Two hundred and fifty years ago this week, a small group of farmers, lawyers, and soldiers told the most powerful empire on earth to pound sand. They didn’t have a standing army worth mentioning or a consensus on what they were building. What they had was an idea—radical, dangerous, and almost absurdly optimistic—that free people, left largely to their own devices, could govern themselves better than any king ever would. The proof is still standing.
I’ve spent more than 30 years in financial services, advising ultra-high-net-worth families and testifying as an expert witness in federal and state courts. In every serious room I’ve sat in, one fact goes undisputed: the American economic model has produced more individual wealth and lifted more people from poverty than any system ever devised. That’s not patriotic chest- thumping. That’s the data talking.
The critics know this, which is why they’ve changed the argument. You can’t look at the abolition of slavery, the defeat of fascism, the moon landing, and the smartphone in your pocket and make a straight-faced case that the country has failed. So, the academic left pivoted to systemic critique: America wasn’t just flawed, it was born wrong, redeemable only through administered redistribution and managed decline. Economist Thomas Sowell spent decades dismantling this conceit with evidence. He called it the vision of the anointed—the belief that a credentialed elite knows better than the accumulated wisdom of free people making free choices.
Watch the protests this Fourth of July. You’ll find the usual cast: campus socialists, professional marchers, and graduate students who’ve read Marx but never met a payroll. The single cat ladies with nose rings who couldn’t tell you what the First Amendment actually says will be out in force, certain that their disapproval constitutes an argument. It doesn’t. Accountability is the most valuable commodity in a free society, and the grievance industry has dodged it for 50 years running.
Which brings us to what is actually happening as we hit the quarter-millennium mark.
Donald Trump returned to Washington with a balance sheet in one hand and a blowtorch in the other. Start with energy. The United States produced over 13.6 million barrels of crude oil per day in 2025—an all-time record. Total oil and liquid fuels output hit 24 million barrels per day, more than Russia and Saudi Arabia combined. Trump ended Biden’s LNG export ban on Day One. The Department of Energy subsequently announced the largest deregulatory action in its history, eliminating 47 regulations and saving Americans an estimated $11 billion in costs.
This matters because energy is the foundational input of every industry. American investor Howard Marks talks about second-order thinking, not just what happens but what happens next. The second-order effect of American energy dominance is strategic independence. We don’t negotiate from weakness with regimes that despise us when we can power our own civilization.
On artificial intelligence, the administration has moved with equal seriousness. The White House AI Action Plan, released in July 2025, established a three-pillar framework: accelerating innovation, building domestic infrastructure, and leading international AI diplomacy. Federal AI contract obligations jumped from $675 million in 2024 to $7.2 billion in 2026. The U.S. now operates 4,011 data centers—nearly eight times more than any other country. Meta, Apple, and NVIDIA each committed $500–$600 billion to domestic AI infrastructure. NVIDIA President and CEO Jensen Huang is clear: the country that controls AI infrastructure controls the next century. We’re making the right bet.
The tariff strategy absorbed short-term volatility—Q1 2025 GDP contracted 0.6 percent as markets adjusted. Critics pounced. But Q2 came in at 3.8 percent and Q3 at 4.3 percent. Tariff revenue from January through November 2025 reached $236.2 billion, triple the $72.1 billion collected over the same period in 2024. Ray Dalio’s axiom applies: disciplined risk-taking means accepting transition costs to capture long-term structural advantage. We’re correcting decades of strategic dependency.
At the southern border, apprehensions dropped approximately 92 percent. The rule of law is no longer a punchline. Barack Obama once asked, rhetorically, what magic wand Trump had to reverse America’s industrial decline. This is it: operational discipline applied to a $28 trillion economy by people who’ve built things, signed paychecks, and understand that a balance sheet has two sides. Community organizers don’t create jobs. Decisions do.
Reagan understood something the Left has never grasped: America’s greatness isn’t a government program. It’s a consequence of freedom—of individuals making choices, taking risks, failing, and building. Every regulatory expansion competes with that engine. Two hundred and fifty years of evidence have settled the argument.
None of that durability was an accident. The Founders were the most remarkable collection of political minds ever assembled: Madison, Hamilton, Jefferson, Washington, Adams—men who had studied history’s graveyard of failed republics and designed a system built to outlast their own genius. The Declaration of Independence named the premise: individual rights precede government. The Constitution distributed power so no faction could monopolize it. The Bill of Rights told the state, in plain English, where it stops. That architecture has proven sturdier than any monarchy, any empire, and every socialist experiment the twentieth century could conjure. Millions have crossed oceans to live under it. That’s the market speaking.
Scalia put it plainly: the Constitution means what it says—a government of limited, enumerated powers restrained by a Bill of Rights that begins with the words “Congress shall make no law.” That’s not a system designed to empower bureaucrats. It’s designed to get them out of the way.
So, this July Fourth, sip a frosty beverage, eat something grilled, and spare a moment of genuine appreciation for the audacity of what was attempted here 250 years ago. Not the America of the grievance seminars and the land-acknowledgment statements, but the America of the founding documents and every immigrant who crossed an ocean because no other place on earth offered what this one does.
The republic isn’t perfect. It never was. But it remains the best idea in the history of human governance, and it’s still running strong after 250 years. That’s worth more than a little fireworks.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a BS in criminal justice from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, UPenn, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.