There’s a comforting rhythm to modern politics: promise the impossible, fund it with someone else’s money, and let arithmetic be a problem for the next administration. It works until it doesn’t.
This morning’s perambulation through the news cycle offered something more revealing than stock or resource prices, updates on the Shadow Fed’s effort to manhandle interest rates or the slinky outfit worn by NFL quarterback Justin Goff’s girlfriend… it offered much more: a glimpse into three very different ideas of what America is supposed to be.
America is like a late-thirty something waking up from a beer and bourbon-doused bender on a buddy’s couch in Nashville, and remembering back home there are bills to pay and mouths to feed, without an actual clue of how to do it. Then, mainlining a vitamin B12 straight into its veins in an effort to sober up and gain the courage for the challenge.
All That’s Missing Is The Math
First, we learned that Zohran Mandami, the mayor-elect of New York City, is en route to Albany to attempt to persuade the state to fund his campaign promise of universal childcare. He picked the easy one first, one supposes.
The polls are firmly on his side.
Nearly two-thirds of New Yorkers support the plan and favor paying for it by raising taxes on those earning more than $1 million a year. People love free things. Or, more precisely, they love things they’re told are free.
Child care is expensive for the same reason health care, education, and elder care are expensive: human labor is expensive.
As Jordan McGillis explains, it’s a textbook case of Baumol’s cost disease — labor-intensive services where productivity doesn’t scale, but wages must rise anyway. Pay accounts for 60–80% of a daycare’s operating costs. Expand coverage to infants, with higher caregiver-to-child ratios, and the math only worsens.
New York already ran this experiment under Bill de Blasio. The result was inefficiency, misallocated seats, and rising costs. But de Blasio let slip the real logic behind it all: “Anything that has a broad constituency will also have more sustainability.” Universal programs aren’t designed to be efficient; they’re designed to be untouchable.
That’s America One: comfort through collectivization, sold as compassion, financed by abstraction.
America as a Nation — or a Creed?
Then there is a second America taking shape, articulated most clearly by J.D. Vance and his intellectual allies.
In this vision, America is not a creedal nation defined by shared principles, but something closer to a European nation-state — bounded by identity, history, and belonging.
Vance has argued that defining America by agreement with the Declaration of Independence is “over-inclusive,” because it would include millions— perhaps billions — of people who share those beliefs but live elsewhere.
In other words, creed is insufficient. What matters is who belongs.
Our friend Bill Bonner was on the case this morning, cutting through the brain fog: Vance mistakes the United States for a nation-state. Nation-states are bound by blut und boden — blood and soil — a philosophy that found enthusiastic expression east of the Rhine in the 1930s. France is the classic example: a fixed territory, a shared language, a common culture, cheese, holidays, and continuity from Louis XIV onward.
According to the Vance faction, America should be more like France — but for Americans only. Participation restricted. Membership curated.
This vision also comes with a plan. Not faith and state, but technology and state — an industrial policy that fuses political power, taxpayer capital, and technological ambition.
As Tanner Greer puts it: “Technological development is only possible when a governing coalition commits to it.” Coalitions must be courted. Incentives aligned. Dissent managed.
Bonner’s rebuttal is the older, quieter generation and far more dangerous to ambitious planners: “America was never meant to be for a special group of people. It was meant to be a place for people who want to be special.”
Yet polls suggest as many as 40% of young Americans would rather live somewhere else. Crime, costs, health care, stagnation. When asked why he left the U.S., Bonner’s answer is stark: “We didn’t leave America. It left us.”
That’s America Two: order through exclusion and design. The old school, wondering what happened to the hard-boiled one left behind in the history pages.
America as a Tech Project
And then there is the third America — the one embodied by Palmer Luckey.
On his desk at Anduril Industries sits a red phone once tied into the nuclear command system. It isn’t connected anymore. But in Luckey’s fantasy-world, he’s getting the call. Vance’s call perhaps.
After inventing a 3D virtual reality headset called Oculus in a trailer and selling it to Facebook for $2 billion at 21, Luckey got himself fired.
He was flush and furious. Silicon Valley, he decided, had outsourced America’s technological soul to China. So he built something else.
Now, Luckey, 33 and only a year younger than New York’s wunderkind Mamdani, is chair of his own real-life Iron Man enterprise.
Anduril Industries makes autonomous surveillance towers for the border, submarine drones for Australia, counter-drone systems for U.S. Special Operations, loitering munitions, hypersonic propulsion systems, and autonomous fighter drones that beat Boeing, Lockheed, and Northrop Grumman in Air Force trials.
Anduril has raised over $2 billion in private capital, and booked more than $1 billion in government contracts, and generated roughly $500 million in annual revenue.
Luckey wears flip-flops to the office and talks openly about saving Western civilization — while making tens of billions doing it. His worldview aligns neatly with the Vance-style industrial state, though his origin story is pure American improvisation.
“I felt our innovation apparatus had been hijacked by China,” Luckey said. Big Tech wouldn’t work with the Pentagon for fear of losing access to Chinese capital and markets. He would.
This is America Three: competition, speed, and scale — liberty harnessed to power.
The Real Cost of Confusion
None of this is simple. And none of it is meant to be.
What makes this moment so disorienting — for investors, citizens, parents, and grandparents alike — is that all three visions now competing for America’s future feel oddly foreign to the country many of us thought we inherited.
One promises comfort without cost. Another promises order through exclusion and design. The third promises renewal through relentless competition, speed, and scale.
Each claims to be pragmatic.
Each claims inevitability.
And yet, all of them drift from the older American understanding that liberty is inseparable from responsibility, and prosperity from restraint.
The historian Russell Kirk once described America not as a machine to be optimized or a constituency to be managed, but as a moral inheritance.
In Kirk’s words, the American order existed “to preserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of property” — property not merely as material wealth, but as independence, stewardship, and the space to act freely without permission.
That vision asked something of the individual. It assumed limits. It respected trade-offs. And it trusted that a free people, though imperfect, could govern themselves better than any plan devised on their behalf.
Today’s confusion — economic, political, cultural — is not accidental. It is what happens when a society loses confidence in its own first principles and substitutes them with promises of ease, control, or technological salvation.
Markets strain under the weight. Politics hardens. And citizens are left trying to orient themselves in a landscape where the old maps no longer seem to apply. Or matter.
Our task here at the Grey Swan HQ, as we head into year 250 of this American experiment, is not to choose a tribe or a slogan — but to recover clarity.
To understand what is being offered, what is being denied, and what quietly slips away when arithmetic, history, and human nature are treated as inconveniences.
That work is slower. Less satisfying. And far more necessary.
Because when the idea of America becomes unmoored, it’s not necessarily yielding to an improvement on the original, is it? The news cycle, for today at least, just reveals it’s being replaced… by something louder.
Louder is rarely wiser.
~Addison
P.S. This Thursday on Grey Swan Live! — December 18 at 2 p.m. EST / 11 a.m. PST — we’ll be joined by forensic investor Dan Amoss, one of the very few who saw both the tech bubble and the mortgage bubble for what they were before they burst… and positioned accordingly.
Dan isn’t a television personality. He’s the kind of investor who does his work with a calculator, a set of financial statements, and an allergy to consensus. One of his better-known trades — a short on Lehman Brothers — paid off 470% overnight on September 15, 2008. For much of this past decade, he’s quietly traded the macro underpinnings of markets alongside Jim Rickards at Strategic Intelligence.
Dan will walk us through why 2026 may prove even more punishing for individual investors than 2000–01 or 2008–09 — and, more importantly, how to think clearly when denial becomes the dominant investment thesis.
That includes a look at several trades he’s made during the AI boom, and the accounting stress fractures beneath the surface that suggest today’s prices are floating far above economic reality.
It will be dense. It may be unsettling. It will be coherent. And it will feel like a refresher course in valuation at a moment when markets seem to have misplaced the abacus.
You won’t want to miss it.
If you have requests for new guests you’d like to see join us for Grey Swan Live!, or have any questions for our guests, send them here.
