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I BelieveGovernance and Philosophy in America A Top 10 Apple Philosophy Podcast Author: Joel K. Douglas
Governance and Philosophy in America A Top 10 Apple Philosophy Podcast joelkdouglas.substack.com Language: en Genres: Government, Philosophy, Society & Culture Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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Should Every Generation be Richer than their Parents?
Monday, 1 December, 2025
Act I. The Golden Handcuffs(SFX: Blizzard wind.)January 1914. Highland Park, Michigan. Six degrees above zero.Ten thousand men press against the iron gates of the Ford Motor Company. Wool coats thin as paper. Broken boots stamping frozen mud. The guards inside are terrified. The mob is too large, so they turn the fire hoses on them. The water hits. Soaks through. Freezes instantly to ice on their coats.The men don’t leave. They stand there, shivering, because a rumor has spread through the tenements of Detroit. A rumor that sounds like salvation:Henry Ford is going to pay five dollars a day.Understand what this means. At this moment in history, a factory man earns two dollars and thirty cents. He sleeps in a boarding house. Eats cabbage. Works ten hours until his back locks, then drinks away the pain at the saloon.Ford is offering double for eight hours of work. An invitation for a laborer to live like a human being.The men freezing at the gate think Henry Ford is their savior. They don’t know the whole truth. Ford didn’t actually raise wages to five dollars. Base pay stayed at two-thirty-four. The rest, two dollars and sixty-six cents, he classified as “profit sharing.”To get the profits, you had to pass inspection.Ford created something called the Sociological Department. This wasn’t just Human Resources. This was a private intelligence agency. He hired 150 investigators. Gave them badges. Cars. And a mandate:Go to the homes.Here’s how it worked:You finish your shift. Go home. Sit down for dinner.A knock at the door. A man in a suit walks in, doesn’t ask permission. Opens your cupboards. Checks your bankbook. Questions your neighbors.Does he drink? Is the house clean? Is he living with a woman who isn’t his wife?If the investigator didn’t like what he saw, if your wife was working, if you bought a luxury before you bought property, he marked a red check on his clipboard. It tracked half the workforce. It pushed them into ‘Americanization’ classes to scrub away their accents and teach them how to be proper, obedient citizens.Next payday? Two-thirty-four. The “profits” withheld. You’re on probation. Fix your life, or you’re fired.Now imagine you’re one of those men.You’ve been standing at the gate for three hours. Your coat is frozen stiff. Your children are hungry. Your wife is coughing blood because the tenement has no heat.Ford’s man finally opens the gate. He hands you the paperwork. He explains the terms.You read it. You understand it. You know what you’re trading. And you sign.Because what kind of person wouldn’t? You resent the privacy invasion, but your children need a warm house. Your wife needs a doctor. You need to stop drinking yourself to death just to get through the week.Ford is offering you a way out, and all it costs is permission. Permission for a stranger to walk through your door. Permission to judge how you live.That’s the trade. Autonomy for comfort. Privacy for security.And you take it. Who among us wouldn’t? Because we love our children more than we love our pride. We make the deal.What they thought would make their children richer came with a cost they didn’t see yet.The men took the deal. They stopped drinking. Cleaned their houses. Learned English. Bought the Model T. They became “materially better.” They had heat. Meat on the table. Shiny shoes.We judge prosperity in income, consumption, and lifespan. By every measure, Ford’s workers won.Their children grew up in warm houses. Went to school with full bellies. Had shoes without holes.The workers looked at their fathers, men who died at fifty with nothing, and they knew they’d made the right choice. They’d bought their children a better life.Ford’s productivity went up too, just like he planned. In 1913, Ford had to hire 52,000 men just to keep 14,000 on the floor. Turnover was running at 370% a year. Training a new man cost the company roughly $100 in today’s money every time someone quit after a week. The $5 day, even with the strings attached, was still cheaper than that chaos. And it worked.Absenteeism dropped. Turnover collapsed. It used to be 370% annually, but fell to 16%. Workers showed up sober. Worked faster. Made fewer mistakes.Productivity went up. Way up. In 1914, it took 12 hours and 8 minutes to assemble a Model T. By 1920? One hour and 33 minutes.Ford didn’t pay five dollars a day out of charity. He paid it because it was cheaper than chaos. A sober, stable, surveilled workforce was more profitable than a desperate, drunk, transient one. He cut turnover costs and saved $100M annually in today’s dollars. Profits doubled from 1914 to 1916. Every boss in America took notes. They called it ‘Welfare Capitalism.’ It sounded generous. It was actually a leash. The inspections weren’t about morality. They were about profitability. Ford’s workers paid for their own compliance. He didn’t force them. He bought them. He made submission profitable.The men took the deal. They quit the saloons. They scrubbed their floors. They opened savings accounts. They learned English in Ford’s mandatory classes. They bought Model Ts on installment, often from the same company that was watching them. Their kids went to school with shoes that didn’t leak.They didn’t clean their houses because he ordered it. They wanted the money. They didn’t stop drinking because he banned it. They couldn’t afford to lose the profit-share. They invited the inspector in because their children were counting on it.Other companies watched the numbers and copied pieces of it. General Electric, International Harvester, and dozens more launched profit-sharing plans. “Welfare capitalism” became the buzzword of the 1920s. An effort to control workers while, at the same time, giving the state no excuse to cross the property line. But once you accept that the price of a good life is constant inspection, you can’t unmake the deal. It becomes normal. The cost of living well. You trade your autonomy for comfort.Ford called this the Five Dollar Day. He called it profit-sharing. We still call it the birth of the Middle Class. We hold the products of the plans in high regard. Profit-sharing bonuses. Retirement plans. Medical services. What Ford proved, accidentally or not, is that he could get a huge chunk of the population to trade a very specific kind of liberty, the privacy in your own home and freedom from moral judgment by your employer, for material goods. And most of us would consider it a bargain.Pensions, profit-sharing, and the company doctor were born inside a surveillance program. In the 1920s, with no regulation, these tools controlled workers. We still call them benefits. We just stopped noticing the handcuffs. Act II. The Fugitive and The TenantHere’s the question that should bother us: Ford’s workers got the money. The cars. The warm houses. Did they actually get richer?To answer that, we need to go back to the old definition of property. Not the modern one, based on the number in your bank account. The old one. The one that defined what it meant to be free before anyone ever heard of an assembly line.Back to a fugitive on the run.1683. London. Past midnight.A man is packing by candlelight. One candle. Any more would draw attention from the street.His name is John Locke. Fifty-one years old. A philosopher, not a soldier. He’s spent his life in libraries, writing treatises on medicine and education that offended no one. But now his hands won’t stop shaking.He’s deciding what to bring. What to leave. What might get him killed if they search his bags.At the bottom of his trunk, wrapped in oilcloth, sits his life’s crown jewel. A manuscript. Two hundred pages arguing that kings rule by consent, not by God. That when a king becomes a tyrant, the people have the right to remove him. By force if necessary.If the King’s men find it, they won’t need a trial. Because King Charles II remembers.Charles was eighteen years old when Parliament put his father on trial. Eighteen when they declared that the people had the right to judge their king. Eighteen when they marched Charles I to a scaffold outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall, made him kneel, and took his head off with an axe while a crowd watched.Charles II spent the next eleven years in exile, begging foreign courts for money. He watched Oliver Cromwell and then Cromwell’s son sit on his family’s throne. He got it back in 1660, but he never forgot what happens when subjects start believing they can say no.So he kept lists. He paid informants. And when a group of rebels plotted to ambush his carriage at a place called Rye House, he didn’t just hunt down the gunmen. He hunted down everyone who’d ever given them ideas.Algernon Sidney. Beheaded. His crime? A manuscript found in his study arguing that people could resist tyrants. The judge declared that “scribbling is treason.”Lord William Russell. Beheaded. He’d spoken too freely about the rights of Parliament.John Locke watched his friends die. And he knew his manuscript was more dangerous than anything Sidney had written. Sidney argued resistance was sometimes justified. Locke was building a philosophical system that made resistance a duty. He was explaining, in precise and careful prose, exactly why Charles I deserved