The Series

I’m starting a new series about the Constitution and the economy. The purpose is to help us better understand what the Constitution was built to do, what our economy was meant to be, and how far we’ve drifted from both.

This series will cover what Social Security was supposed to be and what it’s become. How the government was originally designed to protect the working class. And what it means that CEOs went from making 20 times the average worker’s pay to over 350 times — in the span of one lifetime.

Here’s the question that drives the whole series. Has the working class become the modern serfs of a new kind of lord? And has our government become the new king that the Constitution was built to protect us from?

We seem to be drifting back toward kings and lords without any of the loyalties that came with the old arrangement. The medieval lord was bound to his people — he had to feed them in famine, defend them in war, keep them on the land in old age. The deal was bad, but it was reciprocal.

The modern version has the binding without the protection. We’re locked into jobs by healthcare we’d lose if we left. Locked into careers by student debt we can’t escape. Locked into companies by retirement accounts we can’t move. The economic handcuffs are real even when nobody calls them that. We work for the empires until they no longer need us — and AI is about to decide that a lot of us are no longer needed.

This is the structure the Constitution was built to prevent. Not because the founders foresaw corporations, but because they understood how power concentrates and what concentrated power does to ordinary people. They built a republic specifically to give working people protection from the lords of their day. The question for our time is whether we still have that protection — and if not, how we get it back.

That’s what this series is about.

What the Serf System Actually Was

I have a basic understanding of how the serf system worked, but I want to lay it out before we go further.

When I think of serfs, I think of people who lived and worked for a lord. The serfs provided the labor — planting, harvesting, maintaining the land. The lord provided protection from raiders and management of resources during hard times. Serfs couldn’t leave. They were tied to the land. But the lord was responsible for their lives and their families’ lives. If the harvest failed, he was supposed to feed them. If raiders came, he was supposed to defend them. If they got too old to work, they didn’t get thrown out.

After World War II, American companies took on something like that role. Not by law, but by practice. You got hired at GM or Ford or US Steel, and if you did your job, you stayed for life. The company paid for your healthcare. The company funded your pension. The company kept your job through downturns. Your kids got summer jobs at the plant. The company sponsored the Little League team. Loyalty ran both ways.

That deal broke in the 1980s. Companies stopped seeing workers as members of the enterprise and started seeing them as costs on a spreadsheet. Long-term thinking gave way to quarterly earnings. The pension disappeared. The healthcare started shifting onto the worker. Layoffs became a tool to hit numbers, not a last resort. The CEO who fired 10,000 workers got a bonus. The worker who gave 20 years got two weeks of severance.

Loyalty got replaced by economic necessity. The worker still couldn’t really leave — but the company could leave him any time.

We got the worst half of the medieval deal. Bound to the work without the protection that used to come with it.

What Actually Changed

The medieval lord wasn’t being generous. He fed his serfs in famine because he needed them alive to work the next harvest. He defended them from raiders because they were his asset — the land was worthless without people to work it. The reciprocity wasn’t charity. It was self-interest. Worker and lord shared a fate because the lord’s wealth was tied to the same land the worker stood on. He couldn’t move it. He couldn’t replace the workers easily. He was stuck with them and they were stuck with him.

That’s the part the modern corporation broke. Not the binding — we kept the binding through healthcare and debt and vesting schedules. We broke the shared fate. The CEO doesn’t live in the town where the factory is. The shareholders have never met anyone who works there. The company can pick up and move to Vietnam tomorrow. The worker can’t. The fate stopped being shared sometime in the 80s, and once it stopped being shared, the reciprocity became optional. Then it became inconvenient. Then it disappeared.

The postwar period worked because something forced the shared fate back into the system. Unions made layoffs expensive. Tax policy made offshoring hard. Regulations kept the financial sector from extracting freely. Communities held companies accountable because the executives lived in those communities. The CEO of a steel mill in Pittsburgh sent his kids to school with steelworkers’ kids. He couldn’t be a stranger to his workforce.

Then we dismantled all of that. Union density collapsed. Trade agreements opened the borders. Financial deregulation freed the extraction. Executive compensation tied to stock price changed what CEOs were actually working toward. None of it happened by accident. Each piece was a choice. The 1980s wasn’t a natural drift. It was a coordinated dismantling of the structures that had forced reciprocity into a system that wouldn’t produce it on its own.

Where This Series Is Going

The Constitution was built to be flexible. The founders gave us the ability to make and change laws as needed. That was the point. They knew they couldn’t foresee everything, and they built a document that could be amended, interpreted, and applied to conditions they couldn’t have imagined.

The point of this series is to explore how the Constitution should change and how it shouldn’t. What stays. What gets added. What gets enforced differently. The framework holds. The application to a 21st-century economy has to be built.

The core principle is this. We need to protect the people, and we need to protect the businesses that protect the people. Those two things are on the same side. The corporation that pays its workers, employs Americans, builds things the country needs, and competes honestly — we want that corporation to thrive. The one that exists to extract from workers and customers while shipping the value to shareholders in tax havens — that’s the problem.

The difference is short-term thinking versus long-term thinking. Short-term hurts everyone, including the corporations doing it. They strip-mine their own workforce, lose institutional knowledge, hollow out the communities that bought their products, and eventually find they’ve destroyed the customer base their business depended on. Long-term thinking builds. It invests in workers, in products, in the country those workers live in.

AI and robotics make this question urgent. The productivity gains from these technologies are going to be enormous. Someone captures them. Right now the default is shareholders, and the people displaced by the technology get nothing. The platform’s argument is that the workers being displaced have the strongest claim on the value being created by their displacement. That’s the balance we’re trying to build. Workers protected. Businesses thriving. Productivity gains shared. The country moving forward together instead of splitting into a small class that captures everything and a large class that gets left behind.

That’s what comes next.