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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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The Social Responsibility of Government is Sovereignty
Tuesday, 12 May, 2026
The trailer’s loaded by four. Twenty-five head, sorted yesterday, the gate latched twice. The F-350 idles in the yard while he checks the running lights one more time. Jesse watches from the cab, ears up. The Bentley mark on her forehead catches the radio light. She is certain about the day.Buffalo to Torrington is four hours if the roads are dry. He pulls out of the drive at 4:17 and turns south on 25, coffee in the holder, the dog settled, the cattle quiet behind him. The dash reads twenty-six degrees. The eastern sky is still black.He’s made this drive many times over thirty years. His father made it before him in a different truck, but the math was the same. Raise them, feed them, haul them, take what you’re offered. The price is the price.He knows what he’ll get today, give or take. He knew last week. The packers’ bids move together. Four buyers act like one buyer because that's what four buyers do when they're the only four.. He’s run the numbers a thousand times. Grass, water, fuel, vet, the loan in 2022 when the rates were still reasonable. Every time, the numbers are the same. He needs the price to be a little higher than it’s going to be.The radio finds a station out of Casper. He turns it down but not off. Jesse walks a circle on the seat and lies down, chin on the console.Past Glenrock, the sky starts to come up gray. He thinks about their three kids. The oldest is in Denver. He and his wife have been trying to buy a starter house for four years. Every time they save up, the prices have moved. The middle one is in Cheyenne. She’s a nurse, her husband works for the railroad, and they want three kids but can’t afford for either of them to take a year off. The youngest is in Billings. After a year of work, he’s decided to give college a try, looking at the University of Wyoming for the fall. He doesn’t know what he might do after. The ranch needs him to come back and run things. There hasn’t been money for two households in a while.He passes a gas station outside Douglas. Diesel is up again from last week. By the time he hits Torrington, the sun is full up, and the lot is filling. Trucks from Goshen County, from the Panhandle, from up north like him. Men he’s known for years and men he’s never seen. They nod at each other and back their trailers toward the chutes. The auction starts at nine. The buyers are already inside, drinking coffee, looking at the sheets.He kills the engine and sits for a second. Jesse stands up in the seat. A beautiful morning. He’s not asking for anything. He’s done the work. The cattle are good. The truck runs. The loan gets paid. He’d just like the price to be the price his work is worth, in a market that is what it was supposed to be.He opens the door. The cold comes in. Jesse jumps down ahead of him, but she’ll stay with the truck.Act I. Scene 1. The Half of Friedman Everyone QuotesFifty-six years ago, in September of 1970, the New York Times Magazine published an essay that has shaped American economic thinking ever since. Author Milton Friedman, a University of Chicago economist who would win the Nobel Prize six years later. The title was The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, about three thousand words long. Most people who quote it have read the title and a paragraph or two.This essay, more than any other, changed how business in America works.The commonly understood argument is straightforward. A corporate executive is an employee of the shareholders. His job is to make money for them, within the rules. If he spends company money on social objectives, such as reducing pollution beyond what the law requires, hiring quotas beyond what the market supports, or making charitable contributions beyond what serves the business, he is spending other people’s money on objectives those people did not choose. Taxing the shareholders without their consent.The phrase that survived is the one that was easiest to put on a coffee mug. The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. It became a motto, then a worldview. By the time Reagan took office in 1981, it was the dominant framework of American corporate governance. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it had become something close to common sense. Maximize shareholder value. Let the market sort the rest.Before Friedman’s thesis, many businesses believed they had a broad role to maintain an equitable balance among interest groups. Stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large.Friedman drew a different line. Businesses owed shareholders profits. Social objectives were the work of a different institution. His thesis cleared the way to dismantle the post-World War II structure. Businesses would have minimal obligation to workers, communities, and the country. Their obligation was money. Manufacturing went offshore. Industries consolidated. Productivity gains flowed to CEOs and shareholders instead of workers. Friedman’s thesis was the one people reached for when they needed cover.And the dagger…Friedman was right. The logic is sound. An executive who pursues social objectives with shareholder money is doing two things he is not authorized to do. He is making policy decisions that, in a democratic Republic, are supposed to be made through political deliberation. And he is taxing the shareholders to fund those decisions, without their vote, and without their consent. The objection most people raise to Friedman is that the framework is too narrow. Businesses operate in a society, depend on a society, and owe something back to the society. Treating the corporation as a profit-maximizing machine misses the human reality of what corporations actually are. These objections have weight. Businesses do operate in society and depend on it. But the objection misses the counterpoint. Friedman himself addressed this concern in the same essay. The part nobody quotes.Act I. Scene 2. The Half Nobody QuotesFriedman continued. A few hundred words after the line that became the coffee mug, he wrote that if anyone is going to pursue social objectives with public resources, that person has to be a civil servant. Selected through a political process. If anyone is going to impose taxes and spend money on those objectives, there has to be political machinery. Machinery to decide what taxes to assess. Machinery to decide what objectives to pursue.That’s the part nobody quotes.Friedman is not saying social objectives don’t matter. He is not saying businesses have no obligation to society. He is saying these obligations matter so much that they need a specific kind of institution to pursue them. That institution is not the corporation. That institution is the government. Friedman wrote a complete system. Two halves. The corporation does its job, which is profits. The government does its job, which is everything else the public decides matters.The two halves depend on each other. Social objectives matter. They don’t go away when business stops pursuing them. Without the government doing its job, business doing its job isn’t enough. Friedman knew we need both. He wrote it down. Published it in the same essay.The business disciples kept the first half. They have no role in the government half, so they dropped that part. The part about taxes assessed through deliberation. The part about objectives chosen through consent. The part about political machinery that the public controls.That’s the part that holds the whole system together. And because it had no champion, we lost it.So business profits increased. Industries consolidated. Wages stagnated. Housing got unaffordable. Then, instead of making the rules fair again, making the two halves fit together, we decided we would let business do whatever they needed to increase profits. Workers didn’t get their fair share of wages, but no matter. We would instead funnel money through our political machine to help people have enough money to live. How would we afford to pay for that? A great question. Act II. The PetrodollarThe answer is borrowing. For fifty years, we have paid for things by borrowing money instead of raising taxes. That sentence is ‘History 101’ of federal finance since the early 1970s. We spend more than we collect. We make up the difference by selling government debt. Treasury bonds. A buyer hands us cash today, and we promise to pay them back with interest later.For most of those fifty years, the buyer wasn’t us.They were foreign. Specifically, the buyer was a government or a central bank in another country that had piled up dollars from selling oil and needed somewhere safe to put those dollars. American Treasury bonds were the safest place in the world. So the dollars came back to us. We borrowed them. We spent them. The deal worked because countries sold oil in dollars all over the world, and the dollars had to come home eventually, and home was the US Treasury.This arrangement has a name. Petrodollar recycling. Here’s how we built it.In 1971, Richard Nixon took the United States off the gold standard. Until that day, every dollar in circulation was backed by gold held at Fort Knox. After that day, the dollar was backed by nothing except the promise of the United States government. Nothing physical. Just a promise.That should have been a problem. A currency backed by nothing usually loses value. Other countries should have stopped accepting dollars and started demanding something more solid.They didn’t. Because three years later, in 1974, America made a deal with Saudi Arabia.The deal was simple. Saudi Arabia agreed to sell its oil only in US dollars. In exchange, the United States agreed to protect the Saudi regime and to let Saudi Arabia invest its oil profits in American debt. Other oil-producing countries