Strength Without Fragility: Rethinking National Security in an Age of Concentrated Growth

Ya'll, this isn't socialism.

I recently read a post by historian Heather Cox Richardson that brought into sharp relief a turning point we have still not fully reckoned with. Beginning in the 1980s, Americans were told that the post–World War II government which regulated business, invested in infrastructure, supported a basic social safety net, protected civil rights, and helped stabilize the international order had crossed a line into “socialism.” Regulation was reframed as inefficiency, public investment was cast as waste, and social provision was portrayed as a moral hazard. If these constraints were removed, we were told, growth would accelerate and prosperity would follow.

The result of this experiment over the last 40+ years is stunning. Richardson pointed to a February 2025 report from the RAND Corporation by Carter H Price that found that if the income distribution patterns in place prior to 1975 had remained intact, the bottom 90 percent of Americans would have earned nearly $80 trillion more by 2023 than they actually did. This figure represents decades of economic growth that failed to translate into broader gains, despite Americans working more hours. The scale of what was lost matters because it translates directly into diminished resilience for American families. Spread across today’s population, that amounts to roughly $265,000 per person, or more than $20,000 a year for a family of four, over that span. That figure represents a margin that allows households to absorb shocks, build emergency savings, invest in education, accumulate home equity, and retire with security. Over time, the economy may have continued to grow, but the society underneath became less resilient. This finding stopped me short—I knew wealth inequity and inequality was stark, but I hadn’t seen what Price called the counterfactual–the what if things were different–before. And the report itself didn’t go into the reasons for the figure, so I set out to explore that aspect, and I wanted to put in terms of our expanded lens of national security.

Growth without participation produces fragility

National security is often discussed in terms of military strength, intelligence capability, or geopolitical competition. But at its core, security is about whether a society can withstand shocks, adapt to change, and maintain legitimacy in the eyes of its people. In other words–how we all survive and thrive myriad threats. Economic structure (not just growth) matters deeply to all three.

As we have witnessed, growth has become concentrated in fewer hands, causing households to bear more risk. As households have borne more risk, US families’ resilience has declined. Workers have lost protections, lost out on wage growth, and experienced loss of job opportunities, resulting in the erosion of trust in institutions. As that trust eroded, political participation and state capacity has suffered. These are the downstream effects of structural choices. The RAND findings help put these effects into context. They show that the U.S. economy continued to generate growth after the mid-1970s, but that the mechanisms translating productivity gains into income for most people weakened. The result was an economy capable of producing wealth, but less capable of producing economic security for its people. As we have explored in previous articles, national security is about people in a nation and protecting them so that they can survive and thrive. Economic insecurity among people weakens national security.

What changed after the mid-1970s

For roughly three decades after World War II, income growth tracked productivity growth across much of the distribution. As the economy grew, most workers benefited. This was intentional and reflected a set of institutions and rules such as labor protections, antitrust enforcement, financial regulation, public investment, and a tax system that funded state capacity that shaped how growth was distributed. Beginning in the mid-1970s, that relationship changed. Productivity continued to rise, but income growth for the bottom 90% no longer followed. Instead, as Price and Edwards found in 2020 and later in 2025, a growing share of gains accrued to the top, particularly the top one percent, across every subsequent business cycle.

This shift is often described as “deregulation,” but that framing misses the deeper change. Policy increasingly prioritized efficiency, capital mobility, and firm-level performance, while distribution of earnings was treated as secondary and largely outside the remit of market governance. At the same time, the tools that once corrected distributional drift, specifically tax enforcement, labor standards enforcement, and public investment were weakened. With those changes, growth continued, but participation in that growth by workers did not, and that led to such stark inequity and inequality that we see and feel today.

Healthcare and the quiet suppression of mobility

Beginning in the late 1970s, as U.S. economic policy stopped actively shaping markets toward broad participation, wealth and power became increasingly concentrated. The income share of the top 1 percent more than doubled between 1979 and the late 2010s, while wage growth for typical workers largely decoupled from productivity growth. As corporate consolidation increased and labor protections weakened, changing jobs became riskier and more costly for workers—particularly in a system where healthcare, retirement security, and income stability remained tied to employment. Empirical research shows that job-to-job mobility declined substantially after the 1980s, even as the economy grew, reducing one of the primary mechanisms through which workers historically increased wages and firms were disciplined by the ability to exit. As mobility declined, worker bargaining power eroded, contributing to flatter wage growth and a declining labor share of income. These same dynamics appeared in product markets, where rising concentration across industries reduced competitive pressure and increased returns to incumbents. Over time, the concentration of economic power translated into greater political influence through lobbying and regulatory capture, reinforcing the conditions that produced inequality in the first place.

