The lessons of Classical Antiquity teach that the middling share of national prosperity is no less important to life, liberty, and happiness than any Enlightenment precept bestowed upon us by our Founding Fathers. The predominance of an upright and independent middle class is therefore as essential to our democratic-republican form of government as the liberties and guarantees embodied within our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution.

This truth requires an appropriate prioritization and balancing of the competing rights and interests of civil society. While property rights are sacrosanct, they are not absolute. No sensible or sustainable understanding of the right to accumulate property can tolerate any encroachment into the middling share so far that pessimism annihilates optimism and the middling virtues dissolve, transforming a free and democratic people into the bewildered and squabbling playthings of demagogues. All private fortunes are subordinate to the democratic-republican form and substance of political society. All claims to the contrary are invalid and rightly dismissed. All practices encroaching into the middling share jeopardize our experiment in self-government and are justly curtailed.

Any appropriate limitation imposed upon the rights of accumulation must, however, comport with the values of common sense and due process. This requires that such limits be applied to households rather than enterprises, because the tantrums of individuals are easily confined and households are the final owners of almost all wealth and thus the repositories of greatest market incentive and the fulcrums of greatest enforcement leverage. They must be conveyed through market actors, in order to induce productive and earned wealth deconcentration and avoid the waste, dependency, and patronage that accompanies government-administered wealth redistribution. They must be calculated based on net worth, rather than income or purchasing power, so that they factor the cumulative effects of all economic activity depressing our middle class households. They must be tethered in mathematical proportion the national median, enabling and encouraging the top to raise their limits by raising the median; otherwise policy can bear nothing but an accidental relationship to the middle class. They must be high enough to preserve incentives for legitimate and productive innovation and entrepreneurship, fueling the dreams of avarice for which most ambition strives. They must be uniform nationwide, so that they cannot be arbitraged by States and elites. They must be implemented via constitutional provision, to withstand apportionment clause attacks and the vicissitudes of ordinary politics. And they must periodically adjusted within a prescribed range according to objective and rational criteria and evolving macroeconomic conditions until the optimal social aspect ratio is discovered.

America’s founding generation gave us a brilliant though imperfect political constitution which ordained the legal form of a democratic republic. It has fallen to our generation to restore and expand its political substance: An upright and independent middle class, continually refreshed by upward mobility.

Our vision is to forever redeem what was best about America’s founding, and finally repair what was worst. Our mission is to advance the legal means by which this would be achieved: Through our proposed constitutional amendment.