followed. By the late 1970s, almost all oil in the world was sold in dollars. Every country that wanted oil had to hold dollars. Every country that sold oil ended up with dollars. And those dollars came back to the United States Treasury, looking for a safe place to sit.That’s the petrodollar arrangement. Oil bought and sold in dollars. Dollars recycled into Treasury bonds. America got to borrow cheaper than any other country in the world, because the world had no choice but to lend to us.When a government has to raise taxes to pay for things, the people feel it. They argue about it. Vote on it. They send representatives to a chamber to fight about what’s worth the tax and what isn’t. That’s the political machinery Friedman said was the whole point. It’s slow. Contentious. It’s how a free people decide what they want their government to do.When a government can borrow instead of tax, the people don’t feel it. The bill doesn’t come due today. The bill comes thirty years from now, paid by people who weren’t in the room when the decision was made. The argument doesn’t happen. The vote doesn’t happen. The political machinery doesn’t run.The dead exercise rights over the living. The petrodollar arrangement let the United States skip the political machinery.The petrodollar wasn’t the only reason we borrowed. Demographics shifted. Healthcare costs ran wild. Tax cuts went through without matching spending cuts. We went to war without war taxes. Recessions came and stimulus answered. The pressures pushing toward more debt were real, and they came from every direction.But every other country in the world faces the same pressures, in some form. And every other country eventually hits a wall. The bond market pushes back. Borrowing costs rise. The currency loses value. The politicians have to choose. America didn’t hit that wall. The petrodollar arrangement absorbed the pressure and dissolved it. We could borrow and keep borrowing, because the world had nowhere else to put its dollars.Want a transfer program? Borrow. Want a war? Borrow. Want to subsidize healthcare, housing, agriculture, energy? Borrow. We still hear these ideas today, in hidden words. How would we pay for healthcare for all? Universal basic income? EV tax credits? A $1.5 trillion defense budget? Tax cuts? The government will pay for it. How? With debt. So, business did its job, government skipped its job, and the bill went on a credit card foreign nations were happy to carry. The political machinery rusted. Deliberation stopped. We no longer needed consent, because we no longer felt the cost. That’s how we could pretend to afford to funnel money through the political machine instead of fixing the rules. We couldn’t afford it. We borrowed it. From people who weren’t in the room. To pay for objectives we never deliberated. Through a machine that rusted and seized up when the bill stopped arriving.Even though we didn’t have to pay the bill up front, we are still paying the cost. Act III. The BillThe arrangement is breaking.Not collapsing. Breaking. Slowly. A piece at a time, each piece small enough to ignore, the cumulative weight harder to ignore each year.Foreign central banks don’t buy as many Treasuries as they used to. China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, and Brazil are settling oil and other commodities in their own currencies more often. They’re buying gold instead of dollars. They’re building payment systems that route around the dollar. Each move is small. Together they’re a drift. The drift is twenty years old now, and it’s accelerating.What it means for us is simple. Borrowing costs more and will keep costing more. The bond market is starting to ask questions it didn’t ask before. The forty-year subsidy on American debt is wearing off.That’s the bill.It doesn’t arrive as a piece of paper with a number on it. It arrives as everything we put off, popping up in the lives of the people who inherited the deferral.The rancher’s been thinking about his kids the whole drive.The oldest in Denver. He and his wife have been trying to buy a starter house for four years. Every time they save enough for a down payment, the prices have moved. The last house they looked at was three-twenty. The bank qualified them for two-ninety. They decided to wait another year.The middle one in Cheyenne. She’s a nurse. Her husband works for the railroad. They have one child. They want three. But the cost of raising each one keeps going up faster than what they can save, and they can’t afford for either of them to take a year off when a baby comes. They decided to wait.The youngest in Billings. After a year of full-time work, he decided to give college a try. The University of Wyoming for the fall. He’s not sure what he’ll study. He’s sure that without the degree, the wage he’s been earning won’t earn the life he wants. The question he can’t answer is what the degree is going to cost. He doesn’t know how much he’ll have to borrow. He doesn’t know what