In a free society, the waitress at the DMV does not face apathy and lethargy from her public servant. She is the sovereign. The clerk is her employee, paid by her taxes to provide durable, verified proof of identity: sex, age, name, and citizenship under the Constitution. The transaction is ordinary. The citizen should feel served.
Fifteen miles from my home, people line up at the government DMV an hour before it opens. In my town, a private contractor runs the same software. Lines are shorter, service faster, agents friendly. The public is not paying premium wages and benefits only to be herded like animals.
In a free country, the contractor does not wait while a county desk-jockey who has never managed a construction project decides whether the work may continue. The man who builds is not the supplicant of the man who has never built.
In a free society, the Kennedy Center may be built, but zero tickets go to the powerful in government. Tickets go by lottery to taxpayers who paid more than they received in transfers. In a free country, a congressman does not admit on the record that he fears signing his own tax return because the code sprawls across tens of thousands of pages. The doctrine that “ignorance of the law is no excuse” does not survive when the law cannot fit in a two-bedroom apartment and a Supreme Court nominee declines to define “woman.”
In a free country, the press does not protect sources who lie. It publishes the correction and moves on. Its job is truth, not managing public opinion. Intelligence officials do not turn a foreign-sourced political smear into an “insurance policy” against an unexpected election outcome, then conceal evidence of corruption involving Ukraine while impeaching the ambushed president for asking about that same corruption. A true press would never let it get close.
In a free country, a health official who sets national policy on contested evidence, imposes massive costs, and soft-pedals the most dangerous origin story while shielding a rival power answers under the same rules as everyone else.
In a free country, young men are not turned into maladjusted basement dwellers by twisted feminist anti-family zealots, leaving young women wondering where the men have gone. Parents do not send children to school fearing sexual abuse by teachers, government glorification, and faddish history under a rainbow flag of grievance. Higher education recognizes merit and nothing else.
In a free country, a political party does not nominate candidates like moving chess pieces. In a free country, a responsible press serves everyone, not the bureaucracy. Its first loyalty is verifiable fact. It treats the waitress, the contractor, and the Cabinet secretary by the same standard. When lied to, it exposes the lie and corrects it without shame. Anything less is another set of straps.
Since the iPhone, billions of smartphones have been sold. Untold trillions invested in networks, hardware, and software. Apps became household names: Uber, Airbnb, DoorDash. So competitive, the software was given away for free just to show ads. Cupertino became Silicon Valley on personal computers that let ordinary people book travel, bank, and trade stocks from home. eBay rose on Beanie Babies. PayPal rose to serve them. Elon Musk took his cut and built Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, and Neuralink. In a free country, such men are not vilified for wanting less government.
Government did not create the first billionaire or trillionaire. Customers chose and put their own wealth into it. Government’s only real invention was the internet’s basic architecture: self healing nodes for military defense. AT&T added lasers and fiber. CERN made the point-and-click web. Apollo, wartime airplanes, canals, railroads, automobiles: the pattern holds. Focused government projects created tools. Private producers turned them into daily life. Those acts are the living shafts that bind many into one. Companies already vote with their feet, leaving places that treat them as revenue sources. These are not utopian demands. They are the minimum signs the citizen is still principal and the official still agent. When the opposite becomes normal, the relationship is inverted.
The House still carries the fasces: rods bound by straps, flexible because the wood can bend. The point was never the straps. It was the living shafts. The House is that symbol made flesh: 435 separate groups defined by where they live. Those rods group into states and form the Electoral College. That is why non-citizens should not be counted in the census. Citizens select representation aligned to their interests. Gerrymandering for party objectives on hot-button issues violates the Constitution’s intent. Senators represent their states’ divergent needs, not national party machinery. E pluribus unum. Many bound to a common purpose, still free to stand as themselves. Every system that copies fascist logic begins the moment the straps matter more than the shafts.
In a socialist world, power is divided among political oversight, surveillance and espionage, and enforcement. The political officer is connected and reliable. If necessary, armed. Surveillance is crafty. Enforcement is pitiless, carries practical immunity, and survives by ruthlessness. Relationships outrank law.
Beneath the powerful are the producers. No party membership, no vote, no higher education, no choice of work, no luxury. They endure to live another day while the overseers and enforcers eat better and sleep better than the best factory worker. Invent a better tool, and you get no lasting claim. You cannot leave wealth to your children. Your apartment is reassigned by rank when you die. Buy a car, pay full price, wait years, and you may drive your father’s old machine, still paying the state for the privilege.
A free society does not turn citizens into petitioners before uninspired or unqualified overseers. It does not place non-producers above producers. Public employees are hired help. The waitress, the contractor, and the inventor are the reasons the help exists. The fasces were never about the straps. Strength came from 435 varied rods, people rooted in actual places, bound only tightly enough to hold under pressure. When rank, ideology, and surveillance matter more than the wood, the bundle stops flexing. It turns rigid. Rigid bundles snap.
THINK YOU OWN YOUR LAND? A 100-YEAR-OLD LOOPHOLE SAYS STATE AGENTS CAN WALK RIGHT IN
That is the test. When the citizen meets the state, it should be like Chick-fil-A, not like answering a summons. The citizen is the monarch. When the builder is not halted by the man who has never built, when the inventor keeps what he makes and passes it on, when the 435 rods still speak for the places that made them, and when representation remains the property of citizens rather than party maps or non-citizen counts, the arrangement is alive. When those conditions disappear, the straps are already wrapped too tightly for the flexibility built by design. Right now, the states doing it right are flooded by people leaving the hellholes of socialism. The design is teaching the lesson it was meant to teach. It recalls the desperation to escape the Warsaw Pact before the Iron Curtain became barbed wire, minefields, and machine-gun towers to keep the best and brightest in socialist slavery.
It is time for a new Contract with America. Term limits. Voter ID. A requirement that public servants first spend ten years as professionals or laborers in the private sector, or as first responders or military, before entering elected or appointed office. Make them show competence with skin in the game instead of being born into powerful families, living on government money, then sliding into elite schools and privileged internships.
Michael Breeden is a retired Air Force chief master sergeant with 29 years of service as a combat controller in special operations. He writes on sovereignty, culture, and institutional accountability.