“Democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury.”
~ Alexander Fraser Tytler, Scottish Historian, d. 1813
We expect a lot more protests like these as the U.S. Government grapples with its existing and future debt load (Source: Mother Jones)
October 20, 2025 — Tytler’s observation feels uncomfortably current this week, as millions took to the streets for the so-called “No Kings” protests — a nationwide outcry against “authoritarianism” and “executive overreach.”
According to organizers, if you can believe them, nearly seven million Americans participated in 2,700 rallies across all fifty states. For all their righteous energy, and indignation, one can’t help noticing a strange omission in their demands: no mention of how this leaderless utopia they envision will pay for itself.
Because while the protestors were waving signs about tyranny, the Treasury was quietly releasing its latest fiscal figures — and they tell a story far more consequential than any chant or banner.
Coincidence or no, the Peterson Foundation released their summary of budget data for September 2025, the final month of fiscal year, 2025 this morning.
The federal government ended Fiscal Year 2025 with a $1.8 trillion deficit — the fourth largest in the nation’s history, slightly behind FY 2024. And only surpassed by the inflation-triggering 2021 and 2022 pandemic lockdown spending spree.
According to the federal register, the national debt hit $30.2 trillion, up from $28.2 trillion just a year ago. But if you take a gander at national debt clock rolling ticker the number exceeded $37 trillion weeks ago:
A quick screengrab from the debt ticker as it whizzes upward toward oblivion. (Source: www.usdebtclock.org)
Interest on that debt — $89 billion higher than last year — has now grown faster than defense spending.
Social Security outlays climbed another $120 billion, Medicare rose $78 billion, and net interest costs alone are beginning to rival the combined budgets of some of the largest federal programs.
That is the reality of our democracy in action: three giant engines — entitlements, healthcare, and debt service — consuming almost everything the Treasury brings in.
The newly minted Department of War eats up a close 4th place $914 billion.
The “No Kings” movement may think it’s rebelling against power, but in truth, it’s rebelling against arithmetic.
Tytler would not have been surprised.
He believed democracy was inherently short-lived because, over time, citizens learn to use the vote not as a shield but as a shovel — digging into the public treasury to satisfy every grievance, comfort, or entitlement.
The tragedy is not that democracy breeds tyranny. It’s that democracy breeds dependency, and dependency makes tyranny inevitable.
The “No Kings” crowd insists that concentrated power is the problem. They are half right. But power doesn’t just consolidate in palaces — it consolidates in bureaucracies, entitlement systems, and central banks. Every government check written without corresponding productivity represents another quiet transfer of sovereignty from citizens to the state.
To be blunt, how do the protestors propose we pay for the “people’s government” they celebrate? Raise taxes on billionaires? Fine. Do the math. Even if the IRS confiscated every dollar of income above $1 million, it wouldn’t fund Medicare and Social Security for half a year.
Cut defense? That’s $800 billion against a $7 trillion annual budget. Abolish the Federal Reserve? Then who finances the debt auctions that keep Social Security checks from bouncing?
Whether ruled by kings or committees, nations eventually bow to the same monarch: compound interest.
Ray Dalio, in his study of long-term debt cycles, calls this the “late-stage” phase — when countries reach such a level of indebtedness that every policy option becomes a trap.
Raise rates, and you trigger a recession. Keep them low, and you fuel inflation. Borrow more, and you degrade confidence in your currency. Either way, trust begins to erode, and capital starts running downhill toward real assets — gold, silver, energy—anything with intrinsic value.
In that sense, what’s happening in the markets mirrors what’s happening in the streets.
The “No Kings” protests are not a spontaneous eruption of democratic idealism. They are a social symptom of the same financial exhaustion that’s pushing investors toward hard money and real things. People can sense that something has gone hollow in the promises of government, even if they can’t articulate what.
But rebellion without reason rarely leads to reform.
The United States is no longer governed by kings, but it is ruled by a kind of invisible monarchy — a debt monarchy. The Treasury prints, the Fed monetizes, and the voters demand. It’s an arrangement everyone pretends to despise but no one dares unwind.
We talk about democracy as if it were self-correcting. It’s not. The system we’ve built since World War II, and accelerated after 2008, depends entirely on confidence: the confidence that dollars will retain purchasing power, that Congress will eventually restrain itself, and that the rest of the world will continue financing our deficits in exchange for the privilege of holding our currency.
