OCON 2025 - Application of an Idea #4
Radical Self Governance
In his last novel, Ninety-Three, romantic poet Victor Hugo wrote: “Such are inventors. When one cannot discover America, one discovers a little wagon. At least it is something.” The context was three young children unaware of the imminent danger outside their room. The year was 1793, France was torn by counter revolution - and America’s Constitution had been ratified just five years earlier.
Across the pond and for the first time in all history, a society was to be governed by an idea - the principles of rights, liberty and justice. Not rights granted by the State, as in France, but the moral principles discovered by independent minds.
On July 2, 2025, in Boston, Brad Thompson told his audience that July 2nd was John Adams Independence Day. It was the day the Continental Congress voted to declare the individual colonies free of British rule. The document was approved on July 4th, but Adams held the conviction that “the moral and true and revolution” was in 1760.
As Thompson superbly told the story, “the spirit of liberty was a moral, psychological tripwire.” Once it was embedded in man’s soul, there is no going back. By 1760, Americans “became self-governing in the fullest sense.” To the west was a vast frontier, to the east a vast ocean – and British governance was benign neglect. But with the end of the French and Indian War, conducted mostly in North America, Britain had accumulated enormous debt.
Compounding the problem was the fluid nature of Britain’s Constitution – it was not in writing. To the British, sovereignty resided in Parliament, meaning whatever its majority decided was just. But to the Americans, sovereignty lay in the principles of natural rights. Accordingly, political liberty must be defined and codified in one document.
Several Acts of Parliament later, Samuel Adams’ Circular Letter of 1768 became the “single most advanced statement of the American mind and forerunner of what would follow.” But with the conclusion of the kinetic war with Britain, the Confederation was failing and there were no models to follow. Yet, there was no precedent for creating a rights-respecting sovereign state out of thin air.
America’s Founders needed a new revolution of the mind – and the ratifying conventions for the Constitution became “We the People.” Naturally, rights became liberty and justice became capitalism. But today, middle-class mobility is under assault by the State and their “living constitution.” And postmodern sovereignty over production and trade increasingly resides in a leviathan sanctioned by regulated investment banks and their clients.
There is no time like the present for A Middle-Class Manifesto for Objective Investing. To learn more, please click the link below:
https://www.amazon.com/Moneyball-Method-Middle-Class-Manifesto-Objective/dp/1696009111/