One of the clearest structural contributors to economic fragility in the United States is the continued reliance on employer-sponsored health insurance. This system expanded rapidly during and after World War II, when long-term employment and firm stability were the norm, and by the 1970s it covered the majority of working-age Americans with private insurance. As the labor market shifted toward shorter job tenures, higher geographic mobility, and more frequent transitions, that same structure became a constraint. Research has consistently shown that workers with employer-based coverage are less likely to change jobs, start businesses, or relocate, a phenomenon economists have termed “job lock.” Over time, declining job-to-job mobility has been documented across the U.S. economy, even during periods of expansion, weakening one of the primary mechanisms through which workers historically increased wages and firms were disciplined by exit. Although the Affordable Care Act reduced this effect by expanding access to non-employer coverage, resulting gains in mobility and self-employment were limited by the continued dominance of employer-based insurance. The result is a labor market that reallocates talent more slowly, dampening productivity growth and innovation over time.

In the United States, tying healthcare to employment has had measurable effects on bargaining power in labor markets. Research shows that workers who depend on employer-sponsored insurance are less likely to leave their jobs, even when better matches or higher wages are available, because doing so entails significant risk to healthcare access. As a result, employers gain leverage that is unrelated to productivity or firm performance. As this leverage increases, wage pressure weakens and firms face less incentive to raise pay or invest in worker retention and training. Empirical evidence indicates that declining job-to-job mobility has been associated with reduced wage growth and a falling labor share of income, even during periods of economic expansion. These labor-market effects are reinforced by rising corporate concentration and political influence. Large firms, which benefit disproportionately from lower turnover and stabilized labor costs, are also more likely to engage in lobbying and policy advocacy that preserves existing institutional arrangements, including those that limit worker mobility. Over time, this interaction between reduced exit options and concentrated political influence narrows the range of feasible policy reforms.

The pattern repeating in technology

I have watched these same dynamics re-emerge in real time in how the United States now talks about technology, particularly around artificial intelligence. Technological leadership is framed as a geopolitical imperative in which speed and scale are paramount, while governance is treated as friction to be deferred. In practice, this framing has coincided with rapid concentration across the AI stack: model development, compute, cloud infrastructure, and the hyperscale data centers that underpin them. These facilities require enormous capital outlays and benefit from network effects that naturally favor incumbents, reinforcing market power rather than broad participation. At the same time, the physical footprint of AI infrastructure has grown increasingly visible. Hyperscale data centers place substantial demands on electricity and water resources, often concentrating environmental and infrastructure costs locally while economic returns accrue elsewhere. In many regions, communities are asked to trade water security, grid stability, and land use for promises of growth that are diffuse and difficult to capture. Innovation continues, but ownership, control over critical infrastructure, and agenda-setting power narrow as governance lags deployment. Over time, this pattern erodes public trust and institutional legitimacy, weakening the social, economic, and infrastructural resilience that technological leadership is meant to secure.

Governance, markets, and the misuse of “socialism”

At this point, it is worth pausing on a charge that inevitably arises whenever questions of governance, power, and distribution are raised: that any effort to shape markets toward broader participation represents a slide toward socialism. This framing collapses distinct concepts and obscures what is actually at stake. Socialism, in its classical sense, refers to state ownership of the means of production. What is under discussion here is something different and far more familiar: how a market economy is governed, and whether its rules sustain competition, mobility, and legitimacy over time.

Every market operates within a framework of laws, institutions, and enforcement. Those rules determine who bears risk, who captures returns, and how easily power can concentrate. The postwar U.S. economy—often invoked as a period of exceptional growth and global leadership—was characterized by private ownership, vibrant entrepreneurship, and robust competition, alongside far stronger labor protections, antitrust enforcement, financial regulation, and public investment than exist today. Few would argue that system lacked markets. What distinguished it was not the absence of capitalism, but the presence of governance designed to keep capitalism broadly participatory and politically sustainable.

The question, then, is not whether markets should exist, but whether they should be allowed to harden into systems where exit is costly, competition is limited, and economic power reliably translates into political influence. History suggests that such systems are neither especially innovative nor especially stable. Governing markets to preserve mobility, contestability, and institutional capacity is not an effort to replace private enterprise, but to ensure that it remains dynamic rather than extractive—and that the social foundations on which it depends remain intact.

Policy Recommendations: Building Participation into the Structure of Growth

The lesson of the past half-century is not that economic growth is undesirable, but that its structure determines whether it produces resilience or fragility. Choosing a path forward begins with a practical premise: national strength depends on broad participation, and participation depends on rules that make it possible. The recommendations below focus on institutional design choices that directly shape mobility, competition, and state capacity. These are ideas that voters might consider looking for in their candidates, instead of fear and divisiveness.

1. Make healthcare portable to restore labor mobility and competition

When access to healthcare is tied to employment, workers face real risks in changing jobs, relocating, or starting businesses. Here in the United States, this risk is amplified when non-employer coverage is unstable or unaffordable, pushing workers back toward job-based insurance even when better economic matches exist (amplified by the lapse of ACA subsidies).

Policy should therefore:

• Stabilize and extend non-employer-based health coverage, including making enhanced ACA premium subsidies permanent, so coverage remains affordable and predictable rather than subject to political lapses.

• Reduce administrative and financial penalties associated with job transitions, including coverage gaps, plan churn, and sudden premium increases.

• Enable individuals and small firms to access large, stable risk pools comparable to those available to large employers, reducing dependence on employer-sponsored insurance as the default.

2. Treat childcare as core economic infrastructure

We didn’t address this issue in this article, but we have in aa previous one and it is important to consider here. Childcare is often discussed as a family issue or a social benefit. In practice, it is a binding constraint on labor-force participation, mobility, and productivity—particularly for women, caregivers, and mid-career workers.

Policy should therefore:

• Expand access to affordable, high-quality childcare as a prerequisite for full labor-market participation.

• Treat childcare supply as infrastructure, with sustained public investment rather than short-term subsidies.

• Reduce geographic disparities in childcare availability that limit relocation and job matching.

3. Ensure public investment generates public returns

Public funds routinely support infrastructure, research, and industrial capacity through tax incentives, subsidies, preferential energy rates, land use decisions, and public-sector procurement. Yet in many cases, the economic returns from these investments accrue narrowly, while costs like infrastructure strain, environmental impact, and long-term resource commitments are borne locally.

Policy should therefore:

• Attach mechanisms to capture public returns when public resources are deployed, including revenue sharing, reinvestment requirements, or equity-like instruments tied to long-term performance.

• Condition public support on measurable local and regional benefits, such as workforce development, supplier participation, and sustained community investment.

• Account explicitly for resource use and infrastructure strain—including electricity, water, and land—so that communities are not asked to subsidize growth that weakens their long-term resilience.

• Design investments to leave behind durable capabilities, not just short-term growth or footloose infrastructure that can relocate once incentives expire.

4. Broaden ownership to align growth with legitimacy

Economic systems are more stable when more people have a stake in their success.

Policy should therefore:

• Expand employee ownership and shared-equity models where appropriate.

• Support asset-building through wages, retirement systems, housing, and savings mechanisms.

• Reduce structural barriers that prevent households from accumulating assets over time.

5. Treat the tax code as security infrastructure

The tax system is often treated as a narrow fiscal instrument. In reality, it is one of the primary ways a society sustains the institutions that make resilience possible.

Policy should therefore:

• Restore tax enforcement where it matters most, particularly for complex, high-income, and multinational activity, where noncompliance is concentrated and enforcement yields the greatest public return.

• Close corporate and high-income loopholes that reward extraction over productive investment, including mechanisms that allow income to be reclassified, profits to be shifted offshore, or depreciation to outpace real economic value.

• Simplify the tax experience for most people, including pre-filled returns, clearer credits, and fewer phase-outs that create confusion and hidden marginal tax cliffs.

• Reduce volatility and surprise in household tax burdens, so families can plan, save, and absorb shocks without fear of sudden penalties or clawbacks.

• Align tax benefits with work, caregiving, and asset-building, recognizing that unpaid labor, child-rearing, and long-term stability are core contributors to national resilience.

Rethinking national security: choosing the architecture we live with

The post-1975 period demonstrates what happens when efficiency is prioritized while participation is allowed to erode. The current technological moment risks repeating that pattern at greater speed and scale. The path forward articulated above offers a different trajectory: maintaining innovative capacity and global competitiveness by expanding opportunity, preserving mobility, and governing markets to prevent excessive concentration of power. National security, understood this way, is not only about deterring adversaries. It is about sustaining a society capable of adapting, innovating, and maintaining legitimacy over time.A nation that allows more people to thrive is not weaker. It is more resilient, more adaptable, and better prepared for the challenges ahead.

The last half-century of economic outcomes did not emerge by accident. They reflect choices about how markets are governed, how risks are distributed, and which forms of power are tolerated or constrained. Those choices were often technical, incremental, and framed as matters of efficiency rather than consequence. Recognizing that history does not require agreement on ideology. It requires understanding that systems are designed, and that design decisions can be revisited.

Agency here does not mean demanding perfection or expecting consensus. We must pay attention to whether policies increase or reduce mobility, whether they broaden or narrow participation, and whether they strengthen or weaken institutional capacity. We must ask how proposed solutions affect competition, resilience, and legitimacy, and not just whether they promise growth. The future will be shaped by how we choose to govern abundance: whether we allow growth to concentrate quietly, or design systems that let more people participate in and contribute to it. That choice is embedded in rules, enforcement, and incentives. Understanding that is the first step toward shaping a system that can endure.