Every Economic Collapse Starts EXACTLY Like This...

On December 7th of 1941, Japan launched

a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor,

sending much of the US's naval fleet to

the seafloor and killing thousands of

Americans. The next day, the United

States declared war. History would mark

this infamous day as one of the

starkkest examples of around and find

out. Admiral Yamamoto is often quoted as

saying, "I fear all we have done is to

awaken a sleeping giant and fill him

with a terrible resolve." Whether the

quote is apocryphal or not, the

statement is true. What the US did next

is unparalleled in human history. On a

dime, we pointed our incredible

industrial base singlemindedly to

winning the war. What followed was

industrial shock and awe. American

industry produced nearly 100,000 tanks,

200,000 artillery pieces, and a

staggering 300,000

aircraft. All of that was in addition to

manufacturing nearly 2third of all

Allied military equipment. a feat of

production so incredible that it buried

the Axis powers and ensured none of us

had to learn German or Japanese. America

proved we had the will to fight and the

ability to outproduce anyone on the

planet. We mobilized like a command

economy briefly and then we unwound it

once we were again living free. And what

did we do with that incredibly

well-earned freedom? We went back to

sleep. We globalized. We decayed. And we

have fallen behind. Way behind. If you

look at the numbers, China now looks far

more like the World War II era US than

the US does. China is now the world's

industrial superpower. They outproduce

everyone. And because they're a top-own

command economy, they can move far

faster than the US with all of its

political gridlock. But they're a

dictatorship.

Let that hang in the air while you think

about this. Right now, the stakes are

skyhigh. The US and China are on a

collision course economically,

politically, and militarily. They're

stuck in a historical pattern known as

Thusidity's trap. This is where you have

a declining superpower going up against

a rising superpower. And the last 16

times this has happened in history, the

two nations have ended up going to war

12 times. Each side will do virtually

anything to win. The question is, does

that include the US becoming

authoritarian? We've done it before. And

right now, the US is starting to make

the same kind of policy decisions that

China is famous for. Right now, today,

the US government is no longer just

giving companies tax incentives. They're

buying them. That means politics, not

performance, could soon decide which

businesses win and which ones get wiped

out. That's the same as deciding which

investors win and which ones get wiped

out. So the question we have to ask is,

should America be taking a page out of

China's playbook? And if we do, will the

free market die? And will your

investments be the next casualty? The

answer to that question is anything but

obvious. We're going to walk through the

issue in four critical parts. Part four

is my answer and what I think the right

path forward is, but it will only make

sense if you understand what's really

going on right now between the US and

China. So don't skip around. This one

goes down straight no chaser. Welcome to

part one, the choice we have to make. As

of 2023, China is responsible for

roughly 29% of all global manufacturing

value ad. That's more than the next four

countries combined, which includes the

US. China makes over half of the world's

steel, producing 76 million metric

tonses in December of last year alone,

while the US clocked in at a measly 6.7

million metric tonses for that same time

period. As for ship building, China

controls over half of global commercial

ship building as well. The US is just

0.1%.

A number so grotesque most mainstream

think tanks consider it a national

security threat, which it is. During CO,

it became clear just how many things

like masks and pharmaceuticals were

controlled by China. And they control

70% of the rare earth minerals that

power every phone, drone, and EV on

Earth. If global competition were a foot

race, China is sprinting while America

argues over the rule book. China plans.

Our politicians do and say whatever they

need to to get reelected. And right now,

China is winning. Such is the power of a

command economy. When you can marshall

capital, labor, and infrastructure by

fiat, you can move mountains. You can

pick a goal in the horizon and just

march everyone towards it. No

shareholder votes, no focus group

polling, no need to even build

consensus. It's efficient, disciplined,

and ruthless. And that's why China can

build a bridge in a month while we spend

a decade arguing over the environmental

impact statement. When a top- down

system works, it is breathtaking.

But when it fails, it fails

spectacularly.

The same centralization that lets you

move fast also guarantees that when you

make a mistake, everyone goes down with

you. Mao taught us all that lesson in

the most terrifying fashion imaginable.

45 million people dead from policies

that a [ __ ] could have told you were a

terrible idea. But to tell him no was to

be beaten to death, shot, starved, or

exiled. And today under Xihinping, China

is relearning the same lesson, albeit

more sophisticated.

