When I read The Independent article linked below, I immediately recalled what I call here, in my response essay, The Catalan Principle. The contrast seemed too telling to ignore. Although I do not, in truth, endorse the sanction discussed—certainly not in ordinary circumstances—the historical example provides a striking counterpoint to the modern rhetoric of punishment directed only at the powerless.
Medieval Catalonia—a principality within the Crown of Aragon, governed by its own Cortes and its own body of law—developed one of Europe’s most exacting systems for regulating bankers. This severe and unforgiving regime was born not of vengeance, but of a sober understanding of where real civic danger, and indeed real violence, actually lay. The legislators knew that a banker held the community’s life in his hands. A single failure of trust could ruin families, wipe out savings, and collapse the economic life of a city, indeed, a region. They therefore placed the full burden of responsibility on the man seated at the banker’s bench—the banca, the literal table or counter from which he conducted his trade and at which depositors entrusted him with their funds (the same bench that, when broken, gave us the word bankrupt).
Beginning in 1300, a banker was personally liable for every entry in his sworn journal, his entire estate pledged to his depositors. Should he fail, he was immediately proclaimed bankrupt and disgraced, then confined on bread and water until he made every injured party whole. In 1321, the Cortes went further: a banker who failed to repay his depositors—within one year for past failures, or immediately thereafter—was to be proclaimed bankrupt throughout Catalonia, beheaded, and his property liquidated for restitution. Most strikingly, the law added:
The sovereign may not pardon him unless his creditors have been fully satisfied.
No royal favoritism.
No political clemency.
No early counterpart to the corrupt presidential or gubernatorial pardons used to absolve wealthy offenders in the present era for their financial and other crimes.
This was not theoretical. In 1360, the banker Francesch Castello was beheaded in front of his own bench—the very table at which he had accepted deposits—after failing to repay those whose savings he held in trust. The medieval world understood that economic destruction is a form of violence, and that the most consequential harms are often inflicted by those with power, not by those without it.
Which brings us to idea voiced recently by billionaire Joe Lonsdale for a return to public hangings as a display of “masculine leadership.” His proposed spectacle targets the familiar objects of elite contempt: the poor, the desperate, the socially marginal. Crime, in his imagination, flows upward from the street, not downward from the boardroom.
But consider what a medieval-style code would demand today. If we applied the Catalan principle—that those who hold the wealth of others in trust bear the highest responsibility—we would direct our harshest penalties not at the powerless, but at:
executives who obliterate pensions through financial engineering,
bank officers whose decisions wipe out depositors,
corporate officers whose malfeasances and misfeasances devastate multitudes, in some instances, entire communities,
institutional leaders who destroy livelihoods while shielding their officers through legal artifice.
Would Lonsdale applaud that as “masculine leadership”? Or is his appetite for the gallows limited to those who possess nothing worth stealing?
The Catalan legislators understood something our own era too often obscures: the powerful commit the greatest harms, and justice serves the common good only when it restrains them first.
What Lonsdale demands is not justice but hierarchy—punishment downward, indulgence upward. The medieval world, in this case, was the more virtuous, the more honest. It placed the noose (or lowered the axe, as the case may be) where the damage was greatest: at the bench of the wealthy who had destroyed the lives of others, and it did not permit them to purchase their way out of accountability.
Source: Usher, A. Payson. (1943). The early history of deposit banking in Mediterranean Europe. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard university press, 239-242.
THOMAS COUTURE – Los Romanos de la Decadencia (Museo de Orsay, 1847)
“Est igitur, inquit Africanus, res publica res populi; populus autem non omnis hominum coetus quoquo modo congregatus, sed coetus multitudinis iuris consensu et utilitatis communione sociatus.”
“Well, then, a commonwealth is the property of a people. But a people is not any collection of human beings brought together in any sort of way, but an assemblage of people in large numbers associated in an agreement with respect to justice and a partnership for the common good.”
— Cicero, De Re Publica I.xxv (39), trans. Clinton W. Keyes-Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Re Publica
The Romans named the commonwealth theres publica—the public thing. Ours has become theres mercatoria—the mercantile thing.
I. Form Without Spirit
Republics seldom die by sword or decree. They decay in silence—eroding first in spirit, then in habit, until only the forms remain. The flag still waves, oaths are still sworn, the Capitol dome still gleams in the sun. Yet beneath that marble permanence lies a slow petrification of the civic soul.
Cicero defined the res publica as “the property of the people”—a common good bound by shared agreement on law and justice. But when the people cease to agree on what law means, or what justice demands, the Republic endures only as silhouette. Its forms persist out of inertia, its substance preserved only in ritual memory.
We have reached that stage of endurance. The Republic survives, but uninhabited. Its spirit has withdrawn, its voice replaced by noise.
II. The Market’s Triumph Over the Polis
The hollowing began not in our politics but in our economy. The citizen was slowly replaced by the consumer; civic virtue yielded to commercial appetite.
This transformation did not occur by chance. It was conceived in the classrooms of Vienna and Chicago, where Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman re-imagined freedom itself as a function of the market. Their disciples translated this theory into policy through Ronald Reagan and their obedient acolytes, who proclaimed that government was the problem and private enterprise the measure of liberty.
