Two hundred and fifty years ago this week, a small group of farmers, lawyers, and soldiers told the most powerful empire on earth to pound sand. They didn’t have a standing army worth mentioning or a consensus on what they were building. What they had was an idea—radical, dangerous, and almost absurdly optimistic—that free people, left largely to their own devices, could govern themselves better than any king ever would. The proof is still standing.

I’ve spent more than 30 years in financial services, advising ultra-high-net-worth families and testifying as an expert witness in federal and state courts. In every serious room I’ve sat in, one fact goes undisputed: the American economic model has produced more individual wealth and lifted more people from poverty than any system ever devised. That’s not patriotic chest- thumping. That’s the data talking.

The critics know this, which is why they’ve changed the argument. You can’t look at the abolition of slavery, the defeat of fascism, the moon landing, and the smartphone in your pocket and make a straight-faced case that the country has failed. So, the academic left pivoted to systemic critique: America wasn’t just flawed, it was born wrong, redeemable only through administered redistribution and managed decline. Economist Thomas Sowell spent decades dismantling this conceit with evidence. He called it the vision of the anointed—the belief that a credentialed elite knows better than the accumulated wisdom of free people making free choices.

Watch the protests this Fourth of July. You’ll find the usual cast: campus socialists, professional marchers, and graduate students who’ve read Marx but never met a payroll. The single cat ladies with nose rings who couldn’t tell you what the First Amendment actually says will be out........

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