Our Regulatory Philosophy: Objective Rules, Not Unlimited Bureaucracy
Because the term “progressive” is often associated with the modern administrative state, a common misconception is that The Rational Foundation Plan is a blank check for unlimited federal regulation. It is not.
The Rational Foundation Plan is built on the premise that regulation is not a moral good in itself; it is a mechanical tool. Our framework establishes strict philosophical and structural constraints on when and how government should intervene.
1. Targeting Extraction, Protecting Markets
The system isn’t broken, but it too often rewards extraction over productive value creation.
- Extraction (rent-seeking, regulatory capture, cronyism) occurs when well-connected actors use government power or monopolistic leverage to siphon wealth without creating value.
- Our Mandate: We intervene specifically to target and eliminate extraction. We are not regulating to punish success or tear down producers; we are clearing the way for them.
If a regulation does not target extraction or correct a clear market failure (like unpriced environmental costs), it does not fit this mandate. We believe in setting objective rules of the game so that free markets and productive value creation can thrive without being looted by cronies.
2. Structural Sanitation First
A framework that is “fully pro-regulation without constraints” blindly trusts the regulatory state to act benevolently. We do not.
This is why The Rational Foundation Plan prioritizes Structural Sanitation and Institutional Accountability. Before expanding the scope of any agency, the state itself must be structurally sanitized and held accountable. We demand strict ethics laws, independent Inspectors General, and rigorous performance metrics. We cannot trust a system with expanded duties until we have ended the “Two-Tier System” of justice that allows elites to bypass the rules.
3. The Centralization Constraint
We explicitly reject the temptation to trade local mistakes for inescapable federal supremacy.
Two cases must not be confused. If a state or local government tramples a right federal law already protects, this constraint does not apply — the Supremacy Clause, the courts, and federal enforcement exist for exactly that. No new law is needed; the remedy is enforcing the ones we have. That is maintenance.
This constraint is about the other case: a state policy that is lawful but harmful — protectionist licensing, supply-strangling zoning, rules that offend free trade or property rights as principles without violating any federally protected right. There is nothing for a court to strike down, so the instinct of some is to fix it by creating new federal authority — a sweeping statute, invoking the Commerce Clause, that overrides state policy.
However unjust the local policy, that is a catastrophic bargain. An expanded, unrestrained federal apparatus is historically a far graver threat to liberty and markets than a local mistake — and unlike the mistake, the apparatus is permanent.
The Rational Foundation Plan serves as a principled constraint against this short-term political thinking. We do not build central power simply to solve a localized issue.
4. Honest Costs and Fair Competition
Throughout this framework, you will find terms like “Honest Costs” and “Fair Competition” rather than “Command Limits” or “Transformative Equity.”
Our goal is not to have the government dictate market outcomes. Our goal is to ensure the market functions accurately. By ensuring environmental policies price in “Honest Costs,” and by enforcing “Fair Competition” in trade and antitrust, we are utilizing market mechanisms, not discarding them.
5. Hands Off — After the Hands Come Off
There is a version of the free-market argument this framework agrees with and a version it rejects, and the difference is worth stating precisely.
The version we reject is the one that treats laissez-faire as self-sustaining — that if government simply withdraws, a competitive market persists on its own. It does not. Unregulated markets concentrate; concentrated actors acquire political power; and political power is then used to entrench the concentration. Laissez-faire is not a stable equilibrium. It is a starting condition that decays into cronyism, reliably and fast, unless something maintains the conditions that make it work.
This is not a novel objection. It is the ordoliberal insight — Eucken and the Freiburg School — that a competitive order is not spontaneous but constituted: the state’s job is to write and enforce the rules of competition precisely so that it need not direct outcomes. A strong state maintaining a competitive framework is the alternative to a weak state captured by whoever concentrated first.
So the framework’s destination genuinely is hands-off. Minimal intervention, objective rules, government out of the business of picking winners. But you cannot get there from here by simply withdrawing. The levers are already held. Withdrawing now does not produce a free market — it produces an unpoliced one, which is exactly what incumbents want and precisely how the current arrangement was built. Deregulation without decapture is not liberty; it is a handover.
