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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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Pursuit, not Happiness
Tuesday, 5 May, 2026
The Open Door.October, 1723. Market Street Wharf in Philadelphia. A seventeen-year-old runaway stepped off a boat. Dirty from the journey, pockets stuffed with shirts and stockings. He carried his entire fortune on him, a Dutch dollar and about a shilling in copper. Food money for a few days and nothing else. He could not afford a room. The shilling went to the boatmen for passage down the Delaware. He had run from his older brother’s printing shop in Boston without permission and with no prospects. He knew no one in the city.He walked up Market Street looking for bread. He asked a baker for three pennies’ worth. The baker gave him three great, puffy rolls. He had nowhere to put them. He carried two under his arms and ate the third as he walked. A young woman watched him pass from her father’s doorway and decided he looked ridiculous. He probably did. Years later, after she had become his wife, they would laugh about it.Walking back toward the river, he came upon a woman and her child who had been on the boat with him from Burlington. He gave them the two rolls he had left. He was tired, friendless, nearly broke, and he had just given away two-thirds of his food.He drifted with the Sunday crowd into a Quaker meeting house near the market, sat down in the silence of unprogrammed worship, and fell asleep. When the meeting ended, a stranger gently woke him. He noted decades later in his autobiography that the meeting house was the first building he ever slept in in Philadelphia.The boy was Benjamin Franklin.The first house he slept in in his new city was a church, and the door was open. No guard checked his papers. No barrier to the kind of stranger Franklin was. Exhausted, unwashed, unknown. The door was open because we had not yet chosen to close it.That door is locked now. Most church sanctuaries in America are bolted on weekdays, and many even on Sundays. We claim good reasons. Security. Theft. Damage. And we’ve locked other doors a young person used to find open. The starter home. The trade. The boarding room. The open campus. Each lock added by someone defending what they had. Hear it again. The declaration of our belief is either true, or it is the most spectacular lie ever committed to paper.We tell ourselves we are dedicated to the pursuit of happiness. The phrase is familiar. National wallpaper. Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary of the English Language defined the words the Founders actually used. He defined “to pursue” as to hazard, to put to chance, to endanger. Pursuit was a verb of risk and motion. The Founders did not protect a state of contentment. They protected an action. Inherent in acting is a place to act, a door to enter, a runway from which to begin.A Republic that locks its doors against beginners has not protected the right to pursue happiness. It has protected the comfort of those who already arrived where the rest cannot follow.Act I. The VerbMay, 1776. Three weeks before Jefferson sat down in Philadelphia to draft the Declaration of Independence. A Virginian named George Mason was already drafting the Virginia Declaration of Rights. The document he produced contains a sentence that Jefferson read carefully and then condensed.Mason wrote that all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights. Namely, “the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”Four rights. The first two are life and liberty. Third, the “means” of acquiring property. We might call this ‘effort.’ We own ourselves first, and we labor. Our labor mixed with the world makes it ours. Fourth, the “pursuit” of happiness and safety. If property is the result of effort, happiness is in the pursuit, not the property.Life. Liberty. Effort. Pursuit. The Virginia Declaration is built around what citizens do, not what they receive.Jefferson tightened the language three weeks later. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Three rights, parallel and memorable, recited by schoolchildren two and a half centuries on. But our reading of the words changed over time.Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language was the standard reference for the educated Anglo-American world in 1776. Johnson defined to pursue in terms a modern reader would not recognize. To chase. To follow with hostility. To prosecute. To put to chance. To endanger.Pursuit was a verb of motion that cost something. It implied risk, friction, a thing that might fail. A man who pursued happiness in 1776 was not asking the state to deliver it. He was hazarding his life to chase it, knowing the chase might end in ruin.And what was the happiness he chased? Not what we mean by the word now.Eighteenth-century happiness still carried Aristotle’s meaning. The word translated the Greek eudaimonia. Flourishing. An active life of virtue. The full exercise of one’s faculties in the world. Aristotle argued that happiness was not a feeling but the function of a human being living well, exercising reason, participating in the city, raising a family, practicing a craft. The proper end of human life.By Mason’s time, happiness in serious political writing meant the conditions under which a free citizen could flourish. Not a pleasant feeling