01.
Mission
Why Operation Abigail establishes middle-class primacy as the constitutional principle aligning capitalism, ownership, and republican self-government.
01.00 Summary: A “genuine republican Measure”[1]
Preserve the Republic. Protect the middle class. Amend the Constitution.
Operation Abigail exists to preserve the republican model of government by restoring middle-class ownership.
The diffusion of wealth dictates the diffusion of power.
A republic cannot survive without a strong middle class.
Our vision is both conservative and egalitarian: To restore the conditions that once sustained American virtue, prosperity, and independence, while preserving the equal liberty secured through later reform.
Our task is therefore clear:
Preserve the republic.
Protect the middle class.
Amend the Constitution.
01.01 The guiding principle
The diffusion of wealth dictates the diffusion of power.
To have a commonwealth, the commons must have the wealth.
Power follows wealth.
Ownership cannot be left entirely to chance, for it dictates regime type.
When wealth concentrates, power concentrates. When wealth diffuses, power diffuses.
Only when wealth is broadly diffused in an entrenched, upright, and independent middle class is democratic and popular government possible.
01.02 The middle-class standard
The middle should own half.
A stable republic requires that the middle class hold a sufficient stake in society.
The common intuition of mankind long ago discovered the optimal share: at least half.
A republic is no less about the broad distribution of property than it is about the equal distribution of liberty.
A large middle class makes good government possible. Because the best government exists not where the people’s voice is loudly proclaimed, but where all may speak, yet have nothing to say.
This happy condition cannot exist unless most of the people are economically secure, devoting their focus to the optimistic pursuit of gain.
01.03 The governing rule
This is not redistribution. This is realignment.
No gains for the middle,
No gains for the top.
Operation Abigail is not about redistributing wealth through government intermediaries via revenue taxation. It is about deconcentrating prosperity through market actors, via incentive realignment.
Capitalism works best when ownership expands alongside success.
When prosperity is shared, households are confident customers.
When prosperity narrows, households become cautious, spendthrift dependents.
In a republic, the middle class must come first, for that is what a republic is.
In market capitalism, the middle class must come first, for that is who sustains demand.
Where interests align, markets remain free. Where they undermine the middle class, intervention is required to restore alignment.
The proper form of intervention for democratic capitalism is an incentive plan. If apex growth depends upon median growth, the system achieves optimal outcomes through markets rather than mandates.
We do not assert that the liberty to pursue vast fortunes is not sacred. We recognize that in a capitalist republic, the preservation of the middle class is more sacred.
01.04 The constitutional commitment
Let us finish what the Founders began.
The preservation of a republic requires that every dominating form of power remain subject to constitutional limits.
Whether it be the powers of presidents, generals, judges, legislators, or private citizens, a republic cannot endure if its constitution limits every power except the one power that rules them all: concentrated wealth.
The original method used by America’s founders to prevent the accumulation of dynastic wealth – the abolition of primogeniture and entail at the state level – no longer works in a modern capitalist economy.
Capitalism itself depends on dispersed economic agency. Demand, innovation, competition, and mobility cannot flourish where wealth is concentrated and stagnant.
Constitutional limits therefore need only apply to the extent wealth concentration threatens the middle-class foundation on which both free markets and self-government rely.
Unlike state-level interventions used in the early republic, today’s remedy must be supreme, uniform, and entrenched.
To that end, we pursue a constitutional amendment. For while the Constitution secured the legal form of a republic, it is powerless to preserve its political substance: an upright and independent middle class, continually refreshed by upward mobility.
01.05 To restore what is best in America
No gains for the middle, no gains for the top.
We do not seek to reinvent American capitalism.
We seek to return it to good working order.
The task is not to transform our economy or society, but to restore the shared prosperity that once allowed capitalism, social mobility, and constitutional government to reinforce one another.
We do not reject market capitalism and we do not condemn the rich. We seek only to change their governing incentive from apex maximization to middle-class optimization.
We will achieve this by scaling capitalism’s most powerful invention to the national scale: the long-term incentive plan.
Our aim is broader ownership and wider participation in success, not the contraction of achievement. We want more winners, and happier. Not fewer, bigger winners, retreating from the society that sustains them.
We do not pursue equal outcomes, like some on the left may desire. We do not pursue maximalist outcomes, like the right is sometimes said to do. We pursue optimal outcomes, from standpoint the middle class.
A free nation thrives when citizens have a stake, and dies when they become permanent renters rather than owners within it.
To preserve the republic,
to promote the general welfare,
and to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity,
we commit to restoring middle-class ownership as the foundation of American self-government.
Middle-class primacy is our mission. Amending the constitution is our task.
END OF PART 01