Ghost cities, a housing collapse,

re-education camps, forced labor, and

entrepreneurs vanishing simply for

questioning the party. The founding

fathers of America understood this

danger all too well. That's why the US

was founded on the ideal of freedom

expressly because they had lived under

tyranny and they knew just how bad and

arbitrary it could get. But freedom, the

free market and democracy also have

their tradeoffs. And that's why we now

have to make a choice. Do we embrace

free market capitalism with all of its

mess and chaos so that we can reap its

neverending innovation? Or in order to

catch up with China and make up for the

mistakes of globalism? Do we now begin

copying China? We could go on for days

with all of the ways that China has

outmaneuvered the US in recent decades.

And we are clearly no longer the World

War II era America that could kick

anyone's ass on the battlefield. We're

now the soft financialized America that

tries to solve all of its problems with

sanctions and tariffs. But that hasn't

even stopped postsviet Russia, let alone

the juggernaut that is China. And

honestly, you could make an argument

that we chose long ago to abandon the

free market. That we're already a

command economy. We're just doing it

poorly. We've got enough regulations

right now to stifle innovation, enough

money in politics to guarantee

regulatory capture. And in the past

year, the US government has started

taking direct ownership stakes in key

American companies like Intel, MP

Materials, and US Steel. And unlike in

times past, there's no obvious plan to

exit those positions once this crisis

has passed. Backed by the Department of

the Treasury and the Department of

Defense, these ownership stakes mark a

bold move from being a supporter of an

industry to becoming an active player

tilting the scales. For decades,

economists and advisers alike warned

against using government controlled

capital to guide sectors, pick winners,

and crush competition. Now though, the

US has had its head turned by a new bell

at the ball. Over the past 40 years,

China's economy has exploded and America

has gotten bogged down in culture, war,

[ __ ] We got so convinced that we

were the best, we forgot we climbed to

the top by being the best, by out

competing everyone else. We tried to

take all of the risk out of competition.

We tried to shame people for being

aggressive. We prioritized safety over

freedom. and we watched our lead erode

faster than any economic lead that

massive has ever eroded before. And now

that we're behind, we're open to

changing the rules this country was

founded on, the very predicate of our

success in order to catch back up. And

make no mistake, this is all about your

portfolio as much as it is about

policies and politics. Because when

government capital distorts markets,

valuations detach from reality.

Companies look valuable because they're

protected, not because they're

productive. Everything becomes insider

trading. Because when the political

winds shift, so does a company's

fortunes and potentially yours with

them. Once the state becomes a top

shareholder, CEOs stop chasing consumers

and start chasing congressional

appropriations. R&D budgets turn into

lobbying budgets and the market shifts

from who builds the best product to who

plays the policy game the best. That's

how you get fewer moonshots and more

safe state approved mediocrity. It's how

you strangle the entrepreneurial impulse

that made America the engine of global

innovation in the first place. There's

also a bigger threat lurking, the

erosion of free market capitalism. When

the government owns a slice of the

economy, it holds power to influence

outcomes, which means insiders get

access and outsiders get shut out. This

leads to favoritism, rigged competition,

and a system that rewards connections

over creativity, but it can't be denied

that it lets you move fast. Now, I wish

the dilemma that we face right now was

simply a moral one, but it's not. We'll

get back to the show in a moment, but

first, let's talk about why you keep

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major breakthrough. And now, let's get

back to the show. So, welcome to part

two. You got to give the devil is due.

China's playbook and their incredible

rise. China's GDP per capita rose from

$180 in 1978

to over 12,500

in 2024. That's a 70fold increase. In

that same time period, China has pulled

approximately 800 million people out of

extreme poverty, the greatest poverty

reduction in human history. As American

wages stagnated, the typical Chinese

workers wages went up nearly 30x. As US

life expectancy declined in part due to

deaths of despair, China's skyrocketed

from 66 years in 1978 to 78 years today.

