In support of rational and compassionate public policy at all levels of government which affect the residents of Newtown Township and Bucks County
“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” ~ John Adams
What the FAR LEFT has to say about me and my writing
"You are anti-semitic!"
"You are a Zionist!"
"We don't give single fuck what your privileged ignorant ass has to say."
"Think, you pudding headed fuck."
What the FAR RIGHT has to say about me and my writing
"What an arrogant fool you are."
"YOU are pushing that racist bullshit."
"Dmb fk."
"You're a groomer, and are a danger to society."
I encourage you to explore this site and see what the fuss is about. Apologies in advance if you aren't as excited by measured, evidence-based reasoning as my "fans" in social media.
The zero-sum story has never been true. It has only been loud. A look at citizenship, money, healthcare, and abortion through the lens of the oldest fight in American life.
For the most part, we consume news about the state of our nation in tiny chunks, each detached from the others. It’s left to talking heads, columnists, podcasters and comedians to connect the dots, and rarely are the dots connected without an agenda, the most prevalent being the imperative to say whatever they think will get them noticed.
It’s a “Notice Me!” world.
Inside the Notice Me ecosystem, it’s easier than ever to forget that just a few ideas have gotten us to this point, for better or worse.
Who Counts as Human?
The Founders built the country on a radical premise: natural rights. Merely by existing, they claimed, humans possess certain rights, including the right to pursue happiness (of all things). The promise was a framework within which anyone could lift themselves out of subsistence, without anyone else having to sink. Of course, “anyone” didn’t include everyone. In fact, it didn’t include most someones. By recognizing natural rights only in people like themselves in sex, race, and property, the Founders, some of them fully aware of the contradiction, exploited an ancient loophole, the same one conquerors have always used to justify slaughtering their enemies: people we don’t like, or want to exploit, aren’t fully human. They have no inherent rights, only the rights we choose to give them.
The defining feature of US history has been the redrawing, by fits and starts, of the line between the fully human and everyone else. And every time the line moves outward, insiders push back, sometimes hard enough to move it back.
The line has always been drawn with care. Some of the work was crude: women were simply left out, and the Constitution itself excluded “Indians not taxed.” Even the crude exclusions were choices; New Jersey let property-owning women vote for three decades before taking that right back in 1807. But the most striking feature of the line is the math of race, a category invented largely to draw the line with precision. The Constitution counted each enslaved person as three-fifths of a person—not as a measure of their humanity, but of their enslavers’ power in Congress. Virginia declared one-quarter African ancestry enough to make a person legally non-white, tightened the fraction to one-sixteenth, then decided a single drop would do, while carving out an exception so that families claiming descent from Pocahontas could remain white. Homer Plessy, seven-eighths white, was not white enough for a white railroad car. A nation founded on the claim that every human is born with unalienable rights spent centuries doing fractions to decide who counted as human.
Here’s the irony: by almost any measure, each outward move of the line has left the country better off, insiders included. Freeing enslaved people, opening voting booths and workplaces to women, ending legal segregation—each put more people to work pursuing happiness, and the sum of happiness grew. But to many insiders, every expansion has felt like a subtraction. Someone else’s gain registers as their loss of status, of opportunity, of the comfortable sense that the country belongs only to people like them.
The evidence of a growing pie accumulates slowly and quietly. The fear of a shrinking slice is loud, immediate, and in a Notice Me! world, immensely profitable.
MAGA, the prevailing Notice Me! group of the moment, is pushback in its most concentrated form: the zero-sum fear of a shrinking slice, turned into a political program. Its aim is to move the line back, and to turn rights we’re born with into rights someone grants. Consider birthright citizenship. In 1857, the Supreme Court declared that Black Americans had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” The 14th Amendment moved the line outward in response, and for a century and a half, being born here has been enough. In 2025, President Trump ordered it redrawn. The Court refused, 6–3, with Chief Justice Roberts calling citizenship “the right to have rights.” Trump’s response was to look for another way.
