Introduction

Perhaps the sentiments in the following pages are not yet fashionable enough to have earned general favor. A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.

That paragraph is not mine. I have borrowed it, with small changes, from a pamphlet published in Philadelphia in January of 1776, written by a failed corset-maker and tax collector who had been in America for fourteen months. He wrote it in plain language because he wanted it read aloud in taverns to people who could not read. Within three months it had sold something like a hundred and twenty thousand copies in a country of two and a half million.¹ It did not argue for better management of the colonies. It argued that the arrangement itself was absurd, that everyone already knew it was absurd, and that the only thing standing between the people and a better arrangement was the habit of not saying so.

I am writing two hundred and fifty years later, in a country that is materially the most successful in human history and that cannot pass a budget on time.

I want to be careful about the comparison, because it can be made foolishly. We are not governed by a hereditary monarch three thousand miles away. We are not denied representation. No one is quartering soldiers in your house. The American system in 2026 is not tyranny, and anyone who tells you it is has either read no history or is selling you something.

What we have is different and, in a way, harder. We have a system that works exactly as designed and produces outcomes almost nobody wants. We have arrived, by a series of small and individually defensible steps, at a machine that reliably converts broad public agreement into nothing at all. Not through malice. Through incentives.

That is a stranger problem than tyranny, and it is much less satisfying, because there is no villain at the end of it. But it can be fixed, and the fix does not require anyone to change their mind about abortion, or guns, or God, or any of the things Americans actually disagree about.

I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense.