I Believe

Some oppose a woman’s right to choose, citing God’s law. I, too, am a believer. I offer a different perspective.When we brought our firstborn home from the hospital, they wouldn’t sleep unless someone was holding them. We couldn’t hold the baby twenty-four hours a day without taking shifts. So I took the night shift, holding our oldest in my lap and looking at the glowing computer monitor in the dark, trying to figure out what other people do when their baby won’t sleep.The nurses had taught us in the hospital how to swaddle a baby. They could wrap the blanket tight enough that the baby couldn’t get their arms out. We weren’t that good at it. Once our oldest got their arms out, they were awake.Then I came across the Velcro swaddle thing. So it’s one in the morning, or whatever time it was, and I’m ordering swaddle blankets with rush shipping. A few days later, they showed up.When we put our oldest in one, they went to sleep and stayed asleep longer. It was amazing. My wife would remind me they still didn’t sleep through the night.Having a baby is a challenging time. One or both parents can be exceptionally sleep deprived. And it’s a beautiful time, because you love your baby. Despite the challenges, your baby is amazing, and you’re going to do everything you can to take care of them.A woman close to me lost a baby during pregnancy. As it was explained to me, her doctors knew the baby would be stillborn. They recommended a procedure to bring on the birth early, and she chose to have it.The baby was stillborn. They named their baby and went through the mourning process.When we talk about government making decisions about pregnancy and life saving medical care for mothers, we need to remember what people go through.At the October 14 CNN and Jubilee town hall, a Catholic voter challenged James Talarico about abortion. He said the Bible was silent on abortion. She answered, “Thou shalt not kill.” Talarico said he wouldn’t support abortion if he believed it was murder, and pointed to women he said were dying because doctors feared providing care.That exchange raises a question about the commandments themselves, and another about what public officials owe the people affected by their decisions.Let’s not sidestep the question. We start in the beginning. Or, most correctly, a little after the beginning, with the Ten Commandments.The commandments begin with our obligations to God. Have no other gods. Do not take God’s name in vain. Keep the Sabbath holy. They also tell us how to treat other people.God gave us the commandments dealing with our relationship with God first. And those are the most important. Why begin there if our relationship with God wasn’t the most important place to start?You don’t tell your kid what matters most and bury it in the number seven spot. That doesn’t mean we’re ranking all ten commandments. It means our relationship with God is most important and should govern how we treat other people.The first is pretty straight forward. Only one God. So, love God. Don’t love gold instead.And then. Do not take God’s name in vain.A lot of people think that means don’t curse using God’s name. That’s not all. It means: If you swear an oath in God’s name, you shall not make God witness to a lie.Don’t say you’re going to do something and call on God’s name to make people believe you, then knowingly break that promise. The Almighty will not tolerate us calling on God’s name to lie or mistreat other people. That applies to people who call on the name of the Almighty to take an oath of office.The federal oath changed during the Civil War. Lincoln ordered an expanded oath for executive branch civilian employees in 1861. Congress revised it in 1862, when “So help me God” became part of the statutory oath for nonpresidential federal offices. Later revisions produced the form used today.The oath requires officials to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” They promise true faith and allegiance, take the obligation freely without mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and promise to carry out their duties well and faithfully.And then they state, “So help me God.”Officials can affirm instead. The constitutional obligation applies either way. Those who invoke God also make that promise in God’s name. The vast majority of people choose to swear.The Constitution’s preamble gives us six national goals: form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty.So, in swearing on the name of the Almighty that they will support and defend the Constitution, they are swearing to support and defend the six national goals, on the name of the Almighty.People judge their leaders by those national goals, even if they don’t consciously think in those terms. They may never say “domestic tranquility” or “general welfare.” But they know whether their community is safe and orderly, whether government treats them fairly, and whether they can make decisions about their own lives.A leader won’t achieve everything. People should still be able to see a serious effort toward those goals, understand the decisions, and hold the leader responsible for what happens. Moral leadership requires taking responsibility for the people affected by your decisions.One of our national goals is to maintain liberty.Part of liberty is being able to make decisions about your own property. The idea of life, liberty, and property shaped the American founding. You own yourself and your labor. When you mix that labor with what the earth provides, it helps establish your claim to the property.All the effort you make in your life to own anything begins with your own self. Your self creates the conditions that allow you to gain other property. Your personal self is the preeminent property you own.And if you don’t have bodily autonomy, then you don’t own yourself.That applies to a woman. Her body belongs to her. Pregnancy doesn’t change who owns her body.What does self-ownership mean for a woman’s liberty?The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments protect life, liberty, and property against deprivation without due process of law. They don’t prohibit every government restriction. Courts generally address bodily autonomy as liberty, rather than treating the body as an ordinary possession.We have a responsibility to judge whether government respects liberty.An unborn child is living. Its life has value. The question is whether that life has preeminent rights over the mother.And that brings us back to the commandment the voter raised with Talarico: “Thou shalt not kill.”The word “kill” is central to this discussion.The Hebrew word used in the original is lo tirtsach, from the verb ratsach. “You shall not murder.” Murder better expresses the commandment here than a rule against every taking of life.The same Hebrew root also appears in passages about unintentional killing, so it doesn’t fit our modern legal categories perfectly. Biblical law distinguishes intent and circumstances. It doesn’t treat every taking of life as the same act.Bottom line. The commandment does not say thou shalt not kill. It says thou shalt not murder. Definitely a different concept. And to highlight the difference, let’s look at another question.Does God condemn military service?I served for twenty-one years. You might not hear it said this way often, but the military exists to kill people and break things in defense of the United States. Even if you’re not the one who pulls the trigger, you support that mission.If “thou shalt not kill” condemns every taking of life, then it would condemn military members for the service they agreed to perform. That is unacceptable.Do we condemn military members who lawfully kill in combat? No, we do not condemn them.We recognize that the circumstances and justification matter. We aren’t the Almighty, but automatic condemnation of military service doesn’t follow from this commandment.David’s armies killed many people. The biblical account doesn’t automatically condemn every soldier for serving. It also takes bloodshed seriously: First Chronicles says David would not build the temple because he had shed so much blood and fought so many wars.We cannot accept the distinction between killing and murder for military members, then refuse to consider that distinction when we talk about a woman’s ability to make decisions about her own body.Military service shows why saying taking a life doesn’t finish the argument. If you call it murder, you still have to explain why it is wrongful killing.So. The act of killing does not necessarily violate God’s law. Every circumstance is different. The unborn child’s dependence doesn’t give it a superior claim to the mother’s body. Her body remains hers.Parents have responsibilities to their children. But requiring care for a child and requiring someone to sustain a life inside her body are different obligations.Other people can feed a child, provide a home, or take over the child’s care. They can’t take over this woman’s pregnancy. The law would require her particular body to sustain it.A woman’s authority over her own body is foundational to her liberty. Recognizing the unborn child’s life doesn’t require giving it preeminent rights over her. The decision about her pregnancy belongs to her.Let’s go back to the oath.An official who swears to support and defend the Constitution accepts an obligation to secure the blessings of liberty. Using government to take away a woman’s authority over her pregnancy violates that obligation.And if that official invoked God, their commitment to the Almighty is preeminent. You don’t get to disregard a promise made in God’s name because you want to use religion to justify a different decision.Sincere disagreement about the Constitution doesn’t prove someone lied. But knowingly breaking a promise made in God’s name misuses that name.Moral leadership requires understanding what your decisions demand of other people. What are you requiring this woman to go through? What happens to her health and her family? Does your decision achieve our national goals, including liberty?The leader needs to answer those questions. Invoking God doesn’t answer them.A woman may never describe her pregnancy as a question about our national goals. No matter. A family going through a loss knows whether government helps them get care or makes it harder.Our leaders take an oath to support and defend the Constitution. We should judge them by whether they work toward our national goals, including a woman’s liberty to make decisions about her own body. And if they swore that oath in God’s name, then they need to keep that promise.Before we sign off, let’s go through the logic so I didn’t miss anything.First, if we make a promise using the name of the Almighty, we shall not make God witness to a lie.Let’s build on that. Second, anyone who swears an oath in God’s name to support and defend someone’s right to liberty, shall not make God witness to violating that persons liberty.Third, bodily ownership and autonomy are foundational to liberty. You can own no property without your body, therefore your body is property you own and use to secure all other property. Your self is your most valuable property.Fourth, ownership doesn’t mean unlimited authority. We accept restrictions on how people use their property. But requiring a woman to sustain another life inside her body goes much further than restricting how she uses something she owns. It gives someone else an enforceable claim to the use of her body.Fifth, parents have responsibilities to their children. But providing care and sustaining a pregnancy are different obligations. Other people can feed a child, provide a home, or take over the child’s care. They cannot take over this woman’s pregnancy. Government would compel her personally to provide that bodily support. The unborn child’s dependence matters, but dependence alone does not establish a right to compel another person’s body to sustain you.Sixth, a woman’s authority over her own body is foundational to her liberty. The unborn child’s life has value. But that value doesn’t give it preeminent rights over her body. The decision about her pregnancy belongs to her.Last. This right does not violate God’s law. The commandment prohibits murder. Taking a life does not, by itself, mean murder. We recognize that distinction in military service.The argument for a woman’s right rests on her authority over her own body. The unborn child’s life has value, but dependence does not give it a superior claim to her body or give government the authority to compel her to sustain it.In fact, denying her the right to make her own decisions while swearing on the Almighty that you support her right to liberty makes God witness to a lie. And the Almighty states clearly we will not call upon their name to lie.SourcesThe Talarico exchange. CNN’s transcript records the discussion of abortion, the Ten Commandments, and medical care during James Talarico’s October 14, 2026 town hall. CNN. “CNN & Jubilee Town Hall with James Talarico.” October 14, 2026. Transcript.The commandments and God’s name. Exodus prohibits misuse of God’s name, Leviticus prohibits swearing falsely in God’s name, and Luther’s catechism addresses lying and deception under that commandment. The Holy Bible, Exodus 20:1–17 and Leviticus 19:12; Luther, Martin. “The Ten Commandments.” Small Catechism, 1529. Text.The oath of office. Congressional histories trace the federal oath through Lincoln’s 1861 action, Congress’s 1862 revision, and subsequent changes, including the incorporation of “So help me God.” United States Senate. “Oath of Office.” History and text; United States House of Representatives, Office of the Historian. “Oath of Office.” History.National goals and constitutional obligations. The preamble states six national purposes, Article VI requires an oath or affirmation, and the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments protect life, liberty, and property through due process. United States Constitution. National Archives. Constitution and preamble; Bill of Rights; Amendments 11–27.Self-ownership and property. Locke connects ownership of one’s person and labor to the acquisition of property, while also discussing duties to preserve life and care for children. Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government, §§ 6, 27, 56, 123–126. Complete text; property excerpt, University of Chicago.The Supreme Court’s abortion ruling. The Court overturned Roe and Casey and held that the federal Constitution does not confer a right to abortion. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022). Opinion and dissents.Killing, murder, and the Hebrew verb. The Hebrew verb ratsach appears in passages concerning both murder and unintentional killing, with biblical law distinguishing intent and circumstances. Brown, Francis, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs. A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, entry for רָצַח, Strong’s H7523. Lexicon entry; The Holy Bible, Numbers 35.David and bloodshed. First Chronicles identifies David’s wars and bloodshed as the reason he would not build the temple. The Holy Bible, 1 Chronicles 22:7–10.Medical care after stillbirth. Clinical guidance addresses delivery after fetal death, including how timing and method depend on medical circumstances and patient preferences. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine. “Management of Stillbirth.” Obstetric Care Consensus, no. 10, March 2020. Clinical guidance.Texas law and pregnancy loss. Texas law excludes removal of a fetus that died from spontaneous pregnancy loss from its definition of abortion and expressly addresses that treatment within reasonable medical judgment. Texas Health and Safety Code, § 245.002 and § 170A.0022. Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

Who should pay on the first date?People spend an enormous amount of time arguing about whether the man should pay, whether the bill should be split, or whether one person owes the other something because they paid for dinner.I’ve listened to people discuss this with a level of seriousness that I’d ordinarily associate with negotiating a peace treaty.But why are two people going on a date in the first place?Presumably, it’s because they want to spend time together. They find one another interesting or attractive, and they’d like an opportunity to get to know each other.That’s the purpose of the date.Once you’ve established that, the question becomes how to make it happen.Maybe one person pays for dinner. Maybe they split the bill. Maybe neither has enough money for dinner, so they go for a walk in the park.The details aren’t particularly important. What’s important is that they want to spend time together and find a way to achieve that purpose.And if someone has to promise another person dinner, money, or some other benefit just to convince them to show up, perhaps they shouldn’t be going on that date in the first place.When we’re young, we make the biggest decisions of our lives before we realize how big those decisions are.We choose careers. We go to college, or don’t. We decide where we’re going to live. We fall in love, get married, and sometimes have children. We make commitments that will shape the next twenty, thirty, or fifty years of our lives, often before we’ve lived long enough to appreciate what those commitments mean.How do two people keep a promise for fifty years when neither can know what those years will bring?That’s just part of being young. You make decisions based on what you know, what you want, and what you believe your future is going to look like. Then you spend much of the rest of your life discovering what those decisions mean.I was twenty-three when I married my wife. Next March, we’ll celebrate our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. I wonder now why I thought it was a good idea to be married in the wintertime, but I’ve forgotten.Last year, I sat down and calculated the date when I would have spent more days of my life married than unmarried. That number was 8,663. I crossed that threshold last December. My wife crossed it this year.Not a milestone I hear often. Not everyone feels the urge to do random math problems. Nevertheless, we’ve each spent more of our lives married than unmarried. At twenty-three, I couldn’t have imagined what that would mean.When I was young, I occasionally attended someone’s fiftieth wedding anniversary. I remember thinking two things. First, those people were really old. And second, someday, if I got married, I’d probably have a fiftieth wedding anniversary of my own.I didn’t think there was anything particularly unusual about reaching fifty years of marriage. You got married, stayed married, and eventually somebody brought you a cake. That’s how I understood it.It hadn’t occurred to me that both people also had to live long enough to eat the cake.Of course, when you’re young, you don’t realize how much your life can change in fifty years, how much two people might change, or how fortunate they’d have to be simply to have that much time together.And recently, I became interested in just how fortunate those couples are.PAIGEIn 2011, the United States Census Bureau reported that only about six percent of married American couples had reached their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Thirty-five percent had reached twenty-five years.Six percent. That’s a remarkably small number. That doesn’t mean only six percent of marriages will ever reach fifty years, that survey was a snapshot in time.But there’s another interesting statistic. In November 1980, the National Center for Health Statistics published a study examining how long American marriages would last.Using divorce and mortality rates from 1975, researchers estimated that among first marriages reaching their twenty-fifth anniversary, about one-third would survive to their fiftieth.Two-thirds wouldn’t.Now, those estimates reflected the conditions of the 1970s. Americans are living longer today, and improvements in life expectancy have increased the opportunity for couples to spend more years together. The point. Even after twenty-five years of marriage, reaching fifty depends on more than a couple’s willingness to remain married.It also depends on how much time they have.JOELThere are really two fundamental obstacles to celebrating a fiftieth wedding anniversary. Divorce and mortality.The first is something we have at least some influence over. The second, considerably less.If two people marry at twenty-five, they both have to live to seventy-five to celebrate fifty years. If they marry at thirty-five, they both have to live to eighty-five.They can have a wonderful marriage. Neither may ever consider divorce. They can remain completely committed to one another for the rest of their lives.And still never celebrate fifty years.That’s something I didn’t appreciate when I was young. I saw a fiftieth wedding anniversary as a measure of commitment. And it is. But it’s also a measure of good fortune.Now, as I approach fifty years old myself in a couple years, I’m increasingly conscious of how quickly time passes.I remember my short time as a squadron commander. I was thirty-nine years old, and one of my responsibilities was meeting the young airmen arriving in the squadron. We’d talk about the squadron, our standards, what I expected of them, and what they could expect from the organization.Most of these young airmen were eighteen or nineteen years old. Some hadn’t been born when I’d entered military service.And I remember sitting across from them and thinking about the difference in our ages.I’d already lived two of their lifetimes.And the strange thing was, I didn’t feel particularly old.I could still remember being their age, joining the military, and wondering what the future would hold. I remembered being the young officer arriving at a new unit. It didn’t seem like all that long ago.But apparently, the calendar had a different opinion.To those young airmen, I was the grizzled squadron commander. To me, it seemed like I’d been sitting on their side of the desk just a few years earlier.And I think that’s one of the peculiar things about getting older.Thirty-nine years seems like an eternity when you’re eighteen. But when you’re thirty-nine, those years don’t feel nearly as long as you’d imagined they would.I’m discovering that twenty-five years of marriage works much the same way.We experience life one day at a time. We get up, go to work, take care of our families, and do whatever needs to be done. We make dinner, pay bills, go to bed, and do it again tomorrow.Then one day you sit down and realize you’ve spent more of your life married than unmarried.And somehow, all those days have become twenty-five years.Which has led me to think about something else.When I consider how much life can change over twenty-five or fifty years, I find myself wondering why so much of our conversation about marriage seems concerned with details and arrangements that may not survive even the first few years.PAIGEThere’s certainly no shortage of opinions about what men and women owe one another.Social media is full of arguments about who should pay for the first date, whether married couples should combine their finances, how much each person should contribute to household expenses, and how responsibilities should be divided.And these aren’t meaningless questions. Financial independence matters. Unpaid household work has value. An arrangement that appears equal on paper may place a much greater burden on one person than the other.But much of the debate focuses on what each person should receive from a relationship, rather than what the two people hope to achieve together.It’s a distinction between negotiating individual obligations and deciding on a common purpose.JOELLet’s go back to the first date.Go to a coffee shop. On a walk in the tall weeds on a hot summer night. A motorcycle ride. Play pool. Stop in randomly at midnight at their house, thinking nothing of the hour. Are these dates? Who cares!I’ll say again, if someone has to bribe someone else with dinner, money, or some other benefit just to convince them to show up, maybe they shouldn’t be going on that date in the first place.I think something similar happens when people get married.Some may say the details of what someone owes someone else are the most important part of a marriage.I say, do not marry those people.My wife and I have always combined our finances. When we married, we had one household, one set of bills, and one shared future.We didn’t approach our finances by calculating which expenses belonged to which person. We were building a life together. The money was there to support that life.During my military career, we moved frequently. For about ten years, we moved every year or two. There were periods when my career largely determined where we lived and what our family could do.A tough arrangement when your wife loves to work and is independent.When our children were young, we were fortunate that she could spend time at home with them. That’s an opportunity I’m grateful our family had.But that also meant we weren’t contributing to the household in the same ways.And why would we expect to?We were doing different things because our family needed different things from each of us.If we’d approached our marriage as two individuals continuously calculating what one owed the other, I’m not sure how we would have accounted for all of that.How do you calculate the financial value of staying home with your children? How do you account for a career opportunity one person gives up so the other can pursue something? What about the years when one spouse earns more, or works longer hours, or takes on more responsibilities at home?You can try to assign a value to all of those things. And sometimes, for practical reasons, you have to.But keeping an accurate ledger is not the same thing as building a successful marriage.Now, I’m not suggesting every married couple needs a joint bank account. There are plenty of perfectly reasonable ways to organize a household. My cousin once sold his wife his used car! What works for my wife and me may not work for someone else.But there’s a fundamental difference between approaching marriage as two individuals negotiating their respective obligations and approaching it as two people committed to a shared purpose.And that difference becomes more important as the years pass.Because your circumstances change.You have children. Your careers change. You move. You become ill. Your parents get older. Sometimes one person can contribute more in one area while the other contributes more somewhere else.The arrangement that made perfect sense when you were twenty-five may make absolutely no sense when you’re forty-five or sixty-five.And if maintaining that arrangement has become your objective, then every change in circumstances becomes a problem.But if the arrangement exists to support a larger purpose, you can change the arrangement without abandoning what you were trying to achieve.That’s a distinction I came to appreciate during my military career, and it reminds me of the work of Air Force Colonel John Boyd.PAIGEJohn Boyd was an American fighter pilot and military strategist whose ideas influenced modern military thinking.He’s probably best known for the OODA loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.It’s frequently described as a process for making decisions more quickly than an adversary. You observe what’s happening, orient yourself to the circumstances, decide what to do, and act. Then you repeat the process as new information becomes available.The popular interpretation is that whoever moves through the loop faster gains an advantage.But that misses the decisive part of Boyd’s thinking.Orientation isn’t simply another step in a sequence. It’s the process through which we interpret the world around us. Our experience, assumptions, knowledge, and expectations all influence how we understand the circumstances we’re facing.Think of orientation like it’s the way you’re facing. You can make the fastest decisions in the world and still not see what’s happening real time if you’re looking the other way.And if our understanding is wrong, making decisions more quickly doesn’t necessarily help. You just make the wrong decision sooner.JOELSo. First dates and fifty years.When you’re young, you make the most important decisions of your life, without having the wisdom of time to know how important they are. And there’s a great equalizer in life. Time and chance happen to us all.When I was young, I thought a fiftieth wedding anniversary was simply what happened if you stayed married long enough. But when you’re young, you don’t realize how much your life can change in fifty years, how much two people might change, or how fortunate they’d have to be simply to have that much time together.Next March, my wife and I will celebrate twenty-five years. Our first date? I have no idea what it was. That summer, we met in a coffee shop. Went on a motorcycle ride. Got bit by chiggers in the tall grass. Drifted down a river in a canoe. I’m not sure we even went on a formal date. I’m not halfway to some guaranteed destination. I have no idea what the next twenty-five years will bring or whether we’ll be fortunate enough to have them.I’m not offering anyone a lesson on how to have a successful marriage. I’ve only been married for almost twenty-five years, and I wouldn’t pretend to know everything there is to know about it.But I do wonder if we’ve begun asking the wrong questions.We spend an extraordinary amount of time debating what one person owes another, when maybe we ought to begin by considering what two people want to achieve together.The details will change. What we are trying to preserve is the life we are building together.Maybe that’s a different way of thinking about marriage.SourcesThe percentage of currently married American couples who had reached their 25th anniversary (35%) or 50th anniversary (6%), reported in 2011 using 2009 survey data: U.S. Census Bureau, “Census Bureau Reports 55 Percent Have Married One Time”.The 1980 federal study estimating that approximately one-third of first marriages reaching their 25th anniversary would survive to their 50th, based on 1975 divorce and mortality rates. The findings appear on page 10: James A. Weed, National Center for Health Statistics, National Estimates of Marriage Dissolution and Survivorship: United States (1980).Historical improvements in American life expectancy, including changes in remaining life expectancy at age 65 since 1975: Social Security Administration, “Period Life Expectancy,” 2024 Trustees Report, Table V.A4.Current American life expectancy, including 2024 life expectancy of 79.0 years at birth and remaining life expectancy at age 65 of 18.4 years for men and 20.8 years for women: CDC National Center for Health Statistics, “Mortality in the United States, 2024,” Data Brief No. 548 (January 2026).Colonel John Boyd’s original explanation of the OODA loop, particularly how orientation shapes observation, decisions, and actions, and how experience, cultural traditions, new information, and analysis influence orientation: John R. Boyd, The Essence of Winning and Losing (1996), edited edition by Chet Richards and Chuck Spinney.The deeper interpretation of Boyd’s strategic theory, including why reducing the OODA loop to decision-making speed overlooks the importance of orientation, learning, and adaptation: Frans P. B. Osinga, Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd (Routledge, 2007).The economic value of unpaid household labor, including raising children, caregiving, and maintaining a household. The Government Accountability Office estimated that unpaid household work contributed at least $5.6 trillion in economic value in 2024: U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Unpaid Household Work: Estimated Value and Time Spent on Domestic Tasks and Caregiving” (September 17, 2026).Human outcomes are influenced by circumstances beyond individual control, expressed as “time and chance happen to them all”: Ecclesiastes 9:11, New International Version, via Bible Gateway. 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We are a month away from the midterm elections, and the American people are poised to hold the party in power accountable. Republicans raised taxes on the American people. They called those taxes tariffs, but tariffs are taxes. Then they supported going to war in Iran, which created an energy supply problem. And whenever you have an energy supply problem, prices are going to go up, because as the price of energy goes up, the price of making things goes up and the price of delivering things goes up.So now prices are higher. And while some individual prices can come down, the overall price level generally does not go back to where it was before. If your groceries went from $100 to $120, slowing inflation does not make them cost $100 again. The American people understand that because they live it. So they are going to hold Republicans accountable.The Republican response may be that President Trump did those things, not Republican lawmakers. That is not the case.When a military officer crosses the yellow line to participate in Officer Training School, he or she accepts an obligation that goes beyond their own behavior. They swear that they will “not lie, cheat or steal, nor tolerate among us anyone who does.” The second part matters just as much as the first. It is not enough to say, “I did not do it.”There is a philosophical idea here that applies. A difference between doing something and allowing something to happen. Those are not exactly the same thing. But if you have the power to act, you understand what is happening, you have a responsibility to act, and you knowingly choose not to act, then that inaction is also a choice. That is what I mean by willful acquiescence.Republicans in Congress may not have voted directly for every tariff or every military action, but they were not powerless. Congress has authority over commerce. It has authority over spending. It has enormous power over war and executive action. They could have acted. They chose not to. So they do not get to say, “That was the president. It wasn’t us.” They chose not to stop him, and now the American people may hold them accountable for that choice.I say ‘may’ which also means ‘may not.’ Because the American voter has another problem. What’s the alternative?The Democratic Party is not exactly popular either. So if Democrats win the midterm elections, they have to be very careful about what they think happened. The American people may vote against Republicans without deciding that they suddenly trust Democrats. Those are two very different things. A voter can say, “I do not trust the Democrats very much, but somebody has to put a check on the Republicans.”That is not an endorsement. That is borrowed power. And if Democrats misunderstand that, they will waste the opportunity.Because the Democrats have a much bigger problem than Donald Trump. They do not have a plan.They can tell us which programs Republicans cut. They can tell us which programs they want to restore. They can tell us what they want to put back the way it was before Trump. But the American people already lived through the way it was before Trump. And then they elected Trump again.So simply going backwards is not a plan. If Democrats win in 2026, restore a few programs, congratulate themselves, and believe America has come back to them, they may lose again in 2028 to another candidate who should never have been competitive in the first place.So the Democrats have to answer a more basic question: Why do we exist?Simon Sinek uses the idea of Why, How, and What. That methodology is useful here. What is the Democratic Party’s Why?For most of modern American history, the Republican Party was fairly easy to understand. It was pro-business. It believed in lower taxes, free markets, deregulation, and a strong military. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Business matters. Markets matter. Economic growth matters. But somebody has to balance the interests of business against the interests of the individual.That was supposed to be the Democratic Party. The Democrats were supposed to be the party that said, “Yes, business is important, but the people who work for that business are important too.”Over time, though, something changed. The Democratic Party stopped looking like the pro-people party and started looking like the pro-government party. That is a major problem, because government is not the point. The people are the point. Government is only a tool.And somewhere along the way, Democrats started to reverse the relationship. The central American philosophy is that the people are independent and the government serves them. But too often, the Democratic approach makes the government the king and makes the people the subjects. You have to qualify. You have to apply. You have to wait. You have to ask permission. You have to hope the program still exists next year.That is backwards. The government is not the sovereign. The people are.That needs to become the Democratic Party’s Why again: serve the people.Then you get to the How. How do you serve the people? By creating a system that makes them more capable of living their own lives. The goal should be autonomy, not dependence. Not dependence on a corporation, and not dependence on the government.The How is balancing the interests and power of business with the interests and power of the individual person. Government is the tool Democrats can use to keep that balance—changing the rules, regulating where necessary, and redesigning incentives so businesses can succeed while the people who work for them also succeed.But the answer is not simply to move more money through the government. It is to design the system so more of the benefit reaches people through their own work, their own wages, their own ownership, and their own choices.And that means Democrats have to think very differently about government programs. If somebody has to come to the government, prove that they qualify, fill out paperwork, wait to be approved, receive some benefit, and then worry that the next Congress is going to take that benefit away, that person may be receiving help. But they are also dependent on the continued permission of the government. Sometimes that is necessary. But it should not be the first answer to every problem.Take wages. If somebody works full time and still does not make enough money to buy food, the first question should not be, “How much government assistance should we give that person?” The first question should be, “Why does a person working full time not make enough money to buy food?”Because if an employer doesn’t pay enough to support the worker, and the government takes money from somebody else and gives it to the worker to make up the difference, what has really happened? The money may be the same. But the philosophical point is different. The worker is receiving part of what he or she needs to live from the government instead of through work. And the government has become the intermediary between the worker and economic independence.There is a better way. Instead of simply making the minimum wage higher everywhere—which ignores enormous differences between places like New York and South Dakota—we should think about how government can help businesses raise wages. Many businesses, especially businesses in rural America, don’t have unlimited revenue. Simply ordering them to pay substantially more may not work.But government can change incentives. It can change tax policy. It can design the rules so businesses have a financial reason, and the financial ability, to put more money into their employees’ paychecks. The point is not the exact mechanism. The point is where the money ends up coming from.Whenever possible, the worker would rather receive that money from his or her employer than receive it from the government. The money may ultimately cost society the same amount. But the relationship is completely different. One creates a worker earning a higher wage. The other creates a citizen waiting for a government benefit. That difference matters.SNAP is a good example. There are people who need help buying food. I am not criticizing those people. Many of them work. That is exactly the point. If somebody is working and still needs government assistance just to eat, then before we build another program, we should ask whether the rules of the economy can be changed so businesses are able and incentivized to pay higher wages. Government should try to make the better outcome the default.The same thing applies to housing. If people cannot afford housing, we can give them money to help pay rent. Sometimes we need to. But that cannot be the entire answer. Why is housing so expensive? Why is it so hard to build more of it? Why do we have rules that make construction harder? Why do we make it so difficult for the next generation to buy a house? If government can change the rules so more housing gets built and more people can afford it on their own, that is better than making people permanently dependent on a housing program.Healthcare is the same. If somebody has a $10,000 healthcare bill, we can build another government program to help pay the $10,000 bill. But at some point we have to ask why the bill is $10,000. The goal should not simply be helping people survive absurd prices. The goal should be making the prices less absurd.That is what I mean by being pro-people instead of pro-government.But there is an important exception. There are needs that we cannot solve by changing incentives. Some people have disabilities that prevent them from working. Some people have medical conditions that will never go away. Some children are born into circumstances they did not create. Some families get hit by disasters. There are people who genuinely cannot provide for themselves.In those cases, government should help them directly, reliably, and without making them feel ashamed about it. There is no better economic incentive that is going to make a person with a severe disability suddenly able to work. That is a need society has to meet.This is similar to what we talked about yesterday. Jesus fed people who were hungry. He addressed the need in front of him. There is a moral obligation to help someone who needs help. But that does not mean the goal is permanent dependence when independence is possible. Feed the person who is hungry. Support the person who cannot support himself or herself. But where people can become independent, design the system to make independence easier.That should be the Democratic Party’s How.And then we get to the What. The What is the actual legislation, the actual rules, and the actual results. Every proposal should have to answer one question: when this is over, does the citizen have more control over his or her own life?Can they afford a house? Can they support a family? Can they move to another job? Can they start a business? Can they get healthcare without being ruined? Can they live in their community without having to continually ask Washington for permission or assistance?That question is especially important in rural America, because Democrats have lost rural America. And they aren’t going to get it back with better messaging.They aren’t going to get it back by sending somebody to a county fair. They are not going to get it back because a national candidate puts on boots and takes a picture next to a tractor. And it is not enough to say there are Democrats in Congress who happen to come from rural states or rural districts.That is not the representation I mean.Rural America needs power inside the leadership of the Democratic Party. People from rural America need to be helping set the agenda, deciding what the party stands for, and determining what policies are worth pursuing. They need people in leadership who can say, “No. That may sound like a good idea here, but that will hurt people where I live.”That also means the Democrats need to develop national candidates who actually come from rural America. Not candidates who visit it. Candidates formed by it.Because the Democratic Party will not regain rural America when it learns how to speak to rural Americans. It will regain rural America when rural Americans once again have enough power inside the leadership of the party to speak for themselves.And that brings us back to this election.If Democrats win in November, they should not celebrate as though the American people have forgiven them. They should understand that the clock has started.They have two years. Two years to build an actual plan. Two years to decide what they believe. Two years to develop legislation and ideas that rural America can look at and say, “That makes my life better. That makes me more independent. That gives me more control over my own future.”Not another collection of government programs. Not another attempt to recreate the country as it existed before Trump. And not another campaign based primarily on telling us how terrible Republicans are.A real governing philosophy.The Why is the people. The How is balancing the interests and power of business with the interests and power of the individual, using government as the tool to maintain that balance. The What is legislation that leaves people more capable of governing their own lives.Protect the people who truly cannot stand alone. Help people who have an immediate need. But where independence is possible, build a system that makes it easier for people to stand on their own.If Democrats can do that, they can regain the trust of the American people. And if they can regain that trust, then they may once again have a chance to make a lasting contribution to American politics.But first they have to answer the simplest question.Are they the party of the government?Or are they the party of the people?SourcesTariffs as taxes on imported goods, their effects on consumer prices and purchasing power, and estimates of how much of the tariff burden is ultimately borne through higher prices: Congressional Budget Office, “The Effects of Tariffs on Inflation, Economic Output, and the Federal Budget”Evidence from household transaction data showing that tariffs are passed through into retail prices paid by American consumers: Federal Reserve Board, “The Unequal Effects of Tariffs on Consumer Prices”Congress’s constitutional authority over tariffs and foreign commerce, and the statutory authorities Congress has delegated to presidents to impose tariffs: Congressional Research Service, “Congressional and Presidential Authority to Impose Import Tariffs”Congressional authority over war, including Congress’s powers to declare war, appropriate funds, and regulate the armed forces: Congress.gov, Constitution Annotated, “War Powers”The War Powers Resolution and Congress’s statutory role in decisions involving the introduction of U.S. armed forces into hostilities: Congressional Research Service, “The War Powers Resolution: Concepts and Practice”The Declaration of Independence’s principle that governments are instituted to secure individual rights and derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed”: National Archives, “Declaration of Independence: A Transcription”The long-term political realignment of rural America toward the Republican Party and the widening Republican advantage among rural voters: Pew Research Center, “Changing Partisan Coalitions in a Politically Divided Nation”Americans’ unfavorable views of both major political parties, including the substantial share of Americans who view both Republicans and Democrats unfavorably: Pew Research Center, “Americans’ Views of the Republican and Democratic Parties”Working Americans receiving public benefits, including SNAP and Medicaid, and the prevalence of full-time employment among wage earners receiving those benefits: U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Public Assistance: Millions of Full-Time Workers Rely on Federal Health Care and Food Assistance Programs”Housing supply restrictions, land-use regulation, and the relationship between constraints on new construction and higher housing costs: National Bureau of Economic Research, “The Impact of Zoning on Housing Affordability”The unusually high cost of health care in the United States compared with other wealthy countries, including higher prices and administrative costs as important contributors to U.S. health spending: The Commonwealth Fund, “Mirror, Mirror 2024: A Portrait of the Failing U.S. Health System”The federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), including eligibility, benefits, and its purpose of providing food assistance to low-income households: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service, “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)”Jesus feeding the hungry and responding directly to immediate physical need in the feeding of the five thousand: Matthew 14:13–21, New International Version, via Bible GatewayThe biblical principle of caring for people in need, including the hungry, thirsty, sick, and vulnerable: Matthew 25:34–40, New International Version, via Bible Gateway Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

I was cooking the other day when I thought about a lieutenant I haven’t seen in years. I don’t know why. That happens to me sometimes. A memory will just show up. Nothing in particular brings it to mind. I’ll be driving, or walking, or standing in the kitchen cutting onions, and suddenly I’m back in some room I haven’t thought about in years.This one has come back to me a couple of times recently.It was sometime around 2018 or 2019. I was a squadron commander in the Air Force, and one of my flight commanders, a captain and a mother, came to see me about one of her lieutenants. The lieutenant was a woman who had recently had a baby and had been away from normal operational duty for quite a while. I don’t remember the exact amount of time anymore, and I don’t want to pretend that I do.The Air Force had become increasingly generous with maternity and caregiver leave, and by the time this lieutenant was due to return, she had already been away for a significant stretch. Eventually, though, the leave ended. She was expected to come back to duty.In our squadron, duty didn’t mean showing up at an office at eight in the morning and going home at five. It meant going out on a weapons-system alert. Roughly thirty-six hours away from home.The lieutenant told her flight commander that she couldn’t go. She needed more time.She was breastfeeding. More specifically, she said she couldn’t pump enough breast milk ahead of time to leave her baby for the duration of the alert.Her husband was also active duty, but he worked a job that allowed him to be home. He could care for the baby while she was gone. The problem was not that there was no one to take care of the child. The problem was feeding the child.So my flight commander came to me and asked the question commanders eventually get paid to answer: What do we do?Do we send her back on duty? Do we give her more time? How much more? A month? Three months? Until the child turns one? And if nothing changes, then what? Do we simply accept that she cannot perform that portion of the job for as long as she is breastfeeding?I remember the problem because no answer made everybody happy.And I believed the lieutenant. I want to make that clear. I did not think she had invented a breastfeeding problem because she didn’t want to work. I think she had a baby, she was trying to feed that baby, and she was looking at thirty-six hours away from her child and saying, I don’t know how I can do this.That mattered. She had a responsibility for the child.But something else mattered too.Somebody had to go on alert. The mission didn’t disappear because one lieutenant had a difficult family situation. If she didn’t go, somebody else did. Somebody else stayed away from his or her family. Somebody else carried the burden.And suddenly a question that sounds like a personnel problem becomes a philosophical one.If we say everyone can do this job, can we also say some people don’t always have to do all of it? And if we say that, who decides when that is okay?That question is bigger than breastfeeding. But breastfeeding is what makes the question difficult, because biology is not imaginary. Pregnancy is real. Childbirth is real. Recovery is real. Breastfeeding is real. None of those things disappear because an institution adopts a policy of equal opportunity.That is where equality gets complicated.We often use the word equality as though it answers a question. Sometimes it only starts one.There is equality of access. Can you enter the profession? Can you compete for the position? Can you command? Can you serve in the operational role? Can you serve on the combat team?And then there is equality of obligation. Once you have the position, are the expectations the same?That distinction becomes uncomfortable because we like clean moral principles. Treat everyone the same. Accommodate people according to their circumstances. Both sound good until they run into each other.One way of thinking about this is the difference between equality and equity. Equality says people occupying the same role ought to face the same essential obligations. Equity says relevant differences may justify different treatment. The hard part is deciding which differences matter, and how much difference in treatment is still compatible with calling it the same job.Another way of thinking about it is role morality. Certain roles carry obligations that ordinary life does not. A judge cannot decide a case based on friendship. A physician cannot simply abandon a patient in the middle of surgery. A military officer accepts obligations that most citizens do not.That does not mean the officer stops being a mother, father, husband, wife, son, or daughter. It means those obligations sometimes collide.The philosopher W. D. Ross wrote about competing duties. You can have more than one genuine moral obligation at the same time. You can have a duty to your child, a duty to your fellow officers, a duty to the mission, a duty to obey lawful orders, and a duty not to place unreasonable burdens on other people. The fact that one duty is real does not make the others disappear.That is the part that gets lost when we turn difficult problems into slogans.Sometimes two good things really are in conflict.You can even make what you believe is the right decision and still leave something valuable damaged. Maybe you order the lieutenant back onto alert. The squadron is treated fairly, the mission is covered, and a mother believes she has been forced into a situation that makes caring for her infant harder.Something has been lost.Or maybe you excuse her. The mother and baby are protected, but another lieutenant goes in her place. And another time. And another.Something has been lost there too.There is no administrative form that makes the loss disappear.This question also has an interesting history in the American military. For much of the twentieth century, the institutional answer to pregnancy and motherhood was much harsher than it is today. Women could serve, but pregnancy would effectively end that service.One of the important cases in that history involved Air Force Captain Susan Struck, a nurse who became pregnant in 1970 and challenged the policy that would have forced her out of the service. Her case became part of the broader movement away from treating pregnancy as automatically incompatible with military service.That change was important.But it didn’t eliminate the problem. It moved the problem.At first, the institutional answer had essentially been: women can serve, but motherhood may end that service.Then the answer became: women can serve and become mothers.Which immediately creates another question: what happens when the obligations of motherhood and the obligations of military service conflict?That is not an argument against women serving. It is simply the next question.And over time the question became sharper. The military opened more roles to women: aviation, ships, operational specialties, and eventually direct ground combat positions. Each time a barrier came down, the debate centered on equal access.But another question always follows behind it.Does equal access imply equal obligation?Or can equal access coexist with different obligations?And if the answer is yes, how different can those obligations become before we are no longer talking about the same job?This is where historical fights over equality become more complicated than they first appear.A woman like