or satisfied desire. Not guaranteed comfort. So the phrase Jefferson preserved, read in its original meaning, says something close to: the unalienable right to actively chase a life well lived.That is the right the Republic was founded to protect. Not contentment. Not security. Not even comfort. The action of striving, conducted by free citizens moving in an uncertain world.Now consider who this right is for.Pursuit is not evenly distributed across our lives. It is concentrated in the years we stake a claim in the world. We leave home, learn a trade, marry, have children, borrow money, build equity in our first home. How old are we? Roughly between seventeen and forty. The years before, we prepare. The years after, we steward. Pursuit belongs to the young. The state cannot guarantee the young’s success. But the state should not lock the doors.This is not a complaint about older Americans. It is an observation about the structure of human life. A citizen at seventy enjoying the fruits of a long career is not pursuing. They have already achieved what they will achieve. A citizen at twenty-five who is trying to start a business, buy a first home, or raise a child is pursuing.The Constitution does not name pursuit as a right of the young. But the right is exercised primarily by the young. A structure that blocks the young from pursuit fails to deliver on the right.A Republic that takes the verb seriously asks a structural question modern policy debate almost never asks. Are the conditions of pursuit available to those who are just beginning their pursuit? Are the doors open to the seventeen-year-old who arrives with a Dutch dollar and a shilling in copper? Can a young couple of ordinary means, working ordinary jobs, find a starter home in a place where they want to raise children? Can a young person enter a trade without paying for credentials they cannot afford? Can a young family form, take root, and grow?Or do we have good reason to lock the door? We claim so. Security. Theft. Damage. Who benefits when we change from a country where young people can pursue into a country that protects those who have pursued? What did we protect?Act II. A Table With One Short LegOlder Americans hold the wealth.Americans aged 55 and older hold roughly 73 percent of all household wealth in the United States. Americans under 40 hold less than 7 percent. The ratio is at its most extreme in modern American history. It’s a long-term trend that’s been building for forty years.This is not an attack on older Americans. When you’re young, you live in an apartment that’s barely a room. You show up on day one of a job, and you don’t have the money to buy the uniform, so they loan you one. On and on. You have tough choices when you’re young, and you don’t have the resources to solve your problems. Wealth concentrates in older groups, because older people have had more time to save, more years of labor behind them, more compounded returns on whatever they put away. The question isn’t whether older Americans have more than younger Americans. Of course they do. They worked for it and saved. The question is whether the structural conditions that built that wealth are available to the young.Small, modestly priced starter homes on small lots built the postwar middle class. Banks financed terms an ordinary working family could carry. The Levittown houses sold in 1949 for around 9,000 dollars against a median family income near 3,000 dollars. Three to one. Affordable. Then the government got involved. Today, those homes are zoned out of legality across most of the country. In coastal California, the price-to-income ratio is eight, ten, twelve to one. The home that an ordinary working couple bought in 1949 is illegal to build today.A similar problem in trades. A young person in 1950 could walk into a printing shop or a building site and apprentice. Today, there are credentials, intake caps, licensing fees, and waiting lists that ration opportunity. In 1950, roughly five percent of the American workforce needed a government license to do their job. Today, the figure is roughly 25 percent. Fivefold growth in seventy-five years. Two-thirds of that growth came from lawmakers adding new occupations to the licensed list, not from the economy changing.Each rule has its reasons. Some of the licensing protects public safety. Some of the zoning preserves neighborhood character. Some of the credentialing maintains professional standards. Looked at one at a time, each protects an important interest.Together, they are a closed door. A wobbly table with a short leg.The rules protect existing practitioners, existing homeowners, existing professionals. People built this table one rule at a time over decades. They already had what the rules would protect. They weren’t villains. They acted through ordinary politics and ordinary self-interest. Each rule looked reasonable when they wrote it.A young couple paying low prices for clothes and electronics is not in a better structural position than their grandparents who paid higher prices for clothes but could buy a house on one salary. Consumer surplus is not capital. The affordable starter home, the apprenticeable trade, achievable family formation: those are the conditions today’s young cannot reach.The table wobbles. The young are supposed to pursue, and they can’t reach the edge to pull themselves up. The old, who have already pursued, sit