what he got.It wasn’t philosophy. It was sedition. A manual for revolution. Boots on the cobblestones outside. Voices. He doesn’t know if they’re coming for him or just passing by.He wraps the manuscript tighter. Buries it beneath his shirts. And slips out the back door into the English fog.He made it to the coast, probably a southern port. Locke was careful not to leave any records. He crossed the Channel to Holland and surfaced in Amsterdam before settling in Rotterdam.He changed his name. Called himself Dr. van der Linden. Grew a beard. Lived among a community of English exiles who had backed the wrong side and were waiting for the tide to turn.The English crown knew he was there. They pressured the Dutch government to return him. At one point, the threat grew serious enough that Locke went deeper underground. He lived with Quaker families who hid refugees.For six years, he looked over his shoulder. Watched for spies. Corresponded in coded language. He was never quite sure when the knock would come.He kept writing. They never found him. Then, his moment came in 1688.The Glorious Revolution. William of Orange crossed the Channel with a Dutch army. James, Charles’s brother, was now king, and he fled to France without a fight. Suddenly, the man who had been hunted for treason was a prophet.Locke sailed back to England on the same ship as Mary, the new Queen. He published the manuscript. His ideas would long outlive him.In that manuscript, Locke made an argument that seems obvious now but could get you killed then. He said property isn’t just your stuff. Not just your land, your house, your tools.Property is three things: Life, Liberty, and Estate. Your body. Your freedom to make decisions about your own existence. Your possessions.And you can’t separate them.They’re not three choices on a menu. They’re three legs of a single stool. Kick out any one, and the whole thing topples.If you own your labor, you own what that labor produces. You work. You sweat. You get paid. And once you have the money, no one gets to tell you how to spend it. Not a king. Not a lord. Not a bureaucrat. If they can tell you how to spend it, it was never yours. You were just holding it for them.The ideas spread through Europe.A century later, the ideas crossed the Atlantic.The men who wrote the American Constitution didn’t soften Locke. They sharpened him. His manuscript would eventually found America, where we owe allegiance to no King. Yale University calls Locke “an honorary founding father of the United States.”His book became the philosophical basis for the US Constitution. In it, the Fifth Amendment: “No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”The three-legged stool, written into the supreme law of the land.The Founders understood what Locke understood. The three parts of your property are one. Take away any one leg, and the others collapse. A man who owns his labor but cannot keep what it produces is a slave. A man who has possessions but cannot decide how to use them is a tenant. A man who has freedom but no security isn’t free.So they built protection around all three. The government cannot take your life, your liberty, or your property without due process.But they didn’t anticipate Henry Ford.The Constitution protects you from a government that wants to seize your property. It doesn’t say anything about you handing it over yourself.Fast forward to January 1914. Highland Park, Michigan. Six degrees above zero.Ten thousand men stand at Ford’s gate. Their coats are freezing to their bodies. Their children are hungry. Their wives are sick.Ford’s man opens the gate. Hands them the paperwork. Explains the terms. Keep your house clean. Stay sober. Let us inspect. And we’ll give you a life your father never dreamed of.They read it. They understand it. They know what they’re trading.And they sign.Locke ran from the deal. He chose cold exile and a borrowed name over a comfortable life with strings attached. He kept all three legs of the stool because he understood you can’t sell one without losing the others.The men at Ford’s gate made a different choice. They looked at their hungry children and their sick wives, and they decided that two legs were better than none.They thought they were gaining property. They became servants.When a stranger can walk into your house unannounced, open your cupboards, check your bankbook, question your neighbors, and then decide whether you get paid this week, you are not free.The house might have your name on it. The mortgage might come out of your paycheck. But if your ability to keep paying depends on his approval of how you live, you’re renting your own life.And here’s where the damage spreads.When Ford’s workers traded their autonomy for that five-dollar day, they didn’t just make a choice for themselves. They redefined success for everyone who came after. They taught