he’ll earn when he graduates. The math is fuzzy.Three kids. Three good kids. Each one in a different city, in a different profession, running into a different version of the same wall.The oldest can’t afford the house his parents bought. The middle can’t afford the family her parents raised. The youngest can’t afford the path we told him would work.This is what the bill looks like when it lands in working lives. Three kids in three cities, deciding to wait. A house deferred. A child deferred. An adult life deferred.The bill is the gap between what their labor is worth and what their lives cost. The petrodollar arrangement let us paper over that gap for forty years by funding programs with deferred borrowing. The patches were transfer programs, and tax credits, and student loans, and housing subsidies, and all the downstream machinery that papered over what was happening upstream. The patches cost money. We borrowed the money. The bill came to the kids.They didn’t borrow it. They got handed the math.The rancher in the auction yard in Torrington. The lot is filling. He’s not angry at the kids. He’s not even worried about them, exactly. They’re working. They’re doing what they were told to do. They’ll figure it out, the way he figured it out, the way his father figured it out before him.But he can see the math. He’s been doing his own version of it for thirty years. Grass, water, fuel, vet, the loan. The price at the auction. The numbers that don’t quite work.He’s been a price-taker his whole life. His kids are price-takers too. Different markets, same lesson. That’s the bill. Not what comes due thirty years from now in some abstract Treasury auction. What comes due right now, in his oldest’s apartment in Denver, in his daughter’s hospital shift in Cheyenne, in his youngest’s tuition decision in Billings.If that’s the bill, how do we pay it?Act IV. The WorkThere are five things the government has to do. Structural things that set the conditions a working life can fit inside of.Energy. We pump our own oil, refine our own fuel, build the grid that carries our own power. Energy independence isn’t just a trade-balance number. It’s the only way out of the petrodollar arrangement that doesn’t require the world’s permission. We had to make a deal for oil in 1974. We don’t have to make that deal again if we don’t need to import.Reshoring. We bring the factories back. Not all of them. The critical ones. The ones that make the things a country has to make if it wants to be a country. Things like steel, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, inputs to our defense. Tariffs won’t do this on their own. Tax policy, regulatory policy, infrastructure investment, and serious industrial strategy do. Broad tariffs are theater that puts money into one man’s pocket. The work is harder than performance.Antitrust. The four packers. The three airlines. The two grocery chains in most American towns. The handful of tech firms that decide what most Americans see and hear. Markets don’t function when the buyers all act like one buyer. The rancher in Torrington knows this in his bones, and so does anyone who’s tried to start a business in an industry where the incumbent owns the supply chain. Government broke up Standard Oil in 1911 and AT&T in 1982. Government remembers how to do this. We just stopped doing it.Infrastructure. The real kind. The kind that lets a starter house get built in Denver. The kind that builds American tech training instead of hiring foreign workers on H-1B visas. The kind that lets a kid in Wyoming or Delaware go to college without inheriting thirty years of debt. We’ve spent forty years deferring investment in human capability infrastructure because borrowing for transfers was easier than building for capacity. The bridges are the visible part. The harder part is the public goods that make private work possible.Fiscal rules that survive elections. Not austerity. Not a constitutional amendment. The discipline of making each Congress face the cost of what it spends, in the year it spends it, before the bill goes to the bond market. Pay-as-you-go for new programs. Sunset clauses on tax cuts. Honest accounting on entitlements. The mechanics are technical. The principle is Friedman’s. If we want social objectives, we have to deliberate about them, vote on them, and pay for them.That’s the real work. None of it is easy. None of it is fast. All of it is upstream of the lives that are running into the wall right now.This isn’t austerity. It isn’t libertarian. It isn’t a plan to shrink government. It’s a plan for government to do its job. Build the conditions. Set the rules. Fund the commons. Then leave the citizen alone.Because the point of everything the government does, like antitrust, energy, reshoring, infrastructure, and fiscal discipline, is what it produces downstream. A market that’s a market. A wage that supports a life without taxpayer support. A house a family can save for. A college a kid can afford that trains them for a high-paying job. An adult life that doesn’t require deferral.The work is government’s work. But government doesn’t do work that citizens don’t demand.Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. The political machinery doesn’t run unless we make it run. The rancher is pulling an empty trailer home. The check in the console. The price was the price. He didn’t get more than he expected. He didn’t get less.Past Glenrock. The sun behind him now, low on the right. Jesse asleep on the seat. The dash reads forty-one degrees. Here’s what the rancher knows.He’s done with voting for politicians who promised America first and didn’t deliver. And he’s done with politicians who raged against the other party, said they would make meaningful change, and failed to deliver for the American people.If the senator had a term and didn’t try to break the meatpacker monopoly, he’s done with him. If the congressman had a term and didn’t try to kick start the small house market, he’s done with her. If the president had four years and the deficit kept climbing while the patches kept failing, they lost their chance.He doesn’t care which party. He doesn’t care what they say next time. He cares what they did with the term they had.That’s not a program. It’s discipline. The kind the Republic requires from its citizens when the institutions have stopped requiring it from themselves.He thinks about the kids. The oldest, doing the math on a house. The middle, doing the math on a family. The youngest, doing the math on a degree. All three of them waiting.He’s not going to wait.His vote is the only lever he has, but at least he has one. He’s going to use it. Every cycle. Against any incumbent who didn’t try.The ranch is a long drive ahead. The Bighorns are catching the last of the light. He pulls onto the gravel. Kitchen window light on. Jesse is up now, ears forward.He kills the engine and sits for a second.The vote is his. And he’s going to use it.SourcesMilton Friedman, The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits. The New York Times Magazine, September 13, 1970. The full essay, including the part nobody quotes about civil servants and political machinery.Frank Abrams, “Management’s Responsibilities in a Complex World.” Harvard Business Review, May 1951 (paywalled). The Standard Oil chairman’s stakeholder-balance framework, written nineteen years before Friedman pushed back.Frederick Douglass, West India Emancipation. Speech at Canandaigua, New York, August 3, 1857. Power concedes nothing without a demand.Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Madison, September 6, 1789. The earth belongs to the living letter.David E. Spiro, The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony: Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets. Cornell University Press, 1999. The standard academic account.Andrea Wong, The Untold Story Behind Saudi Arabia’s 41-Year U.S. Debt Secret. Bloomberg, May 31, 2016. The reporting that revealed the previously classified 1974 Saudi-Treasury agreement.Federal Reserve History, Nixon Ends Convertibility of US Dollars to Gold. Background on the August 15, 1971 announcement.U.S. Treasury, Historical Debt Outstanding. Annual gross federal debt by fiscal year, 1790-present.Congressional Budget Office, The Budget and Economic Outlook. Annual report on federal deficits and structural fiscal pressures.U.S. Treasury, Major Foreign Holders of Treasury Securities. Tracks the decline in foreign Treasury holdings as a share of outstanding debt.International Monetary Fund, Currency Composition of Official Foreign Exchange Reserves. Quarterly data tracking the dollar’s declining share of global reserves.World Gold Council, Gold Demand Trends. Central bank gold purchases, including the record buying since 2022.Derrell Peel, Oklahoma State University Extension. Weekly cattle market reports and analysis on packer concentration.Northern Ag Network, Beef Cattle: Market Concentration. May 5, 2026.United States v. Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey, 221 U.S. 1 (1911). The 1911 breakup, cited in Act IV as evidence that government remembers how to do this.United States v. AT&T, 552 F. Supp. 131 (D.D.C. 1982). The 1982 consent decree. The other example.Economic Policy Institute, The Productivity-Pay Gap. Tracks the divergence of worker compensation from productivity gains since the early 1970s.Joint Center for Housing Studies, Harvard, The State of the Nation’s Housing. Annual report on housing supply, affordability, and the first-time homebuyer wall.Federal Reserve, Consumer Credit Report (G.19). Total outstanding federal student loan debt and trends.Companion piecesThe Sand Trap. The longer treatment of petrodollar recycling.The Price Is the Price: A Letter to Raging Moderates. The rancher, the four-packer cattle market, and the price-taker frame.Both Fly. The rancher on tariffs and Article I. Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe
