Brothers Judd Blog

If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

2025

End of History One Economy to Rule Them All

DEMOCRACY, CAPITALISM, PROTESTANTISM:

The Other Revolution of ’76 (William H. Peterson, Fall 1973, Modern Age)

For in 1776, between the appearance of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense in January and the Declaration in July, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith was published. A most remarkable book. This one book reconstituted the industrial revolution and launched the capitalist revolution, at least intellectually. Walter Bagehot said that because of this one book “the life of almost everyone in England—perhaps of everyone—is different and better. . .”1 William Pitt in introducing the budget to Parliament in 1792, echoed Edmund Burke and said this one book furnishes “the best solution to every question connected with the history of commerce, or with the systems of political economy.”2 Henry Thomas Buckle in his History of Civilization in England said:

This solitary Scotchman has by the publication of one single work, contributed more to the happiness of man than has been effected by the united abilities of all the statesmen and legislators of whom history has presented an authentic record.3

Be that as it may, the two revolutions of 1776—American and capitalist—were more than coincidence. Both represented reactions against mercantilism, a system of political economy characterized by aggressive nationalism, central direction and closed economies. Both represented grand endeavors to advance the cause of a free society through the establishment of limited government, although one was mainly political in scope while the other was mainly economic. Both sought, each in its own way, a system of checks and balances, of separation of powers, of freeing the individual—with the ultimate sovereignity of the one residing in the citizen, and with the ultimate sovereignity of the other residing in the consumer. In this article, some of the origins and implications of the capitalist revolution on both sides of the Atlantic are examined, with Smith’s Wealth of Nations as a guide.

Robotics/AI

GREEN ENERGY VS RED TAPE:

These Companies Want To Use AI To Make Cheaper and Cleaner Energy—If the Government Lets Them (Jeff Luse, 12.29.2025, reason)

While reducing paperwork may seem like a trivial fix, it’s an important one; a reactor license application can easily exceed 10,000 pages and undergo up to two years of review from federal regulators. And simple errors in these documents can set projects back and cost thousands of dollars. For one of Everstar’s clients, fixing an error in the licensing documentation, which CEO Kevin Kong tells Reason was “essentially a typo,” required “developing and getting approval for a formal License Amendment Request.” This request cost the developer “tens of thousands of dollars in engineering time and external consultants” and added months in regulatory review, according to Kong.

Gordian, the company’s AI-enabled platform, aims to eliminate cases like these by “automat[ing] compliance, technical documentation, and regulatory navigation for the nuclear industry,” says Kong. Since launching earlier this year, the technology has yielded impressive results. After Last Energy was given federal funding in August to demonstrate its advanced nuclear reactor, it partnered with Everstar to write a 50-page environmental assessment. What would normally take eight weeks was completed in one. The system was also able to turn around a 200-page ecology report—a revision that usually takes a few weeks—in one night.

Kong says his clients have been able to cut “30-40% of the time spent on major regulatory deliverables,” which can be the “difference between projects penciling out or not.” The company plans to scale up operations in the coming year.

Identitarianism

IT IS THE UNIVERSALISM THAT maga HATES:

How 2 Presidents Saved the Declaration of Independence (Janice Rogers Brown, 10.10/25, Coolidge Review)

Lincoln passionately defended the Declaration’s principle of equality during his Senate campaign against Stephen Douglas in 1858. Douglas argued that the signers of the Declaration referred only “to white men, to men of European birth and European descent, when they declared the equality of all men.”

Lincoln rejected this claim. During a July 10 speech in Chicago, he said: “Let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man—this race and that race and the other race being inferior…. Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal.” Lincoln called the Declaration’s insistence on the equality of all men “the father of all moral principle.”

The next year, in a letter reflecting on the anniversary of Thomas Jefferson’s birth, Lincoln wrote:

All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.

Lincoln showed his commitment to this abstract truth in the Gettysburg Address. America, he said, was “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” The Civil War, he said, was a test not just for America but for “any nation so conceived and so dedicated.”

The political philosopher Harry Jaffa notes that Lincoln’s interpretation of “all men are created equal” transformed that proposition from a “pre-political, negative, minimal” norm that “prescribes what civil society ought not to be” into “a transcendental affirmation of what it ought to be.” […]

In his 1926 speech at Independence Hall, Coolidge acknowledged that the right of people to choose their own rulers was an old idea—detailed by the Dutch as early as July 26, 1581, and by the British people in their long struggle with the Stuarts. But he insisted that “we should search those charters in vain for an assertion of the doctrine of equality.” It was this equality principle that Coolidge deemed “profoundly revolutionary.”

