To have a commonwealth, the commons must have the wealth.
Common sense says the middle class should own at least half.
Operation Abigail could make it happen.
To have a commonwealth, the commons must have the wealth.
That means the middle class should own at least half.
Operation Abigail could make it happen.
SITUATION REPORT
We have a republic, but not for much longer. Because to have a commonwealth, the commons must have the wealth.[*] But our leaders have abandoned our middle class, leaving it defenseless against the insatiable plutocrats who are destroying it.
In 1776, America was born a middle-class republic.[*] In 1945, the middle class was re-born. In 2025, the middle class is dying. If we don’t change course soon, America’s democratic republic will end, probably in feudalism, possibly in socialism.
Course correction begins with an agreed destination, so how about this: The common sense of ordinary Americans agrees with the genius of political philosophers and the wisdom of our Founding Fathers: The middle class should own at least half the wealth.[*] Let that be our target. And know how long the road back home to democratic-republican territory is: Today, the middling share is only about 25%, down 5% in 35 years.[*]
To have a commonwealth, the commons must have the wealth. #OperationAbigail
DAMAGE REPORT
Total middle-class wealth is $35 trillion below its rightful share.[*] Over $50 trillion of income has been diverted from ordinary Americans to elites since 1975 relative to post-War (1945-1965) run-rates.[*] This perhaps makes a typical household $250,000 poorer than it should be and the typical paycheck 30% less than it would be had post-War rates continued.[*]
The upward mobility delivered by post-War 1950s-style capitalism is vanishing. Baby Boomers had a 90% chance of earning more than their parents. Millennials have only about a 50% chance.[*]
The Founding Fathers would tell us that wealth concentration is not only un-American.[*] They’d also warn of its dangers to our Constitution. Wealth concentration fuels insecurity, pessimism, animosity, anger, polarization, demagoguery, dependency, patronage, cultism, and authoritarianism, which, in George Washington’s words, “incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual.”[*]
The middle class should own at least half the wealth. #OperationAbigail.
OPERATION ABIGAIL IS THE WAY OUT
Vision: We want to bring back the post-War, middle-class-first, 1950s-style capitalism, without the segregation and the sexism. Operation Abigail perfects capitalism by scaling capitalism’s own device of the incentive plan from the level of enterprise to nation.
Mission: To rebuild our middle class, optimize capitalism, and preserve our republic through one simple policy measure.
Method: We will put the ultra rich on a long-term incentive plan that rewards middle-class gains and punishes middle-class decline. The incentive will be created through the technique of median-top household wealth tethering. Ultra-rich household wealth would be tethered to the national median household net worth at an efficient ratio such that ultra-rich household net worth rises and falls lockstep in mathematical proportion to middle-class household net worth. Once the ratio is in place, the ultra rich must raise the median in order to themselves enjoy any further gains. Operation Abigail’s operative rule is therefore no gains for the middle, no gains for the top. The initial ratio would be 10,000:1, setting a $1.5 billion cap, subject to adjustment, enabling future leaders to backsolve for optimal middle-class size and wealth targets.[*]
Means: The ratio would be enforced by a tax applied only to the ultra-rich, whose wealth exceeds the 10,000x ceiling, a limit surpassed by fewer than 700 households.[*] To defeat geographic arbitrage, the tax must be federal. To survive apportionment clause attack, the tax must be a constitutional amendment. And once it’s clear that the tax will fall mostly on a few Wall Street and Silicon Valley billionaires who won’t be able to evade it, the requisite 38 States should gladly ratify the amendment because each would receive an equal share of the revenues.[*]
No gains for the middle, no gains for the top. #OperationAbigail
EVERYONE WINS
Operation Abigail would benefit workers and markets long-term by nullifying the harmful effects of rentierism, monopolization, immigration, offshoring, and automation. The national household median net worth registers the cumulative effects of all economic activity. Every dollar diverted from American workers to foreign workers, or to a robot or algorithm, or monopolists and rentiers, reduces the median. Every dollar reducing the median reduces the ceiling in proportion to the ratio. At 10,000:1, every $1 decrease to the median reduces the ceiling by $10,000; every $1,000 decrease by $10 million; and every $10 decrease by $100 million.
Operation Abigail would therefore claw back excess value extracted by covered households from labor and markets, thereby inducing market actors to coordinate voluntary and positive-sum wealth deconcentration in order to themselves enjoy any future gains. This would in turn produce infinite positive feedback loops.
In addition to creating this middle-class-benchmarked market incentive, which is its primary purpose, Operation Abigail would also provide immediate benefits to all taxpayers below the ratio by:
✓ Forever prohibiting household wealth taxes below the initial 10,000x/$1.5 billion cap;
✓ Prohibiting federal income tax rate hikes on the same for 20 years;
✓ Prohibiting federal inheritance taxes on the same for 20 years; and
✓ Exempting most small businesses from federal income taxes for 20 years.[*]
Operation Abigail would also distribute all proceeds it raises in equal shares to each State which timely ratifies it. This:
✓ Incentivizes the States to support it;
✓ Prevents some states from freeloading on others;
✓ Ensures that tax revenues are used according to local preferences (South Carolina can use its share for conservative purposes, Massachusetts for progressive policies); which
✓ Strengthens our bedrock constitutional principle of federalism.
Operation Abigail treats the rich fairly and puts fears of capital flight to rest. Operation Abigail grandfathers existing fortunes, but only to the extent they are repatriated to the United States, and provided that their owners are not convicted of certain crimes, recuse themselves from any public debate over Operation Abigail owing to their insurmountable conflict of interest, and extricate themselves from our politics after the next presidential election. This:
✓ Avoids unfair wealth confiscation;
✓ Discourages capital exodus and encourages wealth repatriation;
✓ Cleanses our republic of meddlesome plutocrats; and
✓ Sets the wealth ceiling high enough (initially $1.5 billion) to preserve adequate incentives and rewards for innovation and risk.
Preserve the republic. Protect the middle class. Amend the Constitution. #OperationAbigail
SO, LET’S RECAP:
Operation Abigail is a long-term, capitalist incentive plan that serves:
✓ Middle-class households, because it would prohibit federal: (a) wealth taxes forever; (b) income tax rate hikes for 20 years; and (c) death taxes for 20 years;
✓ Small businesses, because it would exempt the first otherwise taxable dollars from federal taxation, up to an amount equal to 10x the median (today, approximately $1.5 million);
✓ The States, and by extension, the principle of federalism, because it would allocate all its revenues in equal shares to each State to use as local voters see fit;
✓ All ordinary workers, as the ratio claws back excessive benefits the top households would otherwise derive from cronyism, rentierism, immigration, offshoring, and automation, thereby forcing them to coordinate their efforts to improve middle-class outcomes;
✓ American capitalism, by scaling its own device of the incentive plan from the level of enterprise to nation, nourishing the consumer markets, preserving incentives for entrepreneurship, and punishing negative-sum behavior; and above all:
✓ The republican form of government, and by extension, the Constitution, by deconcentrating wealth, depolarizing political society, refreshing upward mobility, and rebuilding the middle class, thereby eliminating the pessimism, faction, demagoguery, cultism, and authoritarianism which have infected our nation.
1. Join team Abigail and show your support: Sign the open endorsement of Operation Abigail.
I endorse Operation Abigail, the Adams Institute’s plan to rebuild America’s middle class. I give this endorsement because I understand these truths:
First, that in order to have a commonwealth, the commons must have the wealth. Authentic republican government is impossible without an authentic middle class. Only an independent and optimistic middle class has political agency. History furnishes no example of any democratic or popular republic which was ever sustained by a dependent underclass. As Thomas Jefferson observed: “Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.” Alexander Hamilton likewise noted: “A power over a man’s subsistence amounts to a power over his will.”
Second, that 50 years of wealth concentration has deprived the middle class of its optimism and independence. Nominal wage and GDP growth conceals the ugly reality behind a gilded façade: Since the Bicentennial, about $50 trillion in income has been diverted from ordinary workers to the top 10% relative to post-war run-rates. Whereas common sense has held since Classical Antiquity that the middle class should own at least half the wealth, America’s middling share is now below 30%; over $30 trillion off-target, and down 5% in 40 years. Middle-class anxiety fuels America’s rising anger, pessimism, polarization, faction, demagoguery, patronage, and authoritarianism more than any other factor. As James Madison wrote: “The most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property.” Such faction will, as George Washington warned: “gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual.”
Third, that Operation Abigail is faithful not only to America’s founding philosophy but also to modern capitalism. Indeed, Operation Abigail scales up capitalism’s own invention of the long-term incentive plan to the national level. Operation Abigail works by capping, as by tethering, the outcomes of the top households to a multiple of the national median household net worth at an efficient mathematical ratio. Once this ratio is in place, the outcomes of ultra-rich households collectively wielding market power would rise and fall lockstep with the median. Economic elites cannot thereafter enjoy any further gains except in proportion to middle-class gains. Such gains would refresh the consumer markets which in turn nourish capitalism. As a true incentive plan, Operation Abigail does not regulate enterprise or impose any specific mandates. The methods used to achieve wealth de-concentration – and the consequences of failure – fall entirely upon market actors. Operation Abigail was thus conceived as a modern measure to heed the timeless wisdom of John Adams:
“Property monopolized, or in the Possession of a Few is a Curse to Mankind. We should preserve not an Absolute Equality – this is unnecessary, but preserve all from extreme Poverty, and all others from extravagant Riches.”
This endorsement was joined by:
3. Change course: FEUDALISM LIES AHEAD, SOCIALISM TO OUR LEFT. Follow us back to democratic-republican territory.
Even if every American was a Socrates every American is distracted, so we’ll make this quick: In order to have a commonwealth, the commons must have the wealth. To preserve our republic, we must rebuild our middle class. This is Operation Abigail’s mission.
When ordinary workers earn a decent living (1945-1965) the interests of the middle class and the ultra-rich don’t conflict. But when the middle class is plundered (1975-2025) the preferences of billionaires must take the back seat. The mission of preserving our democratic-republican form of government takes priority to all conflicting values, other than basic constitutional rights. Property rights are sacred, but all great fortunes facilitated by public support are subject to a public claim, asserted through the state’s power of taxation.
Any notion conflicting with the value of middle-class primacy – such as the idea of government efficiency, nominal stock market and GDP values (often manipulated and meaningless to ordinary people), and silly debunked nonsense cult theories like “laissez faire” and “trickle-down” – must yield to the project of rebuilding our middle class and restoring 1950s-style upward mobility.
Our priorities being clear, we present Operation Abigail’s main features, designed to optimize capitalism, rebuild the middle class, restore upward mobility for all those below, and preserve our republic:
1. Income damage model.
By our math, your paycheck could be 30% larger if 1950's-style capitalism still applied. Let's bring it back.