The revolution was cultural as much as economic. In 1971, Lewis Powell—soon to be a Supreme Court Justice—sent a confidential memorandum to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce warning that American business faced an existential threat from critics of capitalism. His solution: a coordinated campaign to capture the institutions that shape public opinion—universities, media, courts, and legislatures. The result was a new institutional order: the Business Roundtable, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and a constellation of think tanks and lobbying arms that would spend decades re-educating the political class in the gospel of deregulation, privatization, and permanent growth.
By the 1980s this ideology had become orthodoxy. The social compact that once bound liberty to responsibility was rewritten so that profit alone defined the good. The public good became whatever advanced shareholder value and citizenship became an economic function.
Thus the res publica—the public thing—was supplanted by the res mercatoria—the mercantile thing. The Romans had no such term, for they could not imagine a world in which commerce would claim sovereignty over the commonwealth. But the new condition requires a new name.
The irony of this transformation is ancient and bitter. For most of Christian history, the merchant stood outside the moral order—necessary, perhaps, but suspect. The early Church Fathers—Ambrose, Tertullian, Leo the Great—condemned merchants outright, inheriting from Plato (Republic) and Aristotle (Politics Book VII, Ch. IX, 1328b-1329a) the conviction that trade was ignoble and inimical to virtue. By the Middle Ages, this judgment had softened but not disappeared. Augustine warned extensively against avarice, that “uncleanness of heart” which weighed down the soul and bound it to perishing things (Sermon 177). Aquinas, centuries later, distinguished carefully: exchange for necessity was commendable, but trading for profit was “justly deserving of blame, because, considered in itself, it satisfies the greed for gain, which knows no limit and tends to infinity” (Summa Theologiae II-II, Q. 77, Art. 4). Such trading, he wrote, had “a certain debasement attaching thereto”—it engaged the mind too much with worldly cares and withdrew it from spiritual ones (Summa Theologiae II-II, Q. 77, Art. 4). Wealth was a burden to be borne, not a sign of virtue. The Gospels themselves spoke plainly: it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 19:24).
The Reformation reversed this judgment. Labor became a vocation, profit a sign of election, diligence and thrift the new sacraments of grace. The theological architecture of this reversal is visible in Calvin’s 1545 Letter on Usury, which systematically dismantled thirteen centuries of prohibition. Calvin reinterpreted Luke 6:35—”lend, expecting nothing in return”—as a call to charity toward the poor, not a ban on commercial lending. He dismissed Aquinas’s argument that money was sterile and consumed in its use as “too frivolous” and “childish,” insisting instead that money, like land, could legitimately generate return through productive employment. Most decisively, Calvin divorced usury from property rights and natural law, relocating its ethics in “equity” and “mutual benefit”—a standard flexible enough to bless commerce while condemning exploitation. Yet even Calvin betrayed unease: “it would be good to desire that usurers were expelled from the entire world,” he wrote, before immediately adding, “but since that is impossible we must submit to a common utility.” The tension was never resolved; it was merely buried beneath the momentum of markets.
What Max Weber would later identify as “the Protestant ethic” emerged: the doctrine of predestination created psychological need for visible signs of election, and worldly success became such a sign. Labor was no longer penance but calling; profit no longer suspect but evidence of grace rightly used. The Puritan divine Richard Baxter made this explicit: “If God shew you a way in which you may lawfully get more than in another way, (without wrong to your soul, or to any other) if you refuse this, and choose the less gainful way, you cross one of the ends of your Calling, and you refuse to be Gods Steward, and to accept his gifts, and use them for him when he requireth it” (Christian Directory, 1673).
In America, this theology found its most radical expression: a nation that declared itself divinely ordained to prosper, its wealth evidence of providence rather than plunder. The monastery yielded to the countinghouse, the community of faith to the individual of conscience; and the Temple to the money-lenders’ tables. The merchant was redeemed and enthroned, and the marketplace declared holy ground. Yet in this sanctification lay the seed of perversion. What had been a warning against excess became a theology of excess; what had been humility became self-justification. The camel, still unable to traverse the eye of the needle, now claims the needle has widened to accommodate its girth. Thus, through inversion disguised as progress, the old economy of salvation became the new salvation of economy.
Interlude: The Shining Hill and the Idol of Gold
Perhaps this explains the American paradox: the Republic imagined itself a shining city on a hill, a light unto nations. Yet what if that light was never the flame of civic virtue but the glitter of commerce—the reflected gleam of Mammon’s altar? The founders spoke of liberty, but liberty yoked to profit soon ceases to be freedom and becomes appetite enthroned. The idol of gold, once condemned by prophets, now governs the temples of exchange. Thus the Republic mistook the radiance of avarice for the light of grace, and called its marketplace a sanctuary.
If Mammon once ruled the countinghouse, he now reigns through the circuit and the screen.
III. The Digital Usurpation
If the market stripped the Republic of its moral substance, technology has stripped it of its perceptual one. The Internet, once envisioned as a global commons, has been enclosed by a handful of private empires: Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and X.
These companies now mediate nearly every act of citizenship—our speech, assembly, education, even our perception of truth. They claim to connect the world, yet in practice divide it into markets of attention and identity.
Their infrastructures are not neutral. Algorithms decide what can be seen, heard, and believed. Platforms that once promised dialogue now amplify division because outrage is more profitable than understanding. Truth has been outcompeted by virality.
Consider the architecture of a Facebook feed. It does not present information chronologically or randomly, but according to a hidden formula designed to maximize “engagement”—a euphemism for time spent, which translates to advertising revenue. Posts that trigger anger, fear, or tribal affirmation rise to the top; nuance sinks. The algorithm knows no truth, only metrics of return. The result is a kind of epistemic Darwinism in which the most emotionally inflammatory content survives and the most thoughtful perishes unseen.
This is not a bug but the business model. The platform does not sell connection; it sells attention. And attention, in this economy, is harvested through the deliberate fragmentation of shared reality.
What Orwell feared as censorship has become something subtler: curation. The public square has been replaced by the private feed. We are no longer silenced—we are distracted. And distraction, as the tyrants of old never mastered, is the most perfect instrument of control.
IV. The Propaganda Apparatus
Every empire needs its heralds. In the modern order, propaganda no longer marches beneath banners; it wears the costume of journalism.
The Murdoch media empire—Fox News, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial arm, The New York Post, The Times and The Sun in Britain, Sky News in Australia—has perfected this form of propaganda as entertainment. It does not so much persuade as condition.
By flooding the public square with grievance, spectacle, and especially fear, it transforms political life into perpetual theater. Its message is not ideology but emotion: outrage as identity, resentment as belonging. The goal is not to convince the citizen, but to exhaust him—to make deliberation impossible by ensuring that no common truth remains to deliberate about.
The method is simpler than it appears: repeat the lie, normalize the outrage, monetize the attention. Truth becomes just another narrative competing for airtime—and in that competition, truth is structurally disadvantaged. It cannot offer the satisfactions of tribal belonging that propaganda provides. Thus the empire does not need to censor; it merely drowns signal in noise until citizens, exhausted by the effort of discernment, surrender their capacity for judgment altogether.
The old tyrannies burned books; this one drowns them in noise.
V. The Corporations as Princes
It is no longer sufficient to speak in abstractions. The hollowing of the Republic has addresses, headquarters, and quarterly reports.
Sphere of Life
De Facto Sovereign
Instrument of Power
Speech & Assembly
Meta, X, Alphabet
Algorithmic reach, moderation, shadow banning
Commerce & Supply
Amazon, Apple
Infrastructure, logistics, payments
Knowledge & Memory
Google, OpenAI
Indexing, generation, curation of information
Currency & Capital
BlackRock, Vanguard, JPMorgan
Financial concentration, policy leverage
Imagination & Desire
Disney, Netflix, TikTok
Narrative control, aesthetic conditioning
News & Ideology
Fox News / News Corp
Manufactured outrage, narrative distortion
These are not metaphorical princes. They set policy without election, levy fees without representation, and administer justice without appeal—the very acts that once defined sovereignty.
Together they form what might be called The Architecture of Dominion: a network of powers that administer daily life more effectively than any elected government, yet without transparency, consent, or accountability.
VI. The Capture of the Political Class
The final conquest of the Republic occurred when its political machinery was wholly absorbed by the same forces that had already claimed its markets, media, and imagination.
The 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission declared that corporations possess a First Amendment right to spend unlimited sums to influence elections. With that ruling, the barrier between wealth and sovereignty collapsed. Money became speech, and therefore power.
In the years that followed, the American two-party system—already in steady decline as a functional mechanism of representation—was captured outright by oligarchic interests. Campaigns became open auctions, legislators became bought investments, and policies became returns on capital. The parties now differ chiefly in the rhetoric by which they justify serving the same donors.
This demolished the Republic’s ancient defense against oligarchy: the principle that political power derives from citizenship, not property. The legal fiction that corporations are persons—a doctrine conjured by nineteenth-century courts without constitutional warrant—had long troubled the boundary between civic and commercial power. But by extending this extra-constitutional invention to include nearly unlimited political spending, and by declaring money itself to be speech, the Court completed a transformation built not on constitutional text but on judicial fiat. The voices of oligarchs and corporations alike could now be amplified a thousandfold, a millionfold, beyond those of ordinary citizens. When one man’s wealth can purchase more speech than a million voters combined, citizenship ceases to be a meaningful source of political power. What had been a legal convenience became a political weapon—the final triumph of cash over voice, of property over person, of the res mercatoria over the res publica.
This was the Republic’s silent coup. What had once been government of the people became government for the shareholders. The Republic remains as ritual; oligarchy rules in fact.
VII. The Cultural Surrender
While these structures were forming, the culture itself underwent a moral inversion. The intellectual skepticism of the twentieth century—postmodernism’s denial of objective truth—escaped the universities and entered the bloodstream of public discourse.
What began as critique of power became the abdication of reason. Truth was replaced by “personal narrative,” knowledge by “perspective,” and moral judgment by performative empathy. The result is not liberation but solipsism: each of us sovereign within our own unverifiable reality.
