Ending Corporate Subsidies and Insider Deals
Stop favoring winners with subsidies, carve-outs, and no-bid contracts, so firms compete by serving customers rather than by being connected.
A position paper for discussion
An economy that works for the people in it.
For a long stretch, doing your work well was enough to build a secure life in America. For a lot of people, that stopped being true. This is a different way to think about fixing it, one that doesn't fit the usual left-right script.
The open field
The idea is simple. An economy works when everyone can get onto the field and do what they do best, and when doing it well earns a genuinely better life.
Government's job is to keep the field level and honest, and to equip people to compete on it: education, foundational research, sound rules, open markets. It is not to favor who wins, through subsidies, bailouts, and insider contracts. And it is not to gate who may play, through the thicket of needless barriers that protect incumbents from competition. Government builds and maintains the field. It does not play the game, and it does not fix the outcome.
The field carries an obligation in return. No success is purely self-made. It draws on a system others built and maintain, the schools, the science, the rules, the basic public order that made the opportunity possible. Those who draw the most from that system have the most reason to keep it open for the next person. That is not charity, and it is not redistribution. It is the cost of keeping the field level.
A different question
The familiar argument runs along a single axis: more government, or less. The open field asks something else of any policy. Does it keep the field level, and can we afford to keep it that way?
A great many fights that look intractable when posed as government against market look different when posed this way. The test is not whether a policy grows or shrinks the state. It is whether it helps people get onto the field, do their best work, and keep the whole thing standing for the next person.
What it looks like in practice
Seven areas, one set of principles. Each is the same idea applied where the field has tilted.
Trade and the Open Field
Defend open trade, treat tariffs as a rare emergency tool rather than a habit, and help displaced workers move forward instead of propping up what no longer works.
Keeping Social Security Solvent
Guarantee the benefit people paid for, fund it by applying one rate to all income, and let the program correct itself instead of lurching toward a cliff.
Healthcare Competition and a Cap on Premiums
Untie coverage from your job so you are free to take a risk, keep Medicare and make it simpler and open to all, and cap what any household can be asked to pay.
Simpler Retirement Saving
Replace the whole alphabet of accounts with one portable account and one rule, with unused room that carries forward so no one is penalized for saving late.
Tax Reform and the Treatment of Capital
Treat a dollar of work and a dollar of wealth on more even footing, reward capital that builds real enterprise, and reckon accumulated wealth when it changes hands.
A Sustainable Defense
Buy to a mission the country actually chooses, hand off responsibly as allies carry their weight, and bring spending in line with our means.
What this is, and what it isn't
This is not a party's program, and it is not offered as one. Some of it reads as coming from the right, some from the left, and that is rather the point. The open field is not a position on the familiar spectrum. It is a different axis altogether.
The specifics are meant to be argued with. Where a figure appears in the paper, it is illustrative, chosen to show the shape of an idea rather than to fix a final number. The paper follows established precedent wherever it can, and says so plainly wherever it goes beyond current practice. Its fiscal appendix is grounded in the Congressional Budget Office's own scored options rather than wishful arithmetic.
What is not up for trade is the frame itself: that opportunity and solvency are not opposing goals but the same goal seen from two sides, and that a country can be both fair and disciplined if it is willing to hold both at once.
Read the paper
The full argument runs across all seven areas, with each provision measured against the same principles and every departure from current practice flagged in the open. It is meant as a starting point for discussion, not a finished bill.