Birthright citizenship is the line drawn in law. Immigration enforcement is the line drawn on the street, and there, under Trump, it is drawn with far less care. The Constitution promises due process to any “person,” not any citizen, a word choice that keeps the Founders’ premise alive: rights come with existing. Yet by early 2026, ICE was holding more than 68,000 people, among the most in its history, and more people died in its custody in 2025 than in any year in two decades. In Minnesota, federal immigration officers murdered—there is no other word for it—two US citizens during deportation operations. And the Supreme Court has allowed agents to stop people based partly on how they look, what language they speak, and what kind of work they do. Apparent ethnicity alone isn’t enough, Justice Kavanaugh assured us; it’s merely one factor among several. Virginia, at least, wrote its fractions down. Now the line is drawn at a glance.
A nation has every right to enforce its immigration laws, and many Americans want them enforced more firmly. I want them enforced more firmly than they were under Biden, and do not argue for open borders. But a country can enforce its borders without deciding that the people inside them have no rights worth respecting. When rights depend on appearance, the lesson doesn’t stay confined to immigrants. Citizens learn it too: your rights are inherent until an agent decides otherwise. That’s the loophole again, in uniform.
Trump has been the prime mover in implementing MAGA policy. But Trump is MAGA’s front man, not its thought leader. The thinking happens elsewhere, and much of it was written down in advance. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump term, polled so badly during the 2024 campaign that Trump claimed not to know who was behind it. By the summer of 2026, Heritage was telling donors that more than half its proposals were in place, a figure its critics on the left don’t dispute. One of the blueprint’s chief architects, Russell Vought, now runs the White House budget office, and he apparently isn’t finished. Speaking in Baltimore this month, Trump turned to him and promised “big surprises coming up in another few weeks, right, Russ?”
As the Heritage Foundation has operated largely behind the scenes, others have been more candid. Speaking at the Claremont Institute in 2025, Vice President Vance argued that defining America by the principles of the Declaration of Independence is “way over-inclusive,” and that people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have “a hell of a lot more claim over America” than others. The Founders said rights come from existing. Vance says they come from ancestry. Virginia counted fractions of blood; the new math counts generations.
So far, then: a nation founded on the radical premise that rights come with existing, and a line, drawn with care and redrawn with math, separating those whose rights are inherent from those whose rights are granted. A history in which every outward move of that line has enlarged the pie, while insiders experienced it as a shrinking slice. And a movement, with a front man, a playbook, and a manifest built to move the line back.
The Line in Dollars
Of course, rights on paper aren’t the only feature of civilization subject to the drawing of lines. Of all the natural rights, the pursuit of happiness is the one most bound up with money. Economic lines have been drawn and redrawn, also with great care, and the same zero-sum fear has informed the drawing. Here the question isn’t only who is fully human, but what being fully human entitles you to. Who can own land, sign a contract, borrow money, keep their wages?
For much of the nation’s first century, married women couldn’t hold property in their own names. And even after the property laws changed, it wasn’t until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 that banks were barred from denying women credit because of their sex or marital status; until then, many lenders routinely demanded a husband’s signature before a woman could get a loan or a credit card. Social Security, when it began, left out farmworkers and domestic workers, which meant leaving out most Black workers. Federal mortgage maps marked Black neighborhoods—literal lines, drawn in red.
Capitalism is a fantastic wealth engine, but we should never mistake it for the whole car.
Markets have grown the pie; public investment has widened who could reach it. Each needs the other. Capitalism is a fantastic wealth engine, but we should never mistake it for the whole car. Left alone, markets grow the pie but concentrate it, until most people experience the economy as a scramble for a fixed share. (Under MAGA leadership, that's where we've landed, a decidedly unhappy place that has fueled disdain for Republicans and the rise of Democratic socialism.) Trouble is, state control under socialism does the opposite: it divides the pie but stops it from growing, and dividing a fixed pie is zero-sum by definition. Taken to its extreme, either system recreates exactly the zero-sum contest the Founders’ framework was meant to escape. Only a blend, with markets as the engine and public investment as the on-ramp, keeps both the pie and the line moving outward.
The conservative objection deserves a fair hearing. We’re guaranteed the right to pursue happiness, the argument goes, not to achieve it, and taxing one group to benefit another takes what someone earned and hands it to someone who didn’t. There’s real substance in that: incentives matter, debt matters, and programs can fail the people they’re meant to help. Critics on the left, for their part, argue the blend has been tilted toward those already at the top. But the conservative argument rests on a hidden assumption, that the pie is fixed, so whatever goes to the on-ramp comes out of someone’s slice. History says otherwise. And beneath the respectable version of the argument lies a less respectable one: the poor, merely because they are poor, are suspect. Amid so much freedom and wealth, what must they have done, or failed to do? That’s the line again, drawn this time not in fractions of ancestry but in dollars.
Lines in and around Human Bodies
Of the rights the Declaration names, life comes first, and for good reason: it’s the precondition of all the others. A person who can’t get care for a treatable illness has the right to pursue happiness the way a person without a boat has the right to cross a river. Health is where the line and the pie meet in a single entity.
The economic case is stronger than most people realize, because we already pay for the uninsured. Since 1986, federal law has required hospital emergency rooms to treat anyone in an emergency, insured or not. We decided, in other words, that no one should be turned away to die at the hospital door, and then chose to pay for that decision in the most expensive way possible: late, in the emergency room, with the costs passed along in everyone else’s premiums. Meanwhile, tying insurance to employment keeps people in jobs they’d otherwise leave to start businesses or take risks. For a country that prizes the entrepreneur, that’s a strange way to run a market.
Expanding access doesn’t require abandoning the blend. It already exists all around us. Medicare pays for care delivered by private doctors and hospitals, and many beneficiaries choose private plans through it. The ACA marketplaces are private insurers competing for customers whose premiums are partly paid with public money. Several countries, Switzerland and Germany among them, reach near-universal coverage through regulated private insurers. Markets as the engine, public investment as the on-ramp: the formula is the same one that built the schools and the colleges.
And the on-ramp is narrowing. Enhanced ACA subsidies expired at the end of 2025, and enrollees’ premium payments more than doubled on average. In 2026, marketplace enrollment saw its largest drop since the exchanges opened. That’s the line, moving back, in dollars.
Underneath the policy fight is something more corrosive: an attack on empathy itself. Elon Musk has called empathy “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization,” and a strand of conservative Christian writing now warns of “the sin of empathy.” It isn’t hard to see why empathy makes a convenient target. Empathy is how insiders come to recognize outsiders as fully human. It’s the force that has moved the line outward, again and again. Discredit it, and drawing the line stops looking like cruelty and starts looking like preservation of an isolationist ideal.
None of this dissolves the real tension between individual rights and the common good. Mandates, taxes, and public health rules do limit individual choices, and people who value liberty are right to watch them closely. But disease doesn’t respect the line. A virus doesn’t check citizenship or bank balances, and an untreated illness in one person becomes a risk, and a cost, to the people around them. The natural-rights tradition never claimed that rights exist in isolation; Locke himself held that liberty ends where harm to others begins.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has built a career on the opposite premise. Under the banner of “medical freedom,” he has spent years casting doubt on vaccines, and as Secretary of Health and Human Services, he has downplayed measles, cut funding for research on vaccine hesitancy, and hunted for evidence that vaccines are unsafe. The country has paid for it. A disease the United States declared eliminated in 2000 has returned with more cases in the past two years than in the previous twenty-four combined, and children have died. Medical freedom, as Kennedy practices it, is the freedom of one family to make the choice for the infant too young to be vaccinated, the child undergoing chemotherapy, and everyone else who has no say. Your health is, in part, my health. That’s not the end of individual rights. It’s the condition that makes them meaningful.
Every fight we’ve examined so far has been about where the line falls between people. Abortion is different. Here the line runs through a single body, and both sides claim to be defending someone’s humanity. The pro-life movement sees itself as moving the line outward, extending full humanity to the unborn. Take that claim at face value, and the question becomes: when two claims to full humanity collide inside one person, whose wins?
Most abortions don’t begin as a contest between two claims. They begin with a pregnancy that came at the wrong time, or a child the family can’t afford, or a job that won’t survive a maternity leave. Women seeking abortions most often cite money and circumstance as reasons, not indifference to the life they’re carrying. Change the circumstances, and the contest often never happens. When Colorado made long-acting contraception free and widely available, the state’s teen birth and abortion rates both fell by roughly half within a few years. Prenatal care, paid leave, affordable childcare, a health system that doesn’t bankrupt new parents: these are the same on-ramps that have widened the pie everywhere else, and they make abortion rarer without coercing anyone.
This won’t satisfy everyone. For those who believe abortion is the taking of a human life, rarer is not enough, and I don’t pretend it resolves that moral conviction. But it does offer a test. A movement that sincerely wants fewer abortions has every reason to support the policies that reduce them. A movement that bans abortion while opposing contraception, paid leave, and children’s healthcare is telling us something about which life it actually values. Some pro-life voices have embraced that whole-life consistency, and they deserve credit for it. Too often, though, the zygote is fully human, inside the line. The woman carrying the zygote? Most definitely outside the line.
Count Them All
We began with a world of fragments: a birthright ruling here, a detention death there, a lapsed subsidy, a measles outbreak, a new abortion law, each story arriving alone, each competing for our attention with everything else. Seen one at a time, they look like separate fights. Seen together, they’re the same fight, the oldest one in American life: where to draw the line between the fully human and everyone else, and whether moving it outward costs insiders something they can’t afford to lose.
The record answers that question, even as fear doesn’t and never can. Every time the line has moved outward, toward the enslaved, toward women, toward immigrants and their children, toward the sick and the poor, the country has grown richer, stronger, and more itself. Markets grew the pie; public investment widened who could reach it. The zero-sum story has never been true. It has only been loud.
This year we marked two hundred and fifty years since a group of men who owned property, and in many cases owned people, declared that all men are created equal and endowed with the right to pursue happiness. They didn’t mean everyone. But they wrote it down anyway, in words larger than their intentions, and every generation since has had to decide whether to read those words narrowly or generously. That choice is ours now. Reading generously doesn’t mean erasing every distinction. A nation may rightly decide who becomes a citizen, and citizens alone should choose its leaders. But citizenship is a civic line, drawn by law. Humanity is not. The rights the Founders called natural belong to every person within our borders, whatever their papers say. It’s the choice behind every policy argument in this essay, whether it’s about citizenship, credit, coverage, vaccines, or a woman’s body.
The Notice Me! world rewards whoever shouts the loudest about their shrinking slice. The antidote isn’t to shout back. It’s to notice: where the line is being drawn, who is doing the drawing, and who ends up on the other side of it. Notice the fractions, old and new. Notice when rights start to depend on ancestry, appearance, bank balances, or pregnancy. And notice, too, the quieter evidence: the pie keeps growing every time we let it.
The Founders’ premise was that rights come with existing. They failed to live up to it, and so have we, again and again. But the premise is still the best idea this country has ever had, and the only one big enough to include all of us. Millions of someones are still waiting to be counted. The work of the next two hundred and fifty years—ideally, many fewer years—is to count them.
The controversy over the death of a newborn in Lancaster County has revealed the extent to which our politics and our public health are broken.
Check out the full blog:
Fact: Climate change is real. Promoting clean energy is an urgent matter of national security.
Fact: Transgender persons exist, and cannot be legislated out of existence.
Fact: Students need a factual account of our history, including slavery and its residual effects on the rights and freedoms of all Americans.
Me Imperturbe
Me imperturbe, standing at ease in Nature, Master of all, or mistress of all—aplomb in the midst of irrational things, Imbued as they—passive, receptive, silent as they, Finding my occupation, poverty, notoriety, foibles, crimes, less important than I thought;
Me private, or public, or menial, or solitary—all these subordinate, (I am eternally equal with the best—I am not subordinate;) Me toward the Mexican Sea, or in the Mannahatta, or the Tennessee, or far north, or inland, A river-man, or a man of the woods, or of any farm-life of These States, or of the coast, or the lakes, or Kanada,
Me, wherever my life is lived, O to be self-balanced for contingencies!
O to confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs, as the trees and animals do.
~ Walt Whitman
Tired
I am so tired of waiting, Aren’t you, For the world to become good And beautiful and kind? Let us take a knife And cut the world in two – And see what worms are eating At the rind.
