America kicks ass. America is great. This is a great country. I know we are all supposed to be demoralized and upset, and we’re all supposed to believe and claim that no one anymore has any shot at getting ahead in America, that the American dream is dead.
We need something brand new — by which most people mean some idea that was tried centuries ago, for centuries, and then failed over and over and over. Most of those bad ideas revolve around a very basic failed idea that people are addicted to: that there ought to be a special cadre of elite people who direct the economy toward their specific end; that your individual freedoms are actually destructive; that you ought to have your choices circumscribed so that they can build whatever it is they want to build.
For Hasan Piker, total economic leveling in poverty. For Zohran Mamdani, Third World ascendancy and American weakness. For Tucker Carlson, an agrarian feudal state. For the Muslim Brotherhood, Dar al-Islam.
So today, I want to talk about what the American dream actually is and what it actually is not.
You’re constantly hearing the American dream is the house and the white picket fence and the dog and the 2.2 children.
That’s not what the American dream is. The American dream is a process. It is not, in fact, an outcome.
The American dream is a process. That process says that there is a relationship between cause and effect — that if you make good, virtuous, smart decisions, if you perform dutiful and smart things throughout your life, you will end up better off than your parents did.
And then, if you pass those values on to your kids and they do the same thing, they will be better off than you. That is the American dream. That was the thing. It is not that you will instantaneously go from being the poorest person in America to the richest person in America. That might happen to some people, but that’s not the American dream.
The American dream says that your talents and abilities should be able to take you as far as possible, and that you will be better off if you do all those things. Because, again, the process is the thing.
As long as you protect the process, you get your shot. That’s the American dream.
When my great-great-grandparents got here at the beginning of the 20th century, they came here without a dollar in their pocket. They only knew Yiddish. And then they did those things, and they weren’t rich. Their kids did better than they did, and they weren’t precisely rich. My parents did better than my grandparents, but they weren’t rich. And now I’m pretty rich, right?
It’s an intergenerational process very often. This is true for all Americans. That process, in order to work, has to include certain preconditions. There are certain conditions that make the process work.
Free markets.
Private property. You own your labor. You own the products, goods, and services that you produce. Your innovation is your own, and you can trade it with other people. You can rent it to people if you want. That’s what wage labor is. And you can build businesses. You can do those things. That’s what a free market is.
We also need things like equal justice before the law. We need a law that is equally applied — not, “There’s justice for my friends and beatdowns for my enemies.” That is not equal justice, and it doesn’t protect the process because that’s not a process. That is just the Schmittian friend-enemy distinction.
We need freedom of mind — freedom of speech and freedom of religion — so we can think things through, debate them out, so we can actually pursue that process.
And, of course, we need a social fabric that promotes virtue.
You need actual people doing good things. You need to know what a good decision looks like, what a moral decision looks like.
Those are all the preconditions for the American dream:
Free markets. Free minds. Equal justice before law. Social virtue. Those are the things. Those are the preconditions.
And when you have that, and then you have a government that protects those things and protects the process, that’s when the American dream happens. The process not only protects and promotes freedom; it also happens to have the happy effect of promoting insane, unprecedented human prosperity.
Because it turns out the best way for innovation and competition to happen is to access the diverse knowledge and opinions of all humanity. Free people innovate. Free people compete. Free people are able to access each other’s knowledge levels. They’re able to aggregate those knowledge levels. We are much better off because no single human being knows more than the rest of humanity. That’s not a thing. And that’s true when it comes to prioritization as well.
Free markets mean that everyone can prioritize what they want on a material level. You get to make your own decisions about what makes your life better. You get to decide whether you wish to trade your labor for X number of dollars, or whether you wish to trade X number of dollars for a lottery ticket or for a share of stock. Those are the decisions. You get to decide what you are willing to do. That’s what the free-market pricing system is. It is a set of aggregated choices by millions upon millions of individual consumers. And again, free markets also mean that we value everybody’s knowledge base.
I, as a petty tyrant, don’t get to dictate to you what is the best way to fix a toilet because I have the government gun. Because there are lots of people who can aggregate their knowledge and fix the toilet better. And if you don’t know how to do it, somebody else probably does.
So again, the American dream is a process. That’s the process we have to preserve. It is not an outcome.
And that’s exciting, because the American dream — a process that is reliant on your freedom — makes it your adventure. It’s your journey.
You make the decisions about your life. You make the decisions about what you think is important. You make the decisions about what you think things are worth, or what you are willing to trade for what, or which profession to go into.
You make those decisions. I don’t make those decisions. Hasan doesn’t make those decisions. Tucker Carlson doesn’t make those decisions. You make those decisions. And that’s incredible.
Do you understand how rare that is in human history? That is absolutely rare across human history. For most of human history, people were just told what to do all the time. The American dream isn’t that.
That’s what I want. I just want the shot. I want the shot to make that choice. I think it’s what we all want: the shot. We want the process protected. And guess what? That process still works.
There are people who lie to you and say the process doesn’t work. Now, the process doesn’t work as well as it should thanks to the impositions of people like Hasan on the left or Tucker Carlson on the right. Statists inhibit the process. But the process still works, and it works really, really well.
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The Cato Institute did a 2023 study on income mobility, looking at findings from Pew and Raj Chetty, who’s a statistician at Harvard, and his tax-record study of this.
What they found, inflation-adjusted, is that 93% of kids who grew up in the bottom quintile were better off than their parents were by the time they reached their 30s. Ninety-three percent. Nearly everyone.
Eighty-six percent of kids from the middle three quintiles were better off than their parents were by the time they reached their 30s. And 70% of children from the top quintile were better off than their parents by the time they reached their 30s. Again, all of this correlates with making just basic, smart, good decisions.
There’s something called the success sequence. If you follow the success sequence, you will not be permanently poor in the United States, statistically speaking. Ninety-seven percent of millennials who followed the so-called success sequence were not in poverty by their mid-30s.
One: graduate high school.
Two: get a full-time job.
Three: get married before you have kids.
By the way, the most important thing here is get married before you have kids, for a couple of reasons. One, because if you have kids before you get married, then you have high costs and less income. But number two, it turns out that when people get married, they change how they view their life goals. This is true for every young dude. It’s why it’s important for young men to get married particularly, because income trajectory goes steeply up. When you’re a single dude, you are perfectly happy to live in kind of a crappy apartment with a box for a chair and a futon for a bed and eat ramen every night.
That’s true. It was true for me in law school. It’s true for a lot of people in college. It’s true for a lot of people in their early work life. Then you get married, and it turns out you want to provide for your family, and income grows. You make different decisions about your life.
So the American dream — the process — is still there. But there’s a different view of the American dream. And this is the perverse view of the American dream. It actually destroys the American dream. That different view is that the American dream is a set of outcomes. That the American dream isn’t that if you make good, smart, virtuous decisions, you will live better than your parents did and your kids will live better than you.
That actually, the American dream is the house with the white picket fence, or two kids and a dog, or a nicotine factory in India. Now listen, I may want all those things except for the factory, and you might too.
But when the government — which, at the end of the day, all the government is is a big gun pointed at people; it has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force — when you use that gigantic gun pointed at people, directed at achieving certain ends rather than protecting the process, you end up actually destroying the process.
And, by the way, never achieving the ends to boot.
