Postcards: Would You Invest in the American Government if It Traded as a Public Company? (Part II)

In Part 2 of our conversation... we talk about... what lawyers have done to America.

“I got the shotgun. You got the briefcase. S'all in the game."

Omar Little to lawyer Maurice Levy, Season 1, The Wire

Dear Fellow Expat:

Yesterday, I asked a question: What is the business model of the government?

The malfunctioning corporation in which Americans invest their time, money, and lives, some without even realizing it?

Dare I suggest it’s a partial investment into the world’s largest law firm?

After all, economist Casey Mulligan writes that, since 2021, new regulatory costs stick the average American family with a $5,019 tab every year.

How does that even happen? Where are these expensive regulations coming from?

Lawyers.

Political risk shifted in the 1970s after Nixon took the American economy off the gold standard. We outsourced our manufacturing to Asia, gutted an entire region, and called it the “Rust Belt,” and, at a pen stroke, created a system that pushed our best and brightest students into… banking and law.

The expansion of an American legal class is a pillar of the govern…