This meme shows our estimate of by how much a typical worker’s current income deviates from a counterfactual based on post-War run rates. The reference data shows that in the first two decades after World War II (1945-1965) that income distribution generally kept pace with productivity. The next decade (1965-1975) was characterized by a general stagnation. But then, in the period from 1975 until 2018 (the data cutoff), an aggregate of $47 trillion was diverted from ordinary workers to the top 10% relative to post-War run rates.
It is an ironic twist of fate to note that by now, the total prosperity diverted from ordinary Americans since the War must surely rival if not exceed the total aggregate net worth of the former Axis powers we defeated in the War. What can we say but that the valor of the Greatest Generation purchased a peace that was abused to plunder the labor of its grandchildren.
At any rate, the 30% figure was based on our interpretation of the RAND data. Income for all groups was: (a) at the 25th percentile, $9,000 (1975) and $15,000 (2018) with a 2018 counterfactual of $20,000; (b) at the 50th percentile, $26,000 (1975) and $36,000 (2018) with a 2018 counterfactual of $57,000; (c) at the 75th percentile, $46,000 (1975) and $65,000 (2018) with a 2018 counterfactual of $100,000; and (d) at the 90th percentile, $65,000 (1975) and $112,000 (2018) with a 2018 counterfactual of $142,000. On these assumptions, each group’s respective actual 2018 income deviated from their corresponding 2018 counterfactual by: (a) at the 25% percentile, by 25%; (b) at the 50th percentile, by 37%; (d) at the 75th percentile, by 35%; and (d) at the 90th percentile, by 21%, for an average of 29.5% (approximate numbers). Removing the 90th percentile results in a blended number of 32.3%.
See Carter C. Price and Kathryn A. Edwards, Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2020, calculating the gains that would have but did not accrue to ordinary Americans since 1975 relative to post-World War II run rates. The abstract: “From 1975 to 2018, the difference between the aggregate taxable income for those below the 90th percentile and the equitable growth counterfactual totals $47 trillion.”
See the UBS/Credit Suisse Research Institute Global Wealth Report 2023, reporting the following total wealth numbers for the former Axis powers (2022): Germany $17.4 trillion, Japan $22.6 trillion, and Italy $11 trillion, summing up to $51 trillion.
2. Wealth damage model
The middle class should own at least 50%. Ours owns below 30%. How much does it cost you?
This meme shows our estimate of by how much a typical household’s actual net worth deviates from its rightful amount, based on the assumptions described below.
The opinion has held steady for 2,400 years that the middle class should own at least half the wealth.[*]
Today, the American middle class collectively owns about 30% of America’s wealth. On that basis, the middle class has collectively been deprived of a total aggregate of about $35 trillion in wealth. Assuming there are a total of 133 million households in the United States, a simple division of $35 trillion by 133 million equals about $263,000 per household. However, this figure is likely conservative because if there were 133 million total households in the United States, there would only be about 80 million households within the middle three quintiles (middle 60%). Dividing the total damage model of $35 trillion by 80 million households yields nearly $440,000 per household. Raising the denominator to 120 million – splitting the damages in equal shares among the bottom 90% of households – still approaches $300,000 on a pro-rata basis.
Naturally, the circumstances of each household – occupation, spending habits, location, illness, financial literacy, portfolio composition, number of children, and the like – would dictate a wide variation in household outcomes. Operating under “ideal” circumstances, some households would have much more than $440,000 while others would have less.
Despite all the variables, the assumptions, and the unavoidable imprecision in such calculations, this simple exercise nevertheless serves as a basis to communicate the extent to which wealth concentration affects ordinary households.
The common intuition of mankind is that the middle class should own at least half; therefore, this is the target for which legislation should backsolve. See Aristotle, Pol., 1295b, and James Harrington, Id. That the intuition of ordinary Americans agrees, see Michael I. Norton and Dan Ariely, Building a Better America – One Wealth Quintile at a Time, Perspectives on Psychological Science, Association for Psychological Science, 2011. John Adams adhered to Harrington principles; see a letter from John Adams to James Sullivan, 26 May 1776: “Harrington has Shewn that Power always follows Property. This I believe to be as infallible a Maxim, in Politicks, as, that Action and Re-action are equal, is in Mechanicks.” Adams was influenced by James Harrington, whose agrarian proposal would have balanced the nobility 50/50 with the commoners, capping landholdings at £2,000 annual revenues.
Other potential definitions would be: (a) the “second 40%” by wealth, a measure often used by the Federal Reserve (between the top 10% and the bottom 50%); (b) the middle 3 quintiles (60%) by wealth percentile; and (c) the middle tercile (33%).
Total national wealth is around $150 trillion. The middling share is 25.9% when the middle class is defined as the middle 60% by income quintile (Federal Reserve, Q4 2022) and 30.51% when it is defined as the middle 40% by wealth percentile (Federal Reserve, Q1 2024). The middling share of national wealth has decreased by approximately 3.5% in the past 20 years, and by about 5% in the past 30. Distribution of Household Wealth in the U.S. since 1989, Federal Reserve (based on the Survey of Consumer Finances and Financial Accounts of the United States).
3. Operation Abigail protects ordinary households from more taxes.
Operation Abigail prohibits wealth taxes and federal rate hikes on ordinary households...
This meme highlights a key benefit of Operation Abigail to virtually all American taxpayers. Operation Abigail would protect ordinary households from wealth taxes forever, and prohibits any federal income tax rate hikes for 20 years. The only households not protected are those whose net worth exceeds the then-effective median-top ratio, which would initially be 10,000x the median, or approximately $1.5 billion. Less than 700 households currently exceed that ceiling.
The 20-year moratorium on direct tax rate hikes is drawn from Article I, Section 9, Clause 1 in the Constitution, which employed the same 20-year period as part of a compromise to incentivize ratification.
4. Operation Abigail protects the middle class in the upcoming wave of wealth transfers.
Operation Abigail imposes a moratorium on inheritance taxes for the next generation...
In addition to: (a) forever prohibiting federal wealth taxes upon all households below the effective ratio (initially 10,000x); and (b) prohibiting federal income tax rate hikes in the same households for 20 years, Operation Abigail would also prohibit federal inheritance taxes on the same households for 20 years. As with the wealth and income tax guarantees, the only households not protected are those whose net worth exceeds the then-effective median-top ratio, which would initially be 10,000x the median, or approximately $1.5 billion. Less than 700 households currently exceed that ceiling.
And like the federal wealth and income tax guarantees, this 20-year moratorium on direct tax rate hikes is drawn from Article I, Section 9, Clause 1 in the Constitution, which employed the same 20-year period as part of a compromise to incentivize ratification.
5. Operation Abigail protects entrepreneurs and small businesses.
Operation Abigail exempts the Business Revenue Exemption Cieling from federal taxation...
This meme highlights a key benefit of Operation Abigail to all American businesses. Operation Abigail would exempt from all federal taxation, for all businesses, the first otherwise taxable dollars up to the Business Revenue Exemption Ceiling for 20 years. The Business Revenue Exemption Ceiling is an amount equal to 10x the last-published national median household net worth, which is currently about $150,000, setting the Business Revenue Exemption Ceiling at approximately $1.5 million. This amount would rise or fall lockstep with the national median.
This would exempt the vast majority (likely over 90%) of small businesses from any federal taxation. Small businesses comprise approximately 99% of businesses, employ about 45% of Americans, and are responsible for more than 50% of job growth. Meanwhile, corporate tax receipts are approximately 7% of federal receipts, so the benefits of this feature would easily outweigh the costs.
The 20-year moratorium is likewise drawn from Article I, Section 9, Clause 1 in the Constitution.
6. Operation Abigail serves the supreme authority in our constitutional system: the States.
Operation Abigail could inject trillions to the States, strengthening federalism and State autonomy...
The States hold the final pen over America’s legal system by virtue of their power to amend the Constitution. To incentivize them to support Operation Abigail, all revenues raised by ratio enforcement would be distributed in equal shares to each state which timely ratifies the Amendment.
The idea of distributing revenues to the States via constitutional amendment is not new. In his second inaugural address, Thomas Jefferson proposed just that, suggesting that after paying down the national debt “…the revenue thereby liberated may, by a just repartition among the states, and a corresponding amendment of the constitution, be applied, -in time of peace-, to rivers, canals, roads, arts, manufactures, education, and other great objects within each state.”
To the extent today’s national debt is owed to households exceeding the ceiling, the Amendment would enable its cancellation. Unlike Jefferson’s proposal, however, we won’t wait for Congress to satisfy the rest with respect to Operation Abigail’s revenues. We would send all revenues straight to the States. Although it is impossible to precisely compute Operation Abigail’s direct and indirect long-term downstream revenues, a simple calculation suggests they could easily exceed trillions of dollars in value over time. Covered households collectively exceed the 10,000x threshold by around $4.5 trillion.
For hypothetical purposes only: Assuming: (a) today’s covered households all satisfed the grandfathering criteria; (b) the next generation of covered households would but for Operation Abigail step in to the same wealth as the existing generation; and (c) all 50 states timely ratified the Amendment, the implied annual per-state share would be about $4.5 billion over the next 20 years. National long-term economic activity is naturally dynamic and unpredictable, grandfathering and compliance rates are unknown, specific market responses are to be determined, and taxation of de-concentrated income should provide another indirect revenue source, making any calculation useful to illustrate the potential scale of revenues, justifying a claim that they could exceed trillions of dollars in value, but not imply precision in the determination thereof.
However large a state’s share may be, Operation Abigail gives them discretion as to how to use it. With almost 100,000 public schools, 1,600 public colleges, 1,500 public hospitals, 18,000 police departments, 29,000 fire departments, 19 million state and local employees, 35 million retirement system beneficiaries, and $6 trillion held in pension and university endowments, the States can make efficient use of their respective shares for traditional public benefits along the lines Jefferson suggested. Or perhaps some states may want to experiment with visionary programs like Baby Bonds. Perhaps others simply use their shares as an offset to reduce their residents’ tax burden. Whether such objects are progressive or conservative, it is a matter of local concern.
To mitigate the influence of corrupt lobbyists on state legislators, as well as the prospect of a wait-and-see freeloader strategy, each state must timely ratify Operation Abigail to be eligible to receive any share of the revenues. Otherwise, the revenues will only be split among the first 38 states that do so, in perpetuity.
7. Three thousand years of political history, summarized in ten words:
No middle class, no democratic republic...
Popular and democratic governments have existed for less than one-tenth of recorded history and seem to come and go in great waves. The first wave emerged along the ancient Mediterranean in the 6th century BC, yielding at least 300 democracies. The second emerged along the North Atlantic in the 18th century, producing more than 100 democratic regimes since the American Revolutionary War.
