Voters felt the pain. Too few could see the productive future beyond it. Our post-election shows confront that gap; Saturday’s space vision and American System class give us something concrete to explain—and organize for Monday’s after-action review.
Is it constitutional for the federal government to help rebuild American industry? Brian Lantz says hell yes, and traces the American System from Article I, Section 8 through Hamilton, Lincoln and national credit.
Impeachment threats. A fight over tariff powers. Susan Kokinda looks beyond the post-midterm maneuvering to Trump’s answer: rebuild American industry, restore national ambition, and make us a nation of builders again.
Is it constitutional for the federal government to help rebuild American industry? Brian Lantz says hell yes, and traces the American System from Article I, Section 8 through Hamilton, Lincoln and national credit.
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In this week’s Saturday Class, Brian Lantz, with host Tony Papert, went back to the source.
Millions of Americans now hear that Trump is restoring the American System of Hamilton, Lincoln and McKinley. But almost nobody learned it in school.
Tony opened with a revealing example: Arthur MacArthur, Douglas MacArthur’s father, studied the American System by correspondence while stationed at an Army fort in the West. This was once knowledge Americans deliberately passed on. Today, recovering it is part of the fight to recover the country.
Brian’s task was to make that system understandable again—not as a historical curiosity, but as a guide to what we must build next.
Brian began with Tuesday’s vote. In his assessment, it was not a mandate for the Democrats. It was a rejection of the RINOs and the oligarchy inside the Beltway—but a rejection with little understanding of a solution.
That is the gap political organizing has to close.
Generations of Americans have lost their productive identity. When factories disappear, the loss isn’t confined to a paycheck. Skills, expectations and confidence in the future disappear with them. Demoralization follows: Who can I trust? What can actually change?
Brian’s answer was educational. He invoked Socrates in the marketplace of Athens: engage fellow citizens, challenge assumptions, and help people discover the principles they need to govern themselves.
Look at the instruments now being used to rebuild American industry: tariffs, government equity stakes, investment in rare earths, and support for shipyards.
Is that constitutional?
“The short answer is hell yes, it’s constitutional.”
— Brian Lantz
Brian walked through Article I, Section 8: the common defense and general welfare; borrowing on the credit of the United States; regulating foreign commerce; coining money; post roads; and promoting the progress of science and useful arts.
Then comes the necessary and proper clause. For the President, there is the duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
“He shall take care. That’s not passive, that’s active.”
— Brian Lantz
The Founders were establishing a developing republic, not freezing the economy of 1787 in place. They provided powers through which future generations could meet new challenges and create new capabilities.
Federal participation in productive enterprise has deep American roots.
Brian traced that history from the federal lighthouse system and the government’s stake in the national banks to the National Road and Lincoln’s Transcontinental Railroad.
He then turned to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Lending more money to failing railroads was not enough. Purchasing preferred stock gave the government another way to restore essential productive capacity—and later recover the investment.
During World War II, the federal government built steel and aluminum plants, then leased them to private companies to operate. Public investment created industrial capacity that private financing alone had not supplied. Brian’s point: government and private industry working together to meet a national need is part of the American System—not a departure from it.
These examples overturn the idea that industrial policy is something foreign to the American tradition. The American System helped create the industries, infrastructure and skills that made the country powerful.
Brian brought the argument home from the Build Freedom Summit in Galveston.
His example connected federal shipbuilding contracts, Texas workforce investment, local colleges and private industry. Training a generation of skilled shipbuilders requires all of them. A contract without workers is not a shipyard. A training program without productive employment is not a future.
This is cooperation around a national purpose—not a choice between an all-powerful federal government and isolated local communities left to fend for themselves.
Constitutional authority is one question. The principles governing investment are another.
Brian drew on Lyndon LaRouche’s physical economics to distinguish productive growth from financial activity that merely looks impressive on a balance sheet.
Does an investment increase the productive powers of labor? Does it create the conditions in which families can grow and future generations can flourish? Does it raise the power and precision available to production?
His simplest illustration was a saw. You cannot cut wood with the edge of your hand. A saw concentrates force. A power saw adds electricity. More advanced technologies carry that process further.
The test is not how many dollars circulate around a technology. It is what that technology enables human beings to do.
Finally, Brian addressed a question Robert Ingraham had urged him to take up: how do we finance this transformation?
A nuclear plant takes years to build. Financing must match the development of the project, not demand immediate returns before productive capacity exists.
Brian explained the difference between a loan disbursed all at once and a line of credit drawn as construction advances. He connected Hamilton’s national banking tradition to present-day federal financing institutions and loan guarantees that help make long-term productive investment possible.
National credit is not simply money to spend. It is a means of bringing future productive capacity into existence.
Brian directed viewers to his Physical Economics Substack, including his discussion of financing the manufacturing renaissance.
The full class has much more: the failures of the Articles of Confederation, America’s banking system, and a closing look at the Moon base as an expression of the productive future we should be preparing to build.
Watch the full class, then send it to someone who thinks the Constitution forbids rebuilding American industry.
—Promethean Action Editorial Staff
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America went from candles and the horse and buggy to telephones, cars and airplanes, in one lifetime. Bob Ingraham shows how tariffs and Hamiltonian credit did it, and why the same tools, back in play today, can do it again.
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