From Our Generation

Crom Carmichael and Mike Hassell

From Our Generation is all about making sense of history, economics, and politics through real conversations. We dive into the ideas and events that shaped the world, how they still affect us today, and what they mean for the future. No lectures, just honest discussions about where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going.

  1. 1d ago

    THE OLDEST QUESTION

    Barack Obama opened his Presidential Center with a speech that denigrated the Declaration of Independence and praised the Constitution in the vaguest possible terms. He skipped "endowed by our Creator," as he always does, and framed the Constitution as a document designed to "change with the times," a phrase that sounds reasonable until you realize he means judicial reinterpretation, not the amendment process the founders actually built. When Democrats invoke "our democracy," they mean something specific: the removal of constitutional constraints on what they want to do. The founders were deeply suspicious of democracy for exactly this reason. Every structural feature of the government they designed, the Senate, the Electoral College, the separation of powers, exists to prevent a majority from destroying the rights of the individual. Keir Starmer resigned as Britain's seventh prime minister in ten years, less than two years after winning a landslide. He promised to address immigration and increase defense spending for NATO. He did neither. British living standards have slipped to roughly half of American levels over a 50-year period, driven by a government that keeps growing while the productive economy it feeds off keeps shrinking. Sharia law is expanding in British culture. Rape victims who accuse Muslim perpetrators face more scrutiny than the accused. Political greatness, the kind that actually reverses decline, is extraordinarily rare because it requires standing against entrenched interests that are powerful, well-funded, and have no intention of yielding. Two-thirds of Democrats now view socialism favorably. Capitalism's favorable rating among Democrats has dropped to 42%. Democratic Socialists are winning primaries in New York, Seattle, and potentially Los Angeles. Their platform includes abolishing ICE, a 32-hour workweek with no pay reduction, universal basic income, federal rent control, free college, and halting all deportations. These are promises that cannot be kept because the math behind them does not work. Socialism does not fail because of bad implementation. It fails because it eliminates the pricing information that a competitive market uses to allocate resources. Without that information, no amount of good intention produces efficiency. New York City's mayor controls 200,000 public housing units that require $78 billion in repairs to become livable. He is doing nothing to fix them while proposing a tax to build 200,000 more. He is, by definition, the city's largest slumlord. Bernie Sanders wants the federal government to own 50% of AI companies, calling them a "public resource." If AI is a public resource, so is food, water, housing, media, and everything else. The argument has no limiting principle, which is the point. Social Security's trust funds will be exhausted by 2034. Benefits will automatically drop 22% unless Congress borrows more or raises taxes. A Republican amendment at the program's creation would have put half of contributions into individual investment accounts. Had that passed, every retiree today would be financially independent. California signed legislation raising health premiums by up to 97% and is now taxing software. Seventeen red states are suing over a California packaging law that effectively imposes regulatory costs on businesses across the country. The tension between command and freedom is not new. Dutch settlers on Manhattan in the 1600s were already demanding rights from the trading company that employed them, more than a century before the Constitution was written. The question of how much authority any single person or institution should hold over others is the oldest political question there is, and it has not been answered. For more episodes and resources, visit fromourgeneration.com. Dive deeper with Giants of Political Thought at giantsofpoliticalthought.com.

  2. Jul 10

    29% PATRIOT

    A CNN poll on July 4th attitudes reveals a divide that did not exist a generation ago. In January 2001, 85% of Democrats said they were extremely or very proud to be American. In 2026, that number is 29%. Republican pride held steady at 90% across the same period. Only 27% of Democrats plan to display the flag on July 4th, down from 65% twenty-five years ago. The question isn't which party is right. The question is what happened in a single generation to produce that kind of collapse. Part of the answer may be in the classrooms. At Harvard, 47% of seniors report experiencing mental illness during their time at the university, with another 13% unsure. Princeton's numbers are worse: over 60% sought mental health counseling or therapy during college. These are not struggling students. They were among the most capable people in the country when they arrived. Four years later, they are twice as likely to report mental illness as the general population. The demographics most associated with mental illness in the broader data: college-educated, Democrat, liberal, white, and lower family income. College-educated Americans are more depressed than those without degrees. Something is being taught, or absorbed, that is making intelligent people less functional. A self-described socialist internationalist professor at St. Anselm's College posted a public meltdown summarizing the state of the progressive project: Venezuela lost, Cuba slipping, climate action dead, the American left described as populist trash in possession of zero brainpower. The despair is real, but it is the despair of an ideology that assumed history would move in one direction and is watching it reverse. The Obama Presidential Center opened in Chicago at roughly $1 billion, more than triple its original budget, five years behind schedule. Obama gave a speech about how American culture is too fixated on money and fame. Meanwhile, the Association of Black Contractors in Chicago reports that minority firms Obama promised to use were stiffed. Some are declaring bankruptcy after completing hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid work. The celebrities performing at the grand opening were not working for free. A GAO report reveals there is no way to cross-reference federal spending records with the government's own "do not pay" list. Blue states are refusing to cooperate with federal efforts to identify fraudulent recipients. The fraud has become a business model: a mechanism for drawing federal dollars into state budgets with no accountability attached. The EU Parliament voted for the strictest immigration laws in 50 years, followed by floor chanting of "send them back." The EU also agreed to eliminate tariffs on all U.S. industrial goods, a concession that was supposed to be impossible under Trump's trade pressure. Illinois added $800 million in new annual taxes, its 63rd tax or fee increase under Pritzker. California state workers are suing to avoid returning to the office, arguing that commuting harms the environment. And Elon Musk became the world's first trillionaire after SpaceX went public, while Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, neither of whom has ever created a job or shared a dollar of personal wealth, called him too rich. For more episodes and resources, visit fromourgeneration.com. Dive deeper with Giants of Political Thought at giantsofpoliticalthought.com.

  3. Jul 1

    OLIGAHCHY

    Every dollar spent on government is a dollar somebody else had to earn. That math never changes, no matter how large the economy gets. On a ten-person island, adding one government worker forces the remaining nine to work 11% longer to cover the same output. Add a retiree and the burden climbs again. Scale that to a $7 trillion federal budget and the math is the same, just harder to see. Bernie Sanders now leads the Democratic Party by the only metric that matters: candidates seek his endorsement more than any other Democrat's. His position has not moved in 40 years. More government, single-payer healthcare, higher taxes, universal programs. He calls the healthcare system broken while having done more than any single politician to build the system he now criticizes. He points to Canada as a model, omitting that wealthy Canadians fly to the U.S. for surgery because wait times make their own system unusable for anything urgent. He calls Great Britain single-payer when it actually runs a two-tier system where anyone who can afford private care opts out of the government version. The word oligarch gets thrown around without definition. Sanders uses it to attack billionaires, but oligarchy is a political concept: power over others enforced by the state. Mark Zuckerberg cannot compel anyone to use Facebook. The CEO of Exxon cannot set the price of oil. A U.S. Senator can vote to force 330 million people to buy health insurance, destroy an industry, or restructure an economy. If oligarch means anything, it applies to the people who write the laws, not the people who build the products. Russia's economy is smaller than Italy's. It exports oil and raw materials. It has never produced a globally competitive manufactured product, not a car, not an appliance, nothing. That is what happens when a system does not allow producers to become more efficient over time. The absence of property rights and competitive markets guarantees stagnation regardless of natural resources. Graham Platner is running for the Maine Senate seat against Susan Collins with a Nazi prison guard tattoo he wore for 18 years, sexting allegations from over a dozen women, six accusations of physical abuse, and a biography built on an oyster farm that sells primarily to his mother's restaurant. Democrats are standing behind him because they need 51 seats. The New York Times ran a hit piece, likely to pressure him out before the July 12 ballot deadline so the party can appoint a replacement who never ran a primary. In Alaska, Democrats recruited a man with the same name as the Republican incumbent to run as a fake Republican under ranked-choice voting. Scott Pelley was fired from 60 Minutes after publicly confronting his new boss at an all-hands meeting, calling him unwelcome and unqualified. He framed it as a stand for journalistic integrity. The more likely story: his producer asked him to include information that would balance a story, he refused, and called the additional sourcing "unverified" because he never bothered to verify it. Rachel Maddow publicly invited him to MSNBC, which is the last thing a journalist claiming to be balanced wants to hear. For more episodes and resources, visit fromourgeneration.com. Dive deeper with Giants of Political Thought at giantsofpoliticalthought.com.

  4. Jun 25

    BUREAUCRACIES

    Bureaucracies don't die quietly. When Reagan tried to eliminate the EPA, radon suddenly became a national crisis: odorless, tasteless, colorless, and conveniently undetectable without government-approved machines. Cities sitting on limestone, the supposed source, showed no elevated cancer rates. The threat evaporated under scrutiny, but the agency grew. The pattern repeats wherever an institution's survival depends on the problems it claims to solve. UFO disclosures follow a similar logic. The moment government started talking about unidentified aerial phenomena, the credibility dropped. Released footage is either easily debunked or so ambiguous it proves nothing. Tim Burchett vouches for a 4K video of a 300-foot object moving at extreme speed underwater without displacing water. If real, it implies technology so far beyond current capability that speculation about origins is meaningless. What it does not imply is an existential threat or a reason to change a single vote in 2026. The midterm picture is sharpening. In Texas, the Democrat primary produced the furthest-left Senate nominee the state has seen. In Louisiana, the incumbent Republican came in third after voting to convict Trump post-January 6th. In the Texas Republican runoff, John Cornyn was overwhelmed by a challenger running to his right. The Democrat party was supposed to moderate after 2024. Instead, activists have taken the wheel and are nominating candidates further from the center than before. Gas prices will determine more than any candidate. Below $3 by September, Republicans hold or gain ground. Above $4, Democrats benefit. Energy costs cascade through everything: diesel moves goods, fossil fuels set utility rates, and inflation tracks fuel prices more closely than any other variable. Consumer debt is flashing warnings. Credit card delinquencies at 90 days are approaching 2010 levels. Student loan delinquencies have exploded now that Biden-era repayment pauses ended. Auto loan defaults have surpassed the Great Recession benchmark. Mortgage delinquencies remain low, the one firewall preventing a broader crisis. Consumer spending over the next 12 to 18 months is unlikely to be strong. The offset may be capital investment. The big beautiful bill's incentives for building and equipping U.S. factories within 36 months are accelerating land acquisition, permitting, and capital goods orders. Robotics and AI spending is surging. If those factories come online through 2027 and 2028, they will be the most modern manufacturing facilities in the world. Blue states are accelerating in the opposite direction. New York's budget is $268 billion, more than double Florida's, despite having 3.5 million fewer people. Pension sweeteners for teachers alone cost $557 million annually. Hawaii's new "millionaire's tax" hits incomes above $500,000, pushing combined rates past 50%. New York City's new mayor is pursuing property seizures from landlords under conditions that almost certainly violate constitutional protections. Vancouver tried a similar tax on out-of-town owners and within a short period, 60% of targeted properties changed hands to local straw buyers. The revenue never materialized. The question of whether Americans should face draft risk during wartime is really about skin in the game. The same families have fought every war since Vietnam. Politicians who would never send their own children to serve vote for conflicts without hesitation. A draft wouldn't change troop levels today, but it would change how carefully the country thinks before committing to the next war. For more episodes and resources, visit fromourgeneration.com. Dive deeper with Giants of Political Thought at giantsofpoliticalthought.com.

  5. Jun 9

    RIGHTS BEFORE GOVERNMENT

    The Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution, is the founding document that defines what America is. Clarence Thomas made this distinction in a recent speech at the University of Texas, and the argument holds. George Washington said he fought for sovereignty, not for a governing structure he couldn't yet imagine. The Constitution came later as the operating manual. The Declaration established the premise: rights come from nature, not from government, and no authority can justly strip them away. The Articles of Confederation failed for two reasons. States coined their own money, creating inflationary spirals that destabilized commerce. States imposed tariffs on each other, strangling trade between neighbors. The Constitutional Convention convened with exactly one point of consensus: what existed could not stand. Everything else was negotiated, including the fatal compromise on slavery that guaranteed a civil war within a century. The Constitution's design was built around limiting federal power. Congress could coin money and regulate interstate and international trade. Everything else belonged to the states. For 150 years, non-defense federal spending was negligible. Calvin Coolidge reported in 1923 that total federal spending was $2.3 billion, two-thirds of it defense. The federal government has since grown roughly 7,000 times that size. Where there is a giant pot of money, there will always be people who want access to it without creating anything of value to earn it. The Supreme Court's recent rulings on redistricting are reshaping the political map. States can gerrymander for political advantage but can no longer draw districts by race. Southern states previously required to create majority-black districts are now dispersing those populations across multiple seats. Democrats call this disenfranchisement. But New England has been gerrymandering for political advantage for decades: 40% of voters in those states vote Republican, yet 100% of House seats are held by Democrats. The principle is either universal or it isn't. The claim that only black representatives can serve black constituents doesn't survive scrutiny. Burgess Owens, Wesley Hunt, Byron Donalds, and Tim Scott all won in predominantly white districts. Tim Scott wins 70% of the white vote in South Carolina. The question worth asking is whether black communities represented by black Democrats have measurably benefited from that representation in income, education, or opportunity. Capital only exists because property rights are protected. Before the Industrial Revolution, living standards barely moved for 750 years. Between 1760 and 1850, they tripled. Karl Marx could only argue against capitalism once capitalism existed to argue against. The system that created it was built on the same premise as the Declaration: people have a right to the fruits of their own labor. The United States has 11 companies worth over a trillion dollars. No other country has one. That wealth is dispersed across tens of millions of 401(k)s, pension plans, and retirement accounts. The billionaire is the visible target. The millions of ordinary investors who benefit from the same system are invisible. Every attempt to cap wealth or halt innovation follows the same logic as banning the internal combustion engine to protect the horse industry. AI will displace some jobs. Every major invention has. Every one of them created far more than it destroyed. For more episodes and resources, visit fromourgeneration.com. Dive deeper with Giants of Political Thought at giantsofpoliticalthought.com.

  6. Jun 1

    WHEN INSTITUTIONS FAIL

    Trust in institutions is at an all-time low, and the question is whether that's a crisis or a correction. Government, media, Congress: the erosion is measurable. But the people who say they distrust Congress keep reelecting their own representatives. The people who distrust the media keep watching outlets that confirm what they already believe. Distrust without action is just atmosphere. Media accountability is heading to a breaking point. The Sullivan decision gave press organizations broad protection to say nearly anything about public figures. That protection has been leveraged into a business model where false statements generate clicks without consequence. ABC settled with Trump after George Stephanopoulos repeatedly and falsely claimed Trump had been convicted of rape. Alan Dershowitz is refusing to settle his case against CNN, pushing the Supreme Court to narrow Sullivan and raise the cost of publishing known falsehoods. If the Court moves the bar, the economics of partisan media change overnight. A generational fault line runs underneath all of it. The internet stripped the distance between public image and private reality. Bill Cosby, OJ Simpson, Michael Jackson: every hero of a certain era fell publicly and permanently. A generation raised watching that doesn't default to trust. It defaults to skepticism, which is healthy until it curdles into paralysis. Government inefficiency is not a matter of opinion. It is a structural outcome of incentive design. A private business that fails its customers goes under. A government agency that fails to deliver claims it needs a larger budget. The question is never whether government or markets are "better" in the abstract. The question is which failure mode you are dealing with: the kind that self-corrects through competition, or the kind that compounds because no one with authority has a reason to stop it. Operation Chokepoint proved how far executive power can reach without passing a single law. The Obama DOJ pressured banks into dropping legal businesses it disapproved of: gun stores, payday lenders, coin dealers, tobacco shops. No legislation, no trial, just regulatory leverage applied until legal enterprises lost access to the financial system. Trump ended the program in 2017, but the playbook survived. Canadian trucker de-banking and crypto founder account closures trace directly back to the same template. COVID censorship followed the same logic. The Biden administration told social media platforms to suppress opposing viewpoints on public health policy. Those viewpoints turned out to be legitimate. Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that Facebook blocked content at the government's direction. The speech was legal. The opinions were, in many cases, correct. The officials who ordered the suppression have faced no accountability. Accountability is the thread connecting every one of these issues. When government officials who abuse power face no personal cost, the abuse becomes a template. When media organizations that publish falsehoods face no financial consequence, the falsehoods become strategy. The system doesn't fix itself. It requires people willing to enforce the rules it was built on. For more episodes and resources, visit fromourgeneration.com. Dive deeper with Giants of Political Thought at giantsofpoliticalthought.com.

  7. May 20

    WHAT MAKES AMERICA DIFFERENT

    The United States has 11 companies worth more than a trillion dollars. No other country has one. The most valuable company in Europe is worth $600 billion. Japan's is $250 billion. Something about how this country operates produces outcomes no other system has matched, and the question of what that something is runs through every political fight happening right now. The American experiment was built by self-selected risk-takers who left known lives for uncertain ones. The founders designed a system obsessed with preventing tyranny, splitting power between branches, between federal and state governments, between the impulse of the moment and the slow grind of process. For the first 150 years, non-defense federal spending was under a billion dollars. Then a series of Supreme Court decisions changed the architecture. The Commerce Clause was reinterpreted to let Congress regulate a farmer's wheat that never left his property. Chevron deference stripped courts of the ability to check agency rulemaking. Roe v. Wade federalized a moral question every state had already addressed. Sullivan made it nearly impossible for public figures to hold media accountable for false statements. Each decision shifted power upward and concentrated it further from the people the system was designed to serve. Now several of those pillars are cracking. Chevron deference has been overturned. Racial gerrymandering has been struck down, with southern states already redrawing maps that will force candidates of both parties to build broader coalitions. The Dershowitz case heading to the Supreme Court could narrow Sullivan and restore real accountability for media defamation. School choice provisions in the big beautiful bill create a $1,700 federal tax credit that funds alternatives to failing public schools, a financial mechanism designed to unleash the same competitive pressure in education that drives American enterprise everywhere else. The fraud exposure accelerates the shift. States that ignored Obamacare's own revalidation requirements for Medicaid providers are being forced to comply. SNAP recipients buying Ferraris and Lamborghinis make the case for oversight more vividly than any policy paper. Blue states that built budgets around unchecked federal transfers are watching the math change in real time. Population follows incentives. Blue states are losing residents. Over 100,000 people left Los Angeles in 12 months. SEC schools are seeing application surges while Ivy League applications drop 20%. The 2030 census will likely shift 6 to 14 House seats to red states. Couple that with the end of race-based districting, and the structural advantage Democrats built over decades is unwinding on multiple fronts simultaneously. Whether the reversal holds is an open question. But for the first time in a century, the trajectory of centralized power is bending back toward the design the founders intended. For more episodes and resources, visit fromourgeneration.com⁠. Dive deeper with Giants of Political Thought at giantsofpoliticalthought.com.

  8. May 5

    RULES ON PAPER

    Redistricting battles across multiple states expose the tension between constitutional process and partisan ambition. Virginia's legislature pushed through a redistricting referendum without following its own constitutional requirements, ignoring the fact that voters were already casting early ballots before the law was finalized. A lower court blocked it within a day. Florida and Texas followed their state constitutions and will likely prevail. The outcomes look partisan, but the real variable is whether each state followed its own rules. The U.S. Supreme Court's ruling that states cannot draw congressional districts by race reshapes representation in ways that cut deeper than seat counts. Louisiana is delaying its primary to redraw maps. Tennessee may call a special session. The short-term disruption is real, but the longer-term effect may be better candidates on both sides. Mixed districts force broader coalitions, which is closer to what representative government was designed to produce. A 9-0 Supreme Court ruling reinforced that a New Jersey pregnancy center could not be forced to hand over its donor list to the state attorney general. The threat itself was the harm. Separately, the Court agreed to hear a challenge to the Labor Department's in-house tribunals, where the agency writes the rules, prosecutes violations, and decides the outcome. The same institution that created the Chevron deference is now systematically dismantling the architecture that grew out of it. A machine gun case heading to the Supreme Court could redefine the scope of federal power over commerce that never crosses state lines, revisiting a Roosevelt-era ruling that allowed Congress to regulate a farmer's wheat even though it never left his property. The Constitution listed four federal crimes. By 1980, there were over 3,000. Medicaid fraud illustrates the cost of systems built on trust without verification. Obamacare required states to revalidate providers every five years. Most never did. Illinois alone has 58,000 unvalidated providers. SNAP recipients have purchased Lamborghinis, Ferraris, and over 2,000 Teslas. California's honor-system home care program costs $30 billion a year with no checks on eligibility. The fraud is not incidental. It has become a business model. California's billionaire tax proposal has enough signatures for the November ballot: a one-time 5% levy on net worth above a billion dollars. One-time taxes rarely stay one-time. The likely result is an exodus that won't reverse. Germany's chancellor publicly called Trump humiliated over Iran. European NATO allies blocked U.S. base access and overflight rights. Countries that depend on American security guarantees and refuse to cooperate when those guarantees are tested raise a simple question: what is the alliance actually for? Barney Frank, one of the most liberal members of Congress in his era, is releasing a book from hospice repudiating his party's progressive flank. That a figure once considered the far left of the party now occupies its moderate wing tells you how far the center has moved. Across every story, the same pattern holds: institutions built on specific rules are bending or ignoring them, and the people those institutions were designed to serve absorb the cost. For more episodes and resources, visit fromourgeneration.com. Dive deeper with Giants of Political Thought at giantsofpoliticalthought.com.

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About

From Our Generation is all about making sense of history, economics, and politics through real conversations. We dive into the ideas and events that shaped the world, how they still affect us today, and what they mean for the future. No lectures, just honest discussions about where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going.

Information

  • Creator
    Crom Carmichael and Mike Hassell
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    62
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Crom Carmichael and Mike Hassell
  • Show Website
    From Our Generation