Hannah Arendt understood that totalitarianism does not begin with the camps but with the collapse of common worldliness—the destruction of the shared reality that binds men together. She called it organized loneliness: a condition in which individuals, isolated yet interconnected, are governed by narratives they no longer believe but cannot escape. It is the perfect soil for manipulation, for in such loneliness the appetite for belonging overwhelms the duty of thought. The algorithm merely perfected what ideology began: it manufactures isolation and then monetizes the yearning to escape it.
This is the perfect cultural soil for the new oligarchies. For when truth dissolves, authority no longer needs to justify itself—it merely needs to define what truth is today. The relativist becomes the authoritarian’s unwitting ally.
Thus language itself has been weaponized. Freedom means security; dissent becomes hate; lies become “alternative facts.” The corruption of meaning precedes the corruption of law, and the res publica fades from speech before it vanishes from life.
VIII. The Retreat of Education and Virtue
At the heart of every Republic lies paideia—the education of the soul toward wisdom and citizenship. We have replaced it with credentialing and metrics, with the pursuit of “outcomes” rather than understanding.
This transformation, too, bears a lineage. Milton Friedman’s 1955 essay, The Role of Government in Education, proposed the idea of school vouchers as a mechanism for privatization under the guise of parental choice. It took root during the backlash to desegregation in the 1960s and matured in the 1980s and 1990s as “school choice” and “charter reform.” Education was recast as a competitive market rather than a civic institution.
The language of civic formation gave way to the rhetoric of productivity. The so-called “education crisis” of the 1980s culminated in A Nation at Risk (1983), which declared that public schools were failing to serve the economy. From that moment, economic utility supplanted intellectual cultivation as the standard of success. The humanities—once the Republic’s nursery of conscience—were defunded, mocked as impractical, or harnessed to “skills-based learning.”
In higher education, the same logic prevailed. University boards filled with corporate executives who treat knowledge as a commodity and students as clients. The algorithm now decides who is admitted, how teaching is evaluated, and which disciplines survive. The classroom itself has become a data laboratory: outcomes tracked, performance engineered, curiosity quantified—education reduced to the management of metrics rather than the cultivation of mind.
A high-school English teacher is evaluated not by her students’ capacity for insight but by “value-added metrics” derived from standardized test scores—metrics that reduce King Lear to a datapoint in a district’s performance dashboard. A university professor knows that thoughtful, difficult texts will harm her evaluation scores, and that those scores will determine her career. The algorithm optimizes for satisfaction, not formation; for comfort, not growth. Thus the institutional incentive is to teach what pleases, not what challenges—to produce consumers of education rather than citizens capable of self-governance.
Washington, in his Farewell Address (1796), warned that morality and religion were the “indispensable supports” of political prosperity. Adams wrote in an October 1798 letter that the Constitution was made for a moral and religious people, and was inadequate to govern any other. We have tested that hypothesis—and proved them right.
IX. The Political Consequence: Empty Institutions
What remains of politics is theater. Legislatures deliberate for the camera; executives govern by fiat; courts arbitrate between corporate interests. Public authority survives as ceremony, while real power migrates to the unelected oligarchs: the financial houses, the data lords, the platform barons, and the propaganda merchants.
The façade of republican government still stands, but within it resides an empire of bureaucracy and capital—not the civil service devoted to civic stewardship, but the corporate bureaucracy of extraction and surveillance. The old tyrants ruled through fear; the new through dependency. The oath of allegiance has been replaced by the click of “I agree.”
We live under what Sheldon Wolin called inverted totalitarianism—a system in which corporate and governmental power fuse seamlessly while citizens, intoxicated by consumption and misled by propaganda, mistake submission for freedom.
X. The Present Condition: The Hollowing Complete
Consider the life now administered by algorithm: a gig worker’s income depends on maintaining a five-star rating from customers who can destroy his livelihood with a single click—customers who are themselves strangers with no accountability for the judgment they render. A young professional’s romantic prospects are curated by an app that reduces human beings to swipeable commodities, optimizing not for companionship but for the addictive dopamine loop that keeps users returning. A family’s access to housing hinges on a credit score calculated by a private company using undisclosed factors—a score that can deny them a home without explanation or appeal.
This is governance without government, sovereignty without accountability. We have comfort, but not character; connection, but not community; information, but not understanding. The Republic’s architecture remains, yet the light that once filled it—the shared moral imagination of a free people—has gone out.
This is not collapse but inversion: the Republic turned inside out, liberty administered by those who profit from dependence. The Republic endures as interface, its promise reduced to user experience, its citizens reborn as users—forever clicking “I agree.”
XI. Memory as Resistance
And yet, memory remains—the one province not yet colonized. Memory is the Republic’s last frontier: the remembrance that truth exists, that words have meaning, that citizenship is not consumption but conscience.
To remember rightly is to resist silently. For the memory of the Republic is not nostalgia but defiance: the assertion that what once was good need not remain lost.
Yet remembrance need not remain abstract; it begins in quiet acts of fidelity. The decision to read a book rather than scroll a feed. The choice to speak in full sentences rather than in slogans. The cultivation of attention in an economy designed to fragment it. The insistence that words still mean what they have always meant—that truth is not “my truth,” that justice is not self-interest dressed in virtue’s language, that freedom is not the absence of constraint but the capacity for self-government.
These are not grand gestures. They are the quiet practices by which a republic is inhabited rather than merely remembered. And from such practices, carried out by enough citizens in enough places, the Republic becomes possible again.
Within the small fidelities of teachers who still teach the canon, of local journalists who still pursue fact rather than traffic, of congregations that maintain common worship in an age of private spirituality, of small business owners who measure success by craft rather than scale, of librarians who curate knowledge rather than data, and of parents who guard their children’s attention from the platforms’ harvest—within these scattered practices, the memory of the Republic endures not as doctrine but as disposition, not as ideology but as habit.
XII. Coda: The Seed Beneath the Ashes
The form of the Republic may endure, but its substance has subsided into memory.
So it seems. Yet memory, if guarded, may become seed once more. The founders built not merely a machine of government, but a moral architecture designed to house what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. The machine still stands. It awaits habitation.
The Republic will rise again only when its citizens once more deserve it—when they reclaim the courage to speak truth, to resist convenience, and to hold power, even digital, financial, and propagandistic power, accountable to the moral law that no algorithm or Supreme Court ruling can repeal.
Until then, the Republic remains—its monuments intact, its meaning in exile. But even exile is not extinction. For memory, like embers beneath the ash, waits for the breath of the living to make it flame again.
The question is not whether the forms of the Republic shall endure—they shall, embalmed in marble and lit by the flicker of screens. The question is whether we shall prove worthy to reinhabit them.
How Two Decades of Income Tax Cuts for the Wealthy Shifted the Load onto Property Owners and Renters
During the most recent reappraisal for property taxes, thousands of Cuyahoga County residents opened their mailboxes to find reappraisal notices that made their stomachs drop. Property values had climbed by an average of 32% county-wide, with East Cleveland residents facing increases of 67% and Maple Heights 59%.
Michael Chambers, Cuyahoga County Auditor, reported that, for 71-year-old Parma resident Agnes Gallo, this meant her home’s value rose by $76,000, pushing her annual tax bill up nearly $950. “This is outrageous,” she said. “People can’t afford to live in their own houses.” He also said that single mother Roni Menefee, facing a 49% valuation hike, admitted she was considering leaving Ohio altogether: “We’re hardly living in Beverly Hills here.”
County officials insist that House Bill 920 prevents taxes from rising dollar-for-dollar with property values. But for seniors on fixed incomes or working families barely hanging on, even modest increases can be destabilizing. More than 20,000 residents filed complaints, with thousands of adjustments granted. Still, the anger lingers—and justifiably so.
The Long-Term Tax Shift
That anger is rooted in two decades of deliberate state policy. Since 2005, Ohio’s Republican lawmakers have steadily cut the personal income tax, reducing rates most sharply at the top. Over time, these cuts drained nearly $13 billion annually from state revenues.
With less money flowing from the state to schools, libraries, and local governments, communities were forced to raise more themselves. And because they are prohibited from taxing investments or capital gains—the kinds of income more common among the wealthy—the primary tool left was the property tax (although many municipalities also increased their local income taxes-Cleveland voters narrowly approved an increase in its income tax from 2 percent to 2.5 percent in 2016).
The outcome: in 2024, Ohioans paid $23.9 billion in property taxes—more than they contributed through sales taxes ($13.7 billion) or income taxes ($9.5 billion). The most regressive form of taxation has become the backbone of public services.
Put plainly: the legislature cut income taxes for the wealthy, and forced everyone else—retired, middle-class, working-class, and poor—to make up the difference through higher property taxes.
The Nonprofit Inversion
At the same time, Ohio has allowed exemptions and abatements to balloon. Nearly $90 billion in property value—17% of the state’s total—is exempt from taxation, up from 14% two decades ago.
The largest single category? Abatements, totaling $26.6 billion. These were meant as temporary incentives to spur growth but are now permanent fixtures. Even utilities, which have captive consumers and guaranteed profits, receive abatements for investments they would make anyway.
And then there are the so-called nonprofits. Their tax-exempt status rests on public benefit, yet their leaders are not infrequently paid like corporate executives:
Institution
Leader
Annual Compensation
Tax/Exemption Status
Cleveland Clinic
Dr. Tomislav Mihaljevic, CEO
≈ $7 million (2023)
Vast campus tax-exempt as nonprofit hospital
Ohio State University
Ted Carter Jr., President
≈ $1.3 million (2024)
University property tax-exempt
Ohio State University
Ryan Day, Head Football Coach
≈ $10–12.5 million (contracted 2025)
Public university benefiting from exemptions
Hawken School (Private)
D. Scott Looney, Head of School
≈ $1.05 million (2023, IRS Form 990)
Elite private school, property tax-exempt
These institutions are sheltered from taxes while ordinary citizens—many of whom can barely make ends meet—are expected to pay “full freight.”
Renters Pay Too
The burden does not end with homeowners. Renters also pay indirectly, as landlords pass on property tax hikes through higher rents.
In 2023, Ohio saw some of the steepest rent increases in the nation:
Cincinnati: one-bedroom rents up 17% year-over-year.
Columbus: also up 17%.
Central Ohio: squeezed further by Intel, Amazon, and data center developments.
Statewide: over 700,000 renter households are “severely cost-burdened,” spending more than half their income on housing.
Even those who do not own property are being priced out of Ohio’s communities.
Populist Anger and the Ballot Box
It is no wonder, then, that frustration has spilled into politics. In 2025, an all-volunteer group began gathering signatures for a constitutional amendment to abolish property taxes entirely. Organizers say they are moving forward “no matter what” lawmakers do, because people feel they “no longer have a voice in this government.”
The proposal is extreme. Abolishing property taxes would blow a $23 billion hole in funding for schools, libraries, mental health services, and parks. Replacing it with sales taxes could require rates as high as 20%. Yet the fact that such a movement exists—and is gaining traction—reveals how deeply citizens feel abandoned.
They no longer trust lawmakers who, for twenty years, cut income taxes for the rich while pushing costs onto everyone else, especially the working class, seniors, and the poor. They see abatements handed to billion-dollar institutions and “nonprofits” with millionaire executives, while seniors in Parma and renters in Columbus face bills that are unsustainable.
The Choice Ahead
Ohio’s property tax crisis is not an accident. It is the inevitable result of two decades of choices:
Cut income taxes for the wealthy.
Hand abatements to billion-dollar institutions.
Shift the burden onto homeowners, renters, and the poor.
The result is predictable: the young leave by choice, the old leave by necessity, and those who remain are angry enough to contemplate abolishing the system entirely.
Eliminating property taxes outright is likely not the answer—it would devastate schools, libraries, and local services. But for many Ohioans, it may feel like the only way to force state leaders to listen. When lawmakers protect the powerful and ignore the cries of ordinary citizens, radical proposals become the only language that carries weight.[1]
And the cry is not simply to be heard. It is to be relieved—to be lifted out from under a system of taxation that has become oppressive, unfair, and in many instances, unsustainable. Until that relief is real and tangible, until fairness is restored, the ballot box will remain the people’s only instrument. And if the choice is between leaving their homes or leaving the system as it is, more and more Ohioans will choose to abandon the system itself.
The choice is no longer between reform or complacency. It is between reform or rupture.
[1] Some might dismiss the property tax abolition initiative as folly that would devastate local services. But terror concentrates the mind wonderfully. When gerrymandered legislative maps silence voters’ voices in normal governance, when the legislature attempts to eliminate or dilute ballot initiatives entirely, and when even successful citizen initiatives are ignored by lawmakers and courts, extreme measures become rational responses. The terror that grips policy makers, and concentrates their focus if voters eliminate $23 billion in local funding, might finally force the political class that has spent decades redistributing wealth upward to confront the unsustainable system they’ve created. Sometimes breaking a captured system is the only way to build a fair one.
The Browns stadium deal is not merely a bad investment—it is a paradigm of elite hypocrisy, a socialist redistribution of public wealth upward, executed by lawmakers who claim allegiance to free‑market principles while enacting policies that privatize profit and publicize risk.
Earlier this year, Ohio’s Republican supermajority passed legislation requiring that high school students be instructed in the virtues of capitalism.¹ At the same time, these very lawmakers voted to seize $600 million from the state’s unclaimed‑property fund—money legally belonging to ordinary Ohioans—and redirect it to fund a $2.4 billion private stadium project for billionaire owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam. That is not capitalism. That is elite socialism, a state‑directed transfer of private/collective resources to elite private interests.
The Haslams, whose estimated net worth exceeds $8.5 billion, are not merely beneficiaries of state largesse—they are its architects. Whether the team remains in downtown Cleveland (with the city offering $461 million in renovations) or relocates to Brook Park with state and county subsidies, the outcome is the same: private/public funds extracted to enhance elite private empires.
Let us strip away the euphemisms. This is not a “public–private partnership.” It is a state‑sanctioned seizure and redistribution of wealth, orchestrated by legislators who demand work requirements, means testing, and behavioral monitoring for ordinary Ohioans receiving food, housing, or healthcare assistance—but offer no such oversight when the recipient wears a suit and owns a football team.²
When working families receive modest aid, it is denounced as “government dependency.” When billionaires receive hundreds of millions in public money, it is praised as “economic development.” This is not pedestrian ideological inconsistency; it is class warfare masquerading as policy.
County Executive Chris Ronayne called the proposal “piracy,” rightly charging that lawmakers are robbing Bob and Betty Buckeye to pay Jimmy and Dee Haslam.³ And indeed, the state has now declared the unclaimed‑property fund reverts to public ownership after ten years—not to be reinvested in public education or healthcare, but to underwrite the speculative ventures of the ultra‑wealthy.
Even the supposed safeguards are laughable: a mere $50 million in escrow from the Haslams, and another $50 million line of credit—a token hedge against a half‑billion‑dollar state exposure. Meanwhile, individuals requesting a few hundred dollars in public aid are subjected to rigorous oversight and bureaucratic suspicion.
This arrangement is a perfect study in the moral inversion of modern American political economy: public discipline for the broad citizenry, public indulgence for the rich; free‑market platitudes for the powerless, centralized socialism for the powerful.
This stadium subsidy is merely the latest manifestation of a systematic pattern—from pharmaceutical companies capturing billions in public research funding while charging monopoly prices for resulting drugs, to defense contractors operating on cost-plus arrangements that guarantee profits regardless of performance, to agricultural corporations receiving millions in annual subsidies while preaching individual responsibility. The Browns deal simply makes visible what usually operates through more obscure channels.