Both great waves were preceded by an entrenched and independent middle class. In antiquity, the middle classes consisted of the smallholding infantry. Rome’s was the most successful of these, conquering the rest. But it was exhausted by that conquest, its financial insecurity fueling a tournament of popular leaders ending in the rule of the Caesars.[i] In the end, Rome’s own historians blamed extreme wealth concentration for the death of that superpower republic.[ii]
The period spanning the death of the Roman Republic to the birth of the United States saw few democratic experiments, and none on large scale. Yet economic circumstances ordained that the second great democratic wave would commence here because despite slavery, America was born a middle-class republic of yeoman farmers.[iii]
But why is it the middle classes who summon democracy into existence? Because no other part of the commons can withhold or condition its political contribution to the state on a share of its administration. In other words, only a healthy middle class has political agency.[iv] Those within a dying middle class are mere instrumentalities of political faction, pitted against each other by demagogues. And a dead middle class, merged into the underclass, yields nothing but dependent wards, serfs, and subjects.
Regime type is therefore a function of political economy because wealth diffusion dictates power diffusion.[v] Wealth de-concentration results in democracy, wealth concentration results in oligarchy. Hence, the middle class is the condition precedent to democracy. These considerations obliterate the fantasy that government derives its consent from the people. In reality, democracy does not depend on the fantasy that consent is given, but in the possibility that it be withheld.
Just as middle-class growth creates democracy, middle-class death destroys it. That’s what happened to Rome. That’s what the Founding Fathers warned could happen here.[vi] That’s what’s happening now. And so therefore we say, to have a commonwealth, the commons must have the wealth.
In the next meme, we consider what that means…
[i] This chain of demagogues includes Gaius Gracchus, Drusus, Philippus, Saturninus, Marius, Cinna, Sulla, Lepidus, Catiline, Rullus, Flavius, Pompey, Crassus, Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, Lepidus, and finally Augustus.
[ii] See, e.g., Appian, The Civil Wars, I.1, Sallust, Conspiracy of Catiline, 10, 33. I; 37.3, 38, 53, The Jugurthine War, 4, Livy, History of Rome, Preface, Tacitus, Annals, 3.27, Florus, Epitome, I, XLVII, Lucan, Pharsalia, 1.63. Marcus Philippus said in 104BC that out of perhaps 400,000 citizens, only around 2,000 held any significant wealth. See also Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, 37.3; A. W. Lintott, Violence in Republican Rome, Oxford 1968, stating: “Roman writers after the collapse of the Republic were … united in believing that the operative factor throughout was a moral failure arising from the increase of wealth: this had led the governing class to seek riches and power without scruple, while at the same time economic inequality had made the lower classes desperate and ready for any crime against the state.” See also V. Duruy, Histoire des Romains, II, 46-47 (as quoted by A. Stephenson, Public Lands and Agrarian Laws of the Roman Republic), stating: “After having pillaged the world as praetors or consuls during time of war, the nobles again pillaged their subjects as governors in time of peace.
[iii] That the founding generation understood that America was born middle class, and that it was those middling origins which enabled the Founding Fathers to establish the United States as a democratic-republic during an age of aristocracy and monarchy, see, e.g. see remarks from British Colonel Lord Adam Gordon in 1764: “The levelling principle here, everywhere operates strongly and takes the lead, and everybody has property here, and everybody knows it,” Benjamin Franklin, Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, 1751: “6. Land being thus plenty in America, and so cheap as that a labouring Man, that understands Husbandry, can in a short Time save Money enough to purchase a Piece of new Land sufficient for a Plantation, whereon he may subsist a Family; such are not afraid to marry; for if they even look far enough forward to consider how their Children when grown up are to be provided for, they see that more Land is to be had at Rates equally easy, all Circumstances considered. 7. Hence Marriages in America are more general, and more generally early, than in Europe,” Richard Price, Observations on Civil Liberty, 1776: “The Colonies consist only of a body of Yeomanry supported by agriculture, and all independent, and nearly upon a level; in consequence of which, joined to a boundless extent of country, the means of subsistence are procured without difficulty,” Thomas Pownall, A memorial address to the sovereigns of America, 1783, stating that America was characterized by “a general equality, not only in the Persons, but in the power of the landed Property of the Inhabitants” and that America stands on a “natural equal level Basis,” Charles Pinckney, speech of 25 June 1787: “The people of the U. S. are perhaps the most singular of any we are acquainted with.—Among them there are fewer distinctions of fortune & less of rank; than among the inhabitants of any other nation.—Every freeman has a right to the same protection & security and a very moderate share of property entitles them to the possession of all the honors & privileges the public can bestow.—Hence arises a greater equality, than is to be found among the people of any other country, and an equality which is more likely to continue. … there will be few poor & few dependent,” George Washington to Richard Henderson, 1788: “America … will be the most favorable Country of any in the world for persons … possessed of a moderate capital, to inhabit. … it will not be less advantageous to the happiness of the lowest class of people because of … the facility of procuring the means of subsistence.” For confirmation by contemporaneous observers, see Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835: “Amongst the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of conditions.” For confirmation by modern researchers, see Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson, American Incomes 1774-1860, NBER Working Paper 18396, 2012, showing that in 1774, New England and the Middle Colonies were the most egalitarian place in the measurable world.
[iv] See, e.g., Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, 2.37.1 (that democratic participation in Athens is conditioned upon contribution rather than status) and Psuedo-Xenophon, Old Oligarch, Constitution of the Athenians, 1.2 (correlating the distribution of power to economic and military contribution). See also, e.g., Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Nos. 73 and 79 (that “A power over a man’s subsistence amounts to a power over his will”) and Frederick Douglass, West India Emancipation speech at Canandaigua, New York, 3 August 1857 (that “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”) See also, e.g., P. Woodruff, First Democracy, Oxford University Press 2005 (correlating ancient Greek regime types by socioeconomic rank) and P. Spufford, Origins of the English Parliament, 1967 (that the need to obtain consent from the commoners to taxation increased the prerogatives of parliament relative to the monarchy).
[v] See Noah Webster, An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution (1787): “On reviewing the English history, we observe a progress similar to that in Rome–an incessant struggle for liberty from the date of Magna Charta, in John’s reign, to the revolution. The struggle has been successful, by abridging the enormous power of the nobility. But we observe that the power of the people has increased in an exact proportion to their acquisitions of property.” See also a letter from John Adams to James Sullivan, 26 May 1776: “Harrington has Shewn that Power always follows Property. This I believe to be as infallible a Maxim, in Politicks, as, that Action and Re-action are equal, is in Mechanicks.”
[vi] See James Madison, Federalist No. 10: “The most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property.” On the warnings from the Founding Fathers, see, above all, George Washington’s Farewell Address (ghostwritten by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton), 1796: “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.”
8. The reasoned end of politics, summarized in ten words.
And the common intuition of mankind since politics began...
All history teaches that the diffusion and reconcentration of wealth dictates the diffusion and reconcentration of power. Wealth diffusion leads to democracy, wealth concentration to oligarchy. An independent and entrenched middle class is the condition precedent to democracy because no other part of the commons has political agency. Therefore, in order to have a commonwealth, the commons must have the wealth.
But even more than sustaining democratic agency, the society comprised of an independent and entrenched middle class is morally best.[i] Such a middle class:
✓Looks after its own livelihood, reducing its demands on the public treasury and its hostility toward the wealthy;
✓Doesn’t depend on politicians for its livelihood, immunizing it from political patronage and politics;
✓Can make an indispensable fiscal or military contribution to the state;
✓Can withdraw its support from abusive regimes, making government accountable and responsible to its grievances;
✓Is busy in its labors and engrossed in its diversions, reducing the time and attention given to politics and propaganda;
✓Holds practical and steady opinions, making it skeptical of novel, utopian, and revolutionary ideas;
✓Imposes its moderate opinions on the body politic, sedating the most virulent strains of political faction; and
✓Is jealous of property and desires respectable economic gain, encouraging robust commerce and safeguarding property rights.
These considerations confirm that the best, most stable democracy is not where the people’s voice is loudly proclaimed, but rather where the people may speak, but have nothing to say.
The imperative of middle-class primacy being clear, we must quantify it. As for what the middling share of wealth should be, the intuition of mankind has held steady since ancient Greece should be at least half. The genius of Aristotle, the wisdom of the Founders, and the common sense of ordinary Americans all agree.[ii]
And as for defining the middling share of population, we think the most reasonable definition of the “middle class” is the middle 60% by income.[iii] Therefore, the middle 60% by income should hold at least 50% of national wealth.
The middle class should own at least half. But today, the middling share is only about 25%-30%, down about 5% in the past 35 years, and about $35 trillion below target.[iv] More than $50 trillion has been diverted from ordinary Americans to elites since 1975 relative to post-war run-rates.[v]
In the next meme, we consider the method to restore middle-class primacy…
[i] See e.g., Euripides, Suppliants, Line 238 et seq., Plato, Laws 679b, Aristotle, Pol., 1291b, 1295b: “It is clear therefore also that the political community administered by the middle class is the best, and that it is possible for those states to be well governed that are of the kind in which the middle class is numerous, and preferably stronger than both the other two classes or at all events than one of them, for by throwing in its weight it sways the balance and prevents the opposite extremes from coming into existence. Hence it is the greatest good fortune if the men that have political power possess a moderate and sufficient substance.” See also David Hume, On the Middle Station of Life, 1742. In regard to the American situation, see especially Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835: “Between these two extremes of democratic communities stand an innumerable multitude of men almost alike, who, without being exactly either rich or poor, are possessed of sufficient property to desire the maintenance of order, yet not enough to excite envy. Such men are the natural enemies of violent commotions: their stillness keeps all beneath them and above them still, and secures the balance of the fabric of society. Not indeed that even these men are contented with what they have gotten, or that they feel a natural abhorrence for a revolution in which they might share the spoil without sharing the calamity; on the contrary, they desire, with unexampled ardour, to get rich, but the difficulty is to know from whom riches can be taken. The same state of society which constantly prompts desires, restrains these desires within necessary limits: it gives men more liberty of changing and less interest in change,” and
“Not only are the men of democracies not naturally desirous of revolutions, but they are afraid of them. All revolutions more or less threaten the tenure of property: but most of those who live in democratic countries are possessed of property – not only are they possessed of property, but they live in the condition of men who set the greatest store upon their property. If we attentively consider each of the classes of which society is composed, it is easy to see that the passions engendered by property are keenest and most tenacious amongst the middle classes.” See also Alexander Hamilton: “While property continues to be pretty equally divided, and a considerable share of information pervades the community; the tendency of the people’s suffrages, will be to elevate merit even from obscurity. As riches increase and accumulate in few hands; as luxury prevails in society; virtue will be in a greater degree considered as only a graceful appendage of wealth, and the tendency of things will be to depart from the republican standard. This is the real disposition of human nature.” 21 June 1788, New York Ratifying Convention. On defense of property rights by the middle classes, see James Madison, Notes on Suffrage, 1829: “It is a law of nature, now well understood, that the earth under a civilized cultivation is capable of yielding subsistence for a large surplus of consumers beyond those having an immediate interest in the soil; a surplus which must increase with the increasing improvements in agriculture, and the labour-saving arts applied to it. And it is a lot of humanity, that of this surplus a large proportion is necessarily reduced by a competition for employment to wages which afford them the bare necessaries of life. The proportion being without property, or the hope of acquiring it, cannot be expected to sympathize sufficiently with its rights to be safe depositories of power over them.”
[ii] The common intuition of mankind is that the middle class should own at least half; therefore, this is the target for which legislation should backsolve. See Aristotle, Pol., 1295b, and James Harrington, Id. That the intuition of ordinary Americans agrees, see Michael I. Norton and Dan Ariely, Building a Better America – One Wealth Quintile at a Time, Perspectives on Psychological Science, Association for Psychological Science, 2011. John Adams adhered to Harrington principles; see a letter from John Adams to James Sullivan, 26 May 1776: “Harrington has Shewn that Power always follows Property. This I believe to be as infallible a Maxim, in Politicks, as, that Action and Re-action are equal, is in Mechanicks.” Adams was influenced by James Harrington, whose agrarian proposal would have balanced the nobility 50/50 with the commoners, capping landholdings at £2,000 annual revenues. This is why Adams advised James Sullivan that he wanted “to make the Acquisition of Land easy to every Member of Society: to make a Division of the Land into Small Quantities, So that the Multitude may be possessed of landed Estates.”
[iii] Other potential definitions would be: (a) the “second 40%” by wealth, a measure often used by the Federal Reserve (between the top 10% and the bottom 50%); (b) the middle 3 quintiles (60%) by wealth percentile; and (c) the middle tercile (33%).
[iv] Total national wealth is around $150 trillion. The middling share is 25.9% when the middle class is defined as the middle 60% by income quintile (Federal Reserve, Q4 2022) and 30.51% when it is defined as the middle 40% by wealth percentile (Federal Reserve, Q1 2024). The middling share of national wealth has decreased by approximately 3.5% in the past 20 years, and by about 5% in the past 30. Distribution of Household Wealth in the U.S. since 1989, Federal Reserve (based on the Survey of Consumer Finances and Financial Accounts of the United States).
[v] See Carter C. Price and Kathryn A. Edwards, Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2020, calculating the gains that would have but did not accrue to ordinary Americans since 1975 relative to post-World War II run rates. The abstract: “From 1975 to 2018, the difference between the aggregate taxable income for those below the 90th percentile and the equitable growth counterfactual totals $47 trillion.”
9. A genuine republican measure, summarized in ten words.
Operation Abigail, like America itself, were born in the spirit of tax revolt...
The best political outcomes flow from middle-class primacy:
✓Healthy markets and productive capitalism;
✓Personal responsibility and civic virtue; and
✓Accountable democratic government.
While middle-class primacy produces democracy, middle-class insecurity leads to authoritarianism and mob rule. That’s where we’re headed, but it’s not where we started. The principal fact of our founding was that, despite slavery, America was born middle class. And the principal feature of America’s postwar life was that, despite segregation, it was re-born middle class.
Both periods of American middle-class primacy were enabled more by fortunate macroeconomic circumstances than by any policy or economic doctrine. Our chief advantage in 1776 was a surplus of land. In 1945 it was unscathed manufacturing supremacy. But middle-class health has eroded since 1975, as foreign competition and capital mobility increased. Today, no comparable macroeconomic advantages exist which favor middle-class growth. Ignore all those who premise past prosperity on schemes of capital appeasement or promise future prosperity based on the continuation thereof. 50 years of experience and $50 trillion diverted from ordinary Americans to elites proves that tax breaks for billionaires and trickle-down economic theories clearly do nothing to help ordinary workers.[i]
Ignore too all those who say that intervention is un-American. Not only did the Founding Fathers advocate intervention as necessary to maintain America as a democratic-republic, they would have even supported wealth caps.[ii]
Since middle-class growth won’t happen spontaneously, the only path to middle-class growth is through intelligent intervention. But such intervention need not abandon capitalism, or attempt to alter human nature by training elites to behave more altruistically. Nor should such intervention be a conventional plan of “wealth redistribution,” conveyed via government intermediaries. Our intervention should instead use capitalism to harness mankind’s base ambition for gain, in a manner that encourages market actors to voluntarily de-concentrate prosperity through coordinated private transactions. In other words, we need to put the ultra-rich on an incentive plan that ensures that capitalism gives as much to workers as workers give to capitalism.
We must therefore scale capitalism’s own device of the long-term incentive plan from the level of enterprise to the nation. This is what Operation Abigail would do. Operation Abigail would put the ultra-rich on a long-term incentive plan that rewards middle-class gains and punishes middle-class losses. The incentive would be created through the technique of median-top household wealth tethering. Ultra-rich household wealth would be tethered to the national median household net worth at an efficient ratio such that ultra-rich household net worth rises and falls lockstep in mathematical proportion to middle-class household net worth. Once the ratio is in place, the ultra-rich must raise the median in order to themselves enjoy any further gains.[iii]
Or in other words: no gains for the middle, no gains for the top. That is our policy.
Which leaves for the next meme the legal form by which it will be enforced…
[i] See Carter C. Price and Kathryn A. Edwards, Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2020, calculating the gains that would have but did not accrue to ordinary Americans since 1975 relative to post-World War II run rates. The abstract: “From 1975 to 2018, the difference between the aggregate taxable income for those below the 90th percentile and the equitable growth counterfactual totals $47 trillion.”
[ii] That the Founders would have advocated intervention in general, see, e.g., John Adams, Dissertation, 1765: “Property monopolized, or in the Possession of a Few is a Curse to Mankind. We should preserve not an Absolute Equality – this is unnecessary, but preserve all from extreme Poverty, and all others from extravagant Riches,” Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1785: “Legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property,” James Madison, Parties, 1792, advocating measures to “reduce extreme wealth towards a state of mediocrity, and raise extreme indigence towards a state of comfort” and Noah Webster, Miscellaneous Remarks on Divizions of Property … in the United States, 1790: “The basis of a democratic and a republican form of government, is, a fundamental law, favoring … a general distribution of property.” That the Founders would have advocated wealth caps specifically, see, e.g., John Adams to Abigail Adams, 25 August 1776, on Tiberius Gracchus reviving “the old Project of an equal Division of the conquered Lands, (a genuine republican Measure, tho it had been too long neglected to be then practicable).” The Lex Sempronia Agraria revised the Lex Licinia-Sextia, imposing hard caps on private use of public lands. This Gracchan tradition was earlier echoed by James Harrington, who advocated an agrarian law to balance the nobility with the commoners, capping landholdings at £2,000 annual revenues. See also John Adams to James Sullivan, 26 May 1776, advocating measures “to make the Acquisition of Land easy to every Member of Society: to make a Division of the Land into Small Quantities, So that the Multitude may be possessed of landed Estates.” See also Noah Webster’s favorable account of Gracchus: “Rome, with the name of a republic, was several ages losing the spirit and principle. The Gracchi endeavored to check the growing evil by an agrarian law; but were not successful.” Id. Thomas Jefferson’s actions are also part of the Gracchan tradition. See the first three drafts of Thomas Jefferson’s 1776 Virginia constitution, reviewed by James Madison, establishing a conditional 50-acre viritim (land grant) to every eligible adult male citizen. Read this measure especially in conjunction with his 1776 law to abolish entails and 1785 law to abolish primogeniture in Virginia, by which, he announced to John Adams, he “laid the axe to the root of Pseudoaristocracy.” Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 28 October 1813. Other states also abolished entails and primogeniture in an effort to avert wealth concentration. This tradition was continued by General Sherman’s Field Order No. 15, approved by Abraham Lincoln, making 40-acre land grants to freedmen from confiscated lands along the South Carolina and Georgia coasts. We may on that authority justly assert caps on private fortunes whose size exceeds some rational demarcation, to the extent such fortunes were facilitated by public support, including the benefits of public infrastructure, government subsidies, or legal rights of market exclusivity.
[iii] Although not inspired by it, Operation Abigail’s central feature of a ratio indexed against a wealth benchmark has a Classical precedent; see Plato, Laws, 744D: “The limit of poverty shall be the value of the allotment: this must remain fixed, and its diminution in any particular instance no magistrate should overlook, nor any other citizen who aspires to goodness. And having set this as the (inferior) limit, the lawgiver shall allow a man to possess twice this amount, or three times, or four times. Should anyone acquire more than this—whether by discovery or gift or money-making, or through gaining a sum exceeding the due measure by some other such piece of luck, if he makes the surplus over to the State.”
10. The story of Operation Abigail, summarized in ten words.
The Constitution is a brake that can’t stop the wheel. Operation Abigail is the reverse knob...
Operation Abigail, like the Constitution it seeks to protect, is part of a political anthropology extending back to Classical Antiquity.[1] The final two deliverables of Greek political thought are united in Polybius’s account of Rome’s constitution. The first is Anacyclosis (ἀνακύκλωσις), or the wheel: the idea that every unchecked regime is corrupted, and every corrupted regime is replaced. Anacyclosis resolves into a cycle for wealthy states whose destiny is not controlled by another. Polybius gives the natural and probable order as chiefdom, kingship, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and mob-rule, finally back to chiefdom.[2]
The second is the tripartite mixed constitution, or the brake: the idea that since all unchecked power is unstable, the best constitution checks and balances the characteristics of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. The constitutions of Sparta, Rome, and Britain give famous examples of this tripartite brake. Enlightenment writers developed this idea into the separation of powers today comprising the nucleus of the United States Constitution.[3]
The Constitution was designed to prevent the undue concentration of power based on these ancient Greek ideas. But as America’s progression through late-stage Anacyclosis shows, the brake doesn’t actually stop the wheel any more than it turns it. A brake is a brake, not a motor.
As we’ve seen, the motor which turns the wheel is the diffusion and reconcentration of wealth.[4] Democracy follows wealth diffusion; oligarchy follows wealth reconcentration. Apart from the four calamities of plague, mass mobilization warfare, revolution, or state collapse, this motor has only ever turned one way: toward wealth concentration.[5]
Thus, while the Constitution so ably established the legal form of a democratic-republic, it is powerless to maintain the political substance of one: an independent middle class, continually refreshed by upward mobility. The Constitution is a brake that can’t stop the wheel because it was designed merely to check the concentration of institutional authority, but not the concentration of wealth from which political power flows.
Operation Abigail was conceived as the gearbox, or reverse knob, to extreme wealth concentration. It was conceived to empower the Constitution to guarantee the political substance of our democratic republic. And by this, Operation Abigail was conceived to protect our Constitution from the democratic death-sequence of Anacyclosis which would otherwise surely destroy it.
The technique of median-top household wealth tethering is the mechanism of action which enables wealth de-concentration. Tethering ultra-rich household wealth to the national median household net worth at an efficient ratio ensures that ultra-rich household net worth rises and falls lockstep in mathematical proportion to middle-class household net worth. Once the ratio is in place, the ultra-rich must raise the median in order to themselves enjoy any further gains. All that remains is to discover and enforce the optimal ratio to cover the requisite number of households having adequate market power to endow the ratio with sufficient distributive force to induce voluntary wealth de-concentration. With the benefit of experience, future legislators can adjust the ratio to backsolve for prescribed middle-class size and wealth targets.
The initial ratio would be 10,000:1, setting a $1.5 billion cap.[6] The legal form by which would be adopted is a tax applied only to the ultra-rich, whose wealth exceeds the 10,000x ceiling, a limit surpassed by fewer than 700 households.[7] To defeat geographic arbitrage, the tax must be federal. To survive apportionment clause attack, the tax must be a constitutional amendment.
To persuade the States to propose and adopt it, the Amendment would distribute all revenues raised by ratio enforcement in equal shares to each state which timely ratifies it. This would ensure that tax revenues are used according to the preferences of local constituencies and strengthen our bedrock constitutional principle of federalism.
To moderate its impact on ultra-rich households, Operation Abigail would grandfather existing fortunes, but only to the extent they are repatriated to the United States, and provided that their owners are not convicted of certain crimes and extricate themselves from our politics after the next presidential election. This would:
✓ Avoid unfair wealth confiscation
✓ Discourage capital exodus and encourage wealth repatriation;
✓ Cleanse our republic of meddlesome plutocrats;
✓ And set the wealth ceiling high enough (initially $1.5 billion) to preserve adequate incentives and rewards for innovation and risk.
Finally, Operation Abigail would also provide immediate benefits to all taxpayers below the ratio by:
✓ Forever prohibiting household wealth taxes below the initial 10,000x/$1.5 billion cap;
✓ Prohibiting federal income tax rate hikes on the same for 20 years;
✓ Prohibiting federal inheritance taxes on the same for 20 years; and
✓ Exempting most small businesses from federal income taxes for 20 years.
[1] For an example of the influence of the late Roman Republic on the Founding Fathers, see, e.g., a letter from John Adams to Benjamin Rush, 4 December 1805: “The Period in the History of the World, the best understood, is that of Rome from the time of Marius to the Death of Cicero.”
[2] For the anthropology see, e.g., Pindar, 2nd Pythian Ode, Herodotus (III. 80), Thucydides (VIII. 97), Plato (Rep. VIII) (Laws, III. 676 A), Aristotle (Nic. Eth. 8.10; Pol. 1286b), Polybius (Hist. Bk. VI), and possibly Panaetius, Dicaercus, Isocrates, Protagoras, and Hecateus). See also Dionysius, (Rom. Ant. VII, 54-56) Cicero, De Re Publica, I, XXIX, II, XXV), Sextus Pomponius, Justinian’s Digest, I Bk. I, Tit. 2., 2. 1-11), Machiavelli Discourses on Livy, Ch. I. Bk. II. See also John Adams, An Essay on Man’s Lust for Power, All Men would be Tyrants if they could, with the Author’s Comment in 1807 (describing Polybius’ sequence as “the Creed of my whole Life. See also Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 9, alluding to Anacyclosis. See also David A. Teegarden, Death to Tyrants!: Ancient Greek Democracy and the Struggle against Tyranny, Princeton University Press, 2014. Figure A1 therein shows that ancient Greek city-state regimes peaked accordingly.
[3] The idea is attributed to the legendary Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus. For the anthropology, see, e.g. Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, 8.97.2 Plato, Laws, 681d; Laws, 712d; Menexus, 238b-d, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, VII.55, Polybius, Histories, VI.10-18, and Servius the Grammarian, Commentary on the Aeneid of Vergil, 4.682. See also Charles I, His Majesties Answer to the Nineteen Propositions of Both Houses of Parliament, 1642, Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Book XI, Chapter VI, John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Book II, Chapters XII-XIII James Madison, Federalist Nos. 47, 48, and 51, and Articles I, II, and III of the United States Constitution.
[4] See James Harrington, Commonwealth of Oceana, Part I, John Adams to James Sullivan, 26 May 1776 and Defence of the Constitutions, Vol. III, Letter III (Padoua), Noah Webster, An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution, and Misc. Remarks on Divisions of Property.
[5] See Walter Scheidel, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, Princeton 2018. Shows that structural inequality has only been reduced by the shocks of plague, revolution, mass-mobilization warfare, or state collapse.
[6] An approximate number, averaging Census Bureau median household net worth figures for 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022. The number will be updated periodically to account for new data.
[7] An approximate estimate, based on evaluation of various publicly-available “rich list” and billionaire statistics.
4. Stay the course: Shoot down arguments against Operation Abigail. They are 99% brainwashing and anachronism.
They can’t debate our guiding principle: The bigger the middle class, the better. They can’t debate the numbers. The middle class is dying. They can’t debate the betrayal: The middle class has been stabbed in the back by its own plutocracy, and both Republicans and Democrats are letting it happen.
So why object to Operation Abigail? Here are some of the most common objections, with responses:
1. Objection: I think Operation Abigail exceeds our Founding Fathers' vision of a constitution of limited powers.
Response: Not only is Operation Abigail essential to advancing America’s constitutional mission of establishing justice, ensuring domestic tranquility, and promoting the general welfare, it represents the natural progression of American political thought.
Limited government requires a strong middle class. Government can get smaller only where the middle class can get bigger. Where the people are self-sufficient, they demand little because they need little. Their financial independence immunizes them from faction, patronage, and demagoguery. But, where the people lack property they will demand property transfers, just as they will not defend property rights. These simple lessons of history teach that democracy works best not where the people’s voice is loudly proclaimed, but instead where the people may speak, but have nothing to say.
The original Constitution was well-suited to a nation where 90% of the citizens were self-sufficient farmers, who then required little more from the national government than a post office. In spite of slavery, the principal fact of America’s founding was that it was born middle class. In order to preserve our republic, Founders like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison proposed measures to preserve the middle class like abolishing primogeniture and entails, even outright land-grants. The federal Constitution for its part guaranteed the legal form of our democratic-republic, but was not then empowered to guarantee its middle-class political substance. This was not because the Founders didn’t understand these lessons, or because doing so would have violated their principles – they themselves proposed interventions at the state level – but because it was simply unnecessary at the time.
It’s necessary today, however. And Operation Abigail is the next step in America’s democratic-republican constitutional tradition, derived from the lessons of Classical Antiquity, adapted to the capitalist mode of economy, and conceived to guarantee middle-class primacy. If we want to restore the principles of limited government and personal responsibility, we must first rebuild the middle class. If we don’t save the middle class, what’s left of it will soon be extracted by crony capitalists and a dependent underclass. And America’s republic will then probably die the same death as Rome’s: suicide by extreme wealth concentration.
2. Objection: As a conservative or libertarian, I oppose Operation Abigail because it sounds too progressive or liberal.
Response: Operation Abigail is the most authentically conservative, republican, and capitalist proposal today.
Operation Abigail’s vision is conservative, because it would restore the middling virtues upon which limited self-government depends. To restore the middling virtues, we must restore the general optimism that all people of ordinary intelligence and abilities can earn a decent living through reasonable exertion. To restore the general optimism, we must bring back the post-War, middle-class-first, 1950s-style capitalism that created the common prosperity that conservatives now remember with such nostalgia. In 1776, America’s median-top wealth ratio was below 1,000:1. Today it exceeds 2,000,000:1. Operation Abigail would roll America back to 10,000:1.
Operation Abigail’s mission is republican, because in order to have a commonwealth, the commons must have the wealth. Operation Abigail would rebuild the middle class, restore the middling virtues, and rejuvenate upward mobility.
Operation Abigail’s philosophy is capitalist, because it is designed to scale capitalism’s own device of the long-term incentive plan from the level of enterprise to nation.
And thanks to its purebred Classical pedigree, Operation Abigail’s roots stretch back even further than conventional conservatism. Its anthropology is not only pre-Marxian, pre-Madisonian, and pre-Montesquieuan; it is pre-Machiavellian. It contains no dint of socialist ideology. It was originally conceived to answer Aristotle’s advice that the lawgiver always solve for a majority middle class and to be the capitalist-republican adaptation of Gracchus’s agrarian-republican Lex Sempronia Agraria, a law intended to save republican Rome’s middle class which in 1776 John Adams described to Abigail Adams as “a genuine republican Measure.” In short, just like the Constitution it seeks to protect, Operation Abigail’s logos is Greek, its pathos is Roman, and its ethos is American.
3. Objection: Operation Abigail is socialist because it seeks wealth redistribution.
Response: No, Operation Abigail doesn’t seek either wealth or income redistribution. Both wealth and income redistribution are conveyed via government agencies. Under conventional redistribution plans, a government lays taxes to raise revenues, and the same government decides what public benefits (or crony capitalists) to fund.
Operation Abigail is not a plan of wealth redistribution, but of wealth deconcentration. Key differences between Operation Abigail and conventional wealth “redistribution” plans include:
Purpose of tax: The only purpose of conventional taxes is to raise revenues to fund government outlays. The primary purpose of Operation Abigail’s tax is to create a market incentive to encourage market actors to voluntarily de-concentrate wealth through coordinated private transactions. The revenues themselves are only incidental and we take no official position on how the States should spend them.
Method of computing tax. Operation Abigail computes its tax as a multiple of the national median household net worth, as the proxy for middle-class health (initially, 10,000x the median). Conventional taxes are not benchmarked against middle-class welfare.
Scope of tax. To raise revenues, conventional taxes are widely assessed across the general population. For instance, most taxpayers have income tax liability and all taxpayers pay sales taxes. Operation Abigail only applies to ultra-rich households exceeding the 10,000x ratio, as the proxy for market-power.
Use of revenues. Conventional taxes are typically raised and spent by the same government. Operation Abigail differs in using the federal government to lay the tax, but allocating the revenues to the State governments to spend.
No mandates. As a median-benchmarked capitalist incentive plan, Operation Abigail lets market actors decide and coordinate what steps, if any, to raise the median. If markets succeed in raising the median, the wealth cieling will rise, lightening the ultra-rich tax burden. Conversely, market failure increases the tax burden on ultra-rich households. In any case, Operation Abigail does not dictate any specific route of wealth or income “redistribution” as its purpose is to encourage voluntary wealth deconcentration through the sum total of coordinated private agreements.
Suspension of tax. Operation Abigail’s true nature as an incentive plan rather than a traditional tax-and-spend redistribution plan is further proven by the fact that it permits Congress to suspend the tax for the duration that the middle class (middle 60%) owns at least 50% of national wealth, as computed by the most recent national census. If we meet our 50%+ target – if the middle class owns at least half – then Operation Abigail will have served its purpose.
4. Objection: Operation Abigail is socialist and radical because it uses wealth taxes.
Response: No again, because far from abolishing private property, Operation Abigail seeks to multiply the number of owners of private property, and therefore protect capitalism. Allowing plutocracy to continue extracting prosperity from the middle class pushes America toward feudalism, which is as un-American and oppressive as socialism, and which will eventually produce a socialist overreaction.
And as for wealth taxes, every middle-class homeowner has been paying wealth taxes on unrealized gains on their largest assets for decades. Now that our economy is no longer agrarian, there’s nothing radical in the idea that taxation should catch up. Indeed, people who pay wealth taxes are crazy to give billionaires a free pass on them.
5. Objection: Operation Abigail is radical because it uses wealth caps.
Response: Operation Abigail does not impose a fixed wealth cap. It limits household wealth based on a mathematical ratio benchmarked against the median household net worth. Today, the median is around $150k, setting the ceiling at $1.5 billion. This ceiling is today only surpassed by about 700 households. If elites increase the median to $300k, the ceiling increases to $3 billion; if to $1 million, the ceiling increases to $10 billion. This is how capitalist organizations design incentive plans: they reward management for improving a defined target metric.
Operation Abigail adopts the performance metric of the national median household net worth – the single best measure of middle-class welfare – as the measure of economic success.
6. Objection: Not another tax! We already pay enough taxes. I don’t want mine to go up.
Response: We agree. We pay too many taxes. That’s why Operation Abigail protects ordinary Americans from taxes: it (a) forever prohibits wealth taxes on households below the ceiling (initially 10,000x the median, about $1.5 billion); and (b) prohibits rate hikes on all federal direct taxes for 20 years.
And though Operation Abigail would distribute significant revenues to the States, that’s not its real purpose. Its purpose is to encourage elite market actors to voluntarily de-concentrate prosperity so that more households are financially secure and fewer households need government support. This will in turn lower the need for revenues enough to reduce taxes – perhaps even eliminate business taxes altogether – and reduce the national debt.
7. Objection: Operation Abigail is unfair because it punishes success.
Response: If your definition of “success” is killing our middle class through greedy crony capitalism, then yes Operation Abigail punishes that.
But if your definition of success is productive, innovative, prosperous capitalism nourishing a healthy middle class and upward mobility, then Operation Abigail rewards success all day long. As a long-term incentive plan (LTIP), this is its purpose.
Operation Abigail adopts a better, pro-middle class definition of success than the old definition of winner-take-all. This old definition of success forces our elites to cater to self-interest and special interests, neglecting American workers through tax schemes, outsourcing, immigration, monopolization, and increasingly by automation.
By benchmarking national economic success against the national median household net worth – as by median-top household wealth tethering – Operation Abigail would punish the plutocracy if it continues to sell out American workers as it’s done for the past 50 years, and will reward elites only for improving American middle-class outcomes.
8. Objection: Operation Abigail is unfair because it confiscates wealth.
Response: No, Operation Abigail won’t apply to existing fortunes exceeding the initial 10,000x/$1.5 billion cap, provided their owners don’t try to evade it. It specifically grandfathers, or exempts, pre-existing fortunes. In order to qualify for grandfathering, existing fortunes must meet all of the following criteria: (a) they must be repatriated to the United States; (b) their holders must remove themselves from American politics, including from lobbying activities; and (c) their holders must not be convicted of certain financial and electoral crimes. Operation Abigail will only apply prospectively (going forward) to newly-created wealth to the extent that covered households comply with these rules, sanitizing our democratic processes from meddlesome plutocrats.
9. Objection: The rich already pay their fair share in taxes.
Response: Many of “the rich” do pay their fair share of taxes, but it’s safe to presume households that would be covered by Operation Abigail do not.
The true tax burden imposed on “the rich” is frequently concealed by a sophisticated legal distinction between “income” and “capital gains.” Most ordinary household inflows – including wages – are taxed as ordinary income (higher tax rates). However, most ultra-rich household inflows are attributable to capital gains (lower tax rates). Next time you see the argument that the rich pay most of the taxes, it likely excludes the fraction of income taxed at the lower rates, making the relative burden at the top appear larger.
Not only is the type of income that billionaires are likely to have taxed at a lower rate, the trigger for taxation
On top of income taxes, regular wages are hit with extra payroll taxes. And on top of that, most ordinary households pay wealth taxes on their main asset: their home. Ultra-rich households meanwhile avoid wealth taxes on virtually all of their assets. They also use further minimize their taxes using schemes for which there is no useful corresponding benefit for regular people, like off-shore and other tax havens, tax-advantaged trusts, non-realization and income-avoidance tricks like collateralized loans, stepped-up basis, bogus deductions, and bogus philanthropy that hides tax breaks behind “charitable” purposes. Thus, many billionaires get away with paying virtually no taxes at all while everyone from ordinary workers to the lesser rich are left holding the bag.
10. Objection: Operation Abigail will reduce prosperity by causing capital flight. The rich will just leave America and take their wealth with them.
Response: Operation Abigail neutralizes the risks of capital flight. Most ultra-rich people are connected to the communities which made their fortunes. Even if they wished to flee, Operation Abigail ensures they won’t be taking their fortunes with them. If the very few ultra-rich households exceeding the initial 10,000x/$1.5 billion threshold (currently around 700) tried to move money off-shore, they would merely forfeit their ability to grandfather existing fortunes. And as for assets already off-shore, failure to satisfy all grandfathering criteria as by failing to repatriate wealth similarly effectively acts as an excise tax. Tax nexus is easy to achieve, as it is the price of market access for any enterprise in which covered households hold an interest. Changing residency, renouncing citizenship, or transferring wealth to heirs will not defeat the tax.
11. Objection: Operation Abigail will reduce prosperity by reducing innovation, and therefore job creators.
Response: Operation Abigail will not impair innovation one iota, because it deliberately sets the ceiling high enough to preserve the monetary goals for which most ambition strives. What budding visionary-genius entrepreneur won’t get out of bed in the morning for only $1.5 billion? The $1.5 billion threshold is only surpassed by about 700 households, a substantial portion of which inherited their wealth anyway. And as for the job creation point, about 2/3 of jobs are created by small businesses whose owners live nowhere near the $1.5 billion ceiling. Quite to the contrary, the wealth de-concentration prompted by Operation Abigail will nourish the consumer markets, which will only generate more demand for more businesses and more jobs. After all, it is impossible for entrepreneurs to sell anything for which there is no demand, and it is in turn impossible for demand to be strong where middle-class prosperity is weak.
12. Objection: The Founding Fathers would disagree with Operation Abigail, so it is un-American.
Response: The Founding Fathers would endorse Operation Abigail. Operation Abigail is as 100% red-blooded American as you can get. Named for a Founding Mother and housed in an organization named after a Founding Father, Operation Abigail was conceived to redeem what was best about America’s founding. Despite slavery, America was born a middle-class democratic republic, and its first words were that all men are created equal. By founding pedigree, the clinical definition of America is: a middling political society adorned with Classical precepts and Enlightenment principles. And since neither separation of powers nor natural rights prevail where tyrants and oligarchs do, the first object of American patriotism is ensuring the conditions where they can, channeling all our care to the end of middle-class primacy.
We live in a world of confusion and change, but Operation Abigail has no confusion about what’s at stake and will never change its values: America’s future as a republic is more important than the complexion of its skin. The true measure of patriotism and civic virtue are not therefore how many guns one owns, or how often they wave an American flag, but in their comprehension and devotion of the principles of democratic republican government. A man who makes no effort to understand our middle-class heritage and allows himself to be made a tool to forces subversive to our middle-class future is no more patriotic and possesses no greater moral superiority than an avowed enemy of the United States.
The principles of true American patriotism being clear, our dedication to the worthy principles of our founding are clear by reference to the sayings of the Founding Fathers:
John Adams to Abigail Adams, 25 August 1776, on Tiberius Gracchus reviving “the old Project of an equal Division of the conquered Lands, (a genuine republican Measure, tho it had been too long neglected to be then practicable).” The Lex Sempronia Agraria revised the Lex Licinia-Sextia, imposing hard caps on private use of public lands. Adams was influenced by James Harrington, who advocated an agrarian law to balance the nobility with the commoners, capping landholdings at £2,000 annual revenues. See also John Adams to James Sullivan, 26 May 1776, advocating measures “to make the Acquisition of Land easy to every Member of Society: to make a Division of the Land into Small Quantities, So that the Multitude may be possessed of landed Estates.” See also Noah Webster’s favorable account of Gracchus in Miscellaneous Remarks on Divizions of Property … in the United States, 1790: “Rome, with the name of a republic, was several ages losing the spirit and principle. The Gracchi endeavored to check the growing evil by an agrarian law; but were not successful.” On two specific attempts to implement a Gracchan viritim (land grant), see the first three drafts of Thomas Jefferson’s 1776 Virginia constitution, reviewed by James Madison, establishing a 50-acre viritim, and General Sherman’s Field Order No. 15, approved by Abraham Lincoln, making 40-acre land grants to freedmen from lands along the South Carolina and Georgia coasts. Read Jefferson’s 1776 constitution especially in conjunction with his 1776 laws to abolish entails and primogeniture in Virginia, by which, he announced to John Adams, he “laid the axe to the root of Pseudoaristocracy.” Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 28 October 1813.
On ancient Greek writings praising the middle class, see Euripides, Suppliants, Line 238 et seq., Plato, Laws 679b, and Aristotle, Pol., 1291b, 1295b. On pre-revolution Enlightenment Era transmission of the middling virtues, see David Hume, Of the Middle Station of Life, 1742, extolling the virtues of middling status. That our Founding Fathers would endorse government intervention as necessary to sustain America a middle-class republic, see John Adams, Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1765: “Property monopolized, or in the Possession of a Few is a Curse to Mankind. We should preserve not an Absolute Equality – this is unnecessary, but preserve all from extreme Poverty, and all others from extravagant Riches,” Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1785: “Legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property,” James Madison, Parties, 1792, advocating measures to “reduce extreme wealth towards a state of mediocrity, and raise extreme indigence towards a state of comfort,” and Noah Webster, Id.: “The basis of a democratic and a republican form of government, is, a fundamental law, favoring … a general distribution of property.” That the Founders well-understood that America was born middle class, see, see remarks from British Colonel Lord Adam Gordon in 1764: “The levelling principle here, everywhere operates strongly and takes the lead, and everybody has property here, and everybody knows it,” Benjamin Franklin, Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, 1751: “6. Land being thus plenty in America, and so cheap as that a labouring Man, that understands Husbandry, can in a short Time save Money enough to purchase a Piece of new Land sufficient for a Plantation, whereon he may subsist a Family; such are not afraid to marry; for if they even look far enough forward to consider how their Children when grown up are to be provided for, they see that more Land is to be had at Rates equally easy, all Circumstances considered. 7. Hence Marriages in America are more general, and more generally early, than in Europe,” Richard Price, Observations on Civil Liberty, 1776, stating that “The Colonies consist only of a body of Yeomanry supported by agriculture, and all independent, and nearly upon a level; in consequence of which, joined to a boundless extent of country, the means of subsistence are procured without difficulty,” Thomas Pownall, A memorial address to the sovereigns of America, 1783, stating that America was characterized by “a general equality, not only in the Persons, but in the power of the landed Property of the Inhabitants” and that America stands on a “natural equal level Basis,” Charles Pinckney, speech of 25 June 1787, stating: “The people of the U. S. are perhaps the most singular of any we are acquainted with.—Among them there are fewer distinctions of fortune & less of rank; than among the inhabitants of any other nation.—Every freeman has a right to the same protection & security and a very moderate share of property entitles them to the possession of all the honors & privileges the public can bestow.—Hence arises a greater equality, than is to be found among the people of any other country, and an equality which is more likely to continue. … there will be few poor & few dependent,” George Washington to Richard Henderson, 1788: “America … will be the most favorable Country of any in the world for persons … possessed of a moderate capital, to inhabit. … it will not be less advantageous to the happiness of the lowest class of people because of … the facility of procuring the means of subsistence.”
5. Stay focused, don't get distracted: There's no other cure for wealth concentration.
Operation Abigail’s focus is ultimately one of regime type. Its goal is to preserve the democratic-republican model of government by maximizing the size and wealth of the middle class and curtailing crony capitalism. Our mission is to implement a long-term corrective to the problem of wealth concentration in order to achieve permanent, structural wealth de-concentration. The direct function of Operation Abigail is therefore not to raise tax revenues, or even put food on the table – though it should indirectly help to do both – but rather to create a median-benchmarked market incentive resulting in coordinated market action to rebuild the middle-class and restore upward mobility.
Therefore, unlike safety nets, cash subsidies, job guarantees, and the like, Operation Abigail was not designed as an immediate short-term palliative or sedative to the problem of household insecurity. Put simply: Operation Abigail is intended to be a cure to eliminate the causes of wealth concentration in order to minimize the household insecurity that ever comes into existence, not a band-aid to manage the trauma of household insecurity after it manifests. This means that Operation Abigail would exist side-by-side with other plans offering immediate relief, until the project of wealth de-concentration proceeds far enough to withdraw such short-term palliatives.
So, while Operation Abigail shares an inherent community of interest with all those concerned for the welfare of ordinary workers, it does not perform the same function. In considering our place within the universe of egalitarian political interventions, it is important to note that most of these band-aids, these palliatives and sedatives, can coexist with Operation Abigail. But it is essential to understand that, while Operation Abigail’s purpose is to provide an incentive, as the party introducing it, the Adams Institute must remain neutral as to method, otherwise our efforts assume the character of a mandate.
On that basis, we can avert mission creep by defining the battles we will not fight:
1. Not our fight: Taxing corporations.
Response: Operation Abigail would not tax enterprises. In fact, to facilitate small business formation and growth, Operation Abigail would exempt an amount equal to 10x the median (currently about $1.5 million) from all business taxes. The only tax Operation Abigail imposes is a special household tax, only on households exceeding the effective ratio, which is initially 10,000:1, or about $1.5 billion, an amount currently exceeded by fewer than 700 households.
Our rationale for targeting only ultra-rich households for taxation is this: Since households are the final owners of almost all wealth, very few households exceed that ratio, penalties for evasion are much more effectively applied againt individuals, and their tantrums are much more easily confined, we believe that household taxes are the only viable tool to achieve wealth deconcentration and we do not regard increased business taxes as helpful to that objective.
2. Not our fight: Specific policies to raise the median.
Why: Operation Abigail’s purpose is to create a market incentive to encourage voluntary wealth deconcentration via coordinated market action. But to have a true incentive plan, the party designing the incentive plan must allow the party governed by the incentive plan the discretion to determine the specific techniques used to respond to the incentive plan. The moment the plan architects dictate method, the incentive ceases to be an incentive and becomes a mandate. The Adams Institute accordingly recuses itself from insisting upon any specific policy.
Our position is reinforced by our underlying belief in the merit of capitalism. Market actors can determine the optimum deployment of goods and resources better than government intermediaries. Capitalism for its part is not malicious; it’s not even a philosophy. It’s an amoral bundle of legal and market techniques like corporate franchises, limited liability, and capital markets used to pursue profits and capital accumulation. That capitalism is not responsible for extreme wealth concentration should be made plain enough by the fact that wealth concentration was a problem before capitalism ever existed. The only problem with capitalism is merely one of incentive. Operation Abigail’s purpose is to fix the incentive problem.
To reiterate Operation Abigail’s nature as a true incentive plan, the only role it gives the Federal Government in this incentive structure is to:
Enforce the incentive (via its power of household taxation);
Calculate how many households must be covered by the tax to capture market power (via its power to adjust the Ratio within a prescribed range) so as to endow the Ratio with distributive force; and
Administer the collection and distribution of revenues to the States.
Yet while as plan architects we won’t endorse any specific technique to raise the median, we emphasize that most policies advocated by others could coexist with the Ratio. Higher minimum wages, expanded safety nets, cash-settled or in-kind subsidies, stimulus payments, tax credits, enhanced benefits, job guarantees, employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), stock options, profit-sharing plans, pensions, labor unions, collective bargaining agreements, industry pay scales, debt relief, philanthropic giving, baby bonds, and various other methods could all be deployed alone or in some combination alongside the Ratio to raise the median.
The rest we leave to the discretion of private actors.
3. Not our fight: Specific uses of tax proceeds.
Response: The purpose of a federal job guarantee (FJG) is laudable: to ensure full employment in this United States. This idea is neither new nor radical. This was the purpose of the Full Employment Bill of 1945, which would have given all Americans “the right to useful, remunerative, regular, and full-time employment.” That proposal was never enacted into law. The question was revised in early versions of what became the 1978 Humphrey-Hawkins Act, but again that ideal never survived the legislative process. Although we are fully aligned with the FJG’s underlying mission of ensuring full employment, we do not officially endorse a FJG just as we do not endorse any specific approach to raise the median. Operation Abigail’s mission is to introduce a market incentive to induce voluntary wealth de-concentration through market actors; our purpose is limited to creating the incentive. Market actors, in concert with governments if they choose, must determine precisely how to achieve that goal.
4. Not our fight: Campaign finance reform.
Response: The social safety net treats some of the symptoms of wealth concentration. But not without side effects. Its main benefit is to ameliorate human suffering by alleviating household insecurity, thereby promoting stability and sedating violent revolutions. That benefit comes with two big risks, however: (a) an overreliance on patronage suppresses the underlying work ethic of chronic recipients; and (b) widespread systemic patronage risks producing long-term democratic-agency problems. The second concern is informed by the fact that democracy is based not on the fantasy that consent is given to the regime but in the possibility that it be withheld, and history tells us that only an independent middle class has ever wielded such agency from an historical standpoint. A depedent underclass by contrast is eventually reduced to mere instrumentalities of patronage. The safety net, despite its humanity and its benefits, can do nothing to mitigate that problem. Our view of the safety net is therefore that while it must exist for those who truly need it, optimal policy will minimize the numbers who do. For that, we need a plan of wealth deconcentration. So while we are not hostile to the safety net, expanding it is not our mission.
Preserve the republic. Protect the middle class. Amend the Constitution.
How? Simple. No gains for the middle, no gains for the top.
Operation Abigail could make it happen.
Preserve the republic. Protect the middle class. Amend the Constitution.
How? Simple. No gains for the middle, no gains for the top.
Operation Abigail could make it happen.
WE MUST ACT
Establishing our republic was the Founders’ great challenge. Preserving the Union and abolishing slavery was the task of the Civil War. The Lost Generation fought to liberate women, the Greatest Generation to liberate foreigners. But to us has fallen the most difficult mission of all: To restore the middle-class foundation upon which republican government rests. No policy, in all of history, has ever serenely reversed extreme wealth concentration.[*] Many palliatives and sedatives have been used to ameliorate its symptoms, but the disease has never been cured.[*] And it has proven mortal to all great republics which it has infected.[*] The disease of wealth concentration has infected America, and Operation Abigail is the cure.[*]
The official text of Operation Abigail
[IN DRAFT UNTIL NOTE REMOVED]
A PROPOSED AMENDMENT
TO THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO RESTORE MIDDLE-CLASS PRIMACY
AND FOREVER PRESERVE THE DEMOCRATIC-REPUBLICAN MODEL OF GOVERNMENT WITHIN ALL TERRITORIES SUBJECT TO THE JURISDICTION OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT
A/K/A “OPERATION ABIGAIL”
CONCEIVED BY A LOYAL CITIZEN
SECTION 1. Every census prescribed by the Second Section of the first Article of this Constitution shall calculate and publish the national median Household net worth accounting for every Household subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, and every household located on every Indian reservation, and all factors relevant to the determination thereof.
SECTION 2. Congress shall annually lay and collect taxes on every Household described in the preceding section whose net worth would otherwise exceed a prescribed multiple of the amount last published pursuant thereto, which for all property located within any territory subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, including all Indian reservations, shall, in the aggregate, initially be and never exceed [ten Thousand] times, or reduced below [one Thousand] times thereof[; and for all property located in all other territories shall, in the aggregate, never exceed [one-fifth] the limit established by such preceding multiple as is then in effect and as may change from time to time as described in the following sentence]. Congress shall prescribe such multiple within sixty days after the publication of each census, which multiple will remain in effect until adjusted by Congress after a subsequent census or as provided in the fifth section of this Article.
In determining liability for such taxes Congress shall account for all Property directly and indirectly beneficially owned by or for all natural Persons within such Households without regard to title, but disregard from the calculation of net worth: the appraised value of all Real Property not exceeding, in the aggregate, [one Hundred] times the multiple established in the preceding paragraph, to the extent used for non-commercial personal or household purposes; and, unless any such Person is or becomes employed by the government of any State or subdivision or the Government of the United States or, seeks to influence any Officer or Member of the Congress or of the Legislature thereof with regard to any act within the scope of their duties after the effective date of this article, and prior thereto with respect to the ratification of this article, or shall have been anywhere duly convicted of any felony, financial, or electoral crime, the value of any corpus of Property existing prior to the date this article (or any reduced multiple) takes effect which: is as of such effective date located within and not thereafter removed from the United States; or cannot actually be located within the United States without regard to any Treaty or foreign law conceived in subversion hereof.
Within [ninety] days after the ratification of this article, Congress shall prescribe legislation to effect the foregoing Intent and Purposes and punish and deter the evasion thereof without regard to any renunciation of citizenship, redomestication of any Household or any Person thereof (or any of its or their respective beneficiaries, heirs, descendants, successors, or assigns), expatriation of any Property outside of any territory subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, apportionment among the States, uniformity, any other census or enumeration or any other provision of this Constitution or of any Treaty or law. Such legislation may authorize, without limitation, the cancellation or assignment of any indebtedness or other obligation owed by the government to any Persons evading such taxes. The provisions of this article shall impose no cost or material administrative burden upon any Household other than those which are, or reasonably may be, liable for the tax imposed hereby.
Subject to the preceding paragraph, Congress may exempt from any provisions of this article foreign Households not circumventing its Intents and Purposes for the benefit of, or including, any current or former United States Persons, citizens, or resident aliens, or any of their respective beneficiaries, heirs, descendants, successors, or assigns, in perpetuity.
SECTION 3. Congress shall never impose any wealth, property, or any other direct or indirect tax determined based on the net worth or value of any Household assets, whether realized or unrealized, upon any Household, whose net worth, after giving effect to the principles described in the preceding two sections of this article, and during such time, is then below the multiple established by the second section of this article and as may be adjusted and in effect from time to time. Congress shall impose no new federal direct taxes upon any Households as described in the preceding sentence, or increase the relative rates of federal direct taxes payable by any such Households according to their criteria in effect as of the ratification date of this article, for a period of [twenty years] after the date this article takes effect.
SECTION 4. The Treasury shall distribute [all] Revenues collected in accordance with this article equally to each State ratifying this article within [sixty] days after its ratification by three-fourths thereof. Absent manifest error, controversies between States concerning such distributions shall be resolved favoring the more populous claimants. No State which fails to timely ratify this article shall ever be entitled to any portion of the revenues raised pursuant hereto, and no amendment to this prohibition shall be made or effective, without the consent of each State timely ratifying this article in the first instance.
SECTION 5. This article shall take effect and the next census made within three years after the date of ratification, and every subsequent census every [tenth] year thereafter. Congress shall allocate all resources as necessary, and the President shall use the executive power, to ensure the full and complete enforcement of the provisions of this article and the complete, accurate and impartial conduct of each census. Any State timely ratifying this article may bring suit in any Court of the United States to compel the enforcement of any provision herein. No Treaty shall be made, confirmed, or enforced to the extent conflicting with this article.
SECTION 6. Congress may suspend the tax required by this article, but only during such period that the aggregate net worth owned by the [middle three quintiles by annual income] of all Households described in the first section of this article exceeds [fifty percent] of the entire net worth owned by all Households described in the first section of this article, as determined by the last-published census; at all other times the tax shall automatically and without further action of Congress be reinstated in the last-effective multiple before such suspension, until Congress further adjusts such multiple as provided in the second section of this article.
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NOTES
That the diffusion and reconcentration of wealth dictates the diffusion and reconcentration of power, see e.g., Euripides, Suppliants, Line 238 et seq., Plato, Laws 679b, Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, 2.37.1, Psuedo-Xenophon, Old Oligarch, Constitution of the Athenians, 1.2 and especially Aristotle, Pol., 1291b, 1295b: “It is clear therefore also that the political community administered by the middle class is the best, and that it is possible for those states to be well governed that are of the kind in which the middle class is numerous, and preferably stronger than both the other two classes or at all events than one of them, for by throwing in its weight it sways the balance and prevents the opposite extremes from coming into existence. Hence it is the greatest good fortune if the men that have political power possess a moderate and sufficient substance.” On the question of middle-class agency, see, e.g., Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Nos. 73 and 79 (that “A power over a man’s subsistence amounts to a power over his will”) and Frederick Douglass, West India Emancipation speech at Canandaigua, New York, 3 August 1857 (that “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”). See also David Hume, On the Middle Station of Life, 1742. In regard to the American situation, see especially Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835, and Alexander Hamilton, 21 June 1788 remarks at the New York Ratifying Convention: “While property continues to be pretty equally divided, and a considerable share of information pervades the community; the tendency of the people’s suffrages, will be to elevate merit even from obscurity. As riches increase and accumulate in few hands; as luxury prevails in society; virtue will be in a greater degree considered as only a graceful appendage of wealth, and the tendency of things will be to depart from the republican standard. This is the real disposition of human nature.” See also a letter from John Adams to James Sullivan, 26 May 1776: “Harrington has Shewn that Power always follows Property. This I believe to be as infallible a Maxim, in Politicks, as, that Action and Re-action are equal, is in Mechanicks.” See also Noah Webster, An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution (1787): “On reviewing the English history, we observe a progress similar to that in Rome–an incessant struggle for liberty from the date of Magna Charta, in John’s reign, to the revolution. The struggle has been successful, by abridging the enormous power of the nobility. But we observe that the power of the people has increased in an exact proportion to their acquisitions of property.” See also, e.g., P. Woodruff, First Democracy, Oxford University Press 2005 (correlating ancient Greek regime types by socioeconomic rank) and P. Spufford, Origins of the English Parliament, 1967 (that the need to obtain consent from the commoners to taxation increased the prerogatives of parliament relative to the monarchy).
That the founding generation understood that America was born middle class, and that it was those middling origins which enabled the Founding Fathers to establish the United States as a democratic-republic during an age of aristocracy and monarchy, see, e.g. remarks from British Colonel Lord Adam Gordon in 1764; Benjamin Franklin, Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, 1751; Richard Price, Observations on Civil Liberty, 1776; Thomas Pownall, A memorial address to the sovereigns of America, 1783; Charles Pinckney, speech of 25 June 1787; and a letter from George Washington to Richard Henderson, 1788. For confirmation by contemporaneous observers, see Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835: “Amongst the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of conditions.” For confirmation by modern researchers, see Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson, American Incomes 1774-1860, NBER Working Paper 18396, 2012, showing that in 1774, New England and the Middle Colonies were the most egalitarian place in the measurable world.
The common intuition of mankind is that the middle class should own at least half. See Aristotle, Pol., 1295b, and James Harrington, Commonwealth of Oceana. For Harrington’s influence on the Founding Fathers, see a letter from John Adams to James Sullivan, 26 May 1776. That the intuition of ordinary Americans agrees, see Michael I. Norton and Dan Ariely, Building a Better America – One Wealth Quintile at a Time, Perspectives on Psychological Science, Association for Psychological Science, 2011 (a survey of a fair cross section of over 5,000 Americans on wealth distribution whose composite opinion, was that the middle 60% should own about 50% of the wealth).
Total national wealth is around $150 trillion. The middling share is 25.9% when the middle class is defined as the middle 60% by income quintile (Federal Reserve, Q4 2022) and 30.51% when it is defined as the middle 40% by wealth percentile (Federal Reserve, Q1 2024). The middling share of national wealth has decreased by approximately 3.5% in the past 20 years, and by about 5% in the past 30. Distribution of Household Wealth in the U.S. since 1989, Federal Reserve (based on the Survey of Consumer Finances and Financial Accounts of the United States).
See Carter C. Price and Kathryn A. Edwards, Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2020, calculating the gains that would have but did not accrue to ordinary Americans since 1975 relative to post-World War II run rates. The abstract states: “From 1975 to 2018, the difference between the aggregate taxable income for those below the 90th percentile and the equitable growth counterfactual totals $47 trillion.”
An approximate number, averaging Census Bureau median household net worth figures for 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022. The number will be updated periodically to account for new data.
An approximate estimate, based on evaluation of various publicly-available “rich list” and billionaire statistics.
That the Founders would have regarded extreme wealth concentration as un-American and advocated intervention in general, see, e.g., John Adams, Dissertation, 1765: “Property monopolized, or in the Possession of a Few is a Curse to Mankind. We should preserve not an Absolute Equality – this is unnecessary, but preserve all from extreme Poverty, and all others from extravagant Riches,” Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1785: “Legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property,” James Madison, Parties, 1792, advocating measures to “reduce extreme wealth towards a state of mediocrity, and raise extreme indigence towards a state of comfort” and Noah Webster, Miscellaneous Remarks on Divizions of Property … in the United States, 1790: “The basis of a democratic and a republican form of government, is, a fundamental law, favoring … a general distribution of property.” That the Founders would have advocated wealth caps specifically, see, e.g., John Adams to Abigail Adams, 25 August 1776, on Tiberius Gracchus reviving “the old Project of an equal Division of the conquered Lands, (a genuine republican Measure, tho it had been too long neglected to be then practicable).” The Lex Sempronia Agraria revised the Lex Licinia-Sextia, imposing hard caps on private use of public lands. This Gracchan tradition was earlier echoed by James Harrington, who advocated an agrarian law to balance the nobility with the commoners, capping landholdings at £2,000 annual revenues. See also John Adams to James Sullivan, 26 May 1776, advocating measures “to make the Acquisition of Land easy to every Member of Society: to make a Division of the Land into Small Quantities, So that the Multitude may be possessed of landed Estates.” See also Noah Webster’s favorable account of Gracchus: “Rome, with the name of a republic, was several ages losing the spirit and principle. The Gracchi endeavored to check the growing evil by an agrarian law; but were not successful.” Id. Thomas Jefferson’s actions are also part of the Gracchan tradition. See the first three drafts of Thomas Jefferson’s 1776 Virginia constitution, reviewed by James Madison, establishing a conditional 50-acre viritim (land grant) to every eligible adult male citizen. Read this measure especially in conjunction with his 1776 law to abolish entails and 1785 law to abolish primogeniture in Virginia, by which, he announced to John Adams, he “laid the axe to the root of Pseudoaristocracy.” Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 28 October 1813. Other states also abolished entails and primogeniture in an effort to avert wealth concentration. This tradition was continued by General Sherman’s Field Order No. 15, approved by Abraham Lincoln, making 40-acre land grants to freedmen from confiscated lands along the South Carolina and Georgia coasts. We may on that authority justly assert caps on private fortunes whose size exceeds some rational demarcation, to the extent such fortunes were facilitated by public support, including the benefits of public infrastructure, government subsidies, or legal rights of market exclusivity.
See Walter Scheidel, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, Princeton 2018. Shows that structural inequality has only been reduced by the shocks of plague, revolution, mass-mobilization warfare, or state collapse.
Examples of palliatives and sedatives include the Cura Annonae, Lex Thoria, pensions of the Han Dynasty, the Zakat, alms, and the social safety net.
That extreme wealth concentration brought down the Roman Republic, see, e.g., Appian, The Civil Wars, I.1, Sallust, Conspiracy of Catiline, 10, 33. I; 37.3, 38, 53, The Jugurthine War, 4, Livy, History of Rome, Preface, Tacitus, Annals, 3.27, Florus, Epitome, I, XLVII, Lucan, Pharsalia, 1.63. See also Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, 37.3; A. W. Lintott, Violence in Republican Rome, Oxford 1968, stating: “Roman writers after the collapse of the Republic were … united in believing that the operative factor throughout was a moral failure arising from the increase of wealth: this had led the governing class to seek riches and power without scruple, while at the same time economic inequality had made the lower classes desperate and ready for any crime against the state.” See also V. Duruy, Histoire des Romains, II, 46-47 (as quoted by A. Stephenson, Public Lands and Agrarian Laws of the Roman Republic), stating: “After having pillaged the world as praetors or consuls during time of war, the nobles again pillaged their subjects as governors in time of peace.”
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If we do not lay out ourselves in the Service of mankind whom should we serve?
Property monopolized or in the Possession of a few is a Curse to Mankind. We should preserve not an Absolute Equality.—this is unnecessary, but preserve all from extreme Poverty, and all others from extravagant Riches.