their children that prosperity means having stuff, even if someone else holds the keys. Some say the American Dream is a measurement. They are often trying to convince you to vote for them. They ask, are you “materially better” than the generation before? They count the square footage. The gadgets. The horsepower. They act like Estate is the only leg of the stool that matters.But Locke, packing by candlelight, running from the King’s men, knew better.He left most of his stuff behind in a room in England. He knew his ability to choose and his voice were his most treasured estate. That brings us to a witness. Someone who looked at this bargain from the outside and saw it for what it was.Act III. The Witness(SFX: Night insects. A low fire crackling.)1688. Michilimackinac. The straits between the Great Lakes.The air smells of pine smoke and lake water. Two men sit on opposite sides of the fire.On the French side: Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce, Baron de Lahontan, twenty-two years old, lieutenant in the colonial marines. His uniform coat is unbuttoned, the silver gorget at his throat catching the firelight. A pewter cup of brandy rests beside him. He is scribbling notes on whatever scraps of paper he can find, because everything this man across from him says feels like it matters.Across the fire: Kandiaronk, called Adario by the French, called Le Rat for the way he always seems three moves ahead. He is perhaps forty, maybe fifty. No one writes down birth years here. A single eagle feather is tied into his roached hair. Around his neck hangs the wampum collar that marks him as the principal war chief of the Tionontati Petun settled at Michilimackinac. He is smoking a long red-stone pipe, passing it now and then to the young lieutenant who has learned not to cough.He has just pulled off the boldest diplomatic sabotage in the history of New France, and the French have no idea he did it on purpose. They think the peace collapsed by accident. In reality, Kandiaronk arrived with Iroquois prisoners, pretended to make peace, then secretly warned the Ottawa and Ojibwe that the French were about to betray them. When the trap sprang the other way, he shrugged and said, “I lied to save my friends.” The French governor called it treason. Everyone else called it genius.Now he is sitting across from a twenty-two-year-old French officer who writes everything down. Kandiaronk has noticed this. He is not the kind of man who fails to notice things.Lahontan is trying, one more time, to explain money. Kandiaronk watches the young man’s face as he talks. Lahontan is earnest. Educated. Uncomfortable in his own army in ways he probably doesn’t fully understand yet. The chief has seen this before. Some Europeans come to the forest and start asking questions they wouldn’t dare ask at home.These are the ones worth talking to. Sometimes they become useful.When Lahontan finishes, the chief taps ash from his pipe and speaks in fluent Algonquian-French trade jargon that Lahontan will later render into elegant Parisian sentences.“I have traveled to your forts,” he says. “I have seen men who own a hundred beaver skins starve because they owe a hundred and one. I have seen children whipped because their father could not pay a tax. You call this order. I call it a slower way of killing people.”Lahontan objects: “But without laws and punishment…”Kandiaronk cuts him off with a soft laugh that carries farther than any shout.“Punishment? We have no prisons. We have no gallows. When a man steals or murders, the women of his clan sit him down. They talk until he is ashamed. If he still will not listen, we give him a canoe and tell him to leave before the young men lose patience. That is all the punishment we need. Your way turns men into animals and then locks the animals in cages. Ours keeps them human.”He leans forward, firelight on the scars across his chest.“Tell me, my friend. In France, can a man refuse to fight in the King’s war without being shot? Can he leave a cruel chief without starving? Can he and ten friends decide tomorrow to make a new law, and have the rest obey it because it is just?”