Anti‑Feudal America

Ban of Non-Human Entities

Human beings built the Republic, yet over time we permitted legal phantoms, corporations, trusts, foundations, algorithmic systems, and other non-human contrivances, and most recently artificial intelligence to accumulate wealth and wield influence. These entities do not feel the weight of law, fear public shame, or suffer moral consequences like human persons. They persist indefinitely, shielded from liability by layers of abstraction and legal arcana terms “limited liability” and “corporate personhood.”

Why the Republic Cannot Tolerate Disembodied Power

A free people cannot permit authority to drift into structures that cannot be punished, imprisoned, shamed, or meaningfully restrained. When non-human entities act, the harms they inflict are borne by real individuals, yet the responsibility dissolves into a fog of boards, bylaws, compliant accountants, and “internal reviews.”

History shows what follows:

• corporations that pollute without consequence,
• financial engines that crash economies while the architects walk free,
• political influence purchased through donations that obscure the human will behind them
• algorithmic systems making life-altering decisions with no accountable author.

Power that slips the leash of accountability, becomes something closer to feudal privilege.

The Principle: Power Must Belong to a Person or It Belongs to No One

The Constitution never intended that legal fictions could possess independent authority. Tools may be powerful, but tools cannot be sovereign. If something can command wealth, influence markets, or direct human labor, then a human controller must stand behind it.

Section 1 therefore states a blunt but necessary rule: No power or wealth shall exist within the United States but through a responsible person.

This is not the abolition of corporations or institutions; it is the abolition of unaccountable ones. The amendment simply insists that behind every action taken by any collective, machine, or organization stands an identifiable person or persons who answer for its use and its harms. They cannot be permitted to reap all the benefits of control, and yet bear none of the responsibilities and accountabilities.

Without this human anchor, the Republic would be governed indirectly by immortal abstractions that owe allegiance to nothing but perpetual growth. Liberty cannot survive under custodians who are immune to consequence.

Wealth and Authority Are Instruments of Human Choice, Not Self-Generated Forces

Wealth does not act of its own accord. Institutions do not dream, scheme, or abuse power without human intention. Even the most automated system begins as the product of a designer, a programmer, a manager, or a board that authorized its operation.

Yet modern jurisprudence, shaped by centuries of corporate lobbying, has allowed these structures to obscure their operators. Liability lands nowhere. Fault evaporates. Meanwhile, fortunes accumulate behind a veil, shielded from public duty or legal pursuit.

Preventing the Return of Feudalism

The essays that frame these amendments warn repeatedly of modern feudalism, of economic and civic landscapes ruled by feudal lords in all but name. They do not bleed, age, die, or stand for election. Their wealth preserves itself. Their influence multiplies without limit.

Such entities resemble the “estates” of old Europe: land-holding, privilege-holding, perpetually exempt from the obligations placed on ordinary people. When they shield individuals from responsibility, they create an aristocracy of controllers who enjoy the fruits of power without paying its moral or civic price.

By tying all wealth and authority to living stewards, Section 1 prevents this drift toward neo-feudal power. It ensures that every fortune, every decision, and every exertion of influence is traceable to a person who can be questioned, judged, constrained, or removed.

The Reaffirmation of Human Sovereignty

Republics are built on the premise that the people rule themselves. That promise fails the moment power becomes detached from persons. The Constitution must therefore reaffirm that only human beings can hold legal authority, not conglomerates, not foundations, not programmable systems, nor any artificial entity.

Binding Accountability

Artificial Entities Are Not Sovereigns, They Are Tools

For too long, American law has treated corporations as quasi-persons, granted rights, immunities, and protections without proportionate duties of control. But a corporation is not a citizen; it is a tool invented to coordinate human effort. It has no conscience to prick, no life to lose, no liberty to forfeit.

Without this section, sovereignty silently migrates into these structures. They accumulate wealth far beyond any individual, wield influence that outlives their creators, and take actions whose consequences fall on real communities while responsibility falls on no one at all.

A republic cannot tolerate command without commander, action without actor, or harm without a human to answer for it.

The Chain of Accountability Must Never Break

We therefore require that every artificial entity possess an identifiable person(s) who stands as the legal and moral anchor for everything the entity controls or does.

This is not a ceremonial title; it is a constitutional duty. The steward bears responsibility for:

• the use of the entity’s wealth,
• the consequences of its decisions,
• the obligations it creates,
• and the harms it inflicts.

In effect, the law says: If you build a machine powerful enough to shape society, you must stand beside that machine and answer for it.

Shared, Delegated, and Distributed Power Still Leads Back to People

Modern organizations disperse authority through boards, subsidiaries, trusts, automated systems, and layers of managerial abstraction. These structures often exist precisely so no one can be clearly identified as responsible.

Every artificial entity must name human controllers, whether one or many, whose duty is proportional to the control they exercise. If a board directs an entity, the board members are the responsible persons. If a single owner commands it, that owner is responsible. If control is split, responsibility is shared.

What matters is not title but effective power. Those individuals become the living stewards the law recognizes.

Ending the Era of Consequence-Free Harm

Without binding accountability, artificial entities become shields for wrongdoing:

• the chemical corporation whose pollution poisons a river,
• the investment firm whose reckless instruments crash a local economy,
• the platform whose algorithm amplifies extremism,
• the trust that hides wealth across generations to avoid taxes or public duty.

When these harms occur, the public is told the “entity” is at fault; An entity that cannot be jailed, cannot pay restitution beyond what its lawyers negotiate, and cannot learn moral lessons because it never possessed a moral faculty to begin with.

This section restores the ancient republican norm that duty adheres to the hand that wields power, not the instrument that extends it.

Preserving Enterprise Without Surrendering Accountability

Critics may fear that this provision endangers commerce or innovation. In truth, it merely returns enterprise to its natural equilibrium:

• risk and reward move together,
• power and responsibility move together,
• and harm cannot be outsourced to fictional persons.

Corporations may continue to exist, grow, innovate, and employ, but they do so as extensions of human beings, not as autonomous creatures above the reach of law.

The honest entrepreneur has nothing to fear; indeed, responsible business thrives when bad actors can no longer exploit legal fog to cheat, pollute, or evade consequences.

Unaccounted Wealth and Consequences

A Republic cannot govern what it cannot see, and it cannot assign responsibility where responsibility has been deliberately obscured. We deliver a constitutional remedy for this problem: any entity, estate, or structure that holds wealth or exercises authority without an accountable human steward forfeits the protection of law.

This is not a punishment. It is the natural consequence of existing outside the civic order. In the United States nothing enjoys the shield of the law without accepting its legal, civic, and social obligations.

The Peril of Ownerless Power

Wealth is not dangerous because it exists; it is dangerous when it acts without a responsible human behind it. Assets divorced from accountability become instruments of force, able to shape markets, distort communities, and manipulate public life without any person answerable for their consequences.

Orphaned trusts, shell corporations with missing principals, algorithmic funds executing decisions no one will publicly claim - these are little more than innovative evasions. They function as modern strongholds of unanswerable power, accumulating influence with none of the civic duties that make power legitimate.

The Republic cannot recognize such arrangements as lawful. If no one stands to answer for the wealth, then no one may demand the shield of the law on its behalf.

The State Is Not Required to Play Hide-and-Seek With Power

A common pathology of our era is the intentional fragmentation of responsibility. A corporation is owned by a trust, which is administered by a foundation, which delegates control to an LLC, which operates on an algorithm, which no one “fully understands,” and so no one is to blame when things go wrong.

This labyrinth serves one purpose: to make accountability impossible. If the law cannot identify a human steward, the structure loses its legal shelter. The government is not obligated to chase shadows, decode shell games, or indulge the fiction that a “board” exists when no one will publicly answer for its actions.

Power must be traceable. If it is not traceable, it is unlawful.

The Loss of Protection, Not the Taking of Property

Forfeiture under this amendment is not an act of government greed; it is the natural consequence of abandoning the duties that give wealth its legal standing. In the Republic, rights arise only within the civic framework that binds people to the law. An entity that offers no accountable steward removes itself from that framework.

When no human being will claim responsibility, the law cannot pretend an owner exists. The wealth stands unrepresented, unanswerable, and therefore unprotected. The Republic does not take such wealth, it recognizes that it has already been left without a lawful custodian.

Congress may, through due process, dissolve the structure or reassign the assets, ensuring that valid debts and obligations are paid before the remainder returns to public or legitimate private stewardship.

Preventing the Return of Shadow Economies

Every society that permits unaccountable wealth eventually becomes ruled by it. When financial structures are engineered to conceal who directs them, they become engines of unaccountable influence. They distort markets, dodge taxes, and shape public policy while shielding the individuals who profit. This is feudal power under corporate branding.

The Republic must not permit a class of operators who wield vast wealth from behind untraceable shells, donor-advised labyrinths, or algorithmic funds designed to obscure their own architects.

We must prevent the rise of such parallel economies. By making legitimacy dependent on identifiable human accountability, it ensures that no concentration of wealth may exist in a realm where responsibility cannot follow it.

Why Congress Must Possess Authority to Dissolve or Seize

Some critics may argue that granting Congress authority to seize or dissolve unaccountable entities is extreme. But the alternative is worse: a government unable to prevent structures designed explicitly to circumvent regulation, dodge liability, or store wealth in perpetuity beyond public duty.

This authority is not absolute; it is bound by due process. But it must exist, because without it, Congress becomes powerless against entities intentionally constructed to evade both transparency and accountability.

In the Republic, only people may possess rights. Structures that pretend to have rights without accepting human responsibility are parasites on the body politic.

Permanent, Public Ledger

The People’s Right to Inspect Their Government

A republic cannot function when its finances are hidden from the very citizens who fund it. Every dollar created, received, or spent by the United States expresses national will. That will cannot be trusted if the public cannot verify it. A permanent, auditable ledger transforms federal finance from rumor into fact, enabling every citizen to see how power moves through the state.

Modern Scale Requires Modern Transparency

The founders relied on annual reports and personal accountability because their government was small enough to oversee by paper and reputation. Today’s government commands resources vast enough to escape human memory. Only a continuous, searchable record can keep faith with a public whose institutions now operate at continental scale.

Auditability as a Constitutional Obligation

Transparency means nothing if the numbers cannot be verified. A public ledger must be auditable, traceable, checkable, and resistant to bureaucratic fog. Today, major institutions like the Pentagon openly admit they cannot audit themselves. Their systems are so fragmented and opaque that accountability is structurally impossible.

This is not a minor flaw; it is a constitutional failure. When an institution cannot prove where its money goes, it operates on trust rather than law.

A permanent public ledger fixes this by forcing every dollar through a format that is inherently auditable. Agencies lose the ability to hide behind complexity. Oversight becomes a matter of inspecting the record.

Accountability Through Visibility

Opacity breeds slush funds, shadow budgets, and discretionary spending that drifts into private enrichment. A unified ledger prevents this decay. It forces every action to leave a public footprint and ties decisions directly to the officers who authorized them, restoring the republican principle that no official acts without traceable responsibility.

Verification as a Civic Guardrail

A ledger without verification is just a story. Public auditability ensures that no official can ask the people to “trust” what cannot be proven. Independent interrogation of each entry strengthens public confidence and deters corruption at its root.

Transparency Simplifies Governance

Contrary to fearmongering, openness does not burden the government, it clarifies it. A single canonical source of truth eliminates redundant oversight, reduces misinterpretation, and allows Congress and the public to operate on shared facts rather than bureaucratic folklore.

A Citizen’s Right to Confirm Their Contribution

Every contributor to the Treasury deserves the ability to verify that their payment was received and recorded. This is not a luxury, it is a constitutional safeguard. Transparency protects the honest and exposes the fraudulent, fortifying the relationship between the people and the institutions they sustain.

No Disbursement Without Entry

Turning the Ledger Into Law

A ledger is meaningless if the government can act outside it. We must bind every federal financial action to the public record. If a transaction does not appear in the ledger, it is not lawful.

Ending the Era of Shadow Budgets

When expenditures occur off-book, authority dissolves into personal whim. Secret transfers, discretionary caches, and unidentified beneficiaries flourish in darkness. We must deny these conditions the force of law, ensuring that no financial act exists without public proof.

Naming the Officers Who Act

Government is not an abstraction; it is a series of decisions made by identifiable human beings. By requiring each entry to identify responsible officers, the ledger restores the essential republican principle that authority cannot hide behind institutional anonymity.

Revealing the Beneficiaries of Federal Power

Every expenditure enriches someone. If the public cannot see who receives federal money, oversight collapses and markets warp under secret influence. Section 2 ensures that every beneficiary, individual, contractor, corporation, or foreign power is visible.

Preventing Abuse Through Mandatory Recording

By tying legal force to ledger entry, unauthorized expenditures reveal themselves. They appear not as ambiguous mistakes but as clear violations of constitutional procedure. This clarity deters wrongdoing and empowers Congress to enforce fiscal discipline.

Transparency Despite Classification

Secrecy Cannot Become a Shield for Abuse

A republic may keep secrets, but it cannot permit secrecy to erase accountability. While Congress may classify the purpose of certain expenditures for national security, no classification may conceal the existence of a transaction, the amount spent, the parties who received it, or the officers who authorized it. If we are to trust a government, we must make shadow money impossible to create.

The Dangers of Hidden Beneficiaries

Too often, government officials and their cronies use classification to protect themselves. Hidden beneficiaries, undisclosed grants, and masked transfers create opportunities for favoritism, corruption, and quiet market manipulation. When the public cannot see who receives federal money, the line between public duty and private advantage collapses. We must ensure that every financial action taken on behalf of the government leaves a visible imprint on the public ledger.

Markets Cannot Function in the Dark

A civilian government of the people has no legitimate authority to obscure from the people who received their public funds. It is not the role of the United States to tilt markets or shelter selected interests by concealing federal payments. Transparency does not destabilize markets; undisclosed intervention does. The ledger is designed to eliminate this influence by making all beneficiaries individuals, corporations, foreign powers, or contractors publicly known.

Visibility of Officers Preserves Democratic Oversight

Accountability begins with visibility. By requiring that officers authorizing classified expenditures still be named, we ensure that responsibility cannot hide behind a pretext of national security or secrecy. The public need not know every mission or operation, but they must know who moved their money and to whom it was given.

Balanced Secrecy, Balanced Power

We must balance both national security and democratic oversight. It allows the government to protect sensitive purposes while preventing the abuse of secrecy for political, economic, or bureaucratic gain. The people must see the flow of their funds, track responsibility, and verify that classification is in service of the people, not just the powerful.

On Congress’s Duty to Build and Defend the Public Ledger

A Transparent System Requires Constitutional Stewardship

A public ledger must rely on law, structure, and permanence. Section 4 places this obligation squarely upon Congress, requiring it to construct the technical and legal foundations that give the ledger force, resilience, and trustworthiness. Without such a mandate, even the most principled systems decay under bureaucratic neglect or intentional sabotage.

Permanence Through Tamper-Evident Architecture

The ledger’s value lies in the certainty that its records cannot be quietly altered or erased. Congress must therefore commission and establish a system that is tamper-evident, cryptographically verifiable, and replicated across multiple independent custodians. A single database can be corrupted; a distributed, publicly mirrored record cannot be falsified without detection. Universities, civic institutions, media outlets, and watchdog organizations must be able to hold up their mirrors against the government’s own record, ensuring that divergence exposes misconduct instantly.

Authority to Append Must Be Lawfully Defined

Replication alone does not grant legitimacy. Every entry must derive its lawful standing from an authorized officer of the United States. Congress must therefore define who may append to the ledger, under what authority, and through what methods of verification. A financial action should carry legal effect only when authenticated by those who bear responsibility for it.

True Accessibility, Not Symbolic Openness

Congress must also safeguard the ledger’s accessibility. Because public inspection is paramount, this solution must include searchable interfaces, open data standards, and tools for independent audit. A ledger locked behind obscurity or technical barriers would betray its purpose. The people must be able to trace federal funds without requiring permission from the very institutions they seek to oversee. Transparency must be functional, not symbolic.

Preparing the Ledger for the Future

Congress must prepare the ledger for time. Technologies evolve, systems age, and the danger of obsolescence grows with every year. A permanent ledger must be one that can endure technological evolution without losing continuity or integrity. Congress must therefore legislate for migration, modernization, and protection from technological decay.

The ledger is the people’s means of verifying the government's fidelity to law. If Congress fails to defend its permanence, the door reopens to discretionary slush funds, hidden beneficiaries, off-book operations, shadow money, and the quiet drift back to feudalism and unaccountable power.

The Ledger as the Republic’s Institutional Memory

In fulfilling this duty, Congress preserves the Republic’s memory. A nation cannot govern itself if it cannot remember what it has done, who authorized it, and how public resources were carried through its institutions. The ledger is that memory, and responsibility for its life and integrity rests with the representatives of the people.

Goals of Taxation

Taxes are not a punishment for prosperity; they are the maintenance fee for civilization itself.

A legitimate system of taxation serves three essential purposes.

1. It upholds the social contract: Those who draw security, opportunity, and protection from the Republic return a portion of their means to sustain it.
2. It facilitates the operation of the commonwealth: Taxes fund the infrastructure, institutions, and services that no individual could provide alone but from which all benefit.
3. It preserves accountability: By requiring the declaration and contribution of wealth, taxation ensures that power remains visible to the law and proportionate to duty.

Taxation is a civic covenant, binding private fortune to public responsibility and transforms entrenched ownership into responsible stewardship. Wealth circulating through society gains value only because the Republic enforces contracts, protects property, and maintains the peace in which enterprise thrives. Taxes are the contribution each controller of wealth or power owes for the ongoing preservation of that order.

Failure of Current Tax Strategies

The American tax system no longer fulfills its civic purpose. In principle, taxes should reflect participation in the social contract, those who draw the most benefit from it should return the most to sustain it.

The income tax, once a progressive equalizer, has become a sieve. Wages are taxed immediately and visibly, while capital gains, stock options, and deferred earnings slip through gaps deliberately carved into the code. The richest Americans rarely “earn” in the legal sense, while ordinary labor is harvested in full. A system that punishes labor and spares ownership is doomed to result in feudalism.

Payroll taxes, originally a shared contribution to social insurance, have evolved into one of the most regressive burdens in the Republic. They fall hardest on those least able to escape them while exempting investment income and much of the wealth in need of protection. The result is a moral inversion where the poorest pay for the stability that shelters the rich.

Consumption taxes are paid not according to what one controls, but what one spends to live. They draw a disproportionate share from those whose income is consumed by necessity, not luxury. As states turn increasingly to consumption taxes to fund themselves, the system migrates from civic contribution to a serf’s tithe by extracting from daily life while leaving the capital rich untouched.

The estate tax, intended to prevent dynastic accumulation, has been eroded almost to irrelevance. Through trusts, foundations, valuation games, and step-up loopholes, fortunes now pass across generations virtually intact. This results in an oligarchy of perpetual ownership masquerading as entrepreneurship.

The corporate tax, originally a means of ensuring that collective enterprises paid their share for the protections they enjoy, has become voluntary in all but name. Global accounting tricks, shell jurisdictions, and tax credits transform liability into reward. Multinational corporations now wield the leverage of nations, playing governments against each other while contributing less, in proportion, than the citizens whose infrastructure sustains their profit.

Capital gains taxes have inverted civic logic entirely. By taxing passive gains at lower rates than active labor, it enshrines ownership as superior to effort. The investor pays less than the worker who builds his returns. This is a perverse incentive that shifts national wealth from production to speculation.

These failures have restored the essence of feudalism: a ruling authority whose power derives not from what they add to society, but from their ability to extract, entrench, and preserve wealth beyond accountability. Further proof of our decline, even the barons of the first Gilded Age returned a fraction of their plunder to the public by building libraries, universities, and culture centers. Today’s oligarchs return nothing.

The Reset

Feudalism is not a relic; it is a natural disease of unchecked greed. A constitutional wealth tax is the Republic’s immune system, an automatic correction that keeps fortune circulating, influence accountable, and liberty from decaying into lordship.

To cure feudalism, the remedy must match the disease. Incremental reform will not suffice when the structure itself breeds inequality. The only path forward is a constitutional reset: the repeal of all existing federal taxes and the creation of a single wealth tax tied directly to control and accountability. Every fortune must bear a visible share of the cost of civilization. Every concentration of power must feed the system that sustains it. Only then can liberty and equality be more than alternating illusions in the cycle of human greed.

The Wealth Test

Wealth, as defined here, is not limited to money or property. It is any controlled asset that can be exchanged, assessed, and separated from its controller. Only when all three conditions are met does an asset qualify as wealth for the purposes of law and taxation. Together, these tests distinguish the instruments of power from the elements of personhood, establishing a clear framework for determining what may rightly be taxed.

1. The Exchange Test - Can it be traded or pledged?

An asset qualifies as wealth if it can be exchanged, sold, or pledged within a lawful market.

Exchangeability is the mark of social power: anything that can command labor, goods, or influence belongs within the sphere of wealth.

Passes the Exchange Test:

• Money, stocks, bonds, real estate, business ownership, tradeable debt, and other securities. These are assets that circulate through markets, can be pledged as collateral, and can compel the effort of others.

Fails the Exchange Test:

• Non-transferable legal rights such as voting rights or government benefits.
• Non-fungible personal privileges like security clearances or memberships. Internal organizational power like job titles or authorities.
• Personal promises or unverified claims like a handshake agreement or informal debts.
• Assets with no legal market may have black-market value but fail the lawful market condition of the test.

2. The Assessment Test - Can it be valued?

An asset qualifies as wealth if its value can be reasonably valued or compared.

Some assets cannot be reasonably valued, but anything that can be exchanged, pledged, or leveraged already possesses measurable value by definition. Markets, contracts, and collateral all depend on assessment; therefore, what can move through them can also be measured by them.

Passes the Assessment Test:

• Cash, securities, property, intellectual property, business equity, and enforceable debts all can be appraised or priced by established methods.

Fails the Assessment Test:

• Sentimental possessions like family heirlooms kept for love, while personally precious, are of an indeterminate value; but if leveraged or pledged they would become reasonably valued.
• Unverified claims or speculative hopes like rumors, pending deals, or unfounded claims by nature lack a reasonable valuation.
• Non-commercial social value such as personal trust or community standing are meaningful and valued but not measurable in a market setting.

3. The Separation Test - Can it be detached from its holder without destroying its nature?

An asset qualifies as wealth if it can be transferred, inherited, or alienated without loss of its essential identity. Separability ensures that what the law taxes is property, not personhood.

Passes the Separation Test:

• Land, shares, patents, contracts, and transferable licenses each can change hands while retaining value and identity.
• Digital assets and financial claims persist independently of the holder and can be reassigned or inherited.
• Art, machinery, vehicles, or tools of trade where their function remains after transfer; they are property, not person.

Fails the Separation Test:

• Labor, skill, health, or experience where their value ends when detached from the person; to trade them outright would be servitude.
• Reputation, influence, or personal trust are inseparable from the identity that creates them; they dissolve when transferred.
• Citizenship, rights, or personhood are the foundations of human status in law; to treat them as separable would be slavery by another name.

How the Test Protects the Republic

This definition of wealth exists to draw a clear boundary between what is taxable and what is not. It provides a consistent framework for recognizing wealth and power. The purpose is not merely to count value, but to highlight and deter the avenues by which the powerful will conceal it. As new instruments of ownership, exchange, or evasion arise, these criteria will allow the social contract to adapt to these changes without surrendering its principle.

Duty of Control

When accounting for taxable responsibility, the duration of control must be considered. A person who controls wealth for one day bears responsibility for that day’s duty. When control transfers, the duty transfers with it. In this way, taxation mirrors power in motion following the line of actual command through time. To seize control over wealth is to seize the duty of control.

Wealth unbound to any accountable person or government stands outside taxable responsibility. When no lawful controller can be identified, such wealth may be seized through due process and returned to public or private stewardship, with all valid claims and obligations first satisfied. No fortune shall persist in the Republic without a responsible hand to answer for its use.

1. Direct Control

When a person or entity holds direct command over wealth, responsibility rests solely with that controller.

Examples:

• Individual Ownership: A person managing their own bank accounts, real estate, or investments.
• Private Enterprise: A business owner exercising operational control and discretion over company assets.

In all such cases, the controlling party bears tax liability for the full duration of their control.

2. Delegated Control

When control is granted temporarily or conditionally to another party, both the holder and the grantor share responsibility in proportion to the authority they retain.

Examples:

• Financial Advisors: Trading within limits set by a client, the client remains the ultimate controller.
• Property Managers: Acting under the direction of an owner, the owner remains liable.
• Custodians or Fiduciaries: Operating under strict mandate, the benefactor who may revoke that mandate holds final responsibility.

Delegated control does not transfer duty unless accompanied by independent authority to dispose of, pledge, or retain the asset because the power to reclaim control is itself a superior control.

3. Revocable Control

When one party’s control exists only by the permission of another, meaning it can be withdrawn or overridden, the superior power bears the responsibility.

Examples:

• Parent and Child Accounts: If a parent can freeze or seize the account, the parent bears the duty of control.
• Corporate Subsidiaries: A parent company that can overrule or dissolve a subsidiary holds ultimate liability for its wealth and actions.
• Governmental Oversight: If a higher authority may redirect or dissolve an agency’s funds, that higher authority holds the duty of control.

Control that can be revoked is not autonomous control. Responsibility rests with the power that may unmake it.

4. Indirect or Shared Control

When control is distributed among multiple parties, each bears responsibility proportional to their effective authority.

Examples:

• Partnerships and Joint Ventures: Each partner’s liability reflects their ability to act on behalf of the enterprise.
• Corporate Boards: Collective decisions create shared accountability; individual members remain liable within the scope of their authority.
• Marital or Co-Ownership Arrangements: Each controller is proportionally accountable for the duration of shared control.

Shared control divides the duty of control but does not dilute it. Each participant remains responsible for the share of control they retain.

5. Conditional or Deferred Control

When an asset exists but remains outside a person’s active reach, held in escrow, pending inheritance, or awaiting vesting it is not yet their wealth, and the duty of control remains with the originator or current controller.

Examples:

• Non-Vested Pensions or Stock Grants: Duty of control does not transfer until irrevocable control or access is granted.
• Future Inheritance: Until control passes from the estate, responsibility rests with the executor or administrator.
• Funds in Escrow: Taxable to the party who can release or redirect them.

Taxation begins at the moment effective control is obtained and ends when that control ceases.

6. Automated or Institutional Control

Automation and bureaucracy may extend human power, but they cannot replace human duty. No person may defer the duty of control to a machine, algorithm, or institution lacking accountability.

Examples:

• Algorithmic Trading Funds: The individuals or boards who create, direct, or authorize the system remain its controllers.
• AI-Managed Enterprises: Liability follows those empowered to initiate, halt, or modify the system’s actions.
• Foundations and Non-Profits: Responsibility rests with trustees or directors, not with missions, charters, or software abstractions.

No automation, code, or collective process may shield a person from their duty of control. Wealth without accountable human oversight remains subject to seizure or dissolution.

7. Vacant or Disputed Control

Wealth unbound to any accountable person or government stands outside taxable responsibility and the protection of ownership. When no lawful controller can be identified, or when control is contested, such wealth shall be held in abeyance until rightful authority is established.

Examples:

• Abandoned Accounts or Unclaimed Holdings: Temporarily held by the state in trust until control is verified. A claimant seeking to assume control must first satisfy all unpaid taxes, liens, and lawful obligations attached to the wealth.
• Disputed Inheritance or Corporate Receivership: Taxation and authority deferred until lawful judgment determines rightful control and settles all unpaid obligations.

Unclaimed wealth may, after due process, be seized and returned to public or lawful private stewardship, ensuring that no fortune within the Republic persists without a responsible hand to answer for its use.

8. Mutually Revocable Control

When two or more parties each possess the power to revoke or restrict the other’s control, they are jointly and severally responsible for the wealth during that period. Because each holds the power to act or to veto, both exercise effective control.

Examples:

• Joint Bank or Investment Accounts: Either holder may withdraw or close the account; both share equal responsibility.
• Business Partnerships or Dual-Trust Arrangements: Each partner or trustee can dissolve or redirect the enterprise; both bear the duty of control.
• Co-Guardian or Co-Parent Accounts: Each may consent to or revoke actions; both are responsible for the asset’s integrity.

Mutually revocable control creates overlapping power and equal duty. Neither party may disclaim responsibility by pointing to the other.

These examples illustrate common forms of control as they exist in the twenty-first century, but they are not exhaustive. As new instruments of wealth, automation, or authority emerge, this framework shall remain the guide: those who hold control bear the duty to finance and uphold the social contract that sustains the Republic.

Power and duty must always travel together, and the right to command shall never be separated from the duty to contribute.

Why a Public Ledger

A wealth tax cannot function without truth, and truth requires records. The Republic must know what wealth exists, who controls it, and when that control changes hands. Without a universal record, enforcement becomes arbitrary and corruption inevitable.

Potential Technologies

Modern technology offers the means to achieve this transparency. Protocols akin to the AT Protocol or blockchain architectures provide distributed methods for broadcasting, verifying, and preserving information without reliance on a single intermediary.

Each declaration of wealth or transfer of control can be published to a shared network where cryptographic signatures confirm authenticity and public replication guarantees permanence. Every entity and every asset under their control would carry a unique 128‑ or 256‑bit UUID, a permanent digital fingerprint that persists as control changes. This identifier forms the spine of accountability, tracing every lawful owner back through time. These technologies provide what the Constitution requires: a system that is publicly auditable, tamper‑evident, and universally accessible.

Source of Truth

Although verification may be distributed, legitimacy cannot. Only a recognized public authority, be it an institution or notary public, can grant lawful standing to an entry in the civic record. The government’s ledger is the canonical source of truth, the version that carries legal force in court and taxation alike.

External mirrors, universities, watchdogs, civic groups, and private auditors maintain synchronized copies to keep the government honest. Any attempt to alter or erase the record would be easily detectable through divergence of these parallel ledgers.

Incentives and Maintenance

To sustain the system, every action upon the ledger must carry both a cost and a reward. Writing to the ledger, such as declaring control, transfer, or valuation would pay a nominal transaction fee in the form of a token or stablecoin, small enough to encourage compliance yet sufficient to deter frivolous entries.

Those who maintain and validate the distributed record earn a portion of that same fee as civic compensation. This creates a self‑balancing ecosystem where the revenue from writing to the ledger is distributed to those who keep and maintain the ledger.

Unlike speculative cryptocurrencies, this civic token has one purpose: it makes the maintenance of public truth a profitable enterprise, aligning economic interest with civic duty.

Full Process

1. Declaration: A person or entity declares control or transfer of an asset, submitting its UUID, valuation, and controlling parties.
2. Authentication: The declaration is digitally signed and broadcast to the network using an open protocol, such as AT‑style federation or blockchain propagation.
3. Verification: Independent nodes validate the entry, checking cryptographic proofs and confirming the transaction’s conformity to law.
4. Recording: Once verified, the transaction is permanently appended to the federal master ledger, which assigns it a timestamp and public record number.
5. Replication: Confirmation of each transaction is broadcast through the same public protocol, allowing any listener to receive, store, and verify the record in real time.
6. Visibility: The record becomes searchable and inspectable by any citizen, allowing auditors, journalists, and institutions to follow the chain of ownership from origin to present.

In this sequence, every movement of wealth leaves a footprint visible to all, binding power to accountability through technology rather than secrecy.

How to Build It

The Republic should not entrust such a system to any single contractor or corporation. Congress should issue a public bounty or competitive bake‑off inviting the brightest of the technology sector, academia, and civic institutions to design an open‑source architecture that satisfies these constitutional aims.

The winning design would be entrusted to either a new or existing department (such as the IRS) charged with maintaining the canonical ledger and regulating participation.

Taxation and Enforcement

Taxation Must Reflect the True Cost of Governance

The federal government must raise what it spends; therefore we tie total taxation directly to the expenditures Congress authorizes, ensuring that public burdens match public decisions. This simple rule ends the era of magical budgeting, hidden deficits, and the quiet transfer of today’s obligations onto tomorrow’s citizens.

Every appropriation carries a visible cost, and the public can judge their representatives accordingly. The Republic regains fiscal transparency as a constitutional principle.

Liability Follows Control

Taxation under this amendment is not based on income, transactions, or arbitrary classifications. It follows the constitutional logic established earlier: those who control wealth bear the proportional responsibility for the public share of supporting the Republic.

A person who controls more wealth contributes more; a person who controls less contributes less. And because wealth can pass from one hand to another, liability is measured proportionally across time. Control for a single day carries a single day’s duty. Control for a year carries a year’s duty.

This ensures that taxation tracks the real movement of power through society. It is not a punishment for prosperity nor a burden on poverty; it is an allocation of civic responsibility proportional to actual control of the wealth in society.

The Public Ledger Makes Taxation Verifiable

The public ledger provides the factual basis for taxation under this amendment. Every transfer, valuation, and shift of control is time-stamped and recorded. This record eliminates disputes about ownership, prevents the concealment of wealth, and allows assessments to be derived from public, inspectable data rather than opaque filings or self-reported claims.

The Republic no longer relies on trust in private declarations. It relies on a shared, verifiable record of who controlled what, and for how long. This is the end of loopholes, shell structures, and accounting games designed to obscure wealth from public duty.

Enforcement Is Not Arbitrary

No system of taxation is meaningful without enforcement grounded in due process. We authorize the seizure of wealth equal to the unpaid tax, plus poundage necessary to cover costs of recovery and enforcement. This is not punitive; it is restorative.

A person who fails to satisfy lawful taxes has withheld their share of maintaining the Republic. They have transferred their burden onto those who met their obligations. Seizure corrects that injustice by reclaiming what is owed and preventing evasion from becoming a competitive advantage.

With a public ledger, evasion is no longer a matter of clever structuring but a matter of deliberate non-payment. Enforcement becomes precise, justified, and transparent.

Citizen Enforcement Incentives

A proportional tax system works best when the public has a stake in defending it. This section allows Congress to set poundage, or the additional cost assessed when unpaid taxes require seizure, and to direct a portion of that poundage as bounties for watchdogs who expose concealed wealth or evasion.

These organizations already uncover fraud, hidden assets, and shell structures. Under this amendment, their vigilance becomes part of the enforcement mechanism. If they bring unlawful concealment to light, a share of the recovered poundage may reward their contribution.

Public enforcement closes the oldest loophole in government: the belief that proximity to power can buy immunity. Even if an individual enjoys political allies or friendly administrators, the ledger remains open to everyone. Watchdogs, journalists, civic groups, and ordinary citizens can scrutinize the same public record and act when officials refuse to.

This means no administration can quietly protect its friends or punish its enemies through selective enforcement. The public’s ability to expose evasion ensures that accountability does not depend on who holds office. In this system evasion is never safe because the nation is always vigilant.

Wealth Exists Because the Republic Exists

No one becomes wealthy alone. Every dollar made, every enterprise built, every fortune accumulated rests on a foundation the individual did not create: the rule of law, the stability of markets, the safety of streets, the enforceability of contracts, the reliability of infrastructure, and the trust of a currency backed by the full faith of the Republic.

Wealth is the product of talent and ambition combined with the social contract that makes prosperity possible in the first place. And that social contract has a cost to maintain.

Those who draw the greatest benefit from the protections and prosperity of the Republic have a duty to contribute proportionally to its upkeep. This is not punishment; it is reciprocity. It is the price of doing business inside a civilization sturdy enough to let success flourish.

Taxation Becomes a Civic Mechanism, Not a Political Weapon

By tying total tax intake to federal expenditures and linking individual liability directly to control of wealth, we remove taxation from partisan manipulation and the purchasing of votes. No administration may arbitrarily tighten or loosen the tax burden to reward allies or punish opponents. The formula is constitutional, not political.

This creates a system where taxation is predictable, fair, and immune to ideological swings via a financial architecture worthy of a free and self-governing people.

The Limited and Legitimate Purposes of Public Borrowing

Even under a system of proportional taxation, the Republic must preserve a disciplined role for borrowing through the sale of treasury bonds. Debt is not inherently corrosive; it becomes dangerous only when used to evade responsibility or conceal the true cost of governance or the purchasing of influence in the electorate. Within a transparent, ledger-bound framework, borrowing serves three legitimate and necessary purposes.

• First, to respond to emergencies. National crises such as wars, pandemics, natural disasters, and infrastructure failures often require immediate expenditure before taxes can be adjusted. Borrowing allows the Republic to act at once, protecting lives and stabilizing the nation while proportional contributions catch up.
• Second, to seize high-return opportunities for the public good. Some investments produce civic wealth far greater than their cost: critical infrastructure, energy grids, transportation networks, research initiatives, strategic land acquisition, and modernization projects that strengthen national capacity. Borrowing to fund these opportunities is justified when the long-term gain to the Republic exceeds the total borrowing cost.
• Third, to smooth the fiscal cycle without printing money. The flow of tax collection and the timing of federal obligations seldom align perfectly. Borrowing bridges these intervals, allowing the government to meet its commitments without creating new currency or disrupting economic stability. This keeps the Republic functional without resorting to inflationary shortcuts.

These purposes define the legitimate boundary of public debt. Borrowing must never become a political indulgence, a subsidy for the wealthy, or a mechanism for hiding spending from the people. Used properly, it becomes a tool that preserves stability, strengthens national resilience, and ensures the Republic can meet its obligations without distorting its values.

Authority of Congress

Enforcement Turns Principle Into Function

The wealth tax system created by this amendment is a constitutional mechanism that requires careful administration. We are granting Congress the authority to translate the article’s principles into operational law. Congress is therefore empowered to facilitate the construction and maintenance of the systems that make accountability possible.

Valuation: Establishing a Common Measure of Wealth

To tax wealth proportionally, the Republic must define how it is valued. Congress must establish standardized methods for appraising assets across financial, real, digital, intellectual, and emergent forms of wealth not yet conceived. These valuations must not be arbitrary or politicized; they must be transparent, consistent, and auditable.

By legislating valuation rules, Congress ensures that every taxpayer stands under the same measuring stick, eliminating the games of selective appraisal that have long allowed wealth to shrink or expand on paper at convenience.

Qualifying Events: When Duty Attaches and When It Ends

Wealth is not static. It is gained, transferred, diminished, and inherited. Congress must identify the “qualifying events” that trigger reporting responsibilities and tax liability such as acquisition, divestment, transfer of control, vesting, inheritance, dissolution, forfeiture, and other transitions recorded in the public ledger.

This prevents ambiguity and shuts down evasive timing strategies. Duty begins when control begins. Duty ends when control ends. Congress defines the moments that matter.

Assessment of Control: Identifying Who Truly Holds Power

Control is the foundation of tax duty under this amendment. Congress must therefore legislate clear rules for determining who actually commands an asset, especially in modern arrangements designed to obscure accountability.

Effective control may be exercised directly or indirectly, through subsidiaries, algorithms, trustees, or contractual instruments. But the core principle remains constant: the person with the superior power to override, revoke, or seize control holds the true duty of control.

This includes the most decisive form of authority, the ability to take or reclaim control from another. A subordinate party may appear to manage an asset, but if a superior party can seize it at will, the superior party is the real controller.

Example: If a parent company can dissolve a subsidiary, freeze its accounts, remove its leadership, or absorb its holdings, then the parent is the true controller for tax purposes. The power to seize control overrides all delegated or operational authority, and therefore shifts the duty of control and its tax obligations upward to the superior hand.

This principle must be reiterated throughout the enforcement architecture: the highest controllable point of authority bears responsibility for the wealth. No structure of indirection, delegation, or automation can relocate duty away from the person who ultimately commands the power to take control.

Disclosure and Audit: The Architecture of Honesty

A public ledger only works when entries are complete and verifiable. Congress must legislate disclosure requirements and audit procedures to ensure that every controller of wealth reports accurately and that those reports can be independently confirmed.

Audits must be structural, not discretionary. Disclosure must be mandatory, not voluntary. Congress ensures that the Republic does not repeat the failures of institutions that “cannot audit themselves,” but instead operates on truth that anyone can inspect.

Penalties: The Consequence That Makes Duty Real

A system of accountability is meaningless without enforcement. Congress is empowered to define penalties for concealment, misreporting, evasion, fraudulent valuation, and any attempt to obstruct the ledger. These penalties must be strong enough to eliminate the financial advantage of cheating and to ensure that evasion never becomes a profitable option.

Where taxes go unpaid, seizure plus poundage restores what was taken from the public and reimburses the cost of enforcement. Where concealment is deliberate, penalties ensure accountability cannot be sidestepped by clever paperwork or algorithmic camouflage.

Adaptability for an Evolving Economy

Wealth evolves. Markets transform. New instruments, digital assets, AI-managed enterprises, and novel forms of ownership will emerge. We must grant Congress the authority to adapt legislation to these innovations without requiring a constitutional rewrite.