This is not merely the marginalization of the interests of the poor, working, and middle classes, but the broader appropriation of public resources away from the citizenry at large—those who should have access to public investment without facing moral scrutiny, bureaucratic suspicion, or ideological disapproval.
It is telling that both Policy Matters Ohio and the Buckeye Institute—voices from the ideological left and right—oppose the deal. They understand, as do many citizens, that this is not governance in the public interest. It is the use of state authority to engineer a systematic upward redistribution of wealth, cloaked in the language of jobs and development.
The real divide in America is not between socialism and capitalism—it is between elite socialism, in which wealth is extracted and insulated for the privileged, and democratic socialism, in which collective resources are used for collective needs. (Ours has always been a mixed economy—part capitalist, part socialist, the latter increasingly tilted toward elite interests—though this has rarely been acknowledged in our political discourse.) Until we name this truth and demand ideological consistency from our legislators, we will continue subsidizing billionaires while denying the citizenry investment—and calling it “fiscal responsibility.”
The scaffolding of economic life already exists. The only question is whether it will remain a scaffold supporting billionaires or be reclaimed as a structure serving all the people.
NOTES:
¹ Senate Bill 17, signed by Gov. Mike DeWine in March 2024, requires ten principles of “free market capitalism” to be taught as part of financial literacy courses required for high school graduation. The Ohio House passed the bill 66–26 in February 2024. See: Ohio Capital Journal, “Ohio House passes bill that would add capitalism to high school financial literacy curriculum,” Feb. 12, 2024.
The Statehouse News Bureau, “Former Gov. Rhodes said ‘Profit isn’t a dirty word.’ Now, Ohio students will learn about capitalism,” Mar. 15, 2024.
² See, e.g., Ohio Administrative Code 5101:4‑3‑13 and 5101:4‑9‑09 (SNAP work registration, employment/training and sanctions); 5101:1‑3‑12 (Ohio Works First requiring 30–55 hours/week of work). Ongoing eligibility mandates include documentation of income, assets, and residency. No equivalent oversight applies to recipients of corporate subsidies or stadium funding.
³ Chris Ronayne described the plan as “akin to piracy” and stated, “This is not just robbing Peter to pay Paul, this is robbing Bob and Betty Buckeye to pay Jimmy and Dee Haslam.” See: WKYC, “Ohio’s unclaimed funds could help build Browns stadium: Here’s how to see if any belong to you,” June 5, 2025. wkyc.com
Axios Cleveland, “Ohio Senate proposes $600 million Browns stadium subsidy using taxpayers’ unclaimed funds,” June 4, 2025.
DeNatale, Dave, Lynna Lai, and Peter Fleischer. “Ohio Senate approves its version of budget, including $600M for new Cleveland Browns domed stadium in Brook Park.” WKYC, June 11, 2025.
⁴ Should the Browns remain in downtown Cleveland, the city’s proposed $461 million commitment is expected to come from municipally issued bonds, potentially backed by revenues through the Cleveland–Cuyahoga County Port Authority or tax levies. The Port Authority, which regularly issues loans and revenue bonds to spur commercial development, functions as a centralized mechanism for steering public resources—effectively a form of state planning within a nominally capitalist framework, choosing economic “winners” with public backing.
General sources consulted: Associated Press, Axios Cleveland, The Guardian, New York Post
It is even more speculative than the tulips of tulipmania—less beautiful, less tangible, and arguably, less of an asset. Tulips, after all, at least bloomed.
Cryptocurrency has become the modern symbol of speculative excess: a phenomenon untethered from utility, value, or service to the common good. Its defenders proclaim it a revolution in finance, a challenge to the tyranny of central banks, a restoration of liberty through cryptographic purity. But peel back the gilded claims, and one finds something more brittle, more hollow, and perhaps more dangerous.
To be fair, cryptocurrency does serve certain functions. In Venezuela, citizens use Bitcoin to preserve wealth as their currency hyperinflates. In countries with collapsed banking systems, people rely on digital tokens for remittances. In regions where governments block financial transactions, cryptocurrency provides an escape valve. These are real uses, serving real needs.
But examine why these uses exist, and a darker picture emerges. Cryptocurrency functions not as a superior alternative to traditional finance, but as digital tree bark—emergency sustenance consumed only when the normal food supply has failed. It works precisely because the alternatives are catastrophically worse: worthless fiat, collapsed institutions, criminal governments. This is not cryptocurrency succeeding on its merits; it is cryptocurrency serving as expensive, volatile intermediary in humanity’s most desperate financial moments.
The Venezuelan using Bitcoin is not proving cryptocurrency’s revolutionary potential—they are demonstrating what happens when a society’s monetary system breaks down. The remittance flowing through Ethereum is not evidence of innovation—it is a costly detour around institutional failure, adding friction, fees, and volatility risk to what should be a simple transfer. Cryptocurrency serves merely as an expensive, volatile intermediary in what remains, at core, a fiat transaction. Convert fiat to cryptocurrency, pay network fees, endure price swings, convert back to fiat, pay more fees. The process only makes sense when every other option is worse.
Yet cryptocurrency evangelists take these edge cases—where their system barely outperforms complete collapse—and extrapolate them into grand claims about the future of all finance. They mistake being marginally better than failed institutions for being superior to functional ones. Should we design our financial systems around the needs of failed states and criminal enterprises? Should we burn massive amounts of energy to create digital workarounds for institutional breakdown, rather than strengthening the institutions that serve stable societies?
This is not currency in any meaningful sense of the term. It is not a stable store of value. It is not a consistent medium of exchange. It is barely a unit of account. What it offers, rather, is a kind of digital alchemy, where symbols stand in for substance and belief masquerades as value.
For the early adopter, it is a lever for disproportionate gain. For the tax dodger and the launderer, it is a haven of shadows. For the credulous speculator, it is a mirage of easy wealth—a mirage often followed by collapse. And for the society that tolerates it, it is a siphon, draining energy—literal and metaphorical—from more productive ends.
Nor is this merely a matter of theory. In 2023 alone, blockchain analysis firms estimated that over $22 billion in illicit funds were laundered through cryptocurrencies—much of it routed through decentralized exchanges, mixing services, and prepaid debit card schemes. From sanctioned regimes like Iran and North Korea to transnational crime syndicates and terrorist networks, cryptocurrency now functions as the infrastructure of choice for bypassing traditional surveillance. It is not only opaque; it is portable, borderless, and persistently one step ahead of enforcement.
The value of Bitcoin, or any coin, is not intrinsic. Gold, whatever its monetary mystique, at least has industrial applications—electronics, medical devices, aerospace components. Strip away gold’s monetary role, and it retains a floor value based on genuine utility. Cryptocurrency offers no such foundation. It represents only that some energy was spent and some consensus achieved that a bit of code might be worth something to someone else. Unlike fiat currency—however imperfect—which is at least nominally governed by institutions with public obligations, cryptocurrency is governed by no one and manipulated by many.
Cryptocurrency’s history is not merely volatile—it is littered with failure. From BitConnect’s Ponzi scheme and OneCoin’s fabricated blockchain to meme-based absurdities like Coinye (sued into oblivion by Kanye West), entire ecosystems have collapsed under the weight of fraud or fantasy. More quietly, hundreds of lesser-known coins—Auroracoin, Peercoin, Feathercoin, Nxt—have faded into digital irrelevance. According to independent trackers, over 2,000 cryptocurrencies have already failed, often within a year or two of launch.
The blockchain may be secure, but the ecosystem is anything but. Scams, rug pulls, pump-and-dump schemes, and algorithmic collapses litter the field like digital detritus. And still the faithful chant the liturgy of decentralization, innovation, and inevitability.
The irony is almost poetic. A movement born from distrust of fiat currency has created something far less stable, far less transparent, and far more volatile. At least fiat is answerable to a polity. Cryptocurrency is answerable only to its market—and its market often answers to no one but the early sellers.
What was once billed as a decentralized revolution has, under the current administration, become a centralized enterprise of a different kind—one in which the instruments of state are quietly repurposed to serve private gain. Since President Trump’s return to office, enforcement actions against cryptocurrency firms have been reversed, regulations have been softened, and public officials with deep ties to the industry have assumed the very posts designed to police it. At the center of this permissiveness is a blatant conflict of interest: the Trump family’s own holdings in digital assets—including the $TRUMP meme coin, the USD1 stablecoin, and affiliated ventures—are now believed to rival or exceed the value of their traditional real estate empire. Cryptocurrencies are no longer mere instruments of speculation; they have become the administration’s preferred asset class. In this light, regulatory indifference is not ideological—it is financial. The state is no longer simply tolerating speculative delusion; it is underwriting it. The line between financial fraud and political favoritism has not just blurred—it has all but vanished.
What we are witnessing is not the future of money, but the future of speculation unmoored from labor, utility, or production. It is a theater of illusion, where wealth appears without work, where tulips bloom not in soil but in code, and where the coin in the hand may vanish before it ever finds use.
As governments struggle to keep pace, the anonymity and jurisdictional fluidity of cryptocurrency shield perpetrators behind webs of decentralized complexity. One high-profile case involved a dark web site trafficking in child exploitation, where more than 1.3 million separate cryptocurrency addresses were used to obfuscate payment trails. Investigators ultimately uncovered the network only through transnational cooperation and painstaking digital forensics. Yet such victories are rare. In most cases, enforcement plays an endless game of jurisdictional whack-a-mole—outmatched by technology’s relentless innovation and the absence of unified oversight.
The few legitimate uses of cryptocurrency—preserving wealth during hyperinflation, circumventing capital controls, enabling remittances where banks have failed—are symptoms of institutional pathology, not harbingers of financial evolution. Building speculative manias around emergency measures is both dangerous and absurd. These are not features to celebrate but problems to solve through stronger institutions, not weaker ones.
It is not that all cryptocurrency is criminal, nor that all who engage with it are fools. But the overwhelming dynamic is clear: a frenzy of fools and frauds, chasing magic coins in the digital gutter, while the desperate few who genuinely rely on these digital workarounds bear the cost of everyone else’s speculative delusions.
