76report

July 4, 2025

Our Money and Our Freedom

Property must be secured, or liberty cannot exist. - John Adams, Discourses on Davila, 1790

Happy Fourth of July to everyone! The one year countdown begins to the 250th anniversary of our founding in 1776!

I'm writing from the home in which I was raised in Live Free or Die New Hampshire. If you really want to feel connected to America’s history, I would contend there may no better place to be on Independence Day.

Walking along the cobblestone streets of Portsmouth yesterday, I passed the John Paul Jones House. This is where the great naval hero of the American Revolution lived as he oversaw construction of America, the very first ship of the Continental Navy.

Everything about this place speaks volumes about the history of who we are as a nation. And it’s a pretty special history.

The men and women across the colonies who courageously participated in the American Revolution were seizing a unique opportunity in human history. The vision they had, and the risks they took, are the reason we have so much to be thankful for today.

But what was it that they were really fighting for?

When people think about the formation of the United States, most of the emphasis is usually placed on political rights—the right to speak your mind, practice your own religion, and vote for the leaders you prefer.

Don’t get me wrong… all of these rights are sacred to me.

But what often gets lost in the discussion of the American founding is the extremely crucial importance of property rights.

Perhaps now more than ever, we need to understand—and make sure younger generations understand—exactly why property rights are so vital and how they underpin all the other liberties that we treasure.

A shiny, new utopian socialist

We wrote earlier this week about Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year old New York Assemblyman who seemingly came out of nowhere. He could well become the next mayor of the largest city in America.

(If you missed it, I encourage you to check out our note, The Anti-Zohran Trade, which explains a related investment idea, too.)

For the most part, Mamdani was not propelled to victory in the Democratic primary by working class New Yorkers who have been in the city for generations. Exit polls show these voters tended to support Cuomo and Adams.

Instead, it was young, college-educated voters, many of whom seem to follow the mold of Mamdani himself, who gave him this victory.

Young Zohran had the most elite education and upbringing money could buy. His father is a well-known Ivy League academic, and his mother is a famous Hollywood filmmaker.

Somehow, Zohran and his followers never really absorbed the history and economics lessons that they needed to learn. Perhaps they never received them in the first place.

Real ownership

Our founding fathers understood that liberty could not exist if you did not have a right to secure your property. It was a profound insight in an era when European monarchs would simply dole out land as they saw fit.

Back then, even if you were granted land, nobody really owned anything. After all, the monarchs could always just take it away on a whim.

This is not too different from the state of affairs when the communists came to power a few hundred years later in various places around the world. They also could also just take your land and possessions whenever they felt like it.

Politicians like Mamdani want to take us back to a time that we were all trying to escape. The United States of America, by some miracle, was able to do this precisely because our founders understood the value of property rights.

Let’s look at the original text of the Fifth Amendment. The starting point is that Americans have a right to own property and should be afforded extensive legal protections that constrain any restriction of this right.

No person shall be… deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation. - The Constitution of the United States

Trish’s July 4th Message

One of the main purposes of the Constitution is to protect our natural right to own property and to limit the ability of the government to get in the way of that.

Why were the founders so adamant about this? Because as a practical matter, if you do not have economic liberty, you have no liberty at all.

What good is it to be able to speak your mind, and perhaps speak out against people in power, if those same people in power can turn around and take away everything you have and leave you and your family destitute?

You may have freedom of speech, but if you can be economically controlled and destroyed by someone in government, it is totally useless.

Mamdani and his naive followers are falling for the same utopian socialist ideas that have been discredited time and time again. Somehow they keep resurfacing.

Perhaps these ideas are kept alive in our elite colleges and universities, many of which, ironically, are inoculated from the real world by multi-billion dollar endowments that are heavily invested in venture capital and publicly traded stocks.

Mamdani recently spoke about the need to “de-commodify” housing, using antiquated Marxist terminology that could have been directly lifted from Karl’s own manifesto.

And we can fully commit to a new era of social housing…. We won’t de-commodify housing overnight. But we know what we have to do, and we have history to guide us. - Zohran Mamdani

It’s almost sad that in 2025, in the age of AI supercomputers and self-driving cars, we feel we have to respond to this sort of obsolete nonsense. But we are confronted with an individual who is potentially about to obtain a significant amount of political power.

So let’s unpack “de-commodify.”

What does this term actually mean? It means housing will no longer be a commodity.

What is a commodity? A commodity is something a person owns.

Is home ownership suddenly a bad or evil thing? Americans own some $35 trillion of real estate, which represents nearly a quarter of the nation’s $160 trillion household net worth.

Just about two-thirds of all American households live in homes they own. For so many middle class Americans, the equity in their homes is their most valuable asset, the very foundation of their personal wealth.

De-commodification is simply the process of separating you from your wealth and shifting it over to politicians like Zohran Mamdani.

The word sounds fancy and technical… but it basically means theft and subjugation.

Bitcoiners have other ideas

While many young people living in Brooklyn and other parts of the United States may find the dark path of socialism intriguing, others are moving in a quite different direction.

The Bitcoin movement is in many ways the polar opposite of de-commodification. It’s arguably all about the re-commodification of money.

One of the main problems with fiat money is that it is totally controlled by central banks like the Fed.

Central banks operate with varying degrees of institutional independence but are ultimately extensions of the government.

It may be unlawful for any central bank to take your money directly, but central banks can (and continuously do) make your money less valuable by expanding the supply of it.

Bitcoin is a decentralized monetary technology, similar to gold, that is not fundamentally reliant upon the decisions of government workers. Bitcoin is a commodity, not a government-sponsored form of money.

There is much more to Bitcoin than speculative interest in an asset that has appreciated rapidly. It embodies an ideological viewpoint.

This is the reason it has found such strong support from the Trump administration and across the MAGA movement—and so much resistance from the likes of Elizabeth Warren and other Democrats.

Bitcoin as I write is close to $110,000, just shy of its all-time highest levels. With a market capitalization that now exceeds $2 trillion, Bitcoin’s success is a reflection of the global need for a monetary system that is fundamentally severed from political interference.

Bitcoin speaks to the universal instinct of all human beings to hold their own private property in a way that it cannot be easily taken from them (either through confiscation or debasement).

Despite what the socialists might say, this instinct is healthy.

It is not greed. It is the desire to be free and to be in charge of your own destiny.

We’re on the right path

The stock market is not open today in honor of the holiday, but the S&P 500 closed yesterday at its all-time highest level.

Our country and our system may not be flawless, but American capitalism has produced extraordinary results. This only happened because we live in a country that gives individuals the legal protections needed to make this happen.

If you cannot keep the fruits of your own labor, what incentive do you have to labor at all? Or to invent, or build, or innovate, or take risks with your capital?

The Zohrans, and AOCs, and Bernies of the world aren’t going away. They traffic in deeply engrained human emotions like resentment. They peddle enticing fantasies to the ignorant.

There will always be some people who fall for the socialist message. Very often, they will be among the “best educated” (but also the most isolated from the practical realities of life).

No matter what happens to New York City, I’m optimistic on this July 4th holiday.

Our country a whole understands what it is that makes us exceptional and demonstrated this last November. The American people comprehend the dangers that can come from tampering with the magic formula.

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