Much of American history has been animated by two competing visions of how to organize the American economy: Jefferson’s dream of an agrarian republic, rooted in self-sufficient farmers, on the one hand, and Hamilton’s push for an industrial powerhouse, driven by factories and finance on the other. Jefferson feared the corruption of centralized wealth and foreign influence, preferring a nation of independent homesteads. Hamilton saw strength in manufacturing, banks, and tariffs, building a vertical economy to rival Europe’s. The inherent tension between these two visions was a major contributing factor to the outbreak of the War Between the States.

After the war, the numerical advantage of the industrial North in congressional representation was diluted by the admission of the new states of the West. This political counterbalance prevented the complete dominance of northern industrial interests and created a federalist compromise where the agrarian South and West could check the power of the industrial centers. For a century, America maintained this delicate equilibrium between Hamilton’s factories and Jefferson’s farms.

Ending the fiat era will require courage and sacrifice, but continuing on our present course guarantees national decline into vassalage.

Then came 1971. Nixon’s decision to untether the dollar from gold, forced as it was by fiscal circumstance, birthed a new beast: a fiat economy—neither Jefferson’s horizontal fields nor Hamilton’s vertical smokestacks, but an ethereal casino. This wasn’t about producing goods but rather printing dollars and exporting them in exchange for real wealth. Since 1976, the United States has run a trade deficit every year, a feat previously impossible under any prior system. Foreign nations churn out cars, clothes, and electronics, accepting paper in return, while recycling their dollars into US debt, propping up our spending, and suppressing interest rates.

This fiat system enriches a sliver of America—those in closest proximity to the spigot of newly printed dollars—but it systematically steals from everyone else. Small towns, once humming with furniture mills and textile plants, became collateral damage.

Take Bassett Furniture in Virginia’s Appalachia. Founded in 1902, it brought Ford-like innovation to furniture, making quality affordable and building a community where workers were family. But the fiat era unleashed cheap Chinese imports, often sold below cost in predatory “dumping.” By 2003, 73,000 furniture jobs vanished. John Bassett III fought back, winning anti-dumping duties in 2005. But for many, it was too late. Hardwood still grows in Virginia and becomes furniture. Some of it is still built. But much of it is shipped to China, milled, and sent back as particleboard dressers.

A War on the Working Class

  Dr. Benjamin Braddock

Deindustrialization didn’t just kill jobs; it killed communities. When factories closed, so did diners, shops, and schools. The politicians offered some training programs and called it a day, as if providing discounted community college classes to a 55-year-old furniture maker would replace the loss of industries that sustained entire regions. And there was no assistance for living expenses during the “retraining” period. In fact, there was no form of long-term unemployment assistance at all. The only avenue of assistance was to get on Social Security disability, which became a trap. Qualifying meant proving you couldn’t work, but getting a job risked losing that status—and the benefits tied to it. Once lost, reclaiming disability was a bureaucratic nightmare, trapping workers in a perverse limbo where survival meant giving up their productive status.

With Social Security disability came Medicaid cards. Not only was this a poor substitute for the good health insurance many of these people had when they were employed, but it also ended up fueling the opioid crisis. The Medicaid co-pay for a bottle of a hundred 80-mg OxyContin tablets was only $3, while the street value of that bottle was as high as $8,000. Pill mills and overdoses turned small towns into graveyards, with pharmacies and funeral homes as the last businesses standing.

As regulations tightened around prescription opioids, a more sinister wave emerged: synthetic drugs and new forms of methamphetamine. Unlike the old “shake and bake” meth cooked in local trailers, today’s meth is a mass-produced chemical weapon flooding in from superlabs across the border. This new “peer to peer” meth brings not just addiction but also profound mental illness—paranoia, hallucinations, and psychosis—that often proves irreversible. Meanwhile, synthetic opioids like fentanyl, thousands of times more potent than morphine, have multiplied overdose deaths exponentially. A few grains can kill, making street drugs a game of chemical Russian roulette. The economics are devastating: traffickers can turn a few thousand dollars of precursor chemicals into millions on the street, while the American people bear the cost.

Oxy, Opioids, and the End of Empire

  Dr. Benjamin Braddock

The challenges of deindustrialization have proved to be far more complex than policymakers anticipated. The notion that displaced manufacturing workers would simply transition to the “knowledge economy” betrayed a profound misunderstanding of both human capital and community ecosystems. While policymakers and economic thought leaders in financial and technology centers celebrated the rise of the information age, they failed to reckon with basic realities: not everyone has the aptitude, opportunity, or desire to become a programmer or financial analyst. The skills that made a person valuable on a factory floor—technical precision, physical stamina, mechanical intuition—represent more than just job qualifications; they embody essential American character traits forged through generations of settlement, farming, and building. Americans have historically been a people who make, fix, and construct—a nation of builders and tinkerers. This runs deep in our national DNA, from the pioneer spirit to the mid-century industrial might that won world wars and built a middle class.

Our industrial base should be rebuilt in a way that honors our national character while building resilience for the future. Deindustrialization didn’t just kill jobs; it killed communities. When factories closed, so did diners, shops, and schools.

The shift to an economy that privileges abstract knowledge work represents not merely a change in employment patterns, a profound mismatch with the cultural heritage and biological tendencies of many Americans, who find fulfillment and identity in physical creation rather than digital manipulation. We’ve engineered an economic system increasingly at odds with the temperament and innate capacities of large segments of our population, leaving millions feeling not just economically displaced but existentially alienated in their own country.

The path forward requires acknowledging some hard truths: the heartland has been decimated by decades of economic transformation. Thanks to corporate consolidation and the industrialization of agriculture, there is no rural surplus population to fuel reindustrialization, as there was in previous industrial eras. Yet within this stark reality lies opportunity. The classes responsible for the despoiling of the American people could be pressed into service as labor for new factories and regenerative farms.

Can America Rebuild What It Forgot?

  Dr. Benjamin Braddock

What America needs is not simply a set of tweaks to the system that brought us here, but deep, foundational reforms and a reevaluation of its values. Maintaining what we have should come before growth. Efficiency should be tempered with anti-fragility. Quality should not be sacrificed to quantity. Our industrial base should be rebuilt in a way that honors our national character while forging resilience for the future. Germany’s distributed manufacturing model offers valuable lessons: their Mittelstand—medium-sized, often family-owned industrial firms, deeply embedded in regional communities and specialized in high-value production—has maintained manufacturing excellence without surrendering national industrial capacity. Unlike America’s winner-take-all corporate gigantism, the German approach preserves technical knowledge across generations and regions, creating economic stability that transcends quarterly profit cycles.

However, America must chart its own course. Where Germany has adopted self-destructive anti-nuclear policies that increase energy dependence on hostile powers, America should pursue energy sovereignty through its abundant resources and innovation in geothermal and nuclear power. Where Germany’s open borders undermined social cohesion and strained infrastructure, America should prioritize the revitalization of our existing communities and workforce. The goal isn’t autarky, but strategic production capacity in vital sectors—from pharmaceuticals and advanced materials to energy infrastructure and armaments.

This is fundamentally about national renewal. By restoring productive capacity in America’s heartland we not only create jobs but also reknit the social fabric that gave meaning to communities. Americans flourish when they build, create, and contribute to tangible enterprises that match their inherited capacities. Dignity comes not from universal basic income schemes or endless retraining programs, but from meaningful work that allows people to provide for their families and communities through their own hands and minds. A free people must have an economic system that can sustain the American spirit of independence and self-determination, not the one we currently have, which is driving us towards a disturbing techno-feudalism.

This reckoning demands we confront the root cause of our decline: the fiat monetary system that divorced our economy from physical reality. Ending the fiat era will require courage and sacrifice, but continuing on our present course guarantees national decline into vassalage. We must reestablish a sound money system that cannot be manipulated by financial elites, thereby ending the hidden tax of inflation that has hollowed out the middle class. A currency anchored to tangible value—whether through a modernized gold standard, energy backing, or a basket of essential commodities—would realign incentives throughout the economy, rewarding production over speculation and saving over debt. Without this fundamental reform, all other efforts at industrial revival will be undermined by the same monetary distortions that precipitated our decline.

America cannot reclaim its productive heritage while financial abstractions continue to dominate our economic life. Central to this vision must be the principle that growth should never come at the expense of maintaining what we have. Productivity should never be pursued at the expense of community resilience, and efficiency must not overshadow the human element that gives our economy its meaning. By embracing an industrial policy that aligns with our national character and security needs, we can begin to heal the divide between the abstract economy of paper wealth and the real economy of productive work. l

Dr. Benjamin Braddock is an American writer and an Editor-at-Large at IM—1776. He can be followed on X @GraduatedBen and on Substack.