The Founding Act

There is not one founding act. There are thousands. The transition from the industrial economy to the digital economy is an opening, once in an epoch, to reshape what comes next. Small groups of people can decide for themselves how they want to operate in the new economy, and those decisions will compound for generations. Millions of sovereign individuals joining together, each contributing, each holding a stake, each bound by covenant rather than acquired by capital, form the common platform that no one owns completely but everyone owns a part of.

The Philadelphia Convention of 1787 was not a gathering of people who agreed on everything. It was a gathering of people who agreed that the existing structure had failed and that the cost of not acting had exceeded the cost of beginning. They built something imperfect that held for 250 years because it was structural rather than aspirational, because it was designed for human nature rather than against it, because it made the concentration of power irrational rather than merely inadvisable.⁴²

This Declaration is an invitation. It is a shared vocabulary for the problem, a structural argument rigorous enough to survive serious scrutiny, and a way for the people who belong in the room to find each other. The economy that our political constitution never addressed is being built in real time right now. It is our inheritance. It is our responsibility to steward it for the generations to come.

America is the greatest economic engine the world has ever seen, and we are still a young nation. For us to begin the 21st century with a narrative that the Baby Boom generation achieved an American Dream, and what they experienced is over, never to return, is not true. It has been structurally interrupted, and structural interruptions can be structurally corrected. The country that invented the mass middle class, the land-grant university, the GI Bill, the Federal Reserve, the interstate highway system, the internet, and the personal computer is capable of inventing what comes next. The question is whether the entrepreneurs, the workers, the parents, the teachers, the builders in every sector who have always been the actual engine of this country will hold a stake in what they build. The argument of this Declaration is that they must, and that the architecture to make it so is ours to design and ours to build.

The path is made by walking. We walk it together, or we do not walk it at all.