kicked them out anyway? What alternatives do we have?
None of the answers to these problems can be found within the Constitution and the current legal environment. Again, we can’t even get Congress and the Senate to pass commonsense voter ID laws. Which means, we would have to go outside the Constitution to save the Constitution.
Ah yes, the slippery slope reveals itself. But the constitution is designed to limit the actions of the federal government, not the people. This leaves us with the age-old conundrum of rebellion and reformation. Maybe this is the only way that things will ever really change.
What I know is this: We cannot continue on the path we have been following for so many decades. We cannot rely on the system to police itself. And, we cannot allow certain subsections of the population to continue to have influence over our society.
Something has to change, dramatically and for the long term. We could do it through partisan government while breaking a number of constitutional laws, or, we could do it through popular revolution and hope that the country survives the aftermath of total domestic war. In the end, sitting back and doing nothing is not an option.
Tyler Durden Sat, 07/18/2026 - 22:10Authored by Peter C. Earle via The Daily Economy,
Not long ago, the notion of trillions belonged either to the furthest cosmic reaches of the universe or the submicroscopic world of atoms. These numbers describe galaxies in the observable universe, roughly two trillion, or, at the opposite extreme, the picosecond - one trillionth of a second - is used to measure molecular motion and chemical reactions. Until recently, magnitudes denominated in trillions were almost entirely confined to the theoretical hinterlands of astronomy, physics, and schoolyard exaggeration.
Today, trillion-dollar quantities have become commonplace in economic and financial life. At least 12 American companies boast trillion-dollar market capitalizations, with Apple approaching $5 trillion. BlackRock now manages more than $15 trillion in assets. The largest technology firms, cumulatively, measure their investments in the trillions as they build data centers, semiconductor capacity, and power systems on an unprecedented scale. SpaceX's 2026 initial public offering valued the company at more than $1.7 trillion, and its subsequent surge briefly pushed Elon Musk's paper wealth above $1 trillion.
Billionistan opened its gates in 1901, when JP Morgan assembled US Steel into the world's first billion-dollar corporation. Perhaps it surrendered statehood on January 13, 2016, the day Powerball offered the first billion-dollar lottery jackpot. After ten more, Billionistan moved from a numerical destination to a waypoint. We now inhabit Trillionistan.
Governments, unsurprisingly, were early movers; they frequently are. Trillion-dollar economic figures first appeared during the great hyperinflations of the twentieth century. In the United States, the national debt crossed $1 trillion in October 1981, inaugurating an era in which ever-larger fiscal quantities gradually lost their capacity to shock. Annual deficits now exceed the entire national debt of 45 years ago, while America's current indebtedness - as measured by the fiscal gap - extends into the hundreds of trillions.
Public finance is only one province of Trillionistan. The larger phenomenon is the steady upward drift of nominal magnitudes - and our tendency to mistake financial scale for real, truly productive achievement. Prices rise, credit and money supplies balloon, economies grow, markets deepen, and expected future earnings are capitalized across ever-longer horizons. Each process quietly extends the number of zeroes layered onto economic life.
Inflation is plainly part of the explanation. A dollar simply buys far less than it once did. Even if nothing real changed - if no new factories were built, no technologies discovered, and no improvement in living standards achieved - the same collection of assets would be priced higher over time as each dollar lost purchasing power. Nominal dollar records are easier to achieve than real value-driven ones.
But inflation alone cannot explain Trillionistan. The economy has also become larger, richer, more technologically sophisticated, and more global. Companies now serve billions of customers, software scales almost without cost, and intellectual property can generate extraordinary returns worldwide. Genuine wealth creation and monetary depreciation are operating simultaneously, both enlarging the nominal quantities around us. But it's difficult for most observers to distinguish between a trillion dollars of productive assets, a trillion dollars of debt, a trillion-dollar market cap, a trillion-dollar spending bill, and a trillion dollars of future pension liabilities.
Sound economics cautions against confusing abstract money prices with the goods, services, productive capacities, and human satisfactions to which those prices refer. Additional wealth is not created merely because accountants add zeros to balance sheets, central banks expand the money supply, or financial assets are quoted at higher prices. Yet neither are such price changes meaningless. Money is a messenger: prices may reflect changes in scarcity, expected earnings, risk, preferences, credit conditions, monetary supply, or some combination of them. Wealth is created when entrepreneurs discover more valuable ways to arrange scarce resources, including capital and labor, to satisfy human wants. Market prices signal judgments about those uses, but they are not themselves the value being created.
Viewed through that lens, a trillion-dollar company is less alarming, and perhaps more inspiring. A trillion-dollar market capitalization is not a warehouse containing a trillion dollars; it is the market's continuously revised estimate of future earning power (see the price trend in SpaceX since the IPO for confirmation of that phenomenon). Stock prices condense millions of judgments about technology, competition, consumer demand, production costs, and risk into a single signal of likely value. That estimate - whether it proves accurate or wildly optimistic - is a wager, a priced forecast of the future, rather than an inventory of existing riches.
Like the trillions now being committed to AI infrastructure, some investments will transform productivity; others will become expensive monuments to extrapolation. Entrepreneurship has always involved speculation. The more important question is whether monetary policy choices have the effect of systematically warping entrepreneurial judgment and promoting malinvestment. Persistently easy credit and artificially suppressed interest rates do more than raise prices generally. They encourage longer-duration projects, inflate the present value of distant earnings, and allow financial valuations to outrun the economy's underlying productive capacity.
Certainly not every trillion dollar valuation is a bubble. Monetary distortion and genuine innovation frequently coexist. Railroads truly transformed nineteenth-century Millionistan - the impressive Mohawk and Hudson Railroad was built for just $600,000 - though many fortunes disappeared in speculative railroad manias. The internet continued to power our economy well after the collapse of the dot-com bubble. Artificial intelligence may likewise reshape civilization while simultaneously destroying vast quantities of invested capital. Entrepreneurial ventures, especially at the cutting edge of technology, are entrepreneurial wagers. Profit and loss exist precisely because no one knows the outcome beforehand.
Life in Trillionistan has rewired our perceptions. Large numbers anesthetize. A million dollars once represented unimaginable wealth; a billion eventually replaced it; today even the billion is becoming commonplace. As each numerical frontier becomes familiar, it commands less wonder and less scrutiny. We experience reflexive suspicion of individuals who command great fortunes, but slip into complacency toward inflation, debt, and public liabilities. In both cases, the magnitude obscures the institution that produced it.
Not all trillions are created equal. A trillion accumulated through entrepreneurial discovery differs fundamentally from a trillion generated through monetary expansion, leverage, or habitual political can-kicking. Most modern trillions contain elements of both: genuine productive achievement expressed through a steadily depreciating unit of account. The trillion has migrated from cosmology and quantum mechanics into ordinary economic discourse because the economy has genuinely grown, but also because the monetary unit has contracted precipitously.
The important question, then, is not whether another company, fortune, industry, or balance sheet will cross the trillion-dollar threshold. Many will. The more interesting and relevant question is what kind of trillion it will be: one representing genuine wealth creation, one reflecting the capitalization of future possibilities, one inflated by monetary expansion, or some unstable mixture of all three. In Trillionistan, the zeros hint at the scale, but they do not tell us the actual story. And even as we acclimate ourselves to the trillion, the foundations of Quadrillionistan are quietly being laid.
Peter C. Earle, Ph.D., is Senior Director of Research at the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), which he joined in 2018. An economist and financial market practitioner with over 30 years of experience in financial markets, macroeconomics, and economic analysis, Dr. Earle holds a Ph.D. in Economics from l'Universite d'Angers, an MA in Applied Economics from American University, an MBA in Finance, and a BS in Engineering from the United States Military Academy at West Point.
Tyler Durden Sat, 07/18/2026 - 21:00