A jump of 12 years in a single

generation. It's not hard to see why

America would look at what China is

doing with extreme envy. But if we're

not careful, we risk learning the wrong

lesson. There's no doubt one must give

the devil his due. What China has done

since Mao's death has been nothing short

of extraordinary. But as I go to great

lengths to remind people, Deng Xiaoing,

who replaced Mao, realized, the

catastrophe of Mao was in centralizing

decision-making, allowing one man to

make all of the decisions for a country

had led to mass murder and biblical

levels of starvation. Ironically, Deng

Xiaoing, the man responsible for China's

true great leap forward, looked at the

devastation brought on by Mao Central

Planning and then looked at America, her

free market and the prosperity that it

brought and decided to copy that. That

was the innovation that actually

propelled China forward. Capitalism, the

very thing America is in the process of

abandoning in favor of a post deng

that thanks to Xihinping is headed back

in the horrifying Mao direction. People

forget the timeline. Beginning in 1978,

Deng Xiaoping opened the economy to

private markets, private enterprise, and

foreign capital. And the results of that

were seismic. And he did it by inviting

Americans to come in and teach them

about the American system. From creating

thousands of banks and decentralizing

loan applications to the structure of

venture capital itself, they took it all

in and replicated our model and our

success and in many ways honestly

surpassed it. But make no mistake,

Deng's reforms came with strings. The

Communist Party never relinquished

ultimate political control. The state

kept the levers of credit, land policy,

and licensing. It would let private

enterprises grow until it looked like

private enterprise might grow into a

rival. Fast forward to Xiinping. He

inherited a nation far wealthier than

Deng could have ever imagined. And he

had learned the lesson of Russia's

collapse. And so Xi set out to prevent

that from happening in China. He

understood that once people begin

questioning the party, stability

weakens. And he was not going to let

that happen in China. His tool set was

blunt and comprehensive. An expansive

anti-corruption drive that purged anyone

who wasn't loyal and ensured

corporations cooperated with the party.

Hundreds of thousands of officials gone.

and a regulatory offensive that

installed party officials into even the

most successful and powerful private

firms. He rewired party oversight into

corporate boardrooms everywhere and made

clear who ultimately decides the rules.

That's the danger of a system built on

authoritarianism and not freedom. When

entrepreneurs publicly challenged a

system or even just sounded too

independent, the state responded

aggressively.

The most famous example was Jack Maw,

one of the world's richest and most

successful men. On the eve of Ant

Group's 37 billion IPO, Jackmaw made the

fatal error of criticizing bank

regulators. The IPO was instantly halted

and Jack Maw was essentially kidnapped

and re-educated. Ma's public

disappearance and ants and forest

restructuring served as a vicious

warning to the entire entrepreneurial

class. Companies were told to align with

state priorities or face severe

consequences. Fines, restructuring, and

re-education were all on the menu. These

moves were not subtle. They conveyed an

unmistakable message. The party will

allow markets only to the extent markets

remain politically useful. The

government also allowed and in many

cases engineered huge economic bubbles,

most famously in real estate. For years,

local governments relied on land sales

for economic progress, and developers

were incentivized to borrow cheaply,

ultimately building entire ghost cities

on speculative demand to please Xi. The

model blew up spectacularly when credit

tightened and buyers began to bulk. That

led to the 2021 collapse of Everrand, a

company with roughly $300 billion in

liabilities at its peak. That failure

exposed just how leveraged and brittle

China's property economy had become. The

fallout was immediate. Frozen projects,

distressed homeowners, and a contagion

of developer failures that punctured

confidence in that growth model. The

state has since tried to manage the

damage, but the era of easy finance

growth is clearly over because markets

operate on physics. Now, there are moral

costs as well. Alongside economic

control, the party has deployed coercive

measures against minorities, most

notoriously in Jing Jang, where

re-education camps and mass detentions

have drawn international condemnation

and documented human rights abuses. The

same political machinery that builds

super fast rail and industrial capacity

is also capable of mass lockdowns, mass

coercion, and what some have called

concentration camps for the weaguers.

That duality, breathtaking development

on one hand, and brutal repression on

the other is the devil's bargain of a

command economy. The thing people always

seem to lose sight of is the fact that

when you're telling people what to do

and how to do it, eventually someone is

going to disagree. In a free country,

you have to convince them. You have to

use persuasion. In an authoritarian

system, you just use guns. And in the

end, boys and girls, the guns always

come out. So when choosing that system,

you are choosing violence. So when

America looks at that system and swoons,

every alarm bell I have goes off. China

imitating elements of the free market.

That made sense. But here's the playbook

we'd be copying if we decide to ape

China. Now, step one, centralize

political power. Step two, embed the

government inside of companies by buying

up state-owned shares. Step three, drive

enormous gains in output, incomes, and

capacity for a chosen set of winners.

Step four, when private power threatens

political control, or when speculative

bubbles form, or when people just

disagree, step in with force. The result

is a system where market incentives run

on an authoritarian chassis. It produces

the kind of scale and speed that

democracies can only envy. And I get why

it's seductive, but boy oh boy does it

have a downside. But despite that, I

think this decision is a lot harder than

I'm making it sound. Because history has

proven in times of crisis, even America,

the land of the free, has set freedom

aside and folded under something

approaching a temporary dictatorship. So

before part four, and my path forward

will make any sense, we've got to go

through part three. America has some

China in its past. In 1942, the US

government created the War Production

Board, giving Washington the power to

tell companies like Ford, GM, and

Chrysler exactly what to build. The

Reconstruction Finance Corporation,

Revive for World War II, issued more

than $35 billion in government loans

direct to the private sector to build

refineries, synthetic rubber plants, and

shipyards. Cold War era R&D was

basically corporate socialism. In 1964,

the Pentagon's Advanced Research

Projects Agency, ARPA, spent federal

money to wire universities and defense

firms together, which is basically the

prototype for today's internet. In the

1980s, when Japan threatened US

semiconductor dominance, Washington

formed Seitech, a government-f funded

consortium of chipmakers backed by the

Pentagon, the first public private

partnership of the digital age. Post

911, the federal government became a

direct investor again. DARPA, INQEL, and

the Department of Energy's loan programs

financed the early research behind

Google Earth, Palunteer, and even

Tesla's first factory. And today, the

Chips and Science Act and Inflation

Reduction Act have Washington allocating

hundreds of billions in subsidies,

equity stakes, and tax credits to

micromanage everything from chip fabs to

EV batteries. The very definition of

hybrid state sponsored capitalism. These

are the same kind of statebacked capital

plays China is making. The hard reality

is America abandoned true capitalism a

long time ago. We like to think we only

do it in times of war and crisis, but in

all honesty, government interference in

the free market has been at a fever

pitch ever since 1913,

a year that should truly live in infamy.

As they say, remember why you started.

And the founders didn't fight to found a

new country just so once again the

government can control the economy. They

wanted government to secure property

rights, enforce contracts, mint sound

money, and then get out of the way.

Alexander Hamilton argued for a national

bank, but only to stabilize credit after

the revolution. His goal was not to try

and direct industry. Jefferson and

Madison hated even the idea of that much

involvement and fought him on principle.

Jefferson said banks were more dangerous

than standing armies. Madison warned

that concentrated credit power would

enslave the people under monopolies of

paper. And they were right. The ultimate

compromise they struck was to put strict

limits in place and a term on the bank's

charter of only 20 years. When Congress

tried to renew the charter in 1811,

Jeffersonians killed it on the floor.

Their fear was very simple. When the

state controls the money, it controls

the men. They wanted a marketplace of

competing enterprises, not a command

economy hiding under a powdered wig. For

roughly a century, that's how America

ran. The federal government stayed

small. The dollar was goldbacked, and

markets, though often brutal,

self-corrected fast. Entrepreneurs built

railroads, telegraphs, and oil empires

with almost no federal direction. Boom,

bust, rebuild, repeat. That was the

chaotic cycle that forged the richest

industrial society in human history. But

then slowly Washington began tightening

its grip. Now please note this is how

you protect the rich from losing their

money and begin to stagnate the class

structure. When wealthy people can't

lose because the entities they're

invested in are too big to fail or too

systemically important, you now have a

cast system and an economy that never

selforrects. If rich people can't become

poor through a series of bad decisions,

you have a sick economy. And that is

what we've done to ourselves. In 1913,

the diabolical Federal Reserve Act was

passed, creating a permanent central

bank. I did a whole video on it which

you can watch right here. For now, just

know that it created an unelected

committee with the power to print and

price money. And this is why most young

people today can't afford a house and

why socialism, the historically

murderous economic system, is gaining in

popularity. Not to be outdone, in 1933,

FDR's New Deal installed wage controls,

a wave of agencies that turned crisis

management into permanent bureaucracy,

and the disastrous industry codes of

fair competition, which turned the US

economy into a topdown command economy

inside of a democracy. We'll get back to

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now, let's get back to the show. Created

under the National Industrial Recovery

Act, NIRRA, of 1933, these mandates were

one of the centerpieces of FDR's New

Deal. Here's what the act entailed. The

Naira empowered industries to form

government approved cartels that set

prices, wages, production quotas, and

even hours. These weren't guidelines.