Susan Struck was effectively saying that pregnancy shouldn’t automatically end her military career. I think she was right.But once an institution accepts that principle, it has to turn an individual claim into a general rule. Not because every woman necessarily wants exactly what she wanted. Not because every future mother will make the same decision. Institutions simply cannot operate on individual intent. They need principles.A person fights for the right to remain. The institution recognizes that right. Then, years later, someone else enters under that right and asks for an accommodation the earlier system would never grant.That does not mean the original principle was wrong.It means principles have consequences.Rights create obligations. Access creates expectations. Equality is not complete until we talk about both.There is an old philosophical test that helps here: ask what happens if the exception becomes the rule.Not because exceptions are always wrong. They are not. But because a functioning institution has to know where exceptions stop.Suppose any member with a serious personal obligation could decline an essential operational duty whenever the two conflicted. That sounds compassionate. It may be compassionate. But could the unit function?If not, then you need a limiting principle.Which circumstances justify accommodation? For how long? Who carries the burden in the meantime? At what point does accommodation change the nature of the position itself?Those questions apply far beyond pregnancy.A father can become a sole parent. A spouse can become seriously ill. A parent can require constant care. An officer can be injured. A family can suffer a tragedy.Everybody eventually encounters something outside work that matters more to them than work.And yet some professions exist precisely because society needs people who will sometimes place the obligation of the role ahead of the obligation of the moment.That is especially true in the military.Which brings me back to that lieutenant.She had a baby. She wanted to breastfeed. She said she could not produce enough milk to leave the child for thirty-six hours. Her husband could care for the baby. Her authorized time away from duty had reached its end.Her flight commander came to me and asked: What do we do?I know what I decided.I am not sure I want to tell you. At least not yet.Because the more interesting question is what you would have decided.Do you order her back on duty?Do you give her more time?If so, how much?And what principle are you using to decide?Because whatever rule you create for her has to become a rule you could defend for everyone else.Maybe that is the hardest part of leadership.Compassion is personal.Command cannot always be.So here is the question.If we say everyone can do the job, can we still say some people don’t always have to do all of it?And if the answer is yes, who decides when that is okay?SourcesAir Force maternity-leave policy in effect beginning in 2016—12 continuous weeks of paid maternity leave: U.S. Air Force, “AF Implements New DOD-Wide Changes to Maternity Leave,” February 9, 2016 Air ForceAir Force parental-leave policy adopted in 2018—six weeks maternity convalescent leave, six weeks primary-caregiver leave, and three weeks secondary-caregiver leave; caregiver leave was in addition to maternity convalescent leave: U.S. Air Force, “Air Force Implements New Parental Leave Policy, Secondary Caregivers Given 21 Days,” June 8, 2018 Air ForceContemporaneous Air Force summary of the 2018 policy, including its retroactive applicability and the distinction among maternity convalescent, primary-caregiver, and secondary-caregiver leave: U.S. Air Force, “Air Force Parental Leave,” June 18, 2018 Air ForceThe 1948 law formally integrating women as permanent members of the armed services: U.S. Government Publishing Office, Women’s Armed Services Integration Act of 1948, Public Law 80-625, June 12, 1948 GovInfoHistorical overview of the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act, including the original limits on women’s participation and combat service: Naval History and Heritage Command, “Women’s Armed Services Integration Act”Naval History and Heritage CommandCaptain Susan Struck’s challenge to the Air Force regulation requiring discharge of pregnant female officers; the appellate opinion describes her pregnancy while serving in Vietnam and the Air Force’s attempt to discharge her: Struck v. Secretary of Defense, 460 F.2d 1372, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, 1972 OpenJuristU.S. Army historical discussion of Susan Struck’s case and its place in the changing relationship between motherhood and military service: U.S. Army, “Serving on Two Fronts—Finding Balance Between Motherhood and Military Service,” March 29, 2023 ArmyThe Department of Defense’s 2015 decision opening all military occupations and positions—including direct ground-combat positions—to qualified women beginning in 2016: U.S. Department of Defense, “Carter Opens All Military Occupations, Positions to Women,” December 3, 2015 Defense.govDoD’s implementation of women’s full integration into previously closed combat positions, including its stated emphasis on maintaining combat effectiveness and standards: U.S. Department of Defense, “Statement from Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook on Secretary Carter’s Approval of Women in Service Review Implementation Plans,” March 10, 2016 Defense.govW. D. Ross’s idea of prima facie duties—multiple genuine moral obligations that can conflict, requiring judgment about which obligation carries the greatest weight in a particular situation: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “William David Ross” Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyThe philosophical concept of universalizability—the idea that a moral judgment should be defensible under the same standard regardless of which person happens to occupy the relevant position: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Impartiality,” section 4.2, “Impartiality and Universalizability” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

Hey, this is Joel.I’m sitting next to a pile of flowers in the yard.I spent some time this morning taking hops vines out of our hoop house, and now I’m sitting on a bucket, picking the flowers off the vines.A buddy of mine brews beer. Sometimes he gives me some of it, so I’m going to give him a bunch of these.I grow several different varieties of hops in the hoop house. I’ve got some New Zealand varieties, some Cascade, and some Chinook. The Chinook seems to yield better than anything else I’ve tried here at high altitude.If you’ve never smelled a hop flower before, go get yourself a good, fresh West Coast IPA and really smell it before you drink it.That smell is hops.A West Coast IPA is usually very hop-forward, and when you break one of these fresh flowers open, there’s this strong green, citrusy, resinous smell. You immediately think, that smells like an IPA.Except it’s really the other way around.The IPA smells like this flower.My hands are busy, so I obviously can’t type anything. I’m sitting here talking to my phone instead.And with my hands busy, I’ve had some time to think about a few things from this week, even though I haven’t had time to write them down.The first one is cattle.I made a trip this week to the Buffalo Livestock Market up in northern Wyoming, and one of the things that stood out was the number of heifers.For people who don’t spend much time around cattle, a heifer is a young female that hasn’t had her first calf yet. If you want to grow a cow herd, you have to keep some of those young females. You breed them. They have calves. They become cows.That sounds simple enough.Except right now those heifers are worth a tremendous amount of money.An individual heifer can bring something like $2,500.If you keep her, maybe she has ten or twelve or fifteen calves over the course of her life. Maybe keeping her turns out to be a tremendous investment.But maybe cattle prices fall.Maybe three years from now you look back and realize somebody was willing to hand you $2,500 for that animal and you turned it down.And meanwhile, you have to feed her.You have to carry her through the winter. You have to buy hay. You have to buy fuel. You have all the other expenses that come with running a ranch.That was another thing people were talking about at the livestock market. Everybody hopes we get a lot of snow this winter.Snow means moisture. Moisture means grass.And grass matters because hay is expensive.Fuel is expensive.When diesel is expensive, even if there’s hay somewhere else, getting it to your ranch gets expensive in a hurry.So there’s this national conversation about the cattle herd being historically small and ranchers needing to retain heifers so we can rebuild it.But an individual rancher doesn’t operate the national cattle herd.He operates his ranch.He has bills. He has input costs. And he has an animal standing in front of him that somebody is willing to pay a lot of money for right now.Sometimes people ask why ranchers don’t just keep more heifers.Sometimes they can’t afford to.And sitting here picking hops, I realized I’ve got a pretty good example right in front of me.I’ve got thousands of these flowers.Suppose somebody came along and offered me a nickel or a dime for every one of them.At some point, the price might get high enough that I wouldn’t keep any to brew beer myself.I’d sell them.Not because I suddenly stopped liking beer.Not because I don’t know they might be useful later.The price somebody is willing to give me today changes the decision.That’s basically the position ranchers are in.The price can get high enough that you almost can’t afford not to sell the animal you would otherwise like to keep.The second thing I’ve been thinking about is Iran.Part of the reason I think about Iran more than most people probably do is my previous life working around nuclear weapons and strategy.And I keep coming back to the idea that maybe we are just too impatient with Iran.We want problems solved. We want regimes to change. We want countries to behave differently.But Iran isn’t a new country.Persia is one of the oldest civilizations in the world.There’s a story about Alexander the Great that I keep thinking about.Go back to 334 B.C.Alexander is about twenty-two years old. He crosses into Asia with a Macedonian army and takes on the Persian Empire, one of the great powers of the ancient world.And then he starts winning.He defeats Persian armies. He defeats Darius III. He pushes deeper and deeper into the empire.Eventually he gets through the Persian Gates and reaches Persepolis, the ceremonial heart of Persia.Parts of Persepolis are burned.So if you stop the story there, Alexander conquered Persia.He did.But then something interesting starts happening.Alexander begins adopting elements of Persian royal dress. He brings Persian nobles into his government. He brings Persian soldiers into his army. He marries into the Persian royal family. He encourages his officers to marry Persian women.And his Macedonian soldiers hate it.They marched across the known world to conquer Persia, and now they’re looking at their king thinking, wait a minute.We conquered them.Why are you starting to look like them?Persia could obviously be conquered.Alexander did it.But there’s something remarkable about a civilization that can lose the war and still influence the conqueror so deeply that the conqueror begins changing himself.Alexander conquered Persia.And then Persia changed Alexander.I think we ought to remember that.We don’t have to be Iran’s friend.We don’t have to accept Iran possessing nuclear weapons.We don’t have to accept attacks on shipping or attacks on its neighbors through militias and proxies.But maybe we should stop assuming that the final answer is somehow to make Iran into us.We’ve tried versions of that before.In 1953, the United States became involved in the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and helped restore the Shah’s position.Over the next couple of decades, the United States became very closely associated with the Shah while he pursued rapid modernization, military expansion, and increasingly authoritarian rule.It’s probably too simple to say America was trying to make Iran culturally American.But we were deeply involved in determining who governed Iran and what direction the country would take.And eventually there was a backlash.The Iranian Revolution in 1979 had a lot of causes. Religion mattered. Economics mattered. Political repression mattered. The Shah mattered. Foreign interference mattered.And out of that revolution came a phrase Americans still recognize immediately.Death to America.Maybe there’s a lesson in that.Iran does not have to become us.We can deter Iran.We can contain Iran.We can protect our allies.We can oppose nuclear proliferation.We can respond when American troops or American interests are attacked.But those things are different from assuming we are going to redesign Iranian society.Even negotiating with Iran is complicated.Iran has several centers of political power. The elected government handles diplomacy and much of the ordinary work of government. But the Supreme Leader has the final say on the biggest national-security questions, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps answers to him, not to the elected president.So when an Iranian diplomat sits across the table from an American diplomat and signs something, the question isn’t just whether we got a signature.The question is whether the person across the table actually has the authority to bind the parts of the Iranian system that have the missiles, the ships, and the guns.Does the Supreme Leader support the agreement?Does the security establishment consider itself bound by it?Will the Revolutionary Guard carry it out?You can have diplomacy happening in one place while military pressure continues or resumes somewhere else.That doesn’t necessarily mean the Iranian diplomats are fake, and it doesn’t mean the Revolutionary Guard is some completely separate rogue government.It means we need to understand who actually has authority before we congratulate ourselves for reaching an agreement.And maybe the broader point is just patience.Patience isn’t the same thing as weakness.Sometimes patience means understanding the civilization in front of you well enough not to expect it to become something it isn’t.Anyway, I’m still sitting here picking hops.They’re going into a silver metal bucket.When I’m done, I’m going to spread them out on a screen, let them dry for a couple of days, and then freeze them.And while I’ve been doing that, I’ve also been thinking about Russia.I read a piece this morning in the Wall Street Journal about something Russia has become very good at doing.Russia takes actions against NATO countries that seem deliberately designed to stay just below the point where everybody immediately agrees an armed attack has taken place.Cyber operations.Sabotage.Electronic interference.Disinformation.Using proxies.Border pressure.Things that can create real damage without a Russian tank necessarily crossing a NATO border.And that creates a strange problem for NATO.Article 5 says an armed attack against one member is considered an attack against all.But real life is messier.Something gets sabotaged.Who did it?Can you prove it?Was it an armed attack?Was it espionage?Was it a criminal act?Was it a proxy?How much evidence do you need before you respond?And if you respond militarily, are you defending yourself or escalating something that was intentionally designed to sit below that threshold?Russia may not just be testing NATO’s military strength.It may be testing NATO’s decision-making machinery.From Moscow’s point of view, the ideal action might be something serious enough to frighten people and impose costs, but ambiguous enough that thirty-two NATO governments spend the next two weeks arguing over what exactly happened.I think we make a mistake if we assume there are only two possible responses.Do nothing.Or go to war.There is a lot of room between those two things.And geography gives NATO some choices.One place Americans don’t talk about very much is Kaliningrad.Kaliningrad is a small piece of Russian territory on the Baltic Sea, physically separated from the rest of Russia.It sits between Poland and Lithuania.Both are NATO countries.Kaliningrad is extremely important to Russia. It is home to major Russian military forces and Russia’s Baltic Fleet. It gives Russia a powerful position in the Baltic.But that geography also makes it vulnerable.It is Russian territory surrounded on land by NATO.And some of the land transit between mainland Russia and Kaliningrad crosses NATO territory.So if Russia wants to operate in the gray zone, NATO doesn’t necessarily have to answer every provocation by firing a missile.There are economic tools.There are diplomatic tools.There are transit rules.There are inspections.There are sanctions.There are ways to increase pressure gradually.You could imagine a ladder.Russia takes some deliberate action against NATO infrastructure.NATO responds by tightening restrictions.Russia escalates.NATO tightens them further.At the far end of that ladder, you could even start discussing suspension of some rail transit.The United States cannot simply close a railroad through Lithuania.It is Lithuanian territory. European Union law matters. Our allies matter.And completely closing access would be a very serious escalation.But that’s exactly why it can matter as leverage.Deterrence works when the other side knows there are things it values that can be put at risk.Kaliningrad is a Russian strength.It is also a Russian vulnerability.And if a new American president really wants to understand Russia, I think one of the first places he or she ought to go is Finland.Go to Finland and listen.Finland shares about 830 miles of border with Russia.The Finns have lived next to Russia for generations.They have fought Russia.They have negotiated with Russia.They have traded with Russia.They have deterred Russia.They built their military and a lot of their civil preparedness around the fact that Russia is going to remain next door no matter who happens to be sitting in the Kremlin.There’s something we can learn from that.Sometimes Americans think distance gives us objectivity.Sometimes distance just gives us distance.If you want to understand somebody, listen to the people who have to live next door to them.That doesn’t mean Finland is always right.It doesn’t mean Poland is always right.It doesn’t mean the Baltic states are always right.But their experience matters.We shouldn’t decide what Russia means from Washington and then call our European allies afterward to explain our decision to them.We should listen first.Sometimes the people who understand a rival best are the people who have had to live next door to it.And then there was one other thing from this week that has almost nothing to do with Iran or Russia.I went to a University of Wyoming football game Saturday.Wyoming played Hawai‘i.We recently dropped our oldest off at the University of Wyoming. Three weeks ago, maybe a month ago.It was great to see them.And it got me thinking about college.A lot of people are worried about college right now.And I understand why.College is expensive.Private universities can be extraordinarily expensive.Tuition has increased tremendously over the last several decades.And young people are looking at those numbers and asking a pretty reasonable question.Is this worth it?I think there was probably a period when too many people treated college as automatic.You graduated from high school, so you went to college.Nobody stopped to ask what you were studying.Nobody stopped to ask what the degree cost.Nobody stopped to ask what kind of job it might lead to.Nobody stopped to ask how much debt you would have when you finished.We should think about all of those things.But I wonder if we’re starting to swing too far in the other direction.Now there’s a growing cultural message that college just isn’t worth it.If you’re seventeen or eighteen years old, I’d be very careful about letting that cultural mood make the decision for you.When everybody starts moving in one direction, that’s usually a good time to stop and ask whether that direction makes sense for you.That doesn’t mean every kid should go to college.Absolutely not.There are great careers that don’t require a four-year degree.There are trades that pay extremely well.There are people who would be much better off becoming electricians, plumbers, welders, mechanics, or entrepreneurs than borrowing a hundred thousand dollars for a degree they don’t need.But the opposite is also true.If you can get a useful degree in a field where there is demand, at a price you can reasonably afford, and you have a good chance of finishing it, that can still be a very good investment.The question isn’t whether college is good or bad.It’s what are you trying to do?What education does that require?What will it cost?And what are you likely to get in return?Don’t go to college just because everybody else went.But don’t refuse to go because everybody around you suddenly decided college is a scam either.Make your own decision.And maybe that’s what all of these things I’ve been thinking about this week have in common.The cattle market.Iran.Russia.College.The easy answer is usually the one everybody repeats.Keep the heifers and rebuild the herd.Make Iran more like us.Either ignore Russia or go to war with Russia.College is always worth it.College is never worth it.But reality is usually more complicated than that.The rancher has to make payroll.Iran has thousands of years of history.Russia understands geography.And an eighteen-year-old has to live with their own decision long after everybody giving them advice has moved on to something else.Maybe the lesson from this week is just to slow down a little.Understand the incentives.Understand the history.Understand the geography.Listen to people who know something you don’t.Then make your own decision.Anyway, I’m still picking hops.I keep looking down at this bucket wondering when it’s ever going to be full.It’s like an infinite bucket.It never fills up.So I’ve still got plenty of flowers left to pick.Thanks to you all for keeping me company while I sit on this bucket and pick flowers.SourcesCattle / heifer retentionUSDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, United States cattle inventory down slightly — Jan. 30, 2026. This supports the small national herd and current inventory context. USDA NASSUSDA Economic Research Service, Livestock, Dairy, and Poultry Outlook: February 2026. This is especially useful because it specifically discusses beef replacement heifers and says sustained heifer retention is needed before the beef cow herd can expand. Economic Research ServiceUSDA ERS, Livestock Production Cycles Affect Long-Term Price Outlook for Cattle, Hogs, and Chickens. Good background on the cattle cycle, historically low inventories, and why low supplies produce high cattle prices. Economic Research ServiceU.S. Energy Information Administration, Weekly Retail Gasoline and Diesel Prices. Useful for the high-diesel-cost portion; national on-highway diesel was above $6.50 per gallon in the week of Sept. 21, 2026. U.S. Energy Information AdministrationAlexander and PersiaAlexander the Great, World History Encyclopedia. Covers Alexander’s effort to integrate Macedonian and Persian elites, the Susa marriages, his marriage to a daughter of Darius III, adoption of Persian dress and manners, incorporation of Persians into the military, and Macedonian resistance to those policies. World History EncyclopediaAlexander the Great & the Burning of Persepolis, World History Encyclopedia. Useful for the conquest and destruction of Persepolis. World History Encyclopedia1953 Iran coup / the ShahU.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, Foreign Relations of the United States, Iran, 1951–1954. A 1954 CIA memorandum explicitly describes the U.S.-approved campaign to remove Mossadegh and replace his government with a pro-Western government under the Shah. Office of the HistorianThe same official documentary collection includes Eisenhower acknowledging that the United States helped bring about Mossadegh’s removal and the Shah’s restoration. Office of the HistorianThere are also contemporary CIA communications describing direct American support for the Shah during the operation. Office of the HistorianIranian political structure / IRGCCouncil on Foreign Relations, The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. It explains that the IRGC answers directly to the Supreme Leader and that its command structure bypasses the elected president. It also covers the IRGC’s military, political, economic, and regional roles. Council on Foreign RelationsRussia / NATO gray-zone activityNATO, Collective defence and Article 5. Particularly important because NATO explicitly says an “armed attack” is assessed case by case and that sufficiently serious cyber and other hybrid attacks can qualify under Article 5. NATOKaliningradCouncil of the European Union, EU sanctions against Russia: questions and answers. Useful for the legal and logistical reality of Kaliningrad transit; EU sanctions make specific provisions for goods moving between Russia and the Kaliningrad oblast. Council of the European UnionNATO material describes Kaliningrad as a Russian exclave on the Baltic surrounded by Lithuania and Poland and discusses the importance of civilian and military transit. NATOFinlandNATO material gives Finland’s land border with Russia as about 1,340 kilometers, or roughly 830 miles. NATOCollege costs and valueCollege Board, Trends in College Pricing and Student Aid 2025. This is probably your best source for tuition, sticker prices, net prices, financial aid, and the long-term cost discussion. College Board ResearchCollege Board’s archive gives you historical reports back through the 1990s if you want to make a precise claim about thirty-year tuition growth rather than simply saying college has become expensive. College Board ResearchU.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Education pays, 2025. In 2025, workers with bachelor’s degrees had median weekly earnings of $1,578 and a 2.8% unemployment rate, with earnings generally increasing and unemployment generally declining as educational attainment rose. Bureau of Labor Statistics Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

The shovel rings. Every year a couple or three fence posts rot along the front lane. Enough moisture gets in the wood and maybe a beetle or two, and the Earth wants to retake what it will. Everything eventually, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. She has a couple of spare fence posts in the barn. Not too many anymore. She shifts other posts to unbury them, and dust and soil puff up, catching in her nose. She carries one out and lays it on the ground next to the leaning post. It’s heavy enough that she can’t carry it and the tools and she has to go back to the barn for those, a shovel, pickaxe, post hole digger. She lays them next to the fence post. She puts on her gloves to protect her hands while she frees the three cross rails from the stubborn upright. Tough yellow tan leather, turning black at the fingertips. Each rail has a screw holding it to the upright, red dust lining the metal edges. She removes them one at a time and wiggles the upright side to side pulling them away from their slot. They stack there, still attached to the side post beside the rotting upright. Then she gets to the rotting fence post. First to remove it. The best way to make progress is just to break it. So she rocks it back and forth, pushes on it with her weight, until it gives at the base. Gray decay sifts into the grass. With the post removed, she gets to work on the rotted wood under the soil line. The shovel makes quick work at first, each bite of the shovel bringing up soft, rotted wood. Before long, the digging has her breathing hard as the hole deepens. She stops to rest, then works the pickaxe through pockets of stubborn wood. At intervals, she leans over and reaches in, feeling for the bottom of the rotted post. Often her hand meets packed earth, only to find more rotted wood just beneath. At last, her hand finds the bottom. She clears as much rotted wood as she can, sorting it from the soil piled beside the hole. Then she lowers the new post into place and shovels enough saved earth around the base to hold it upright. She sets the level against the wood and nudges the post till it stands true, unlike the last one, which still leans a little crooked. Only then does she fill the hole and tamp the earth firm around the post. When the upright stands true, she reattaches the three rails, driving each screw into the fresh wood. Then she gathers her tools.Half a world away, in Sumatra, another shovel bites into the Earth for a cinnamon tree.That evening, in the kitchen, she dusts the scraps of leftover pie dough with cinnamon. Her daughter’s favorite. The spice rises sharp in the air as she slides the small cookie sheet into the oven. While the scraps bake, she blind-bakes the pie crust and prepares the filling. She makes the dough with lard and butter, flour, salt, and water, lard for flake, butter for flavor, salt because salt makes everything better. Rolled thin on the counter over a dusting of flour, wrapped around the rolling pin, draped over the blue fluted pie dish. Foil to line the bottom, then the pie weights to stop the bubbles. Into the oven.She collects the other ingredients from the cupboard: pumpkin pie filling, Libby’s. Sugar, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, flour, condensed milk. She grabs eggs from the counter, fresh from the chickens in the yard. Pumpkin. Her favorite.The directions say to mix the dry ingredients separately, but she knows it doesn’t matter. She opens the can of pumpkin and uses a spoon to scrape out the last bits. She adds the eggs. She adds the dry ingredients straight to the pumpkin and eggs, gives everything a good stir, then pours in the condensed milk and mixes it again.About now the timer sounds. Potholders to grab the pie dish, foil and weights out, pie dish back in to finish the blind-bake.The next morning, pumpkin pie for breakfast. Out of the fridge comes the whipping cream. Two cups into the mixer, then sugar and vanilla. She starts it on low so the cream doesn’t splash out of the bowl, then turns it up to high until the stiff white peaks. The whisk turns faster than her hand could manage. She watches the cream thicken, stops the mixer, lifts the whisk to check. Peaks.She puts a dollop of the whipped cream onto her coffee, her favorite treat, then some onto the pie. She savors the vanilla in the cream, the bite of cinnamon and ginger mixed with the pumpkin, and heads into work.At work, the accounting sheets are waiting. Each needs checked and then checked again. There are more sheets than she has time to go through carefully.She opens a conversation with an AI. She details precise instructions. What she needs to check, what a mistake looks like, what should agree with what. Together they work on a piece of Python code to go through the documents one at a time.The first try isn’t quite right. She changes a term, explains it again. They try another approach. She runs the code, checks what it finds, changes the code, goes back to the conversation. A couple of hours pass this way.Eventually, it works. The code moves through the sheets finding the mistakes that need her attention.She gets to work fixing them.At a desk nearby, a mathematician works through a problem he has struggled with for years. He knows where he gets stuck. He can get partway to an answer, but the next step depends on something he hasn’t been able to prove. Every approach brings him back to the same place.He’s tried changing his starting assumptions. He’s tried approaching the problem from other directions. There are papers on his desk with passages underlined, calculations in the margins. Books and old computer programs he keeps because he thinks he might find the answer there. Some of that work belongs to people who have been working on the problem longer than he has. Some will never work on it again.He opens a conversation with an AI. Types the problem, gives it explicit details, explains where he gets stuck.The AI says it’s thinking about it. Gives an answer back. He reads it chewing on a pencil. For him to get to a final solution he has to prove every line, and he can’t get past the third. He goes back to the AI and explains the mistake, walks it through his reasoning. Another answer. This one a different route that arrives at the same difficulty. He checks each step again anyway.Over the next several days, he returns to the conversation. Sometimes it helps him work through a calculation. Sometimes he spends an hour finding out why a suggestion won’t work.Then the AI suggests a way of writing the problem differently.He copies it onto paper. Works through the first line, then the second. He tries a simple example whose answer he already knows.It works.He tries another. Then he goes back over what they have taken for granted, looking for something that slipped through unnoticed.For the first time, he can see a possible next step.There’s still work to do. He needs to know whether the approach works beyond these examples. He needs other mathematicians to look it over. A promising afternoon is a long way from his end goal.But he turns to a fresh page.We say she dug the hole by hand. We say she made the pie from scratch. And she did.But where does ‘by hand’ or ‘from scratch’ begin?She used a shovel. Somebody made it. Before someone could make the shovel, someone made steel. Someone extracted iron ore from the ground. Someone figured out how to turn it into something useful. They needed furnaces, fuel, equipment to move the material, tools to shape it, people to do the work. Every one of those had to be made or fed, too.And the handle. A tree had to grow. Somebody cut it, moved it, dried the wood, shaped it to fit the shovel, and shaped it so that your hand could hold it.Whatever fastens the blade to the handle has its own need: a pin, a screw, adhesive. How do you make resin from scratch? For every one of them, if you follow their trail backward, there’s more work. Even if she could obtain everything herself, every ingredient, she would still need to know what to do with them.Somebody makes every material. Somebody else discovered how. Somebody learned through years of mistakes what would work. What would hold together? What would fail or rust faster?We could learn what they know, but we don’t have time to live every one of their failures. She doesn’t need to know the history of metalwork. Other people have worked that out, and they gave her a tool she can hold. Most of their names don’t survive.People observed things long ago, before there were papers to publish or patents to file. They tried something. They remembered what happened. They showed somebody else. Knowledge traveled through a family or a community across generations. It could be lost, discovered again, changed by somebody who noticed something others missed.In the kitchen, she measures flour. She didn’t grow the wheat or grind it. If she had, she would use knowledge someone else taught her: when to plant, what to save for seed, how to recognize grain ready for harvest, how to turn it into flour, and how to make flour into something worth eating.The cinnamon arrived in a jar from Sumatra, halfway across the world. In that jar, there are people who grew and harvested it, people who prepared it, people who moved it from one part of the world to another, and behind their work is knowledge that they didn’t have to discover for themselves.When she turns on the mixer, she watches the cream turn into soft and then stiff peaks and decides when it’s ready. She can use the machine without knowing who built its motor or how they did it. She can take the cream out of the refrigerator without knowing how to make a refrigerator.And we still say that she made whipped cream from scratch.Then at work.She knows the result she needs, opens a browser window, explains how she needs to check them. The first version fails; she changes the code, and it fails again. She changes her instructions; it fails. She works through it over and over, tries again, until she achieves her goal. What part of that effort belongs to her? It’s a legitimate question. But we should ask the same question about the shovel, the flour, the refrigerator, the language she uses to explain the problem she has.The question, really, is: what does it mean to do something by hand?Human achievement depends on more human experience than any one person could ever accumulate. We start ahead of the finish line, beginning our lives with answers other people long dead spent their lives finding, and many spent their lives failing to find.Let’s pull on this thread some more and think about another facet of AI that no one is talking about: justice.It’s one of our six national goals, and it means equal treatment under the law, but it also means that a boy or girl who grows up in a trailer and is willing to put in the work can become great.And for AI especially, it’s not really a governance effort because it’s private enterprise. But let’s think about the effort in the context of: does it align with one of our national goals?We’ve already talked about how knowledge is inherited, but access to that knowledge isn’t equal. Some people grow up with great teachers or great professional connections. Their parents have connections, their friends have connections, or they have people who can explain how to start