at the table that lawmakers tell them is level. Then there are the chains of debt.The federal entitlement system that includes Social Security and Medicare promises benefits we haven’t funded. We didn’t design a system where each generation pays for itself. We built a system where one generation makes promises, and the next generation funds them.Now the trust funds are running down.Social Security’s main trust fund is projected to run out in 2033. Medicare’s hospital insurance trust fund is projected to run out the same year. When that happens, the programs do not disappear. Payroll taxes still come in. Social Security would have enough money to pay about 77 percent of scheduled old-age benefits. Medicare’s hospital insurance fund would have enough money to pay about 89 percent of scheduled costs. Congress can prevent those cuts, but only by raising taxes, cutting benefits, borrowing more, or changing the structure of the programs. The debt is real. The obligation is real. Future workers will service that cost through future taxes, future inflation, future benefit cuts, or a weaker country carrying promises one generation used, passing the cost to another.The earth belongs to the living. No generation can rightly contract debts that the next must pay. No generation may build a country the next cannot live in. The dead have no right to govern the living.That is the moral problem. The people who benefit from this borrowing are not the people who will repay it. The benefit goes to one generation. The cost falls on another. The second generation never consented to the transaction.The structures that protect the wealth of those who have already arrived were built by people who are now dead. We enacted Social Security in 1935 and Medicare in 1965. Zoning rules between 1970 and 2000. Licensing regimes accumulated decade by decade. Lawmakers no longer in office voted for each rule on behalf of people who have since aged into beneficiaries or passed on.We never asked the young of 2026.But they are paying anyway. Payroll taxes fund benefits the programs cannot honestly afford. Housing costs inflated by zoning rules they never voted for. Credentialing fees fund barriers they didn’t choose to build. And we are passing them the federal debt we are adding to keep the system solvent. They are funding a feast for a generation that will not be alive to pay the bill.The dead have no rights over the living.You can argue that earlier generations paid for their elders, too. That’s true. But in exchange, they inherited a country where the basic conditions of pursuit were available to them. Affordable housing supply. Reasonable paths to good jobs without four-year degrees. Career ladders that began in mail rooms and ended in corner offices. The previous bargain was reciprocal even if not formally negotiated. Children paid into systems that supported their parents, and they received in turn a country that worked for their own pursuit. Today’s young face the obligation without the bargain. We need to open some doors.In place of the structural argument, lawmakers in our largest state are having a different one.Act III. The CruxOn the November 2026 ballot in California is Initiative 25-0024.The measure would impose a one-time tax of five percent on the worldwide net worth of any California resident whose total wealth exceeds one billion dollars. Roughly 200 people meet that threshold. Together they hold somewhere around two trillion dollars. California projects the measure to raise approximately 100 billion dollars.Where do they intend that money to go? Ninety percent to the state’s healthcare program, Medi-Cal. Ten percent to public education and food assistance. SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West, the union representing the state’s healthcare workforce, sponsors and funds the measure. Proponents present it as a measure of generational and economic justice. The wealthy billionaire pays. The vulnerable Californian benefits.The political class argues that this is justice. Alongside union, order, defense, welfare, and liberty, justice is one of the six national goals named in the Constitution. How could we object? Let’s consider their argument.The wealth being taxed is held by Californians who have already arrived. Most are in their fifties and sixties. The 200 individuals subject to the tax are men and women whose pursuit is behind them. They built businesses, founded firms, accumulated capital, and now hold what their pursuit produced. Whether one approves of the scale of their accumulation is a separate question. The projected revenue will fund Medi-Cal. Medi-Cal is California’s Medicaid program, providing healthcare coverage to roughly 14 million residents. Look at where the dollars actually go. Children and working families are the largest enrollment categories. But seniors, who make up roughly 10 percent of enrollees, cost nearly twice the program average per person. Long-term care recipients who make up under 3 percent of senior enrollment consume roughly six times the next-highest senior care category. In 2024, California eliminated the asset eligibility test for long-term care. The program now subsidizes the long-term care of seniors regardless of their accumulated wealth or property. The wealth-transfer-at-death from one prosperous generation to the next is now structurally protected by the state’s healthcare