The Declaration mattered, Coolidge said, not because it established a new nation but because it established “a nation on new principles.” The Declaration’s preamble set out “three very definite propositions” regarding “the nature of mankind and therefore of government”: “the doctrine that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that therefore the source of the just powers of government must be derived from the consent of the governed.”

Identitarianism

GOTTA BLAME SOMEONE FOR PERSONAL FAILURE:

Hannah Arendt can help us understand today’s far-right populism (Christopher J. Finlay, December 28, 2025, Asia Times)

Comparing today’s politics to fully fledged totalitarianism can be illuminating. But if it’s all we do, we risk overlooking Arendt’s subtler lessons about warning signs that can help us gauge threats to democracy.

The first is that political catastrophe isn’t always signposted by great causes, but arises when sometimes seemingly trivial developments converge. The greatest example for Arendt was political antisemitism. During the 19th century, only a “crackpot” fringe embraced it. By the 1930s, it was driving world politics.

This resonates with hard-right and far-right ideology today. Ideas widely seen as eccentric 20 years ago have increasingly come to shape democratic politics. Anti-immigrant sentiment and xenophobia penetrate the political mainstream. Alongside growing Islamophobia, antisemitism is on the rise again too.

The mainstreaming of previously marginal views helps explain a second warning sign that politics is increasingly driven by what Arendt described as “forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest.”

A simplistic politics of ideological fantasy and paranoia takes over instead. It appeals most to the isolated and lonely, people lost in society who have given up hope that anyone will ever address their real interests and concerns. Perpetually frustrated by reality, they seek escape in conspiracy theories instead.

Homocentric Universe

BECAUSE IT IS OBSERVED:

Ask Ethan: Why does something exist instead of nothing? (Ethan Siegel, 12/28/25, Big Think)

We are certain that “something” exists. We are certain that if you take away the particles and antiparticles and photons and quanta in a region of space, that empty space will still exist. If you move far away from any sources of mass or energy and clear the space of all external electric, magnetic, and gravitational fields, and prevent any photons or gravitational waves from entering that space, that “physical nothingness” will still exist in that region. And in that region, certain things cannot be removed:

there will still be quantum fields in the vacuum of that empty space,


the fundamental constants and underlying laws of physics will still exist in that empty space,

and there will still be a “zero-point energy” inherent to that space, and it will still possess a finite, positive, and non-zero value.

As far as we can tell, that’s as close to nothing as we can get within our Universe.

You might be able to imagine, in your mind, a state of pure nothingness that’s even more “nothing-like” than this, but that doesn’t represent anything physically real. There’s no experiment you can design that can create such a condition. The best we can say — assuming that we’re sticking to science and not moving into the realm of theology, philosophy, or pure imagination — is that the reason there’s something rather than nothing is that “nothing” cannot exist compatibly within our Universe. Of course, that leads back to the original question: why? And for that, dissatisfying though it is, science has no answer. The Universe is the way it is, and though we strive to understand it as best we can, we are compelled to be humble before the great cosmic unknown.

Why Being Rather Than Nothingness? Part II: While scientific inquiry and advances have changed the world we live in, it does not have the power to penetrate even a centimeter into the primary question of God. (Regis Martin, 12/28/25, Crisis)

There once lived a rather tiresome New England transcendentalist by the name of Margaret Fuller, reputed to have been America’s first feminist, who had fallen early on into the irritating habit of announcing to all and sundry, “I accept the universe!” It was as if she were doing the universe a favor by allowing it to exist. This prompted the tart-tongued Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle to reply, “Gad, she’d better.”

So, yes, there is a universe; and, no, it is not negotiable whether or not we accept it. It’s actually been around for quite a while, by the way, and we’ve simply got to deal with that fact. Nor does it appear to be going away anytime soon, either. But does it do anything? I mean, what is it for? And, more importantly, who’s responsible for its creation?

“Why,” to ask the question posed by Stephen Hawking, who, until his death in 2018 was the world’s most celebrated cosmologist, “does the universe go through all the bother of existing?” And since it does exist, is there anything in the laws of physics to account for that fact? “What is it,” Hawking wants to know, “that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to govern?”


Now there’s a bit of sleight of hand for you. To go from nothing to something, how does that work? The sheer circularity of the thing reveals a fairly serious want of logic. To blithely insist, for example, as that most eminent thinker Bertrand Russell did in his one sentence summary of the world’s wisdom, “I should say that the universe is just there, and that’s all there is to it,” is really an astonishingly stupid thing to say.

