Mission Statement
Our organization seeks to inform the educated public, academics and political activists on the true purpose of the American political economy. There is widespread misunderstanding regarding the goal of the American system. Most American activists believe that freedom or equality are the most important values of the American system. We follow the philosophers who most influenced the founding of the United States, arguing that the central goal of the American system is practical, economic stability and security from the arbitrary use of force. Since the advent of the internet and ideological libertarianism, we have witnessed a resurgence of a type of person who is better able to take as much wealth and power as he can. We are in a dangerous period in our history, a time when authoritarianism is showing its power as a temptation to many citizens. Sadly, our activist class has often contributed to their resurgence by alienating voter-citizens by pursuing values that have no connection to the concrete well-being of average citizens.
We hold that for about a century now, a plurality of activists across the political spectrum have sought to use the political system as a vehicle to achieve moral goals. Drawing on the thought of thinkers who have had the most significant impact on our system, we show how and why this is wrong-headed; how good intentions indeed can end up as a ‘road to hell’. We explain how the treatment of politics as a vehicle for the achievement of moral absolutes has especially in the last half century harmed our well-being. The purpose of a political system is to maximize order and material well-being. A basic requirement for this goal to be sustained over time is the disincentivization of the strong man (“authoritarianism”) as a type who when allowed, causes chaos and suffering whenever he gains access to power.
The main goal of the modern political thinkers who had the most important impact on the success of the American paradigm was to find those motives, or incentives, which are naturally present in the types of individuals who make up all societies. We show how the goal of this system is to coordinate these four types to construct a stable social, political economic order with a primary goal being to minimize the chance that the strongman will be able to gain access to power. This goal is achieved first by understanding particular incentives of each type and second harnessing them to desired ends. A primary purpose of this site is to educate on this framework. While Americans are prone to assuming that human beings are all essentially the same and that freedom is a natural condition, we show that this assumption is not at work in our political-economy. This site seeks to explain each of the four types in terms of dominant motive related to political society as well as the outcome of this motive when it is engaged. Click here to be brought to the first of three charts explaining the model in detail.