But confidence is not infinite. It erodes in stages — first in markets, then in politics, and finally in the social contract itself. You can already feel the tremors. Gold at record highs. Silver up double digits. Bitcoin volatile but holding six figures. Those are not speculative excesses; they’re signals of mistrust.
It’s worth remembering that in the 1930s — another era of populism, interventionism, and protest — the United States confiscated its citizens’ gold, devalued its currency, and dramatically expanded federal control over the economy. The Depression didn’t make Americans more democratic; it made them more dependent. The “No Kings” generation may believe they are guarding democracy, but history suggests they are rehearsing the same script that leads to greater centralization of power.
In 1940, as the Great Depression gave way to war, a former Wall Street trader named Fred Schwed Jr. published a slim, satirical book called Where Are the Customers’ Yachts? It skewered the financial optimism of the 1920s and the delusions that had fueled the crash of ’29. His point was simple: the insiders always find a way to sail away richer, while the public is left holding the bag.
Eighty-five years later, the same dynamic is playing out in the AI boom. The insiders — venture funds, chipmakers, megacaps—are building yachts at record speed. The “little guy” is buying at the top, encouraged by analysts and influencers who’ve learned to speak the new gospel of technological inevitability. But beneath the surface, the fundamentals remain what they were in Schwed’s day: speculation, leverage, and faith in perpetual motion.
The “No Kings” protesters may think they are fighting oligarchy, but they are living inside its architecture. Every pension fund, every index, every digital payment is tied to the same financial system they condemn. And that system, sustained by debt and liquidity, now shapes not just economics but geopolitics.
When Washington borrows $1.8 trillion a year, it isn’t just a domestic accounting problem — it’s a global strategic liability.
The dollar remains the world’s reserve currency, and may grab some legs by digitizing as we’ve outline in our Dollar 2.0 presentation, but that status depends on discipline we no longer exhibit. Our adversaries see the weakness. China accumulates gold and pushes for commodity-backed trade. The BRICS nations discuss alternatives to dollar settlement. Even allies are diversifying reserves.
In a sense, the “No Kings” protesters are right to fear centralized power. They just misunderstand its source. The real danger isn’t in one man’s hands — it’s in the inertia of the system itself. A state that borrows to fund consumption and entitlement eventually becomes captive to its own promises. You don’t need a king for that. You just need a population willing to believe it can live forever on tomorrow’s money.
Aquinas would have recognized this moral exhaustion. He taught that government exists to orient man toward the common good — not merely the collective satisfaction of appetite, but the flourishing of a just and virtuous community. The legitimacy of rulers depends on their commitment to that end. When rulers — and by extension, citizens — pursue only private gain, the polity degenerates into disorder.
We are witnessing that degeneration in real time. Not tyranny, but drift. Not rebellion, but confusion. The “No Kings” movement mistakes symptoms for causes. The problem isn’t authority — it’s irresponsibility. A people who cannot govern their appetites will always invite someone—or something — to govern them.
So perhaps the right question isn’t “No Kings?” but “What kind of kingdom are we already in?”
Because whether ruled by monarchs, mobs, or markets, the laws of economics and the constraints of debt remain sovereign. The Treasury’s ledger is our mirror. We can protest power all we want, but unless we confront the addiction to deficit spending, our democracy will continue to trade freedom for comfort, sovereignty for subsidy, and reason for rhetoric.
The “No Kings” crowd might one day discover that the tyranny they fear doesn’t wear a crown. It wears a smile, signs checks, and calls itself “the common good.”
And like all monarchs in the end, it will demand obedience — long after the cheering stops.
If history rhymes, as it seems to, we’re somewhere between the late 1930s and the late Roman Republic. The crowds are restless, the debt insatiable, the elites insulated, and the reformers convinced they can vote their way to virtue. The yachts are still in the harbor; the customers are still swimming.
“No Kings”? Fine. But remember: every time the crowd dethrones a monarch, it tends to crown a bureaucracy. And bureaucracies, unlike kings, never die.
~ Addison
P.S. Our Dollar 2.0 presentation closes at midnight tonight, if you haven’t had the chance to review, please do so before the Federal Reserve special meeting on digital assets begins tomorrow, October 21. You can review Dollar 2.0, right here.
