The Founders Are Why America Is Rich. That Legacy Is at Risk.

The Wall Street Journal ^ | July 3, 2026 8:00 pm ET | Greg Ip

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Touring a young United States in 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at Americans’ boundless appetite for commerce, industry and wealth.

“Nothing checks the spirit of enterprise,” the 25-year-old Frenchman later recounted in “Democracy in America.” As to the reason: “I have no doubt that the democratic institutions of the United States…are the cause…of the prodigious commercial activity of the inhabitants.”

The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence finds the U.S. the biggest and most dynamic economy in the world and among its richest. As Tocqueville intuited long ago, Americans owe much of that to the democracy the founders built.

Look closely, though, and you can detect cracks in those political foundations. The checks and balances the founders embedded in American democracy protected workers, investors and entrepreneurs from arbitrary rule. President Trump is now centralizing more economic authority in himself, and just this past week the Supreme Court provided an enormous assist.

By reminding Americans they controlled their political fates, democracy also encouraged economic self-betterment. But Americans’ confidence in both democracy and capitalism has waned. Socialism has a toehold in the Democratic Party.

Economists have long known that democracy alone doesn’t deliver economic growth; institutions also matter. In their book “Why Nations Fail,” Nobel Prize winners Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson wrote that “extractive” institutions concentrate power in the hands of an elite who then confiscate wealth from the rest of society. This is why so many emerging countries remain poor.

Inclusive institutions both constrain and broadly distribute power. England acquired such institutions with the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 after which the king could no longer suspend laws, raise taxes without the consent of Parliament, or arbitrarily confiscate private property.

The American colonists inherited England’s institutions. Indeed their legislatures were so strong that “neither the meanest nor...”

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TOPICS: History
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[E. Pluribus Unum]

Look closely, though, and you can detect cracks in those political foundations. The checks and balances the founders embedded in American democracy protected workers, investors and entrepreneurs from arbitrary rule. President Trump is now centralizing more economic authority in himself, and just this past week the Supreme Court provided an enormous assist.

FUWSJ

[ViLaLuz]

Biased garbage.

[marktwain]

President Trump is now centralizing more economic authority in himself, and just this past week the Supreme Court provided an enormous assist.

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Exactly the opposite of reality. Enormous power was centralized in the unelected bureaucracies. There were designed to bypass Constitutional checks and balances. President Trump and the Supreme Court are restoring those checks and balances.

[jdsteel]

I read the article before seeing it here.

To call it a steaming pile of garbage would be too kind.

[SMARTY]

True

And people should remember that the guys who kick started Colonial opposition to hereditary, dynastic rule were themselves successful and some very wealthy men who rolled the dice on everything they owned.

They risked not just their lives, but also the material, social and physical futures of their families and friends, if they did not succeed

[marktwain]

Exactly so.