program.So, what does this Billionaire Tax actually do?It taxes Californians whose pursuit is behind them. It funds healthcare consumption disproportionately benefiting Californians whose pursuit is behind them. It protects the inheritances of the children of wealthy seniors who would otherwise spend down their parents’ assets on care. It does little for the young Californian with no money striving to pursue. Nothing for the starter home she can’t afford. Nothing for the trade he can’t enter. Nothing for the family they can’t form because the median rent in the city where her job exists requires more than half their combined income. Nowhere does it propose what the alternative would actually require: small homes legal to build, lot sizes the market can clear, prices young families can afford, and healthcare for the children whose pursuit is yet to begin.This is not justice. This is intra-generational accounting, dressed in the moral vocabulary of justice. We cannot recreate the postwar economy. We can recreate the postwar bargain on housing. The small homes, ordinary financing, legal permission to build, without the racial exclusions that disgraced the original.Capital leaving the state makes the structural problem worse. A reported 700 billion to one trillion dollars in California-based wealth has left the state ahead of the January 1, 2026, residency snapshot date. That leaves a hollow tax base. The structural problem of locked doors, unaffordable homes, rationed trades, and bureaucratic accumulation remains untouched. It could be possible to have both redistribution and structural reform. Some redistribution is necessary. Some generational obligation is unavoidable. If the voter agrees to a wealth tax, the state could pair it with two structural reforms: preempt local zoning that prohibits affordable housing, and reform occupational licensing that blocks trade entry. That combination would serve both ends. The objection is not to wealth taxation in principle. The objection is to redistribution that ignores structural reform when the structural problems are within reach of policy.The argument here is not that redistribution is illegitimate. The argument is that redistribution disconnected from structural reform is not justice. It is political theater.The political class is using the word “justice” that could mean two different things. It helps to separate them.California’s meaning is transactional. A wealthy person has more than they need. A vulnerable person has less than they need. Move the surplus from the first to the second. This is the Billionaire Tax. A billionaire pays. A poor or sick or elderly Californian benefits. A transactional model of charity. A coin in the cup.The real meaning of justice is structural. It asks a different question. Not who pays whom inside the system, but whether the system works.Imagine you are designing the rules of a society. You will be a citizen there, but you don’t know where you will land in it. You don’t know whether you will be born wealthy or poor. You don’t know your race, your family, your intelligence, your health, your nationality. You don’t know which generation you will be born into. You don’t know whether you are the billionaire being taxed or the senior receiving Medi-Cal long-term care or the young Californian unable to afford a first home.Knowing none of these things, you sit behind a veil of ignorance and design the rules.Behind the veil, would you choose to inherit the system the United States runs in 2026? You would not. What rules would you choose?Behind the veil, you wouldn’t design a system that takes money out of someone’s pocket claiming to benefit the needy without first fixing the broken structural conditions. You wouldn’t call a one-time wealth tax justice while leaving every locked door locked. The Billionaire Tax sounds just in the first sense. It is a transaction that takes from the wealthy and gives to the vulnerable. Surely that must be justice.The Billionaire Tax fails the second sense entirely. It is a transaction in a system designed for structural injustice. The injustice was in the rules themselves. The zoning, the licensing, the unfunded promises, the locked doors. A measure that operates within those rules while leaving them untouched isn’t justice. It is the opposite of justice. It is a continuation of injustice in the service of the machine.Does this argument hate the poor and the elderly? Does it defend billionaires? Does it prefer that the vulnerable suffer rather than the wealthy contribute? It does not. We have an obligation to feed the hungry and clothe the needy, just as Ben Franklin gave two puffy rolls to the woman and her child. But the highest form of help we can give is not the coin in the cup. It is the restoration of the conditions under which a person can act, work, see, walk, and return to the table as a citizen rather than as an object of pity. The blind receive sight. The lame take up their bed and walk. The man at the gate goes home, returns to his work, and defends himself with his own voice.That is the deeper meaning of help. Not alms, even when they are needed. The removal of the condition that made the alms necessary in the first place.The Billionaire Tax is a transaction conducted around a broken system that it does not address. To insist on alms when restoration is possible is not the deeper love. It accepts the brokenness as permanent. It offers to soften the consequences while protecting the structures that produce them. To love the young is to give them sight. To open the doors. To restore the architecture of pursuit so that they need not depend on the alms of a generation that broke the system in the first place.Pursuit, not happiness.A Republic that takes the verb seriously cannot leave the doors bolted. It has to do the work.Let’s open some doors.SourcesBenjamin Franklin’s account of his arrival in Philadelphia in October 1723. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Part One, 1771. Available through Founders Online at the National Archives.Samuel Johnson’s definition of to pursue and pursuit. A Dictionary of the English Language, first edition, 1755. Available through Johnson’s Dictionary Online.George Mason, Virginia Declaration of Rights, drafted at Gunston Hall, May 1776, adopted by the Virginia Convention June 12, 1776. Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence, drafted in Philadelphia between June 11 and June 28, 1776, adopted July 4, 1776. Aristotle on eudaimonia as the proper end of human life. Nicomachean Ethics, Books I and X, fourth century BC. W. D. Ross translation available through MIT’s Internet Classics Archive.John Locke on self-ownership and the labor theory of property. Second Treatise of Government, Chapter V, “Of Property,” 1689. Available through Project Gutenberg.Wealth distribution by age cohort. Federal Reserve Distributional Financial Accounts, quarterly release. Levittown 1949 home prices. Digital History at the University of Houston, “Levittown” entry.1950 median family income. United States Census Bureau, Historical Income Tables, Families, Table F-7.Occupational licensing growth from five percent to twenty-five percent of the U.S. workforce since 1950. The figures appear consistently across sources from across the political spectrum:Council of Economic Advisers, Occupational Licensing: A Framework for Policymakers, July 2015. Issued under the Obama administration.Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, “The Rise of Occupational Licensing”, 2008.Mercatus Center at George Mason University, “Changes in Occupational Licensing Burdens across States”, 2018.The finding that approximately two-thirds of the growth in licensing comes from new occupations being added to the licensed list rather than from workforce composition shifts is from the Council of Economic Advisers report cited above.Social Security and Medicare trust fund depletion projections. Social Security Trustees, 2024 Annual Report (most recent at time of essay drafting). Medicare hospital insurance trust fund depletion projection. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Trustees, 2024 Annual Report. Mechanics of trust fund redemption being funded through federal borrowing. Congressional Budget Office, The Budget and Economic Outlook (annual report).Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, September 6, 1789. The phrases the earth belongs in usufruct to the living and the dead have no rights are from this letter, written from Paris during the early French Revolution. University of Chicago.Social Security Act of 1935 enactment date. Public Law 74-271, signed August 14, 1935. Available through the Social Security Administration’s history office.Medicare enactment date. Title XVIII of the Social Security Act, signed July 30, 1965, as part of the Social Security Amendments of 1965 (Public Law 89-97). Social Security Administration’s archive of LBJ’s Medicare signing.Initiative 25-0024. Full text available through the California Attorney General’s Office of Initiative Coordinator.The Preamble to the United States Constitution, naming union, justice, tranquility (order), defense, welfare, and liberty as the six national goals.Medi-Cal enrollment, expenditure, and demographic data. California Department of Health Care Services, Medi-Cal Statistical Brief. The findings that seniors at roughly ten percent of enrollment consume close to twice the program average per person, and that long-term care recipients at under three percent of senior enrollment consume roughly six times the next-highest senior care category, are derived from the most recent expenditure breakdowns published by the California Legislative Analyst’s Office.California’s 2024 elimination of the Medi-Cal asset eligibility test for long-term care. California Department of Health Care Services, “Asset Limit Changes for Non-MAGI Medi-Cal”, effective January 1, 2024.John Rawls, the veil of ignorance and the Difference Principle. A Theory of Justice, first published 1971, revised edition 1999, Harvard University Press. The thought experiment of designing rules behind a veil of ignorance is developed in Part One, Chapters 1-3. The earlier theological grounding for the argument appears in A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith, John Rawls’s 1942 Princeton senior thesis, published posthumously by Harvard University Press in 2009 with introduction by Joshua Cohen and Thomas Nagel.The healing of the man born blind. Gospel of John, chapter 9. The phrase one thing I know, that I was blind, now I see is from John 9:25.The healing of the lame man. Gospel of Mark, chapter 2, verses 1-12, and parallel accounts in Matthew 9 and Luke 5. The phrase take up thy bed and walk is from Mark 2:9. 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