They were legally enforcable codes

signed by the president and carrying the

force of law. The idea was to end

cutthroat competition during the

depression by coordinating business

behavior from the top down. Over 500

such codes were written, covering

everything from steel and oil to dry

cleaning and dog grooming. The Supreme

Court, however, struck them down in

1935, ruling that they amounted to

unconstitutional delegation of

legislative power. Attempts to control

our economy didn't stop there, however.

In 1971, Nixon closed the gold window,

severing the dollar from any gold

backing whatsoever and ending fiscal

restraint once and for all. From then

on, money became little more than a

political instrument. Its supply being

dictated by policy, not the production

of additional valuable goods. By the

1970s and 80s, a maze of regulation from

the EPA to OSHA to price and interest

rate caps had crept into every major

sector, throttling risktaking while

entrenching incumbents who could afford

compliance lawyers. This is known as

regulatory capture, and it's another

brick in the wall that keeps the rich

rich. Economists like Milton Friedman

and Friedrich Hayek sounded the alarm.

When regulation and monetary

manipulation replace competition,

capitalism mutates into corporatism,

where profits are protected by politics

rather than outperforming the

competition. Today, we might call that

industrial policy, but the founding

fathers would have called it tyranny.

The way America was designed around

freedom was radical precisely because it

trusted that innovation would flow from

the creative chaos of man pursuing his

own self-interests, curiosities,

delusions of grandeur and passions. By

giving people the right to be wrong, man

is freed up from the overbearing will of

those who are convinced they know better

but who rarely do. Freedom is driven by

the belief that the individual is divine

and therefore worthy of sovereignty,

that markets are self-correcting by

nature, and that trusting man's innate

desire to compete for glory and riches

will lead to far more innovation than

temperous centralized control or safety.

There is no doubt that freedom brings

with it the unsettling creative

destruction of mistakes over exuberance,

greed, and plain stupidity. But it also

allows for merit and productivity to

steer the ship. When you try to remove

all of the danger and risk from freedom,

you make docile, anxious people and

innovation stagnates. The moment we

decide safety matters more than freedom,

we begin engineering our own decline.

And that's what's happened over the last

40 years. As China allowed for more

freedoms, they rose. As America

strengthened its centralized control, we

declined. We've lost sight of the fact

that there are no solutions, only

tradeoffs. And now we need to

consciously decide what trade-offs we're

willing to accept. Since the Federal

Reserve Act was passed in 1913, we have

lulled people into the belief that they

can have a command economy to protect

the little guy. But in reality, it has

come at a huge cost that has already led

America into a cold civil war, which you

are in right now. And it risks pushing

us into a hot revolution. We already

have political assassinations and states

waring against the federal government

based on party lines. And it's only

going to get worse from here if we don't

have a unified vision for how we march

forward. So, welcome to part four, the

dangerous path forward. Throughout the

entire 19th century, federal spending

averaged less than 5% of GDP. Almost all

of it went to defense, the postal

service, and infrastructure. From 1820

to 1900, US real GDP per capita roughly

tripled, vaultting America from a

frontier economy to an industrial

powerhouse in just two generations. From

1870 to 1913, America's share of global

manufacturing output jumped from roughly

23% to 32%, surpassing even the entire

British Empire. Real wages rose about

60% between 1860 and 1913, while prices

stayed flat or fell thanks to relentless

innovation. Prices should go down over

time. Despite guilded age tycoons,

upward mobility in the US was

extraordinary. By 1900, they had the

highest worker wages in the world. By

1900, the US rail network stretched

190,000 miles, a continent spanning

logistics grid built largely by private

capital. Roughly 25 million immigrants

arrived between 1880 and 1913. That's

the largest voluntary migration in

history. And they came chasing

opportunity, not government handouts.

The United States most explosive

worldbeating growth happened under

extremely limited federal government. By

1950, with just 6% of the world's

population, America produced roughly 27%

of all global GDP. Liberty, not dictate.

built the richest society in human

history. But as government spending,

regulation, and central planning rose

through the 20th century, the growth

rate, dynamism, and social mobility that

defined the American miracle steadily

flattened. The freer the economy, the

faster America grew. When Washington's

share of GDP was tiny, innovation,

immigration, and mobility exploded. As

the state grew larger, however, with the

addition of central banking and income

tax both were added in the same year,

the explosion of the alphabet agency's

massive entitlements and immoral deficit

spending, growth slowed, volatility

increased, and inequality stabilized

into a permanent cast structure. Said as

plainly as possible, America didn't rise

because government managed the economy.

It rose until the government started

managing the economy. So, if we're going

to stop our managed decline and get back

to being an unparalleled economic

powerhouse, what do we need to do,

especially now in this unique moment

where we're going up against a rising

power like China? Do we take a page out

of their playbook? Or do we get back to

a true free market, the thing that

powered our initial rise? Whatever we

choose, it's not going to be a utopia.

It will be risky. There is danger no

matter what we choose. Everything is a

trade-off. But here is what I think is

our best path forward. One, build a

strategy based on first principles.

Economies operate on physics. This is

why patterns occur over and over again

in history. Every time you run the

experiment, you're going to get similar

results. Here are the rules to remember.

Nothing comes for free. Everything is

paid for by someone. Economics is a

PVPVE game. Everyone is competing

against everyone else in a highly

complex chaotic environment. Cooperation

is a strategy to win, not an outcome in

itself. The government should be a

referee, not a player. Economic systems

are too complex to predict and therefore

too complex to control from the top

down. It can work for brief periods, but

on a long enough timeline, rapid

decentralized decision-making will

always be more efficient than a command

economy. Governments tend towards

tyranny, so their power should be

checked relentlessly. The rules of the

game need to be fair and transparent.

The government should therefore secure

property rights and enforce contracts

and the rule of law. Economies must be

compatible with human nature. Humans

pursue self-interests

far more reliably than altruistic ones.

So the system should be designed to take

advantage of that. Set another way, the

system should optimize for freedom and

fairness. Two, focus on infrastructure

and innovation. The government has never

been nor will it ever be the home of

innovation because the government

doesn't have to compete. Because of

that, it does not have the necessary

stimulus it needs to innovate. Its focus

should be entirely on laying the

foundation for the private sector which

does have to compete to innovate on top

of it. Whether that's building roads,

the internet, or giving the kind of tax

incentives that welcome all comers, the

government should see its job as

creating the soil in which the private

sector can work its distributed, albeit

chaotic magic. Three, let creative

destruction take place. The markets are

designed to foster competition. If no

one can fail, then bubbles form and the

losers never get out of the way of the

potential new winners. You clog the

system with ideas that should have died

and been killed off long ago. Market

signals get all confused and therefore

progress stalls. You have to let people

lose and lose big. Stay out of the way

of the markets and they will correct

themselves. Get involved. You may smooth

out the pain, but you make growth far

less likely. Four, focus on national

security and national dominance. Every

country should believe in itself enough

to play to win. Remember, the game is

PvPVE,

whether we want it to be or not. So, we

might as well be going for broke. When

deciding what soil needs the most

nutrients, the government should focus

obsessively on being the highest growth

economy with the largest middle class.

It does not make sense to grow fast if

you're just accelerating an excessive

level of inequality. But some inequality

is the point. People work hard to get

ahead of others. You don't spend your

entire life training for the Olympics

hoping to end up in the middle of the

pack. You do it to win gold. Economics

is the same way. It is the sport of

money. It doesn't mean you don't have

alliances. You do and you should. But it

does mean that you're still playing to

win and you accept that you might fail,

especially at the individual level. The

only time the government should directly

involve itself in the markets is if

there is a national security reason to

do so. Right now, for instance, where we

have made the catastrophic error of

globalizing to the point that our

largest rival basically controls our

entire way of life. It's absolutely

suicidal and needs to be rectified

urgently. We must bring advanced

manufacturing back to the US, but it

should be done in a way that adheres to

the principles laid out in steps 1

through three above. Five, if the

government must intervene, restrict it

massively. If government money is going

to be invested directly in private

companies, for example, to secure chip

production, critical minerals, or

defense tech, we should do it through

one small specialized fund that's

tightly controlled, totally transparent,

and extremely temporary. Here's how it

would work step by step. a a single

backs stop, not a bureaucracy. Think of

it like a national emergency fund for

industry called something like the US

strategic capital facility run by

professionals, not politicians. It would

be independently audited and legally

shielded from political meddling. B, a

clear job description. The fund would

have just three ranked goals in the

following order of priority. First,

protect national security and keep

essential production on shore. Second,

step in only when private investors

can't or won't fill a critical gap.