something. Others have ability and ambition, but they don’t have these connections or the guidance.Circumstances narrow our choices in life. If a boy or girl grows up in a trailer and they are curious and willing to work, their circumstances shouldn’t decide how far they can develop their abilities.AI as a tool creates another way to learn and attempt things and to build knowledge and skills that you wouldn’t be able to otherwise. It’s a place to ask questions, request more explanation about something, practice unfamiliar skills, build something useful.New abilities also create new opportunities. It can help finish a project, get a promotion, or develop new skills they can showcase to an employer or customer.AI isn’t an end-all, be-all. But it offers concrete steps toward the goal of an ordinary, worthwhile life: to love your work, raise your family in a safe neighborhood with good schools, and eat and drink with those you love.So let’s judge the technology not solely by the chatter, but by whom it enables and whether it advances our effort toward achieving a national goal.America exists to protect and enable the weak, not the strong. And to do so, we must take deliberate effort to empower those born with nothing who are willing to work to become great.So, what’s better?Human achievement only?Human achievement enhanced with AI ability? And a question we need to ask. There are answers we need for tough questions. When will we get to those answers alone?If one day the answer to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Problem about fluid motion helps us better model solutions for a changing climate, would we ignore the result?Postscript.My stories are mine. For this piece, I read into a microphone and used AI to transcribe for me. And yes, I use the hell out of it to help me write Python code.Around twenty-five hundred years ago we were thinking about the progress of knowlege: 8Ask the former generation and find out what their ancestors learned,9 for we were born only yesterday and know nothing, and our days on earth are but a shadow.10 Will they not instruct you and tell you? Will they not bring forth words from their understanding?” Job 8, 8-10, NIVSourcesSteel production, iron ore, fuel, and the materials behind manufactured tools: World Steel Association, “Raw Materials”; World Steel Association, “The Steelmaking Process”Indonesian cinnamon from Sumatra and the people involved in its production: McCormick Science Institute, “Cinnamon”; McCormick, “Empowering Women in Indonesia’s Cinnamon Supply Chain,” March 8, 2023Human knowledge accumulating through social learning, innovation, and transmission between people: Maxime Derex and Robert Boyd, “The Foundations of the Human Cultural Niche,” Nature Communications, 2015Returning to dust: Ecclesiastes 3:20, New International Version, via Bible Gateway; the wording “ashes to ashes, dust to dust”: The Book of Common Prayer (1662), “At the Burial of the Dead,” Church of EnglandLearning from earlier generations and the limits of one person’s experience: Job 8:8–10, New International Version, via Bible GatewayHow new ideas and technologies spread through communication, social relationships, and adoption over time: Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, fifth edition, Free Press, 2003Navier–Stokes equations, fluid motion, and the Millennium Prize problem: Clay Mathematics Institute, “Navier–Stokes Equation”; Charles L. Fefferman, official problem description, “Existence and Smoothness of the Navier–Stokes Equation”Mathematicians working with AI on fluid equations, building on earlier human research, and questions about credit and unpublished work: Tristan Buckmaster, public statement on his collaboration with Levent Alpöge and interactions with OpenAI, September 2026OpenAI’s claimed Navier–Stokes solution and its account of the research process and concurrent mathematical work: OpenAI, “On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem,” September 8, 2026Fluid-motion equations in numerical weather prediction and modeling systems used for weather and climate: Met Office, “History of Numerical Weather Prediction”; Met Office, “Unified Model” Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

A man selling good cows is not happy about it.Wednesday morning in May.He pulls into the gravel lot at half past seven. The sun is up but the cold has not gone. Winter is fighting summer. Some days in May might reach the 80s, some days snow. His breath hangs in the air and catches on the bill of his hat. Jesse stands on the seat and watches the door.The lot is full. It should not be full. Wednesday is not a normal sale day in May. Today is a drought sale, and the trailers are lined up in rows he has not seen in this lot in years. Goosenecks and bumper-pulls. Plates from three states. Some of the trailers have cows in them with calves still wet at their sides. The market is so busy there aren’t enough pens to hold all the groups. The ranchers unload, and the cattle move straight through the alleys into the sale ring, then onto a different truck. A rancher does not haul a wet calf to a sale barn unless something is wrong.He kills the engine. Sits a moment. The check he is about to get is already in his head. The math is bad and the math is the math. Twenty-five head in the trailer. Cows he had not planned to sell for years. Good cows. Bred back. The snow and the grass didn’t come this winter and the hay he would need to carry them through summer is gone or priced past what the check from October will cover. Some years he might have been able to buy hay from Missouri and ship it, but fuel prices are way high because some strait on the other side of the world is closed, so that doesn’t pencil out. He has run the numbers a hundred times since April. There is no version where he gets to keep them and still make money.He steps down. The gravel crunches. Jesse, Bentley mark on her forehead, stays in the cab.The brand inspector is at his post off to the left of the building. Same man. Carhartt and a brown ballcap. He looks up and nods. He has been doing this a long time and he has never seen a Wednesday like this one. He does not say so. He does not need to.Inside, the pay window. Three ladies behind it. One of them smiles at him the way she has smiled at him for twenty years. He touches the brim of his hat.Through the door to the arena. The stairs are tall and the bleachers are full. Men he knows. Men he does not. Coffee in styrofoam. The smell of diesel and pine shavings and manure that his father knew and his grandfather before him. The auctioneer is already going.He climbs up. Finds a seat. Watches.The buyers are in the front row. He counts them. Three. There should be more. He drove four hours past Buffalo to get to a barn that has eight on a good day. Today there are three, and none of them are looking up.A heeler trots up the aisle. Red, with a bad left ear. She sniffs his boot. Moves on.The cows come through. Cow calf pairs, mommas still wet from calving with their calves in the pen behind them. A man two rows down has his hand over his mouth. The auctioneer’s chant rises and the gavel falls and rises and falls again.His turn comes. Twenty-five head out of the trailer. Black, good condition, papers clean. The gate opens and they come through in a knot, hooves and dust, and the man with the flag moves them into the ring.The chant starts. A nod from the buyer for the Nebraska feedlot. A nod from Oklahoma. The Colorado man does not look up. The pause. The gavel.The price is the price.He walks down. Goes to the pay window. The lady he knows slides a check across the counter. She doesn’t smile. He folds the check and puts it in his shirt pocket and thanks her and touches his hat and walks out.The trailer is empty when he gets to it. Jesse stands up on the seat and waits for him to open the door.He sits a moment before he turns the key. The lot is still full. Other men are still in the bleachers. Cows in the holding pens behind the building are bawling for the calves they came in with, the calves now in different pens behind different trailers belonging to men they have never met.He has played the game for thirty years. His father played it for forty. His grandfather homesteaded the ground. It was never designed for him to win.He starts the truck. Pulls out of the lot. Four hours home. He has all afternoon to think about it. On the drive home, he passes a sign for a high school football field. He doesn’t think about it. He should.Act I. Hope in the NorthA Sunday in January, a sports bar in Detroit, a man in a Lions jersey watched his quarterback take a knee.Jared Goff at quarterback. Three years before, the Lions and Rams had swapped quarterbacks. The Lions sent Matthew Stafford to Los Angeles. The Rams sent Goff to Detroit along with two of their best draft picks for the next two years to make the deal go through. The NFL holds one draft a year. Every team picks new college players in turn, worst team first, best team last, the rule that has built competitive balance in the league for ninety years. Los Angeles gave up its top picks in two of those drafts to get Stafford. Two years of the league’s best mechanism for building a future, handed over for one quarterback. The Lions took the deal because they hadn’t won a playoff game in thirty-two years and had nothing left to lose, and because the picks the Rams handed over were what they needed to build a team around the quarterback nobody else wanted.Then, 2022. HBO put new head coach Dan Campbell’s fiery speeches on ‘Hard Knocks’ and the city took to him right away. The team started one and six that year, and then won eight of their final ten games. A year later. On this Sunday, in the wild card round of the 2023 playoffs, the Lions were ahead of the Rams by three with two minutes on the clock. Goff dropped back. He threw a first down to Amon-Ra St. Brown, a fourth-round receiver every other team had a chance to take, a receiver Detroit had taken because the rules of the draft put him in their pile when nobody else wanted him. The first down moved the chains. The clock kept running. Then the victory formation. Goff under center. The snap. The knee. Clock running. The crowd on its feet. The man at the bar with his hand on his beer and his eyes on the television and his throat closed. The Rams fans somewhere far away, already gone.The man at the bar had grown up watching the Lions lose. His father had grown up watching the Lions lose. Thirty-two years. The Lions had been the worst-run franchise in American sports. The rock bottom of those years came in 2008 when they became the first team in NFL history to lose every game of a season. Detroit was the punchline of every joke about American decline and the people who lived there had been told by everyone who had never lived there that the city was finished.The man at the bar had not moved on. And on this Sunday in January, his team was taking a victory knee in a playoff game.The league was built for this.The teams had the same salary cap. The same revenue from the same national television deal. The same weighted draft order that gave worse teams better picks the next year. Rules written so that thirty-two years of losing could be ended by good drafts and good decisions and a fair chance. The Lions did not win the Super Bowl that year. They lost the divisional round the next week by three points, on a kick as time expired. The season didn’t need a trophy. The season had done the work. Detroit had been crushed by shuttered auto plants and fights between capital and labor. The Lions gave them reason to keep going. The man at the bar would carry that reason into his Monday morning. Into the rest of the winter, into the next season and the season after that. Whatever else the Lions did or did not do, the man at the bar had been given back the thing that had been taken from his city for thirty-two years.A country, like a city, has to be allowed to keep what it has earned. Our founding documents are our rules. The rules say we the people, for the people. They claim a kid born in a leaky trailer can raise her children in a warm house, with food on the table, in a good school district. They are either true, or they are the most spectacular lie ever committed to paper.Competition does not happen naturally. The principle is older than football, and the league did not invent it. It has to be designed. Enforced. Maintained, year after year, against the gravitational pull of consolidation, because consolidation is what every winning team and every winning company would prefer if the rules allowed it. The rules aren’t focused on the teams. They’re focused on the people. At the start of every season, any fan can believe their team can win a playoff game. The salary cap does not celebrate competition. It is an admission that without it, the Steelers and the Patriots and the Chiefs would eat everyone, and the product would die.The NFL’s design isn’t perfect. The Patriots ran the AFC East for two decades. The Chiefs have run the AFC West for most of the last ten years. The Packers under Lombardi won five championships in seven seasons. Talent clusters. Coaches and quarterbacks and general managers cluster with talent. The design can’t stop Tom Brady and Patrick Mahomes from being great quarterbacks. The design constrains the time over which a team can dominate everyone else.Imperfect is not the same as failed. And it took many years to build consensus.In February of 1936, Bert Bell, owner of the worst team in football, proposed that the league’s college player draft be run in reverse order. Worst team picks first. Best team picks last. The richest owners in the room would lose the freedom to outbid Bell for college talent. They would lose the path to permanent dominance. Bell argued that without the rule, the strongest teams would consolidate talent year over year, the weaker teams would fold one by one, and a league without competitive balance would lose its audience. The vote was unanimous. The first NFL draft was held two days later. The reverse-order draft has been the rule ever since.Twenty-five years later, in 1961, Commissioner Pete Rozelle proposed a single national television contract that would split the revenue equally among all fourteen teams. The richest teams would leave millions of dollars on the table. They agreed. Rozelle then took the deal to a federal court in Philadelphia, where a judge ruled it an illegal restraint of trade under the Sherman Antitrust Act. Rozelle had weeks to save it. He went to Congress, testified that professional sports could not function as ordinary businesses because no team in a league wants its competitors to fold, and asked for a law that would legalize what the court had just struck down. Congress passed the Sports Broadcasting Act in September. President Kennedy signed it. Every dollar of national television revenue the NFL has earned since has been split evenly among the franchises because a Commissioner persuaded the owners of the richest teams to share with the poorest, and then persuaded Congress to bless the sharing.We built the design for a game.We didn’t build it for beef or airlines or for the search bar in everyone’s pocket or the cloud the search bar runs on or the eyeglasses on the reader’s face or the seeds the farmer puts in the ground. In every one of those markets we did the opposite. We let corporations consolidate and shareholders cut costs. The products got worse and prices got higher and the people on the receiving end of those markets, like the rancher, the traveler, the searcher, the patient, and the farmer, got told it was the cost of efficiency.It is not the cost of efficiency. It is the cost of cowardice.Now, let’s not be naive. The NFL is a cartel. The salary cap is wage suppression. The draft is a restraint on the freedom of a young man to sell his work to the highest bidder. The revenue sharing is collusion among thirty-two owners who agreed to bind themselves to a common rule.The cartel produces something the free market does not. A Sunday in January in Detroit. A man at a bar with his throat closed. Hope in a city that everyone told to give up. The cartel produces the thing a country actually needs its institutions to produce.We built the rules for a game. We didn’t build them for the country. We still can. It’s been done before.Act II. Sir Robert PeelA century and a half before Bert Bell asked his peers to constrain themselves, a different man stood in a different chamber and asked the same thing of a different cartel. He had no Commissioner. No Congress willing to bless what he was about to do. He had only the office, the argument, and courage.His name was Robert Peel. He was a Tory. He was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, the most powerful office in the most powerful empire the world had ever seen. He had been born to a wealthy cotton manufacturer and raised to defend the interests of the rich men who had paid for his education. He did, for thirty years. He defended them in the House of Commons. He defended them as Home Secretary. He defended them as Prime Minister. The interests he defended included the Corn Laws.The Corn Laws were tariffs on imported grain. Tariffs are taxes on the poor. They had been passed in 1815 to protect the price of domestic British wheat against cheaper grain from mainland Europe and the United States. The men they protected were the landed gentry. The men they hurt were everyone who bought bread. In a country where the working class spent half its income on food, the new taxes stood between a man’s wage and his children’s supper.Peel defended them. He believed, as his father and his class had, that protecting domestic agriculture was the foundation of national security and social order. He was not wrong about either argument. A country that cannot feed itself is a country at the mercy of its enemies. A country with impoverished agricultural producers is a country with unstable political order. The arguments were serious. Peel made them seriously.Then the potato crop failed in Ireland.In the autumn of 1845, a fungus arrived in Europe and turned the Irish potato harvest into a black slurry in the ground. The crop failed again in 1846. And again in 1847. Ireland, a country of eight million people, lost a million of them to starvation and disease in five years. Another million left. The population of Ireland in 1851 was smaller than in 1841.The Corn Laws did not cause the famine. The blight caused the famine. But the Corn Laws were the laws under which a starving country could not buy cheap grain from abroad, because the laws made cheap grain illegal. The landed class was protected. The Irish peasant was not.Peel saw it. He had defended the laws his entire career, and he saw what the laws were doing in the autumn of 1845. He decided he had been wrong. Not wrong about the principle of national agricultural security. Wrong about tariffs levied on the people who were starving in real time. The arguments he had made for thirty years were no longer the arguments the moment required. The discipline of his career was to follow the evidence to the decisive point. He did.He decided to repeal the Corn Laws.His party would not follow him. His party was the Conservative Party. He had built it and supported the wealthy elites. He had defended their principles for three decades. Repealing the Corn Laws meant taking food off the table of the men who had funded his career and put him in his office. Two-thirds of his own party voted against him.He did it anyway.The Importation Act passed the House of Commons on May 15, 1846. The House of Lords passed it on June 25. Royal assent came the next day. The cartel of grain prices that had stood for thirty-one years was no more.The same night the Lords passed the repeal, a coalition of Whigs, Radicals, and protectionist Tories who had not forgiven Peel for his betrayal defeated his government on an unrelated Irish coercion bill. The vote was 292 to 219. Peel resigned the office of Prime Minister four days later, on June 29, 1846. He had spent his career as a Tory and ended it without a party. The Conservatives he had built would not speak his name without a curse for a generation.He gave three speeches before he resigned. The last was the one that mattered.On June 29 he stood in the chamber and defended what he had done. He didn’t apologize or hedge. He explained that he had repealed the laws because the laws had become unjust. That a country whose food was priced beyond the reach of its workers was a country whose government had failed in its first responsibility. That protecting the few at the cost of the many was not conservatism. It was privilege wearing the costume of conservatism. And that the conservative who refused to know the difference was conserving nothing worth conserving.And then he turned, in the last paragraph, to the country he was leaving. In modern words, he said:One day, families will sit in a warm house and share a meal. They will have earned that meal by the sweat of their brow, in work that paid them what their work was worth. The food on their table will not be priced past their reach by men they will never meet. They will not give thanks for the absence of injustice, because they will not have to know it was ever there.In those houses, perhaps, they will remember one who had the courage to lose his career so the cartel could be broken. One who had the discipline to follow the evidence past every argument he had spent his life making. One who had the justice to say out loud that a law written to protect the few at the cost of the many is not a law worth keeping. One who had the wisdom to know that a party which protects privilege is not conserving anything that deserves to be conserved.In those houses, they will remember him with goodwill, the way a family at a full table remembers anyone who made the table possible.Sir Robert Peel died four years later, in July of 1850. Thrown from a horse on Constitution Hill in London. It shied, threw him, and fell on top of him. He lived for three days in pain and died at his home in Whitehall Gardens. He was sixty-two.His party did not attend his funeral.The working men of Britain did. They lined the streets in numbers no one expected. They had not known him personally. They had never been in a room with him. They knew only that they were eating cheaper bread because of what he had done. The law that had taxed their suppers had been broken by a man who had been the most powerful man in the country. He had spent his career defending the system and then gave up his power to break it. We have his problem. Courage is not rare. It is common. What is rare is the willingness to pay its price.Act III. The Empty PenNorth out of Torrington on 26, then west to Casper, then north again toward home. Jesse on the seat. The check folded in his shirt pocket. Empty trailer behind him. Afternoon sun on his left shoulder.He has driven this road a thousand times. He has never driven it after a sale like this one.The rain had come last week, too late to matter. The grass here was winter grass. The rain would make it green, but it grew in the winter, not the summer. It would not grow now. By July the pastures would be the color of straw. Twenty-five head. Good cows. Cows he had not planned to sell for years. Cows that would have raised calves in 2027 and 2028 and 2029. Three years of calves gone in one Wednesday morning. The calves those calves would have raised, gone with them. He had not just sold cows. He had sold the next decade of the ranch.If he could have kept heifers in 2026, the bull could breed them in 2027, calves in 2028. By the time those calves were on the ground and weaned and through the feedlot, that’s pretty close to the end of the decade. There isn’t anything anybody can change. We can’t build them out of spare parts.Biology is biology. A cow has one calf a year. A heifer takes two years to be ready. The herd can’t be rebuilt by want or policy or prayer. The herd can only be rebuilt by years of high prices that let ranchers afford to keep the females and breed them instead of selling them. The herd needs five years. The drought reset the clock to zero.His kids in three cities will be in middle age before the national herd is back to where it was the day before he was born. And prices will stay high until that day comes.North of Kaycee the Bighorns come up on the left in a long pale wall. Snow on the high peaks. The sage between him and the mountains, gray and patient.He knows what the country could do, if the country had the courage. The answers are not hidden. They are not even particularly hard.Break up the four packers. Enforce the Packers and Stockyards Act the way it was written to be enforced. Give him eight buyers in the front row at Torrington instead of three. Let the price the auctioneer calls be a price discovered in a real market, not a price set the day before on a board in Chicago by four companies that act like one.Label the beef. Country-of-origin, ranch-of-origin, USDA grade fed back to the cow-calf operator the way the data has been technically possible for ten years and politically possible for none. Let his good cows command the premium good cows are worth. Let consumers know what they are buying. Let the price he gets reflect the work he did.Tax the businesses that pay their workers below the wage that keeps them off social programs. Reward the ranches and the diners and the small operations whose employees do not need the taxpayer’s help to heat the house. Stop subsidizing corporations that pay their employees so little the government has to make up the difference. Stop treating corporations like disadvantaged small businesses.Build starter homes. Reform zoning. Let his son in Billings come home to a house his work can afford.None of it is theoretical. All of it has been written, debated, modeled, scored, and shelved. The reforms are sitting in committee files in Washington. They are sitting in policy papers from Heritage and Brookings. They are sitting in the books on his own nightstand.What is missing is the senator who will lose her caucus to vote for them. The congressman who will lose his district. The president who will lose his coalition the morning after the bill is signed.Courage is not rare. The willingness to pay its price is.He does not know if that person exists. He has not seen one in his lifetime. But he hopes, because the alternative means agreeing to the world as it is. The wicked prosper, injustice goes unanswered, the violent rule the meek.He does not agree.He will walk on the high hills. He turns off the highway onto the county road. Past the mailbox his father put up. The gate his grandfather hung. Jesse stands up on the seat. The kitchen window light is on. The wife is at her desk, writing.He walks out behind the barn, to the pens. They will be empty this summer. And next summer. Maybe the summer after that. Empty when his son in Billings decides whether to come home, or empty when his son decides not to.The wind moves through the aspens. A meadowlark sings from the pasture. The Bighorns catch the last of the light. A man selling good cows is not happy about it.SourcesKate Meadows, “Wyoming Ranchers Selling Off Cattle As Drought Tightens Grip Across State.” Cowboy State Daily, May 13, 2026. https://cowboystatedaily.com/2026/05/13/wyoming-ranchers-selling-off-cattle-as-drought-tightens-grip-across-state/ The May 13, 2026 special drought sale at Torrington Livestock Markets — 9,000 head, against a typical May weekly volume of 400 to 700 head. Co-owner Lander Nicodemus on the cause.USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, “Cattle Inventory,” January 30, 2026.https://usda.library.cornell.edu/concern/publications/h702q636h Official USDA-NASS report. Total cattle and calves at 86.2 million head as of January 1, 2026 — lowest since 1951. Beef cow inventory at 27.6 million head.American Farm Bureau Federation, “Smaller Cattle Herd Creates Market Volatility.” https://www.fb.org/market-intel/smaller-cattle-herd-creates-market-volatility Farm Bureau analysis. Year 13 of the current cattle cycle, year 8 of contraction.Derrell S. Peel, “Drought Threatens the Herd Rebuild.” Cow/Calf Corner Newsletter, Oklahoma State University Extension, May 6, 2026. Republished by Angus Beef Bulletin.The White House, “Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy,” July 9, 2021. Official statement confirming the Big Four control approximately 85% of the beef market.The Fence Post, “100 years of the Packers and Stockyards Act: Modernization and enforcement,” August 20, 2021. Equitable Growth, “Protecting livestock producers and chicken growers: Recommendations for reinvigorating enforcement of the Packers and Stockyards Act,” 2023. https://equitablegrowth.org/research-paper/protecting-livestock-producers-and-chicken-growers/ Policy analysis of the Packers and Stockyards Act and current enforcement gaps.Pro Football Hall of Fame, “1936: The NFL’s First Draft.” https://www.profootballhof.com/football-history/nfl-draft-history/1930/1936 Official Hall of Fame history. Bert Bell’s proposal approved May 19, 1935. First NFL draft held February 8, 1936 at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Philadelphia. Jay Berwanger first pick.Federal Judicial Center, “NFL Television Broadcasting.” https://www.fjc.gov/history/spotlight-judicial-history/nfl-television-broadcasting Federal court history. Judge Allan K. Grim’s 1961 ruling that the NFL’s pooled CBS deal violated the Sherman Antitrust Act, and the legislative response.Sir Robert Peel, “Resignation of the Ministry,” speech in the House of Commons, June 29, 1846. Hansard, 3rd Series, Vol. 87, cols. 1043–1056. https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1846/jun/29/resignation-of-the-ministry The full resignation speech, in Peel’s own words, as recorded in the parliamentary record. The closing passage modernized in Act II of the essay is from this speech.Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England 1783–1846. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006. Standard academic history of the period including the Corn Laws repeal and Peel’s career.Norman Gash, Sir Robert Peel: The Life of Sir Robert Peel After 1830. London: Longman, 1972. The standard biography. Sourced for the death of Peel (June 29 – July 2, 1850) and the working men’s response at his funeral.Cormac Ó Gráda, Black ‘47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Standard academic history of the famine.Central Statistics Office of Ireland, “Population of Ireland 1841–2022.” https://www.cso.ie/en/statistics/population/Official Irish census data showing the population decline from 8.2 million in 1841 to 6.5 million in 1851 and below.National Famine Museum, Strokestown Park. https://strokestownpark.ie/national-famine-museum/ Documentation of the famine, mortality, and emigration.Habakkuk 3:17–19 (New King James Version). Though the fig tree may not blossom, Nor fruit be on the vines; Though the labor of the olive may fail, And the fields yield no food; Though the flock may be cut off from the fold, And there be no herd in the stalls — Yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation. The LORD God is my strength; He will make my feet like deer’s feet, And He will make me walk on my high hills. To the Chief Musician. With my stringed instruments.Habakkuk 1:2–4 (New King James Version), on injustice unanswered. Source of the prophet’s complaint: “the wicked surround the righteous, therefore perverse judgment proceeds.”Companion PiecesThe rancher, the four-packer market, the kids in three cities, and the structural reforms named in Act III have been developed across the following pieces in this body of work:The Price Is the Price: A Letter to Raging Moderates. Both Fly. The Sand Trap. Should America Give Our Surplus Grain Away Every Year? Should American Cattle Ranchers Sacrifice for China? Do You Know Where Your Beef Comes From? Why Do We Treat Small Businesses Like Publicly Traded Corporations? Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe

The trailer’s loaded by four. Twenty-five head, sorted yesterday, the gate latched twice. The F-350 idles in the yard while he checks the running lights one more time. Jesse watches from the cab, ears up. The Bentley mark on her forehead catches the radio light. She is certain about the day.Buffalo to Torrington is four hours if the roads are dry. He pulls out of the drive at 4:17 and turns south on 25, coffee in the holder, the dog settled, the cattle quiet behind him. The dash reads twenty-six degrees. The eastern sky is still black.He’s made this drive many times over thirty years. His father made it before him in a different truck, but the math was the same. Raise them, feed them, haul them, take what you’re offered. The price is the price.He knows what he’ll get today, give or take. He knew last week. The packers’ bids move together. Four buyers act like one buyer because that's what four buyers do when they're the only four.. He’s run the numbers a thousand times. Grass, water, fuel, vet, the loan in 2022 when the rates were still reasonable. Every time, the numbers are the same. He needs the price to be a little higher than it’s going to be.The radio finds a station out of Casper. He turns it down but not off. Jesse walks a circle on the seat and lies down, chin on the console.Past Glenrock, the sky starts to come up gray. He thinks about their three kids. The oldest is in Denver. He and his wife have been trying to buy a starter house for four years. Every time they save up, the prices have moved. The middle one is in Cheyenne. She’s a nurse, her husband works for the railroad, and they want three kids but can’t afford for either of them to take a year off. The youngest is in Billings. After a year of work, he’s decided to give college a try, looking at the University of Wyoming for the fall. He doesn’t know what he might do after. The ranch needs him to come back and run things. There hasn’t been money for two households in a while.He passes a gas station outside Douglas. Diesel is up again from last week. By the time he hits Torrington, the sun is full up, and the lot is filling. Trucks from Goshen County, from the Panhandle, from up north like him. Men he’s known for years and men he’s never seen. They nod at each other and back their trailers toward the chutes. The auction starts at nine. The buyers are already inside, drinking coffee, looking at the sheets.He kills the engine and sits for a second. Jesse stands up in the seat. A beautiful morning. He’s not asking for anything. He’s done the work. The cattle are good. The truck runs. The loan gets paid. He’d just like the price to be the price his work is worth, in a market that is what it was supposed to be.He opens the door. The cold comes in. Jesse jumps down ahead of him, but she’ll stay with the truck.Act I. Scene 1. The Half of Friedman Everyone QuotesFifty-six years ago, in September of 1970, the New York Times Magazine published an essay that has shaped American economic thinking ever since. Author Milton Friedman, a University of Chicago economist who would win the Nobel Prize six years later. The title was The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, about three thousand words long. Most people who quote it have read the title and a paragraph or two.This essay, more than any other, changed how business in America works.The commonly understood argument is straightforward. A corporate executive is an employee of the shareholders. His job is to make money for them, within the rules. If he spends company money on social objectives, such as reducing pollution beyond what the law requires, hiring quotas beyond what the market supports, or making charitable contributions beyond what serves the business, he is spending other people’s money on objectives those people did not choose. Taxing the shareholders without their consent.The phrase that survived is the one that was easiest to put on a coffee mug. The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. It became a motto, then a worldview. By the time Reagan took office in 1981, it was the dominant framework of American corporate governance. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it had become something close to common sense. Maximize shareholder value. Let the market sort the rest.Before Friedman’s thesis, many businesses believed they had a broad role to maintain an equitable balance among interest groups. Stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large.Friedman drew a different line. Businesses owed shareholders profits. Social objectives were the work of a different institution. His thesis cleared the way to dismantle the post-World War II structure. Businesses would have minimal obligation to workers, communities, and the country. Their obligation was money. Manufacturing went offshore. Industries consolidated. Productivity gains flowed to CEOs and shareholders instead of workers. Friedman’s thesis was the one people reached for when they needed cover.And the dagger…Friedman was right. The logic is sound. An executive who pursues social objectives with shareholder money is doing two things he is not authorized to do. He is making policy decisions that, in a democratic Republic, are supposed to be made through political deliberation. And he is taxing the shareholders to fund those decisions, without their vote, and without their consent. The objection most people raise to Friedman is that the framework is too narrow. Businesses operate in a society, depend on a society, and owe something back to the society. Treating the corporation as a profit-maximizing machine misses the human reality of what corporations actually are. These objections have weight. Businesses do operate in society and depend on it. But the objection misses the counterpoint. Friedman himself addressed this concern in the same essay. The part nobody quotes.Act I. Scene 2. The Half Nobody QuotesFriedman continued. A few hundred words after the line that became the coffee mug, he wrote that if anyone is going to pursue social objectives with public resources, that person has to be a civil servant. Selected through a political process. If anyone is going to impose taxes and spend money on those objectives, there has to be political machinery. Machinery to decide what taxes to assess. Machinery to decide what objectives to pursue.That’s the part nobody quotes.Friedman is not saying social objectives don’t matter. He is not saying businesses have no obligation to society. He is saying these obligations matter so much that they need a specific kind of institution to pursue them. That institution is not the corporation. That institution is the government. Friedman wrote a complete system. Two halves. The corporation does its job, which is profits. The government does its job, which is everything else the public decides matters.The two halves depend on each other. Social objectives matter. They don’t go away when business stops pursuing them. Without the government doing its job, business doing its job isn’t enough. Friedman knew we need both. He wrote it down. Published it in the same essay.The business disciples kept the first half. They have no role in the government half, so they dropped that part. The part about taxes assessed through deliberation. The part about objectives chosen through consent. The part about political machinery that the public controls.That’s the part that holds the whole system together. And because it had no champion, we lost it.So business profits increased. Industries consolidated. Wages stagnated. Housing got unaffordable. Then, instead of making the rules fair again, making the two halves fit together, we decided we would let business do whatever they needed to increase profits. Workers didn’t get their fair share of wages, but no matter. We would instead funnel money through our political machine to help people have enough money to live. How would we afford to pay for that? A great question. Act II. The PetrodollarThe answer is borrowing. For fifty years, we have paid for things by borrowing money instead of raising taxes. That sentence is ‘History 101’ of federal finance since the early 1970s. We spend more than we collect. We make up the difference by selling government debt. Treasury bonds. A buyer hands us cash today, and we promise to pay them back with interest later.For most of those fifty years, the buyer wasn’t us.They were foreign. Specifically, the buyer was a government or a central bank in another country that had piled up dollars from selling oil and needed somewhere safe to put those dollars. American Treasury bonds were the safest place in the world. So the dollars came back to us. We borrowed them. We spent them. The deal worked because countries sold oil in dollars all over the world, and the dollars had to come home eventually, and home was the US Treasury.This arrangement has a name. Petrodollar recycling. Here’s how we built it.In 1971, Richard Nixon took the United States off the gold standard. Until that day, every dollar in circulation was backed by gold held at Fort Knox. After that day, the dollar was backed by nothing except the promise of the United States government. Nothing physical. Just a promise.That should have been a problem. A currency backed by nothing usually loses value. Other countries should have stopped accepting dollars and started demanding something more solid.They didn’t. Because three years later, in 1974, America made a deal with Saudi Arabia.The deal was simple. Saudi Arabia agreed to sell its oil only in US dollars. In exchange, the United States agreed to protect the Saudi regime and to let Saudi Arabia invest its oil profits in American debt. Other oil-producing countries followed. By the late 1970s, almost all oil in the world was sold in dollars. Every country that wanted oil had to hold dollars. Every country that sold oil ended up with dollars. And those dollars came back to the United States Treasury, looking for a safe place to sit.That’s the petrodollar arrangement. Oil bought and sold in dollars. Dollars recycled into Treasury bonds. America got to borrow cheaper than any other country in the world, because the world had no choice but to lend to us.When a government has to raise taxes to pay for things, the people feel it. They argue about it. Vote on it. They send representatives to a chamber to fight about what’s worth the tax and what isn’t. That’s the political machinery Friedman said was the whole point. It’s slow. Contentious. It’s how a free people decide what they want their government to do.When a government can borrow instead of tax, the people don’t feel it. The bill doesn’t come due today. The bill comes thirty years from now, paid by people who weren’t in the room when the decision was made. The argument doesn’t happen. The vote doesn’t happen. The political machinery doesn’t run.The dead exercise rights over the living. The petrodollar arrangement let the United States skip the political machinery.The petrodollar wasn’t the only reason we borrowed. Demographics shifted. Healthcare costs ran wild. Tax cuts went through without matching spending cuts. We went to war without war taxes. Recessions came and stimulus answered. The pressures pushing toward more debt were real, and they came from every direction.But every other country in the world faces the same pressures, in some form. And every other country eventually hits a wall. The bond market pushes back. Borrowing costs rise. The currency loses value. The politicians have to choose. America didn’t hit that wall. The petrodollar arrangement absorbed the pressure and dissolved it. We could borrow and keep borrowing, because the world had nowhere else to put its dollars.Want a transfer program? Borrow. Want a war? Borrow. Want to subsidize healthcare, housing, agriculture, energy? Borrow. We still hear these ideas today, in hidden words. How would we pay for healthcare for all? Universal basic income? EV tax credits? A $1.5 trillion defense budget? Tax cuts? The government will pay for it. How? With debt. So, business did its job, government skipped its job, and the bill went on a credit card foreign nations were happy to carry. The political machinery rusted. Deliberation stopped. We no longer needed consent, because we no longer felt the cost. That’s how we could pretend to afford to funnel money through the political machine instead of fixing the rules. We couldn’t afford it. We borrowed it. From people who weren’t in the room. To pay for objectives we never deliberated. Through a machine that rusted and seized up when the bill stopped arriving.Even though we didn’t have to pay the bill up front, we are still paying the cost. Act III. The BillThe arrangement is breaking.Not collapsing. Breaking. Slowly. A piece at a time, each piece small enough to ignore, the cumulative weight harder to ignore each year.Foreign central banks don’t buy as many Treasuries as they used to. China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, and Brazil are settling oil and other commodities in their own currencies more often. They’re buying gold instead of dollars. They’re building payment systems that route around the dollar. Each move is small. Together they’re a drift. The drift is twenty years old now, and it’s accelerating.What it means for us is simple. Borrowing costs more and will keep costing more. The bond market is starting to ask questions it didn’t ask before. The forty-year subsidy on American debt is wearing off.That’s the bill.It doesn’t arrive as a piece of paper with a number on it. It arrives as everything we put off, popping up in the lives of the people who inherited the deferral.The rancher’s been thinking about his kids the whole drive.The oldest in Denver. He and his wife have been trying to buy a starter house for four years. Every time they save enough for a down payment, the prices have moved. The last house they looked at was three-twenty. The bank qualified them for two-ninety. They decided to wait another year.The middle one in Cheyenne. She’s a nurse. Her husband works for the railroad. They have one child. They want three. But the cost of raising each one keeps going up faster than what they can save, and they can’t afford for either of them to take a year off when a baby comes. They decided to wait.The youngest in Billings. After a year of full-time work, he decided to give college a try. The University of Wyoming for the fall. He’s not sure what he’ll study. He’s sure that without the degree, the wage he’s been earning won’t earn the life he wants. The question he can’t answer is what the degree is going to cost. He doesn’t know how much he’ll have to borrow. He doesn’t know what he’ll earn when he graduates. The math is fuzzy.Three kids. Three good kids. Each one in a different city, in a different profession, running into a different version of the same wall.The oldest can’t afford the house his parents bought. The middle can’t afford the family her parents raised. The youngest can’t afford the path we told him would work.This is what the bill looks like when it lands in working lives. Three kids in three cities, deciding to wait. A house deferred. A child deferred. An adult life deferred.The bill is the gap between what their labor is worth and what their lives cost. The petrodollar arrangement let us paper over that gap for forty years by funding programs with deferred borrowing. The patches were transfer programs, and tax credits, and student loans, and housing subsidies, and all the downstream machinery that papered over what was happening upstream. The patches cost money. We borrowed the money. The bill came to the kids.They didn’t borrow it. They got handed the math.The rancher in the auction yard in Torrington. The lot is filling. He’s not angry at the kids. He’s not even worried about them, exactly. They’re working. They’re doing what they were told to do. They’ll figure it out, the way he figured it out, the way his father figured it out before him.But he can see the math. He’s been doing his own version of it for thirty years. Grass, water, fuel, vet, the loan. The price at the auction. The numbers that don’t quite work.He’s been a price-taker his whole life. His kids are price-takers too. Different markets, same lesson. That’s the bill. Not what comes due thirty years from now in some abstract Treasury auction. What comes due right now, in his oldest’s apartment in Denver, in his daughter’s hospital shift in Cheyenne, in his youngest’s tuition decision in Billings.If that’s the bill, how do we pay it?Act IV. The WorkThere are five things the government has to do. Structural things that set the conditions a working life can fit inside of.Energy. We pump our own oil, refine our own fuel, build the grid that carries our own power. Energy independence isn’t just a trade-balance number. It’s the only way out of the petrodollar arrangement that doesn’t require the world’s permission. We had to make a deal for oil in 1974. We don’t have to make that deal again if we don’t need to import.Reshoring. We bring the factories back. Not all of them. The critical ones. The ones that make the things a country has to make if it wants to be a country. Things like steel, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, inputs to our defense. Tariffs won’t do this on their own. Tax policy, regulatory policy, infrastructure investment, and serious industrial strategy do. Broad tariffs are theater that puts money into one man’s pocket. The work is harder than performance.Antitrust. The four packers. The three airlines. The two grocery chains in most American towns. The handful of tech firms that decide what most Americans see and hear. Markets don’t function when the buyers all act like one buyer. The rancher in Torrington knows this in his bones, and so does anyone who’s tried to start a business in an industry where the incumbent owns the supply chain. Government broke up Standard Oil in 1911 and AT&T in 1982. Government remembers how to do this. We just stopped doing it.Infrastructure. The real kind. The kind that lets a starter house get built in Denver. The kind that builds American tech training instead of hiring foreign workers on H-1B visas. The kind that lets a kid in Wyoming or Delaware go to college without inheriting thirty years of debt. We’ve spent forty years deferring investment in human capability infrastructure because borrowing for transfers was easier than building for capacity. The bridges are the visible part. The harder part is the public goods that make private work possible.Fiscal rules that survive elections. Not austerity. Not a constitutional amendment. The discipline of making each Congress face the cost of what it spends, in the year it spends it, before the bill goes to the bond market. Pay-as-you-go for new programs. Sunset clauses on tax cuts. Honest accounting on entitlements. The mechanics are technical. The principle is Friedman’s. If we want social objectives, we have to deliberate about them, vote on them, and pay for them.That’s the real work. None of it is easy. None of it is fast. All of it is upstream of the lives that are running into the wall right now.This isn’t austerity. It isn’t libertarian. It isn’t a plan to shrink government. It’s a plan for government to do its job. Build the conditions. Set the rules. Fund the commons. Then leave the citizen alone.Because the point of everything the government does, like antitrust, energy, reshoring, infrastructure, and fiscal discipline, is what it produces downstream. A market that’s a market. A wage that supports a life without taxpayer support. A house a family can save for. A college a kid can afford that trains them for a high-paying job. An adult life that doesn’t require deferral.The work is government’s work. But government doesn’t do work that citizens don’t demand.Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. The political machinery doesn’t run unless we make it run. The rancher is pulling an empty trailer home. The check in the console. The price was the price. He didn’t get more than he expected. He didn’t get less.Past Glenrock. The sun behind him now, low on the right. Jesse asleep on the seat. The dash reads forty-one degrees. Here’s what the rancher knows.He’s done with voting for politicians who promised America first and didn’t deliver. And he’s done with politicians who raged against the other party, said they would make meaningful change, and failed to deliver for the American people.If the senator had a term and didn’t try to break the meatpacker monopoly, he’s done with him. If the congressman had a term and didn’t try to kick start the small house market, he’s done with her. If the president had four years and the deficit kept climbing while the patches kept failing, they lost their chance.He doesn’t care which party. He doesn’t care what they say next time. He cares what they did with the term they had.That’s not a program. It’s discipline. The kind the Republic requires from its citizens when the institutions have stopped requiring it from themselves.He thinks about the kids. The oldest, doing the math on a house. The middle, doing the math on a family. The youngest, doing the math on a degree. All three of them waiting.He’s not going to wait.His vote is the only lever he has, but at least he has one. He’s going to use it. Every cycle. Against any incumbent who didn’t try.The ranch is a long drive ahead. The Bighorns are catching the last of the light. He pulls onto the gravel. Kitchen window light on. Jesse is up now, ears forward.He kills the engine and sits for a second.The vote is his. And he’s going to use it.SourcesMilton Friedman, The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits. The New York Times Magazine, September 13, 1970. The full essay, including the part nobody quotes about civil servants and political machinery.Frank Abrams, “Management’s Responsibilities in a Complex World.” Harvard Business Review, May 1951 (paywalled). The Standard Oil chairman’s stakeholder-balance framework, written nineteen years before Friedman pushed back.Frederick Douglass, West India Emancipation. Speech at Canandaigua, New York, August 3, 1857. Power concedes nothing without a demand.Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Madison, September 6, 1789. The earth belongs to the living letter.David E. Spiro, The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony: Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets. Cornell University Press, 1999. The standard academic account.Andrea Wong, The Untold Story Behind Saudi Arabia’s 41-Year U.S. Debt Secret. Bloomberg, May 31, 2016. The reporting that revealed the previously classified 1974 Saudi-Treasury agreement.Federal Reserve History, Nixon Ends Convertibility of US Dollars to Gold. Background on the August 15, 1971 announcement.U.S. Treasury, Historical Debt Outstanding. Annual gross federal debt by fiscal year, 1790-present.Congressional Budget Office, The Budget and Economic Outlook. Annual report on federal deficits and structural fiscal pressures.U.S. Treasury, Major Foreign Holders of Treasury Securities. Tracks the decline in foreign Treasury holdings as a share of outstanding debt.International Monetary Fund, Currency Composition of Official Foreign Exchange Reserves. Quarterly data tracking the dollar’s declining share of global reserves.World Gold Council, Gold Demand Trends. Central bank gold purchases, including the record buying since 2022.Derrell Peel, Oklahoma State University Extension. Weekly cattle market reports and analysis on packer concentration.Northern Ag Network, Beef Cattle: Market Concentration. May 5, 2026.United States v. Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey, 221 U.S. 1 (1911). The 1911 breakup, cited in Act IV as evidence that government remembers how to do this.United States v. AT&T, 552 F. Supp. 131 (D.D.C. 1982). The 1982 consent decree. The other example.Economic Policy Institute, The Productivity-Pay Gap. Tracks the divergence of worker compensation from productivity gains since the early 1970s.Joint Center for Housing Studies, Harvard, The State of the Nation’s Housing. Annual report on housing supply, affordability, and the first-time homebuyer wall.Federal Reserve, Consumer Credit Report (G.19). Total outstanding federal student loan debt and trends.Companion piecesThe Sand Trap. The longer treatment of petrodollar recycling.The Price Is the Price: A Letter to Raging Moderates. The rancher, the four-packer cattle market, and the price-taker frame.Both Fly. The rancher on tariffs and Article I. Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe