The American Shareholder Commonwealth

Part I: The Promise

What This Is

You own America. You just haven't been paid.

The oil under federal land is yours. The electromagnetic spectrum your phone uses is yours. The research your taxes funded—research that became the drugs you buy at 1,000% markup, the technologies that power the companies worth trillions—is yours.

This system makes your ownership real. Not through redistribution—through production and investment.

The American Prosperity Fund is a vertically integrated engine. It owns the inputs (resources, spectrum, land). It funds the innovation (R&D equity). It employs the production (the Civilian Corps). It delivers the output (healthcare, housing, food, education). It invests the surplus (capacity expansion, compounding returns).

Every layer captures efficiency instead of paying margins to middlemen. The compound returns flow to shareholders. You are a shareholder.

This eliminates the toll collectors between you and the things you need. It replaces extraction with provision. It builds the floor that lets you rise.

The floor is not a hammock. It is a launchpad.

What This Is Not

This is not socialism. Socialism abolishes private property and centralizes production decisions. This system strengthens property rights by extending them to their logical conclusion: you own what you funded, what you preserved, what was held in trust for you. The private market remains unlimited. The Fund produces necessities at cost; everything else is market.

This is not welfare. Welfare is a gift from government, granted to those deemed deserving, revocable at political whim. This is a dividend from ownership. The distinction is not semantic. Gifts can be taken away. Property is yours. Section 3 of the amendment makes conditions unconstitutional.

This is not redistribution. Redistribution takes from producers to give to non-producers. This system does the opposite: it stops the taking. Right now, producers are being extracted to death—30-40% of income to housing, 18% of GDP to healthcare that delivers less than peer nations, a decade of debt for credentials. The extraction layer produces nothing. This system removes it and returns the value to the people who actually produce.

This is capitalism, correctly implemented. Shareholders own assets. Assets generate returns. Returns flow to shareholders. That's the system. What we have now is management looting shareholders—the extraction industries capturing returns that belong to citizens. The Commonwealth corrects the breach. It enforces the property rights you already have.

Part II: The Architecture

The Financial Foundation

Every proposal to finance necessities does one of two things: it adds real resources, or it reroutes claims on existing resources.

This one reroutes. And produces. And invests.

The Fund doesn't passively collect and redistribute. Through the Civilian Corps, it delivers the same healthcare, housing, food distribution, and education that currently exists—performed by the same workers doing the same productive work. The nurse still heals. The teacher still teaches. The builder still builds. The overhead disappears.

And every efficiency gained compounds. The Fund invests in capacity—more clinics, more housing, more training pipelines. Those investments generate returns. The returns fund more investment. The flywheel accelerates.

The Accounting Identity

At the system level, total spending on a necessity resolves into four components:

This is not ideology. It is arithmetic. The wedge is the design space.

The Wedge: A Precise Definition

This is not a moral claim. It is an accounting residual. A dollar is classified as wedge (W) if it meets any of the following conditions:

If the service can be delivered at the same scale and quality without the expense, the expense is wedge.

What Counts as Wedge

Empirical Ranges

Using OECD comparisons, Medicare cost structures, and sectoral decomposition. These ranges deliberately under-claim—they assume current quality, competitive labor compensation, and exclude secondary effects.

If critics dispute a figure, the burden is to show which wedge component is necessary for production.

Why the Wedge Is Real

The wedge is not theoretical inefficiency. It is observed dispersion:

The Design Implication

Because:

• C (sustainable cost) is bounded by real resources
• r (payment overhead) can be minimized through unified rails
• W (wedge) produces no output

The wedge is the only legitimate design space.

Eliminating or capturing it does not reduce production. Does not require increased labor. Does not require money creation. Does not require redistribution.

It is a conversion of waste into capacity.

This is why the system works: The Fund doesn't "fund" necessities. It replaces an extractive architecture with a productive one and retains the surplus.

If someone claims the wedge can't be captured, they are implicitly claiming that billing wars, denial processing, monopoly rent, and financial friction are necessary inputs to healthcare, housing, or education.

That's the line that forces them to show their work.

Part III: The Constitutional Lock

Why An Amendment

Legislation can be repealed. Any law creating citizen ownership can be unwound by the next Congress. Any fund can be privatized. Any provision system can be defunded, conditioned, or captured.

The extraction industries have armies of lobbyists. They write legislation. They fund campaigns. They will fight this with everything they have, and if this is merely law, they will eventually win.

The only way to make ownership permanent is to make it constitutional. Property rights at the constitutional level cannot be removed by simple majority. They require supermajority in Congress AND ratification by 38 states.

This is not about trust. It is about mechanism design. The amendment creates a structure where the default behavior of self-interested actors—politicians seeking power, corporations seeking profit, bureaucrats seeking budget—cannot easily unwind citizen ownership.

Definitions (Non-Negotiable)

Before the operative sections, the amendment requires precise definitions. Eighty percent of legal exploitation dies here.

The Seven Sections

Each section exists because history teaches the attack pattern.

The Gold-Plating Problem

Cost-plus pricing has a known failure mode. If I get cost + 5%, my incentive is to maximize cost—gold toilets, unnecessary staff, bloated procurement—to maximize the absolute value of that 5%.

Target Cost Pricing (The Fix)

The Fund sets regional benchmark costs for procedures, housing units, educational outcomes—based on best-performing providers.

This shifts the incentive from "bloat costs to increase margin" to "efficiency increases your capacity and standing."

Providers compete to beat the benchmark. The benchmark ratchets down as best practices spread. Efficiency compounds. The opposite of the current system where costs ratchet up.

Governance & Capture Resistance

The amendment says "radical transparency." Adults ask: what are the mechanics?

This isn't a bureaucracy bible. It's enough to show you understand capture patterns and have mechanisms to resist them.

Part IV: The Provision Layer

Necessities at cost. Not free—at cost. The system can prove where every dollar went.

The private sector will not deliver most provision services. The profit motive doesn't work when profit is prohibited. This is by design. Provision is delivered through publicly-owned infrastructure, non-profit entities, or price-regulated providers. Different services may use different models. What they share: no extraction layer.

Part V: The Civilian Corps

The Key Insight

The corps is not a program. It is not a bureaucracy. It is the production engine.

Everyone staffing the provision layer—healthcare providers, educators, food distribution workers, housing construction crews—is corps. They produce. The nurse heals patients. The teacher develops capability. The builder constructs homes. This is real work creating real value.

The difference from the current system isn't what they do. It's what's missing: the extraction layer that currently consumes 20-40% of every dollar before it reaches the person doing the work.

Same production. No toll collectors. Every dollar of efficiency flows back to the system—and to you.

The Compensation Structure

The Parallel Labor Market

This is the mechanism that fixes labor markets without mandates.

Currently, workers have limited alternatives: work for available employers, or starve. This asymmetry creates exploitation. Employers don't have to offer good terms. They just have to offer better-than-starvation.

The corps creates a real alternative. When workers have a credible outside option, private employers must compete. Not against starvation, but against a decent alternative.

This is how you raise all wages without minimum wage laws. Not by mandating floors, but by creating alternatives that make exploitation impossible.

The Incentive Gradient

Want a homestead fast? Serve where we need you. Want the highest dividend? Develop skills, take hard assignments. The gradient pulls people toward contribution. Not through coercion, but through better deals for harder work.

Structural Clarifications (Defusing the Attacks)

Liability & Credentialing

Once you say this explicitly, the "forced labor / New Deal jobs program / federal monopoly" attack collapses.

Part VI: The Citizen Dividend

The Base

Every citizen receives a dividend. Every citizen. No conditions.

No work requirements. No drug tests. No means testing. No bureaucrat deciding if you "deserve" it.

The formula is published. The calculation runs. The money deposits. Automatically.

The Gradient

The private market path: Base floor plus everything you earn. Unlimited upside. The corps path: Full provision plus enhanced dividend. Good life, stable, meaningful work. The minimum path: Simple life. Roof, food, healthcare, survival. Not comfortable. But not homeless.

No Welfare Cliff

Current system: Earn too much, lose benefits. The marginal tax rate on the poor often exceeds 100%—earn a dollar, lose a dollar and a half in benefits. Work is punished.

Commonwealth: The dividend never disappears when you work. Work adds to it. Every dollar of private earnings makes you better off. There is no cliff.

This is the incentive structure conservatives claim to want. This delivers it.

The Freeloader Question

"What about people who just take the dividend and don't work?"

First: You're already paying for them. More.

The person who won't work is currently cycling through: emergency rooms ($3,000+ per visit), jail ($50,000/year to incarcerate), shelter system, police interactions, property crime to survive. Total cost to society: easily $75,000+/year.

Base provision + base dividend: $25,000-30,000/year. Give them a small house, food, and a modest check. They stay out of your way. That is cheaper than the alternative.

Second: Almost nobody wants that life.

You cannot stop humans from wanting more. It's wired in. The base dividend is a simple life. Not a good life. Simple. You can eat. You won't freeze. You cannot: travel, eat at restaurants, buy nice things, have status, attract mates, feel accomplishment.

Most people want those things. The dividend doesn't buy them. Work does. Contribution does.

Third: The freeloaders aren't the expensive ones.

The expensive ones are the people desperately trying NOT to be freeloaders, getting crushed by the system anyway. The guy working two jobs who ends up in the ER. The family declaring bankruptcy over medical bills. The kid with potential who takes the dead-end job because she can't risk losing health insurance to start the business.

Fix that, and the small percentage of genuine freeloaders is rounding error.

The Dividend as Macroeconomic Stabilizer

The dividend is residual: Revenue minus provision minus capacity investment minus reserves. This makes it an automatic stabilizer.

The Fund becomes a macroeconomic stabilizer by design, not by discretionary policy. More direct than the Fed manipulating interest rates and hoping transmission mechanisms work.

Part VII: The Accountability Framework

If we eliminate private extraction, we risk replacing it with bureaucratic capture. The Soviet Union had no private healthcare extraction. It also had healthcare quality you wouldn't wish on your enemy.

How do you get the efficiency of market discipline without the extraction of market pricing?

Service Level Agreements

Published metrics. Automatic consequences. No political protection.

What This Prevents

The Exit Mechanism: Receivership

In private markets, bad firms go bankrupt. The structure dies. This is healthy—it clears out failure. The Corps needs an equivalent.

The Receivership Trigger: If a collective fails SLA targets for 18+ months despite leadership changes:

1. Receivership declared automatically (no political discretion)
2. Patients/students/residents transferred to neighboring units
3. Assets assessed for redeployment
4. Staff reassigned to functional units or retrained
5. Collective dissolved and re-chartered, or territory absorbed by successful neighbors

This is the death mechanism that keeps the system healthy. Bad structures don't persist indefinitely consuming resources. They die and get replaced.

The Capacity Forcing Function

SLAs create mandatory capacity expansion. If demand exceeds capacity: Queues form → Wait times increase → SLA violation → Automatic expansion trigger → Mandatory capacity investment.

The system must respond to constraint by building, not by rationing or by letting quality slide.

A constitutional percentage of Fund revenue is earmarked for capacity investment: training pipelines (more doctors, nurses, teachers), facilities (more hospitals, housing, schools), technology (automation, efficiency gains). This is not discretionary. The Fund must invest in capacity.

The Comparison to Markets

Markets provide accountability through competition and price signals. Quality failures lose customers. Bad businesses go bankrupt.

The Commonwealth provides accountability through transparency and automatic consequence. Quality failures show in metrics. Bad managers get fired.

Different mechanism. Same function. The key insight: accountability doesn't require prices. It requires measurement, transparency, and consequence.

Part VIII: The Private Market

Everything above the floor.

The provision layer handles necessities at cost. The private market handles everything else at whatever price the market will bear.

The market is unlimited. Upside uncapped. Wealth accumulation unrestricted (through productive contribution, not through extracting from desperation).

Why Markets Work Better With A Floor

Markets fail when one party is desperate. When you're choosing between "accept these terms" and "die," you accept the terms. The employer doesn't need to offer good terms. They just need to offer better-than-death.

When survival is handled:

• You can negotiate (you have alternatives)
• You can say no (you won't starve)
• You can wait (you have runway)
• You can take risks (failure isn't fatal)
• You can start businesses (healthcare doesn't depend on employer)
• You can walk away (from bad deals, bad jobs, bad employers)

The floor doesn't suppress markets. It enables them.

The Entrepreneur's Launchpad

Currently, starting a business requires: family money (most don't have), savings from high-paying job (excludes most), or willingness to gamble your family's survival on an idea (irrational for parents).

How much innovation never happens because the person with the idea couldn't risk their kids' healthcare?

With the floor:

• Healthcare doesn't depend on employment (quit the job to build the company)
• Housing is secure (failure doesn't mean streets)
• Food is covered (you can eat ramen by choice, not necessity)
• Your family survives (you can take the rational risk)

The cost of the floor is known and bounded. The upside of unleashing 330 million people to build, create, and innovate is unbounded.

Part IX: Fund Revenue & Transition

Revenue Sources

The Fund generates revenue from assets it owns and services it produces:

Note what this is: returns on ownership and production. The Fund owns assets that generate value. The Fund produces services more efficiently than the extraction system. The Fund invests surplus and compounds returns. This is not taxation. It's not redistribution. It's how any well-managed enterprise works.

The Transition Phases

Transition Shock Absorbers

The transition is where big systems break. Named mechanisms that prevent catastrophic failure:

The transition isn't a leap of faith. It's a ramp with guardrails.

What Happens to Existing Industries

The Retirement Question

"My 401(k) holds those stocks!"

Yes. The extraction industries tied everyone's retirement to extraction intentionally. They made you complicit. They made opposition to extraction feel like opposition to your own retirement. Clever hostage-taking.

But think about what retirement actually is. What are you saving for?

• Healthcare when you're old
• Housing security
• Money to live on
• Not being a burden on your children

The Fund provides all of this directly. The dividend IS retirement income. The provision IS healthcare and housing security. The floor IS the safety net.

Your 401(k) balance might drop as extraction industry stocks decline. But what did those stocks represent? Claims on future extraction from sick people, desperate renters, indebted students. Paper wealth built on other people's suffering.

What replaces it: Actual security. Guaranteed healthcare. Stable housing. Unconditional income. Not paper claims—real provision.

Your actual retirement security increases even if the number on your statement decreases. You trade uncertain paper claims for guaranteed real goods.

That's not a loss. That's the trade you were always trying to make—you just couldn't see through the financial engineering.

Part X: The Inflation Question

This is the primary attack. It reveals a fundamental misunderstanding.

Where Does Value Come From?

The same place it always did: work.

Doctors still heal patients. Teachers still teach students. Builders still build homes. The Corps performs the same productive labor that currently happens—it just captures the value instead of leaking it to extraction.

A nurse in a healthcare collective does the same job as a nurse at a private hospital. The care is identical. The difference isn't the nursing. It's that there's no insurance company overhead, no hospital billing army, no denial processors consuming resources while producing nothing.

The production is real. The extraction was waste. Remove the waste, keep the production, invest the savings.

"You're Printing Money"

No. The Fund produces.

The Fund does not print dollars. The Fund does not run deficits. The Fund does not borrow. The Fund owns assets that generate returns: resources that produce royalties, spectrum that produces license fees, R&D that produces equity returns, capacity that produces services, investments that produce growth.

This is production and investment, not money creation. The returns are real because the underlying assets are real and the work is real.

"You're Adding Spending"

No. The Fund is replacing spending—and doing it more efficiently.

Americans already spend $4.5T on healthcare. Already spend $3T on housing. Already carry $1.7T in student debt. The Fund doesn't add to this. It replaces it—and captures the $2.4T extraction wedge in the process.

When the Fund pays for your healthcare, you stop paying your premium. But here's the key: the Fund pays $82 for what you were paying $100. The $18 difference was overhead and extraction. It's gone now.

That's not neutral—it's deflationary for necessities.

"Giving Everyone Money Causes Inflation"

The Fund isn't "giving everyone money." It's delivering services more efficiently and returning the savings.

The insurer received $18 and produced nothing with it—overhead, profit, denial processing, appeals, executives. Now that $18 stays with you. You might spend it. You might save it. You might invest it. Either way, it's in the productive economy instead of the extraction economy.

• For necessities: This is deflationary. Same care, lower cost. The overhead is gone.
• For discretionary goods: Increased demand from people who have more to spend. This signals entrepreneurs to build capacity. Investment flows. Supply expands. This is healthy economic activity.

The inflation that matters is the kind that traps people: housing costs rising faster than wages, healthcare consuming ever-larger shares of income. The Commonwealth eliminates that inflation by eliminating the extraction that causes it.

"Unlimited Funding Causes Price Absorption"

Yes—if prices are unlimited. This is the Student Loan Trap. Unlimited federal loans → colleges raise tuition to capture the money → students get no benefit, just more debt.

Section 7 prevents this. Prices are tied to documented cost. Not "whatever you want to charge." Cost.

If the Fund pays for healthcare at cost, hospitals cannot absorb unlimited funds by raising prices. The price is what it costs. Increases require documented cost increases. The constitutional structure closes the absorption loophole.

"Healthcare/Housing/Education Costs Rose 12-18x"

Yes. That's the evidence FOR this system, not against it.

• Healthcare did not become 18x more valuable since 1980. It became 18x more extractive.
• Tuition did not increase 12x because education got 12x better. It increased because unlimited loans enabled unlimited charging.
• Housing did not cost 4x more to build. Zoning restricted supply while financial engineering extracted from demand.

The price increases are extraction, not value. Removing extraction is deflationary for these goods.

The Binding Constraint

Money cannot buy what doesn't exist. If more patients chase fixed clinician-hours, you get queues (rationing by time) not price spikes (rationing by money).

The system handles this through mandatory capacity investment:

• Training pipelines (more providers)
• Technology (more productivity per provider)
• Facilities (more capacity)

The SLA system forces this investment. Queues form → SLA violation → mandatory expansion.

Short-term: Some queues during buildout. Rationing by time, which is fairer than rationing by money.

Medium-term: Capacity expands. Queues diminish.

Long-term: Capacity meets demand. System runs smoothly.

The honest statement: There will be friction during transition. Building capacity takes time. The question is whether that friction is worse than the status quo.

The Velocity Question

If 300 million people suddenly have disposable income and security, they spend differently. A dollar in the hands of someone who was barely surviving moves faster than a dollar in the savings account of someone already comfortable.

Velocity will increase. This is real.

Why It's Manageable:

• Necessities (healthcare, housing, food, education): Prices fixed by Fund at cost. Velocity can't inflate them.
• Discretionary (restaurants, electronics, travel): Prices are market. Velocity creates demand-pull.

What happens when demand-pull hits the discretionary sector? It signals capital to build capacity there. Entrepreneurs see opportunity. Investment flows. Supply expands to meet demand.

This is healthy inflation—the kind that drives growth and investment. The inflation is quarantined to the sector where it drives productive response, while the necessities that define survival remain stable.

The Capacity Constraint Rule

This turns inflation from a philosophical argument into an engineering constraint:

The Fund may not expand coverage or distributions faster than demonstrated increases in productive capacity.

Make it explicit. Make it measurable. Make it binding.

Expansion of coverage is gated by demonstrated capacity expansion. You cannot promise more than you can produce. The system must build before it can distribute.

This is what distinguishes the Commonwealth from magic-money-tree proposals. Critics who say "but you can't build that fast" are making an engineering argument, not an economic one. The answer is: "You're right. That's why we gate expansion to demonstrated capacity."

Part XI: The System Dynamics

The Investment Flywheel

The Fund isn't a transfer program. It's an investment engine with compounding returns.

This is how sovereign wealth funds work. This is how endowments work. This is how any well-managed capital pool works. Invest, produce, compound, grow.

The difference: the shareholders are 330 million citizens instead of a university or a Gulf state.

The Vertical Integration Advantage

The Fund captures efficiency at every layer of the value chain:

• Inputs: Owns the resources, spectrum, land
• Innovation: Holds equity in publicly-funded R&D
• Production: Employs the workforce through Corps
• Distribution: Delivers services directly to citizens
• Reinvestment: Channels surplus back into capacity

No middleman margins at each step. No extraction layers between production and consumption. The entire supply chain operates as one integrated system optimized for citizen returns, not intermediary profits.

Currently: Debt begets debt. Extraction begets extraction. Each generation starts with more overhead than the last. The compound interest runs against the population. The Commonwealth reverses the direction. Efficiency begets efficiency. Investment begets returns. Each generation starts with more capacity than the last.

The Feedback Loops

Why This Stabilizes

The system has negative feedback loops that prevent runaway failure:

The Bimodal Economy

This is the architecture that emerges:

Two modes. One economy. The floor removes desperation from economic decisions. The ceiling rewards contribution without limit. You get stability where you need stability. You get dynamism where you want dynamism.

Part XII: What You Get

What Changes

Part XIII: The Ask

Pass The American Ownership Amendment.

That's it. Not a party. Not a candidate. Not a platform. One constitutional amendment. Seven sections. Citizen ownership, locked in.

The Fund structure, the provision systems, the dividend formula—all of that is legislation. It can be adjusted, improved, refined based on experience.

But the amendment is what makes it permanent. The thing that says: You own this. They can't take it.

Why It Has To Be Constitutional

Legislation can be repealed. The extraction industries have more money than you. They have more lobbyists. They write the laws. If citizen ownership is merely law, they will eventually repeal it.

Constitutional amendments require 2/3 of Congress AND 3/4 of state legislatures (38 states). This is hard. It should be hard. Property rights should require supermajority consensus.

But it's achievable. 38 states is not a partisan split. It's a coalition: everyone who produces, everyone tired of extraction, everyone who believes work should pay, everyone who wants ownership not dependency.

This is not left versus right. It is owners versus extractors. Producers versus toll collectors. Citizens versus the system that extracts from them.

The Future

AI is coming. Automation will accelerate. Productivity will increase exponentially. The question is: who captures the productivity gains?

Current path: Capital captures everything. Wages stagnate. Wealth concentrates. The extraction economy becomes permanent—and automated.

Commonwealth path: The Fund holds equity in AI companies built on public research. The Fund employs the workers who train the models. The Fund owns the infrastructure. Productivity gains flow through Fund to citizens.

As automation reduces the cost of producing necessities, provision becomes cheaper. The Fund's costs drop. The surplus grows. The dividend increases. The more productive the economy becomes, the more the Fund returns to citizens.

Automation doesn't threaten you—it enriches you. Because you own it.