“No? Then do not speak to me of freedom. You have traded the forest for a chain you forged yourselves, and you call the chain beautiful because it is made of gold.”Lahontan says nothing. His brandy sits untouched.Kandiaronk studies him. The young man is not arguing. He is not defending his king or his church or his laws. He is just sitting there, turning the words over. A long silence. Only the fire and the lake. Then they talk about something else. Maybe the price of beaver pelts, or the route west, or nothing at all. But this conversation is one Lahontan will keep thinking about.Lahontan will desert the army five years from now, flee to Amsterdam, and publish these conversations almost word-for-word, only he will give his friend the pen name “Adario” and detail the dialogues happened over many nights. Europe will read them and argue for a century about whether they are true. Most will decide they cannot be, because no “savage” could speak this clearly.But tonight, in 1688, the words are real, spoken in the smoke between two men who already know the answer to the question we still refuse to ask.Fifteen years later, Kandiaronk will be dead of French smallpox, caught at the signing of the Great Peace of Montreal, the peace deal he earlier sabotaged to keep his people alive. By then, the math had changed. The Iroquois were too weak to threaten anyone. The French no longer needed Tionontati warriors. Kandiaronk made peace because there was no longer any advantage in war.He was right about the golden chain. But he couldn’t escape it either.The book Lahontan published will circulate through Paris salons for a century.Famous European philosophers will buy it. Rousseau will read it. Voltaire will quote it. Diderot will steal whole paragraphs for the Encyclopédie.Three hundred and thirty-five years after this night, another society, America, will build the most sophisticated cage ever invented. Some of the bars have names like “mortgages,” “credit scores,” “non-compete clauses,” and “401(k)s.” We tell ourselves the bars are there to protect us. When anyone brings up that the cage is still a cage, we answer that if you work hard enough, you can escape. Kandiaronk would not believe us.(SFX: The fire settles into embers. A loon calls across the water.)Act IV. The Murder WeaponWe love to congratulate ourselves.Look how far we’ve come, we say. In 1914, Henry Ford sent private detectives into workers’ bedrooms to decide who deserved their wages. Today? We’d never do that. Today we’re civilized. We have social programs. Food stamps. Section 8 housing. Medicaid. Disability checks. Subsidized daycare. Free school lunch.We call them proof that we’re kinder than the robber barons. Proof that we learned. Proof that we care. It’s the season for caring, after all. But did we fix the problem? Or did we make Ford’s system permanent?Kandiaronk is still sitting by that fire, three centuries dead. And he’s asking the same question he asked Lahontan: “Why do your people need permission to survive?”Ford’s Sociological Department never went away. It just got a bigger budget, better branding, and a government seal.The old version: Keep your house clean, stay sober, live the way we approve, and we’ll let you keep the profit-share. The new version: Fill out these forms to prove you still qualify. Don’t save too much, or you lose benefits. Don’t earn too much, or we’ll cut you off.Ford’s inspectors asked: Is your house clean? Are you saving money the right way? Today, we ask: How much is in your bank account? Who lives in your house? Are you working, but not too much?We build moats around people and tell them they’re bridges. Rules that say you can have housing assistance, but you can’t build equity. You can have disability benefits, but you can’t save for an emergency. We’ll help you survive, but only if you promise never to thrive.Locke left his possessions behind in a room in London. His ability to choose and his voice were his most treasured assets. We’ve built a system that offers the opposite bargain. We give people the stuff, the food, the housing, the check, but we take the choice. We take the voice.We created a class of people who are fed but cannot own. Housed but cannot build. Surviving but not permitted to rise. Kandiaronk would call them prisoners.Locke ran from the King’s men with a manuscript wrapped in oilcloth. Kandiaronk asked why his people needed permission to survive. Ford’s workers signed away their privacy for a warm house.That brings us back to the question we will finally ask. What does it mean for a generation to be “materially better” if the cost is that no one owns anything anymore?Somewhere along the way, we forgot the math. We decided that if the pile of stuff was high enough, we didn’t need the other two legs of our stool. We accepted a new definition of wealth: Consumption over Ownership. We traded the Title for the Lease.Locke and Kandiaronk had competing philosophies, but both agree that the self is more important than stuff. At the same time, there is no pure freedom without chaos. We may not be able to throw off the golden chains entirely. But we should also not cage an entire class of people with them.Freedom is our blood and our voice. Comfort is just jewelry on a corpse.We have more stuff than our ancestors could dream of. We have the phones, the cars, the calories. But we have less freedom than Locke or Kandiaronk could imagine.May God bless the United States of America. Music from Epidemic SoundArtist: NyloniaSong: Transmission Road Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe
