I’ve spent the last several months architecting a comprehensive legislative and constitutional package (127 points total) designed to address what I see as the terminal decline of American state capacity and moral coherence.
I am posting this here because I want a "stress test." Most political discussions are about vibes; I want to talk about mechanics.
The Core Pillars:
Institutional Security: Moving oversight to randomly selected Citizen Juries to break the back of the lobbyist/bureaucrat feedback loop.
Economic Anti-Fragility: Forcing a 20% market share cap on corporations to prevent them from becoming "Too Big to Fail" or "Too Big to Regulate."
Axiomatic Anchoring: Grounding the legal system in a Western/Christian moral framework (Life is Sacred) to act as a stable coordination point against value drift.
I used an LLM to help me cross-reference the data and polish the 500+ pages of text, but the architecture and the trade-offs are mine. I’m looking for the "smartest people in the room" to tell me where this breaks.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
No politician is going to go teach high school math. It’s beneath them. That’s a IQ 105 job which most should be well above.
You can ban book fees sure. Then JD Vance returns to Ohio and becomes a raspberry farmer. Peter Thiel buys a lot of raspberries (basically identical to doing book deals). A lot of the book deals actually make money because a Democrat aligned PAC or non-profit buys a lot of Hillary Clinton books and distributes them. Thiel can just donate raspberries to poor white kids. Any legitimate business you can think of can be designed to give a kickback. And they will. So you need to end up banning all forms of compensation to thousands of top politicos/policy people.
I don't know about raspberries, but if you're looking for a kickback scheme you can do a lot better than books. People look at the nameplate advance estimates, see the bulk buys, think there's something fishy, and cry corruption, but it's really more complicated than that. Yes, Hillary Clinton got an 8 million dollar advance for Living History. I can't find any allegations that bulk buying was involved, but let's look at the economics of it anyway. She didn't get to keep the whole 8 million. An agent typically gets 15%, which takes us down to 6.8 million, plus she used a ghostwriter, and if you want a ghostwriter you have to pay them yourself. She reportedly paid hers $500,000, so we're down to 6.3 million that she collected.
But that's not a flat fee; it's an advance against royalties, meaning she can't collect any royalties until the book sells enough to recoup the 8 million advance. The list price of the book was $28. Half of that goes to the bookseller, and a typical royalty is 10% of retail. So of that $28, Hillary made $2.80 per book sold, as far as accounting against the advance. The book would need to sell a little over 2.8 million copies before she would make any money on it beyond the advance, and even when she reached that threshold, she would only be making $2.38 per book after the agent takes his cut. There are a couple caveats here: That assumes that all the sales would be of the domestic hardcover at the list price. Foreign rights are sold separately for a flat fee, so if a publisher in another country wants to pay $1 million for them then she'd get $100,000 credited towards royalties in one fell swoop. On the other hand, if there's a paperback edition the list price would be lower, and some books will be sold at below list through book clubs and publisher discounts, so she'd need to sell more books to make up for it. And then there's audiobooks, large print, etc., which has its own price.
The upshot is that if you're trying to give a politician a kickback through book sales, you're only giving them 8 1/2 cents on the dollar, and that's not until after they've recouped their advance. Most politicians aren't going to recoup their advance. Why do publishers give them if they're never recouped? Because they can still make money for the publishers. Hillary Clinton needs the book to sell 2.8 million copies (give or take the caveats) to make money beyond the advance at an effective royalty of 8.5% of retail. The publisher, however, is making 40% of retail, less fixed costs like art, editing and promotion, and marginal costs like shipping and the book itself. If we ignore those (which I will because I have no idea how much they would have cost in 2003), they're making $11.20 per book sold, meaning they only need to sell about 714,000 books to make back their investment. If I assume for the sake of argument that they're making $6/book after costs, they still only need to sell half as many books as she does to come out ahead.
The other thing about bulk buys is that it mostly isn't done as a kickback but by the author themself to their own immediate detriment. The first reason for this is similar to what you said about PACs and the like buying the book to distribute to their supporters, but politicians often buy books themselves as thank-you gifts to donors. Again, I have no idea if this happened or not, but suppose someone gives Clinton's reelection fund $1000 in 2003. They might be more inclined to donate in 2004 if they receive a signed copy of the book with a thank-you note in the mail. In this transaction, Clinton actually lost about $25, but it's worth it if it keeps a large donor on the hook. The other reason to do this is to pump the bestseller lists, particularly the NYT.
A big part of this is vanity, but there can be some financial motive. The publisher can write the best blurb in the world, but it isn't going to compare with "New York Times Bestseller" emblazoned on the cover of subsequent printings. Subsequent printings which might not happen, by the way, which extend the shelf life of a book's profitability and might not happen if the book isn't on the list. Plus it means Barnes and Noble will put it on a display in the front, and the list itself is a form of advertising. It's a risky strategy, though, because it's expensive and isn't guaranteed to work. The number of books sold required to get on the list varies by the week, and you might not have any idea of sales figures until you get royalty statements six to nine months later (and even then you can only estimate). If Hillary Clinton thinks it will take 10,000 copies sold in the first week, then she's laying out $280,000 for a shot in the dark. Plus, the NYT is a curated list, not one based on raw sales totals, and beginning in the 90s they started putting daggers next to books that they thought benefited from bulk sales. Ted Cruz was famously pissed when they refused to list his book altogether due to allegations of bulk buying. $280,000 isn't a lot when you have $6.3 million to play with, but most book advances aren't that high.
In any event, I don't think there's any real doubt that Simon & Schuster paid Clinton what they did for any reason other than economics, because the deal made sense at the time. She was already a bestselling author at that point; It Takes a Village was her most noteworthy work, but she had just put out a coffee table book that sold half a million copies. Add to that that it would be a memoir and was coming a few years after the Lewinsky scandal and it was reasonable for them to expect demand to be high. And they were right—it sold a half million copies in its first week. If she were juicing the demand through bulk sales she would have given far more than the advance back to the publisher. I don't know who buys them (I never saw them become a phenomenon like Michelle Obama's book was), but they apparently sell well.
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