President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is roughly 270 words long. The Declaration of Independence is around 1,320 words. Those two documents alone prove the power of brevity. (Whenever I find that I am unable to write what I’m trying to say within the Lincoln-Jefferson word limit, I chuck it in the trashcan because I’ve most likely buried my intended message under parasitic weeds.)
The whole U.S. Constitution, the shortest in the world, has only 4,400 words. Yet every two-year Congress since WWII has enacted 4-6 million words of new law. A wise man once told me that if a law can’t be written in a single sentence, it has no business restricting Americans’ liberty. Over 200 million words of imposed law since the last Great War have no doubt stolen a good deal of Americans’ natural rights and liberties.
Do we believe the modern American legislature’s verbiage is a necessary requirement for fulfilling the promises outlined in our founding documents? Or is it more likely that Congress learned long ago that it could bury monumental power grabs underneath an untamed jungle of distracting weeds and has been writing new weeds into law ever since?
Tyranny comes in many forms, yet one of its subtlest is manufactured complexity. Esoteric language + complicated bureaucracy = citizen compliance. If no-one understands the law or how the monetary system works or whether some agency exercising government power is legitimate, then a great deal of corruption and crime can be committed without the public’s objection. Complexity is the favorite poison of those with power.
Consider how the government’s tyranny through complexity makes answering even the simplest questions quite difficult:
- Have you broken any laws today?
- How many departments or agencies exert power over you?
- Is saving money wise?
- What does the Constitution say?
In a society governed by reason and rationality, these four questions should be rudimentary for any citizen. Instead, they are outrageously vexing.
(1) There are tens of thousands of state and federal laws, hundreds of thousands of rules and regulations set forth by administrative decree, and limitless possibilities for judicial interpretation to shape what is legal and illegal. (2) The administrative bureaucracy is always expanding with the formation of new agency subsidiaries of some department’s creation of this group’s authority or that committee’s jurisdiction to take a slice of Executive power for itself to wield against ordinary Americans. (3) Because the Federal Reserve is a private company that manipulates the supply of U.S. currency and because the U.S. dollar is not backed by anything except the Treasury’s promise that its paper has value, saving monetary currency has the obscene effect of debasing wealth. (4) And ever since Chief Justice John Marshall empowered the Supreme Court alone to decide the Constitution’s meaning in the 1803 case of Marbury v. Madison, courts have magically discovered implied powers, hidden rights, and unknown obligations all appearing and disappearing according to the subjective determination of any given jurist to hunt down unwritten language lurking in the “penumbras and emanations” that miraculously exist beyond the plain meaning of the Constitution’s text.
Just these past two weeks, this last point was driven home when the Court ruled correctly that abortion is not a constitutionally protected right and that New York’s restrictions on carrying guns outside the home violate the Second and Fourteenth Amendments.
By originally divining a constitutional right to abort a child in the womb, the federal government stole power from state governments. By enforcing a gun restriction that infringes on an individual’s constitutional rights, New York stole power from anyone within its jurisdiction. The first case remedied a misreading of the Constitution that has been law in America for nearly half a century, while the second case remedied an unconstitutional power grab that has been law since 1913. That’s an awfully long time for Americans to endure illegitimate exercises of power. When the Judiciary embraces imaginary complexity to bend the Constitution to its will, either our governing document or society will eventually snap in two.
A regrettably large share of our legal experiences operate not in the shadow of the Constitution and its constraints, but rather in the shadow of explicitly unconstitutional rules, actions, and orders. In the time it takes for improper Executive Orders to be reined, for illicit administrative decisions to be corrected, and for misinterpretations of constitutional power to be overturned, so much of society’s activity is framed by what we might call the not-Constitution — all those acts of government that are deemed illegal only after they have caused enduring harm. A most troubling aspect of government power is its insistence on pushing past constitutional constraints and operating in a blurry legal wilderness of its own creation while forcing Americans to prove that those power grabs lack legitimacy.
Governance is always about overreaction and never about precise remedy. In response to the vast economic aggregation during the late 19th-century industrial boom, progressivism delivered not only curbs on corporate monopoly power, but also the creation of a vast administrative bureaucracy with unchecked powers of its own. In response to unjust Jim Crow laws, the Supreme Court acquired unjust super-legislative powers.
In response to air and water pollution, President Nixon created an Environmental Protection Agency whose power has grown to stifle American industry and threaten private property. In response to a perceived health insurance crisis, Obamacare’s socialized medicine has only exacerbated the cost of healthcare while giving the government a peek at Americans’ private medical records. Every time government identifies a problem, its answer is to expand its own inherent powers and complicate matters further.
Historically, Congress’s budgetary “power of the purse” empowered the “people’s representatives” to restrict Executive overreach and the natural human proclivity to harness unchecked power. The quickest way to arrest illegitimate government power, in other words, was to stop paying for it. A century of central bank money printing, runaway deficit spending, and doomed mandatory spending commitments, however, have handed the “power of the purse” to the bankers and bureaucrats. In exchange for giving away the people’s power over their government, Congress legally encumbered the nation’s property, monetary, and banking systems in such a way as to maximize the federal government’s power over every purse in every kitchen in America.
All these legal and economic charades hide government tyranny behind so many layers of complexity that ordinary people throw up their hands in exasperation. What can possibly be done to thwart the machinations of the State when its illegitimate power grabs opened Pandora’s box long ago? That feeling of hopelessness is exactly what bureaucrats crave.
The more one denies his own agency, the more enslaved he is to whatever system he insists is oppressing him. The more one relies on a socialist system of government, the more he relinquishes individual liberty for the promises of assured survival and subsistence. The more one leans on government to provide human liberation, the further away from freedom he runs. Through the illusion of complexity, one resulting social order becomes guaranteed: a small ruling class controls everyone else.
Here’s the thing, though: once you realize that complex institutions exist largely to tame and subdue the public, then it’s the people with extraordinarily simple yet powerful demands — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — who begin to resonate with everyone else.
Should we ever find ourselves returning to those same basic foundations that were succinctly expressed in the Declaration’s nimble 1,300 words, I propose we dispose with all laws on the book today and begin again with something exceedingly straightforward: All future legislation must be memorized and recited by at least one member of Congress before becoming law.
After all, an easily understood Constitution + a limited bureaucracy = an empowered citizen. That’s the American way.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