We are looking to be hands off. First we need to get the existing hands off.
That is why anti-corruption, antitrust, and structural sanitation come before and enable the lighter touch — they are not a expansion of the state’s role but the precondition for reducing it.
The obvious objection, and the answer
“Transitional intervention” is the standard justification for interventions that become permanent. Every expansion in history has claimed to be temporary. If the framework asserts a hands-off destination, it owes an account of what would actually trigger the hands coming off — otherwise the claim is decoration.
Accordingly, every step-three intervention (see §6) carries explicit exit conditions:
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The public option de-escalates to a standing floor — and this is deliberately weaker than exit. Thresholds are named in the Health Security Act: entry at HHI ≥ 2,500, or fewer than three insurers, or one insurer above 50% share, per rating area; de-escalation at HHI below 1,800 sustained three years with four or more insurers each above 5%. CMS publishes the data annually for every market, verified by CBO or GAO, whether or not it supports continued operation. On de-escalation the public option stops marketing, auto-enrolment, and employer solicitation, but remains available at actuarial cost and re-escalates automatically if concentration returns.
We considered full withdrawal and rejected it, for the reason this section exists: withdrawing entirely restarts the cycle that produced the concentration. A market is not permanently competitive because it was competitive once — that is the same error as treating laissez-faire as self-sustaining, committed one level down. A standing public option constrains pricing by existing rather than by winning, on the Tennessee Valley Authority’s yardstick logic: a public operator whose costs establish what adequate service should cost.
So the honest statement is that this intervention recedes to a floor and stays there. The framework’s general claim is that step-three interventions recede; the public option is a partial exception, and saying so is preferable to quietly redefining “recede” to mean “shrink a bit.” Everything else on this list still exits completely.
- Structural remedies are one-way. Breaking up a monopoly does not require a permanent agency; it requires a court order. Prefer remedies that finish.
- Standards are floors, not ratchets. A minimum that never rises is a rule. A minimum that rises annually is a bureaucracy acquiring a constituency.
- Anything that cannot state its exit condition does not qualify as step three. It is either a rule (step one), or it is an expansion the framework has not justified.
We will be judged on whether the interventions actually recede. Stating the conditions in advance is what makes the claim checkable instead of convenient.
6. When the Referee Must Also Compete
The constraint above raises an obvious objection, and it deserves a direct answer rather than silence: this framework creates a public health insurance option, sets national policing standards, and conditions state education funding on federal formulas. Is that not the centralization we just rejected?
Intervention in this framework escalates in three steps, and each step must justify why the previous one is insufficient:
- Rules — objective, generally applicable, enforced by courts. Antitrust, honest-cost pricing, disclosure, anti-corruption. This is the default and covers most of the mandate.
- Standards — minimum floors where the failure mode is catastrophic and local variance is the harm itself. Police certification and educational breadth sit here. A floor on what may not be cut is not a curriculum, and a licensing standard is not a federal police force. Delivery stays local; only the floor is national.
- Public participation — the government entering a market as a competitor. This is the step that genuinely trades against the constraint, and it is justified only where market structure has failed so completely that no rule can restore competition.
The public option is the one provision that reaches step three, and the burden of proof sits with it. The argument is that in regional hospital and insurance markets already consolidated to a handful of players, there is no rule that manufactures a competitor. Antitrust can prevent the next merger; it cannot undo the last thirty years of them. Where consolidation has eliminated the competitive discipline that rules are supposed to protect, a public competitor supplies that discipline rather than replacing it. The referee steps onto the field because the other side of it is empty.
That argument may be wrong. If it is, the correct response is to say so and drop the provision — not to quietly hold both positions. What the framework will not do is claim anti-centralism as a principle while treating exceptions as unremarkable.
The test for any future provision: name which step it occupies, and if it is step three, show that steps one and two cannot reach the problem.
In summary: We are building a government that enforces fair play — and competes only where there is no longer a game to referee.
Last updated: September 2026