Third, make sure taxpayers get their

money back and ideally with a profit. C,

small ownership on equal footing. The

government should never take over a

company. It should only be allowed to

buy a minority stake, let's say less

than 20%, maybe going up to 25% during a

formally declared crisis. Its investment

terms must be the same as private

investors. D. Taxpayers should share

directly in the upside. If a company

later succeeds because of public

support, the fund should automatically

get warrants or a small share of profits

so taxpayers benefit, not just the

company or its executives. E, there

should be built-in end dates. Every deal

needs a timer. The fund must sell its

stake within 5 to seven years and the

entire program expires automatically

after 10 years unless Congress votes to

renew it based on an independent audit

and extreme circumstances. All of those

things should happen only in extreme

circumstances. Otherwise, the government

should secure rights, enforce laws, and

otherwise stay the hell out of the way.

In short, government intervention should

be small, rare, and temporary, not a

permanent bureaucracy. Help America move

fast in a crisis, protect taxpayers, and

then shut itself off before it turns

into the next Fanny May. Six, unclog the

real economy so private capital can win.

Execute regular regulatory spring

cleaning. Sun set old rules unless

re-justified every 5 years. Have a

competition policy. Target regulatory

modes, not scale. Mandate data

portability so switching is easy and

companies have to continue to please

customers to maintain their lead. Kill

off monopolies wherever they rise up and

threaten legitimate competition. Seven,

implement strict fiscal and monetary

guard rails or nothing else matters.

Balance the budget. Set strict statutory

debt to GDP rails that are mapped to

annual growth. If you're growing by 3%,

then barring war, you can't deficit

spend beyond 3%. Put all of those

together, and that's the path. Return

America to the core of freedom that made

it the most successful engine of broad

prosperity the world has ever known.

acknowledge that there are trade-offs on

both sides, but what corrupts empires

and brings them down is always excessive

governmental involvement. The market is

simply too complex to plan from the top

down despite its apparent utility in

moments of crisis. China's model may

seem to be working now, but its real

engine of prosperity came from copying

America's economic freedom. And all of

China's current woes are born of its

top- down mandates, not its bottomup

billionaires trying to out compete each

other. That's where the innovation comes

from. It is precisely the bottomup chaos

that gave us the microchip, the

internet, electric cars, and private

space flight. I'm not saying the

government doesn't have a role in trying

to make sure that the soil is prepared

for entrepreneurs and private companies

to come in and make use of, but the

private markets is why a nation with 4%

of the world's population still creates

roughly half of the world's

billion-dollar companies. Freedom to be

wrong and to fail is the very oxygen of

innovation because it lets people bet

against the consensus which is required

to avoid stagnation. China's system can

sprint, sure, but ours can self-correct.

Freedom is inefficient. I get it and

it's messy, but it maximizes access to

human creativity and ingenuity

unbburdened by bureaucrats who will

never be able to outperform the free

masses. The path forward isn't romantic.

It's practical and it's competitive.

There will be major failures and people

will suffer in the short term from time

to time. But as the history of America

proves, in the long run, the entire

world prospers when the world's best and

brightest are given an even playing

field on which to swing for the fences,

even when people think they're stupid.

Many are going to fail. But over times,

the winds will stack up into something

undeniable. When the state is used like

a scalpel, incredible things happen.

When it's used like a sledgehammer,

people learn to be quiet, hold their

hand out for a gimme, and while you may

remove risk, you also remove reward. We

don't need a five-year plan. We need a

fivepoint compass. Freedom, competition,

sound money, limited regulation, and a

government that knows how to leave when

the job is done. That's how instead of

trying to out China, China, we will out

America everyone else. That's how you

turn the next century into the century

of progress instead of the century of

tyranny and control. In the end, it

really is simple. We must choose between

a future run by bureaucrats and one run

by builders. The choice we make right

now will determine whether America

remains the world's innovation engine or

becomes yet another creator of the

oppressed who can only long to breathe

free. All right, if you want to join me

as I explore ideas like this live, join

me Wednesday and Friday at 6 am Pacific

on YouTube, Twitch, X, and Kick. You can

join the debate or just chill in the

community. I hope to see you there. Till

next time, my friends, be legendary.

Take care. Peace. If you like this

conversation, check out this episode to

learn more. In 1933, under the veil of

the Great Depression, the US government

did something unthinkable. They made it

illegal to own gold. Executive Order

6102. It didn't just