Ownership Society

THE SAVINGEST PEOPLE ON EARTH:

401(k)s Built America’s Wealth and Proved All the Critics Wrong: The rise of defined contribution accounts has given workers portability, flexibility, and a stake in America’s capital markets. (Judge Glock, December 24, 2025, Daily Economy)

A recent Wall Street Journal story highlighted the hundreds of thousands of “401(k) millionaires” just at the Fidelity brokerage. Far from being a refuge just for the wealthy, individual retirement accounts have become a widespread and secure way to save for retirement. They have also become one of the main reasons for America’s national wealth. […]

Around the time of the 401(k) tax code change, there were about 30 million defined benefit plan participants in the private sector, an all-time peak. That was nearly double the total in “defined contribution” or individual retirement plans, such as the 401(k).

Today, the number of active participants in defined benefit plans is down to about 10 million, but there are almost 90 million in defined contribution plans. Thanks to 401(k)s, the total number of workers with any retirement plan is at an all-time high, even accounting for population growth. […]

Despite periodic cries about a retirement crisis, people with the option to save for retirement are saving a lot. Fidelity estimates that people with 401(k)s are saving over 14 percent of their income in them, including both employer and employee contributions. The median retirement savings for the recently retired is $200,000, which helps explain the all-time record net worth for this group. The amount of savings will go up as more people retire who only know of defined contribution accounts. The number of people with individual accounts at middle age is actually higher than it is for older groups.  

Beyond the benefits to individuals, there are social benefits to individual retirement accounts. In countries with more expansive collective safety nets and social security, most people don’t have to save as much for retirement. Although for some individuals that could work out fine, for society as a whole, it can be devastating.

Uncategorized

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURES:

Robots fast-track antibiotic discovery by building hundreds of metal compounds in days (Neetika Walter, Dec 23, 2025, Interesting Engineering)


Robots are now doing what once took chemists months, building potential antibiotics in days as drug resistance tightens its grip on the world.

In a striking demonstration of automated chemistry, researchers have used a robotic synthesis platform to rapidly generate and test hundreds of metal-based compounds, uncovering a promising new antibiotic candidate in the process.

The approach could reshape how scientists search for urgently needed drugs to combat antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Sport

KING PONG:

The Real-Life Marty Supreme Taught Me How to Hustle (Amy Chozick, 12/24/25, NY Times)

I met Mr. Reisman when I read the manuscript for his memoir, which I unsuccessfully championed. He cut a distinctive figure, walking around the Lower East Side in vintage Panama hats, tinted aviators and custom-made pastel pants. He always had a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

I hesitate to call him a mentor. After all, Mr. Reisman was, by his own account, friends with members of Meyer Lansky’s Murder Incorporated gang, a self-declared Ping-Pong hustler who, paddle in hand, had, he told me, taken money off everyone from Montgomery Clift to the president of the Philippines.

I remain useless at table tennis and lose bets to my 7-year-old, but Mr. Reisman taught me that if I wanted to make it, I’d need to cultivate my own kind of con. He showed me how to reinvent. To self-mythologize. To stop apologizing and start throwing elbows at the Barneys Warehouse Sale. To order an off-menu roast duck bowl at Mee Noodle Shop.

It’s easy to feel as if you’re going to get eaten alive when you first step out into the world, especially in a place like New York City. It’s a fake-it-till-you-make-it kind of place, where it seems as if most of the people you meet were born on third base. Anyone who’s ever tried to weasel inside or work her way above her station knows that a certain amount of hustle — even con — is required. It’s why we love Jay Gatsby and Don Draper and have welcomed the woman known as Anna Delvey back to Fashion Week.

Mr. Reisman did this in the most florid way. Known as the Needle because of his slim physique, he was born in New York in 1930 and grew up on the Lower East Side. He told me he picked up table tennis in Bellevue Hospital after he had a nervous breakdown at age 9. And damn, if Mr. Reisman didn’t cultivate his talent and the Reisman myth to travel the world and get into rooms he was never meant to be in. […]

Mr. Reisman used to tell me about the characters who frequented his splendid Gothic establishment, Riverside Table Tennis, on 96th and Broadway: Freddie the Fence, Herbie the Nuclear Physicist, Betty the Monkey Lady, Tony the Arm, Dustin Hoffman, David Mamet and a group of violinists from the Metropolitan Opera. “No one knows why,” he said.

