Ten points. Each one names the rule that changes, the hard question people ask about it, and the receipt that shows it works. Underneath: the ideas we start from and the full record. Nothing here creates a new agency, hands out a subsidy or puts government in the ownership of a private company.
Open any point to see what is broken, how we fix it, the hard question, and the receipt.
Productivity is how people win back their time. Open every job to people who can do it, degree or not. Stop federal loan guarantees from inflating tuition. Let the education dollars follow the child. Let new schools, AI tutors, apprenticeships and skills tests compete. Give every kid a class size of one.
More than one in five working Americans holds a government license to do their job, and a license earned in one state often counts for nothing in the next. Meanwhile the main ticket to a good job, a degree, keeps getting more expensive, and federal loans help push the price up.
Published tuition and fees at a public four year college rose from $5,940 in 1995 to $11,950 in 2025, after inflation. College Board, Trends in College Pricing, 2025
For each extra dollar of subsidized federal loans available, colleges raised tuition by about 60 cents. Lucca, Nadauld and Shen, New York Fed Staff Report 733
Alpha School already runs the model: two hours a day of AI-guided academics, the rest of the day for projects, sports and life skills, with human guides in the room. Alpha School, how it works
If federal loans go away, how does a kid without money go to college?
Today that kid borrows more each year to pay a price the loans helped push up. Ending the guarantees removes the reason tuition rises. Lenders who look at whether a program pays off will fund the ones that do, and students will walk away from the ones that do not. Apprenticeships pay the student instead of charging them.
Care is expensive because supply is rationed. Let nurses and pharmacists do what they are trained to do. Let new clinics open without asking competitors for permission. Allow safe drugs approved abroad. Post real prices. Own your health savings.
America spent $5.3 trillion on health care in 2024, about $15,474 per person and 18 percent of the whole economy. That buys a lot of care. The problem is that the rules limit who can provide it and hide what it costs.
Posted prices already work. The Surgery Center of Oklahoma lists one all inclusive price per surgery, covering surgeon, anesthesia and facility. A knee arthroscopy is listed at $4,458. surgerycenterok.com price list
National health spending: $5.3 trillion, $15,474 per person, 18.0 percent of GDP in 2024, projected to reach 20.6 percent by 2034. CMS National Health Expenditure fact sheet
What happens to me if I get seriously sick and cannot pay?
You are covered, and it costs you less than today. Real insurance, bought for the catastrophe and priced like it, is cheap when the routine care underneath it costs what a visit to the Surgery Center of Oklahoma costs. It travels with you from job to job, so losing a job never means losing care. Charity care, mutual aid and family carry further when a clinic visit costs what a haircut costs. And a hospital that posts its prices cannot bury you in a bill it made up afterward.
Rent is high because building is illegal in most of the places people want to live. Allow homes by right. Approve permits on a deadline. End parking mandates. Legalize modular and manufactured homes. Let robots build. More homes push rents down, and nothing else works as well.
Building a home in America has gotten harder, not easier. Value added per construction worker was about 40 percent lower in 2020 than in 1970, while the rest of the economy got more productive. Before anyone picks up a hammer, a project faces zoning that bans everything but detached houses, discretionary permits that take years, and rules that dictate how many parking spaces a home must come with.
Austin let builders build. The region permitted 957 apartments per 100,000 residents from 2021 to 2023, and rents then fell for 19 straight months, to a typical asking rent of $1,645 in December 2024. Texas Tribune analysis of Census and Zillow data, January 2025
San Francisco went the other way. Landlords covered by its 1994 rent control expansion cut the rental housing they offered by 15 percent, and the authors conclude the lost supply likely pushed market rents up citywide. Diamond, McQuade and Qian, American Economic Review, 2019
US construction productivity has been flat or falling for decades. Goolsbee and Syverson, NBER Working Paper 30845, 2023
New buildings are luxury apartments. How does that help someone who can’t afford them?
The new units are usually the expensive ones. They help by giving higher earners somewhere new to live, so those people stop bidding up older apartments. Austin’s rents fell across the market, not only in the new towers, and renters got the relief first, before anyone bought anything. The faster a city says yes, the sooner that happens. A city that blocks new homes still changes. The only difference is that rents rise faster while it does.
Police and courts exist to stop violence, theft and fraud. End qualified immunity so officers answer for abuse. End taking property without a conviction, and end taking your home for someone else’s project. Adults decide what goes into their own bodies. Put victims, not budgets, at the center of justice.
Accountable police and courts, because protecting people from violence is the one job government must do.
Cheap energy makes everything cheaper. Clear the permitting logjam with firm deadlines. License advanced nuclear on a fixed timeline. Connect finished solar and storage to the grid. End subsidies for every fuel. Make polluters pay the people they harm.
About 2,061 gigawatts of proposed generation and storage was waiting for a grid connection at the end of 2025. In the regions with data, projects that make it through take more than five years to reach operation. The projects are proposed. The rules decide how many ever get built. Berkeley Lab, Queued Up 2026
A solar panel cost $132.38 per watt in 1975 and $0.12 in 2025, both in 2025 dollars, a drop of about 99.9 percent. That is the module itself; the install and the wires cost extra, and they are next. Our World in Data, from Nemet, Farmer and Lafond, and IRENA
The median federal environmental impact statement issued from 2019 to 2024 took 2.8 years from notice to final statement. Council on Environmental Quality, January 2025
Only three new reactors have entered service in the US since 2000. Vogtle Units 3 and 4 were planned at $14 billion for 2016 and 2017; they opened in 2023 and 2024 at more than $30 billion. US Energy Information Administration
Vogtle went over budget and years late. Why bet on nuclear?
A fixed licensing timeline does not fix bad project management. It does remove the reason no one has built enough plants to get good at it. Builders get cheaper with repetition, and that only happens if the second plant of a design is allowed to start. Solar got 1,100 times cheaper the same way: by building the next one.
War is the most expensive thing government does, in money and in lives. Defend the country, not the world. Close bases that defend nothing. Make the Pentagon pass an audit before its budget grows. Trade with people everywhere; fight only when attacked.
Defense stays a core function of a minimal government. The question is what it defends, and whether it can account for the money.
Trade between people is how countries get rich and stay at peace. Tariffs are taxes paid by your own family at the checkout. Drop broad embargoes that punish ordinary families. Aim any sanctions at named individuals who commit violence, with an end date.
Every tariff is a price increase you did not vote for, collected at the register. We repeal them.
The connected pay lobbyists for favors because government sells them. Stop selling. End subsidies, bailouts, special tax breaks and government stakes in private companies. Put an expiration date on every handout. Separate business and state. And stop the quietest tax of all: a government that cannot print money to cover its spending cannot inflate away your savings.
Prices are up 30.6 percent since January 2020. A dollar saved then buys about 77 cents’ worth today. Nobody voted for that. BLS, CPI-U all items, January 2020 (257.971) to September 2026 (336.940)
The danger in a rich society is not that someone has more. It is that someone can lock the door behind them: the license nobody new can get, the seat nobody can challenge, the subsidy that never sunsets. We keep every door open. Political speech stays free; the fix is to remove what is for sale.
Big companies stay big when rules protect them from challengers. Strip out the licenses, extended patents and regulations that lock incumbents in. Let failed giants fail. Make it easy for workers to own shares or start cooperatives.
Don’t markets create monopolies?
A company that stays on top by serving you better has to keep doing it every single day, or you leave. The ones that stop fearing you are the ones a rule protects: a license, a patent extended by law, a regulation only an incumbent can afford. The answer is the same every time: let someone compete, and make it easy for you to walk. Capitalism is a perennial gale; the giants that cannot stand in it are supposed to fall. Schumpeter, 1942, p. 84
Your power at work is your power to walk. We make walking easy: your license works everywhere, your benefits come with you, and there is always another employer in town because starting one is easy. Band together and bargain if you want; nobody is forced to join or pay.
More than one in five workers needs a government license to do their job, and a move across a state line can erase it. Health coverage is chained to the employer. The result is a worker who cannot afford to leave, and a boss who knows it.
In 2025, 21.6 percent of employed Americans held a government occupational license. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey, Table 49
As of 2025, 28 states recognize occupational licenses earned elsewhere. Trudeau, Timmons and Seevers, reported August 2025
What if there is only one employer in my town?
Then the rules that keep it that way are the problem, and every one of them is on this list. The license that stops you from working in the next state over. The permit that stops a competitor from opening. The health plan that dies the day you quit. Remove them and the one employer in town has company, and you have options.
Underneath all ten: free and fair elections, open to every candidate with real support, counted by ranked ballots. A free society starts there.
Abolish the income tax and the agency that collects it. A government that only runs courts, police and defense does not need to know what you earn. What it does need is a small slice of what government spends today, and a small slice is easy to fund: a low, visible levy to start, shrinking every year as loser-pays court rules, private arbitration and assurance contracts for shared goods carry more of the load. Where a service can be paid for by the people who choose it, it is. Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own, and a government that handles less of yours wastes less of it. Friedman, 1993
America already spends $5.3 trillion a year on health care, about $2.5 trillion of it through government. Cut the cost of care by four fifths with AI and the arithmetic flips: catastrophic insurance becomes cheap enough for everyone to carry, the programs that exist today shrink as prices fall rather than grow, and what government stops spending pays down the debt. Cut the price of a home and a kilowatt hour the same way, and most of the people who need help today will not. For the ones who still do, help goes further than it ever has: insurance that is actually insurance, portable and priced for the catastrophe; charities, mutual aid and congregations whose every dollar goes far further; and neighbors who are no longer broke themselves. Everyone is a producer who wants to be, and nobody has to be to live well. A disability, an illness or old age stops being a sentence when the essentials cost what a neighbor can carry. CMS, 2024
Every promise on the front page has a builder, a price that fell, and a rule that got out of the way. These are the ideas underneath.
Your body, your work, your time and what they produce are yours. Freedom means the ability to own, create, exchange, associate, dissent, and pursue your own version of a good life. The smallest minority is the individual, and we defend that one first. Rothbard, For a New Liberty, 1973, p. 33
Firms, cooperatives, charities, congregations, mutual aid societies and neighborhood funds are all free people choosing to work together. None of them needs a mandate. The line we hold: voluntary cooperation between individuals, never collective coercion by the state.
Laboratories, factories, computing, savings and investment are how work gets easier. A dollar taxed or tied up in red tape is a tool that never gets built.
The price of a thing is the whole world telling you how badly it is wanted and how hard it is to get. No office can know what a million prices know. Where prices are hidden or fixed, the information dies and the shortages start. Hayek, 1945, p. 526
The whole of economics in one sentence: look past the immediate effect to the longer one, and past the one group that benefits to everyone who pays. Every rule on this page fails that test. Every fix passes it. Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson, 1946, ch. 1
Cheaper intelligence speeds discovery. Cheaper energy makes everything cheaper to make. Robotics cuts the labor in every good. Competition passes the gains to you. Without a free market there is no price, and without a price nobody can tell whether they are creating value or burning it. Mises, 1920, p. 25
Breakthroughs come from founders and from the engineers, suppliers, workers and customers around them. The gains reach you through the same door every time: a competitor who wants your business or your labor.
Rights, impartial courts, contracts and defense. Small enough to stay out of your way, strong enough to stop violence, theft and fraud.
Health, family, meaning, creativity, time and community. A cheaper life is the floor. What you do with the freedom is the point.
Your time. Your attention. Your standing with the people you respect. A life that means something. Cheap homes, care and power do not retire prices, property or competition; they move them up the ladder, from survival to meaning. Meaning is earned, not given, and a free society is the only kind that lets you earn it your own way.
When the essentials cost a fraction of today, producing becomes a choice instead of a survival test. Most people will choose it anyway, because people want to matter. The ones who cannot, through disability, illness or age, live well regardless, because a good life no longer costs more than a family, a charity or a modest savings can carry.
Televisions, phones, software, clothing, toys. The things where anyone can enter, compete and sell.
Hospital care, college, childcare, housing. The things that are licensed, subsidized and supply-restricted. The complaint is right. The cure is supply.
Free people produce more. Here is the scoreboard.
Homes, health care, energy. Someone has to build the house, train the nurse and run the power plant. The system that wins is the one that gets the most people building, and nothing gets people building like freedom.
When you can start a business without permission, keep what you earn, trade with anyone and change jobs when you want, you have every reason to work hard, try something new and get better at it. Millions of people doing that at once is what makes things cheap.
Where people need permission to produce, less gets produced. Where they are free, you get abundance. Rank the world’s countries by economic freedom and the gap between the top and the bottom is enormous, in income and in years of life.
That pattern is not one study. A 2014 review of 198 studies using the economic freedom index found that over two thirds tied economic freedom to good outcomes, such as faster growth, and fewer than 4 percent tied it to bad ones.
It shows in how people feel about their lives, too. Across countries, freedom to make life choices is one of six factors that together account for more than three quarters of the differences in how people rate their lives.
And it shows in your own life. Measured in hours of work, 50 basic commodities cost 70.9 percent less than in 1980. The average American worker put in about 3,100 hours a year in 1870 and about 1,800 in 2023. Productivity bought that time. It will buy the next round too.
Sources: Economic Freedom of the World 2026 (2024 data, quartile averages); Hall and Lawson, 2014; World Happiness Report; Simon Abundance Index 2026. Bars are proportional to the values printed on them.
You don’t need more money. You need the money you have to go further, and here is the proof it can. Every number on this page names its source, its year and what it measures, right where it appears. The future on this page is a destination, and we say so. Find an error and we fix it in public.
Fall in the time price of 50 basic commodities from 1980 to 2025. Measured in hours of work, the world is far more abundant than it was.
Simon Abundance Index 2026, Human ProgressFall in the price of a solar panel, from $132.38 per watt in 1975 to $0.12 in 2025, in constant dollars.
Our World in Data, updated 2026Hours worked per US worker per year, 1870 to 2023. About 42 percent fewer hours, for a far richer life.
Our World in DataShare of humanity in extreme poverty, under $2.15 a day, 1990 to 2019. About 2 billion people to about 700 million.
World BankChildren who died before age 15: about half across most of recorded history, about 4.3 percent in 2020.
Our World in DataThe check Paul Ehrlich mailed Julian Simon in 1990 after betting that five metals would get scarcer over a decade. All five got cheaper. The ultimate resource is people.
Wired, 1997; Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2, 1996The pattern in every number: when people are free to enter, compete and sell, prices fall and lives get longer. Where that freedom is blocked, prices rise. The sectors Americans complain about most, hospitals, colleges, childcare and housing, are the most licensed, subsidized and supply-restricted parts of the economy. The complaint is correct. The cure is supply.
Count yourself in, and we will tell you when a receipt like these is on a ballot near you.