Founding Presidents Religion Uncategorized

IT’S A PURITAN NATION:

Calvin Coolidge’s “Hebraic Mortar”: Henry Ford sought to mainstream anti-Jewish sentiment in the United States. In a 1925 address, Coolidge decisively broke with Ford’s movement. (Devorah Goldman, 12/22/25, Public Discourse)

But he argues that the colonial character was nonetheless marked by a common religious liberalism: “From its beginnings, the new continent had seemed destined to be the home of religious tolerance.” This, he suggests, is because of the Bible, “the work of literature that was common to all of them.” Scripture was everywhere in the colonies. Citing “the historian Lecky”—presumably the nineteenth-century Irishman William Lecky—Coolidge contends that “Hebraic mortar cemented the foundations of American democracy.”

For the “sturdy old divines of those days,” the Bible served as a patriotic rallying cry:

They knew the Book. They were profoundly familiar with it, and eminently capable in the exposition of all its justifications for rebellion. To them, the record of the exodus from Egypt was indeed an inspired precedent. They knew what arguments from holy writ would most powerfully influence their people. It required no great stretch of logical processes to demonstrate that the children of Israel, making bricks without straw in Egypt, had their modern counterpart in the people of the colonies, enduring the imposition of taxation without representation!

The idea of America as a kind of Israel, an “almost chosen nation,” in Abraham Lincoln’s words some generations earlier, was not new. William Bradford, founder of the Plymouth colony in 1620, compared his personal study of Hebrew to Moses seeing the Promised Land, yet not being permitted to enter. John Davenport and Theophilus Eaton, founders of the New Haven colony in 1637, were expert Hebrew scholars; around half of the dozens of statutes in the New Haven code of 1655 contained references to Hebrew scripture. Davenport ensured that the first public school in New Haven included Hebrew in the core curriculum and encouraged broad engagement with, as Coolidge puts it, the “great figures of Hebrew history, with Joshua, Samuel, Moses, Joseph, David, Solomon, Gideon, Elisha.” The United States is peppered with place names sourced from the Bible: Salem, Sharon, Jericho, Bethlehem, Goshen, Shiloh, and Hebron are just a few examples.

George Washington famously sent warm greetings to Jewish congregations, most notably to a synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, where he offered a blessing inspired by Hebrew prophets: “May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants—while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

This biblical rootedness, Coolidge suggests, remains vital to maintaining a cohesive polity. A shared attachment to the Bible bolstered the patriot cause, drawing together scattered sympathies and interests and “divergencies of religious faith.” It is no wonder, he notes, that Jews—who first arrived on America’s shores in the 1650s—formed an integral part of the Revolutionary War effort, giving ample blood and treasure.

End of History

THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH AMERICA THAT ELECTING A LIBERAL WOULDN’T FIX:

Let’s Not Grant the Postliberal Critique of Market Liberalism: Discontents with liberal modernity are perennial and a spiritual awakening won’t cure them (Jonathan Rauch, Dec 21, 2025, The UnPopulist)

Nineteen-seventy was a banner year for American cultural criticism. Blockbusters like Charles A. Reich’s The Greening of America and Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock heralded a decade of introspection. Another bestseller, now largely forgotten, was by the American sociologist Philip Slater: The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point. (You can read the 1970 edition here.)

Why, Slater asked, is America so prosperous, yet so unhappy? “Scarcity is now shown to be an unnecessary condition,” he wrote. Americans enjoyed an unprecedented bounty of choice—a bounty not only of consumer goods but also of lifestyles. Yet prices were high, services were deteriorating, the environment was suffering. Worse, “there is an uneasy, anesthetized feeling about this kind of life,” Slater wrote. “We … feel bored with the orderly chrome and porcelain vacuum of our lives, from which so much of life has been removed.” The blame, he charged, lay with an “old culture” which “has been unable to keep any of the promises that have sustained it” and “is less and less able to hide its fundamental antipathy to human life and human satisfaction.”

Revised in 1975 to reflect the end of the Vietnam war, Slater’s book made its way, by and by, into the hands of a certain teenager living in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona. At 16, I thought the book was brilliant. I wasn’t alone. The Pursuit of Loneliness fed into a stream of national self-doubt that culminated in President Carter’s “malaise” speech of 1979. The country, said Carter, faced a

crisis of confidence … that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.

In 1979, his diagnosis seemed right to me and a lot of other Americans.


And then … Reagan. Morning in America.

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