The term school choice has been thrown around a lot over the past few years, especially in Texas. Some people say it's the savior of a broken education system, while others say it will destroy everything. But what is school choice? It's more complicated than you might think. We will talk about segregation, the unschooling movement, Harvard and LBJ, Milwaukee, and, of course, High School Football. But the history only tells part of the story. Stick around until the end to hear my solution to it all. Before diving into the history of school choice, we must define what we mean. To do that, we will use the hypothetical of a system with absolutely no choice. This system would require each student to go to public school from K-12 at the neighborhood school the state assigns them to. Now, splitting off from that system, we have different versions of school choice. The first version, right to exit, allows people to withdraw from the system to attend private school or homeschool. Right to exit is the absolute bare minimum of choice. The second strain, public choice, is when public schools offer different options for kids within the public school system. Public choice ranges from magnet schools to allowing kids to transfer to other public schools with open slots.  The third strain, charter schools, is a hybrid model between public and private schools. Depending on the state, they are primarily private organizations that receive only public funding to teach students. They still have to be approved by the government and, in many cases, are very regulated. The fourth strain, tax choice, is when the government gives tax credits or deductions to people to encourage choice in some way. There is an extensive range of these programs.  The fifth strain, private vouchers, is when the government gives parents a voucher to bring to a private school that redeems that voucher for government funds.  The sixth and final strain, educational savings accounts, is what most people talk about when they refer to school choice today. An educational savings account, or ESA, is an account that is funded every year for each school-age child a parent has who does not attend public school. Parents can then spend that money on private school, school supplies, tutors, or anything directly related to a child's education. So, let's dive into the history, but instead of going chronologically this time, we will explore the history of these strains since the 1950s, when our current iteration of public schools took hold. If you want to dig in for yourself, be aware that most of the content comes from pro or anti-school choice sources. So, take everything with a grain of salt. Right to exit is pretty straightforward. Homeschooling took off in the 1970s when John Holt proposed that children should be "unschooled" until age eight. The unschooling movement on the left was joined by an evangelical movement for homeschooling on the right in the 1980s. Homeschooling has always been legal in Texas and is treated the same as an unaccredited private school. There isn't even a mention of homeschooling in Texas law to prohibit it or single it out. Both of these strains of homeschooling have met legal restrictions, but homeschooling in the US has never been illegal for long. Several states have tried to ban it, and the Supreme Court has stepped in time and time again to correct them. Right to exit is a Constitutional right in the US. Unfortunately, some school districts attack homeschooling and private schools for drawing students and funding away from neighborhood schools. Public choice has a million different iterations, so we will focus on Texas public choice and a few red herrings that opponents bring up regarding school choice proposals. Public school choice in Texas is handled almost exclusively at the local level. Texas doesn't mandate or prevent school districts from creating specialized schools. First, there are magnet schools. Magnet schools are specialized programs based on competitive acceptance rather than where you live in a district. There are three main types of magnet programs: Add-on programs, which are individual classes School within a school, which are specialized schools located on the campus of a neighborhood school Separate and unique schools, which are whole specialized schools Magnet programs can be anything from art-focused programs to gifted and talented programs. BJ Stamps and Bragg Stockton planned the first magnet school in the country in the mid-1960s. The plan was to have a school within a school that focused on high achievers and allowed them to specialize in professional subjects from medicine to filmmaking. They received approval to start the school in February 1971 and began their first year as Skyline High School in Dallas that fall. The following year, the federal government started funding magnet programs that helped them accelerate. The feds continued funding for these programs off and on through to the present day. Despite their overwhelming popularity with the students and parents they serve, the Dallas magnet program faces opposition from the school board every year, like most magnet programs. Magnet schools are the top schools in our public education system, but most school districts do not offer them despite their success. Out of more than 1200 school districts in Texas, less than 50 offer magnet schools. Unfortunately, some school districts attack magnet schools for drawing students and funding away from public schools. Then, we have the Texas Virtual School Network. Created in 2009, Texas Virtual School Network provides full-time school for grades 3-12 and single courses for public school attendees. This program provides at least a little choice to all Texas public school students. Charter schools are the next branch of school choice, and most people don't completely understand them. Texas Charter schools started in 1995 when George W. Bush signed a major charter school bill into law. So, what is a charter school? A charter school is a public school that doesn't have to adhere to all the regulations that regular public schools have to adhere to, does not have the power to tax for building costs, can accept students from anywhere, and is managed by institutions of higher education, non-profits, or government entities. This bill created three kinds of charter schools: Open enrollment charters: The state approves these schools and has a yearly and total cap. Only 305 charters are allowed in Texas. Thankfully, each charter can have multiple campuses. Campus charters: The local school district approves these as new charters or as a charter taking over an existing neighborhood school. Home-rule charters: None exist, but theoretically, if a school district voted for it, voters could turn a whole school district into one extensive charter system. You shouldn't be surprised that the vast majority of the charter schools in Texas are open-enrollment charters. Unfortunately, some school districts attack charter schools for drawing students and funding away from neighborhood schools. At least 983 charter schools currently serve nearly half a million students, but there are still roughly 130,000 students on active waiting lists. The shortage is because the state rejects about 80% of new charter school applications, and cities are stopping even more by rejecting their zoning exceptions. Charter schools also disproportionately serve disadvantaged communities and have better results than public schools that serve, on average, wealthier and more advantaged students. Tax choice is the next branch of choice that people often bill as a halfway point between no choice and vouchers or an ESA. The government can structure tax choice in many ways, but since it never passed in Texas and isn't seriously being considered now, we will just review the basics. Tax choice is when the government gives people tax incentives (credits or deductions) to donate to private school scholarship programs. Even in states where these exist, they don't work well because not many people want to pay twice for schools. The next branch of school choice is the one that gets the most hate: Vouchers. The modern iteration of vouchers comes from Milton Friedman's essay "The Role of Government in Education," where he calls for the public funding of private schools. He called for a universal government-funded scholarship that paid for private schools or a voucher. People across the political spectrum championed vouchers. After Brown v Board of Education, seven states reprehensively adopted a voucher program that was specifically designed to allow white students to go to segregated private schools. On the other side, Christopher Jencks, a Harvard inequality scholar, Ted Sizer, dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Phillip Whitten, another Harvard education scholar, all progressive academics, argued that inner-city public schools "destroyed rather than developed human potential. They proposed a means-tested voucher system to help the poor out of poverty. They even convinced the Johnson administration to run a pilot program in Alum Rock, California. However, the Nixon Administration did not renew the funding for the program, and it died without conclusive results. In the eighties, we saw support for vouchers from the Reagan administration, but they settled and supported increased funding for magnet and charter schools. In 1990, in Milwaukee, Republicans and Democrats created the first modern voucher system in the country for the lower class. It proved so successful that they later expanded it to the middle class. Now, we will focus back in on Texas' history with vouchers. In the charter school bill passed in 1995, George W. Bush originally intended to include a voucher program. He compromised and just included charter schools. Then, in 2005, Rick Perry backed an attempt to pass a limited voucher program for disadvantaged students. That bill failed on a 72-71 vote in the Texas House and marked the end of the voucher fight in Texas. That leads us to our final branch of school choice, Education Savings Accounts or ESAs. There are two big reasons for ESAs. The first is vouchers encourage private schools to charge up to the maximum of the voucher level because if they don't, the student loses that benefit. An ESA allows parents to use the money for any educational purpose or roll that money into a college savings account. For instance, if the ESA is worth $10,000 per student and the private school only charges $8,000 a year, that parent can pay for tutoring services, school supplies, or even an online educational program. Theoretically, ESAs will create competition in price and quality. The second reason is the courts. In 2011, Arizona's Supreme Court ruled that a voucher system is unconstitutional, but ESAs are not. Even though the Supreme Court has cleared this ruling up several times, ruling that both are constitutional, there's no reason for activists to return to an inferior system. The school choice movement needed a shock to the system to move on to ESAs. After the Arizona victory, Greg Abbot was elected Governor of Texas and, in 2017, pushed for ESAs. ESAs passed the Senate but didn't get out of committee in the House. 2020 changed everything. Two main events happened in 2020. One was COVID, which shut down schools and showed parents what their children were learning in classrooms. Seeing a combination of propaganda and lack of rigor, matched with anger over school closures, created a mass exodus from the public school system. That's when parents started to look for other options. That same year, in June, the Supreme Court said that school choice programs that omitted religious schools violated the First Amendment freedom of religion. ESAs took off. In 2021, New Hampshire and West Virginia passed limited ESA programs. In 2022, Arizona passed the first Universal ESA program. In 2023, Arkansas, Iowa, Utah, and Florida passed universal ESAs Greg Abbot joined the fight once again. In 2023, he pulled out all the stops to pass universal ESAs. His problem was that there were only 65 pro-ESA Republicans in the House, and there were not nearly enough Democrats to close that gap. He tried to solve this issue by combining a historic teacher pay raise with ESAs. He still only got 65 Republicans and one Democrat to vote for ESAs, and the measure failed. Betting on the popularity of ESAs after COVID, Abbot decided to challenge anti-ESA representatives in the primary. With 65 pro-ESA lawmakers starting, five anti-ESA lawmakers retired, replaced with five pro-ESA representatives. Then, nine challengers beat anti-ESA incumbents, and two anti-ESA challengers beat pro-ESA incumbents. This results in 77 of 150 house representatives who are pro universal ESAs. In all likelihood, Texas will pass universal ESAs in 2025. That brings us to the present, so what are the problems with school choice? Let's go through the arguments one by one. Hang on with me because there are eight. The first argument is that ESAs are racist and just another way to segregate schools. Just because there are segregationists who once wanted school choice doesn't mean that it is racist. Segregationists also once wanted public schools because they were a way to segregate. That said, what we have seen when we offer people a way out of public schools is that the people who leave are overwhelmingly disadvantaged students, no matter what their race is. In 2022, the GAO came out with a study that public schools are increasing in segregation due to increasing segregation in neighborhoods. Public schools aren't racist because they used to be, and ESAs aren't racist because they once had racist supporters. Most people who support ESAs want to see better outcomes for every student. The second argument is that ESAs take money away from public schools, and guess what? They do. Every student who leaves the public school system lowers their funding by the amount of money that the school was receiving for that one student. However, per-student funding increases due to school funding not based on attendance, such as building funds. Funding is still a valid argument against school choice. The schools that see the most students leave will struggle to stay afloat and, in extreme cases, will shut down. We are already seeing this in cities like Miami. The third argument is that ESAs increase overall government spending. This claim is valid... at first. At the start of the ESA program, the first wave of parents to use it are parents who have already left the public school system. These parents would shift the burden of paying for their student's education from themselves back onto the state. That increases government spending. However, they decrease spending once these programs expand and start drawing people away from public schools. Since the ESA funding is less per student than public school funding, the government saves money each time a student switches to a private school. Once the second effect outweighs the first effect, overall government spending decreases. The fourth argument is that it would decrease participation in school sports. The argument for this is that most private schools won't have sports teams, and once enough people leave public schools, they won't have the funding to support the big sports anymore. This effect entirely depends on the demand. If parents want their students to attend a school with sports, they will. If they don't, they won't. The fifth argument is that rural communities will suffer because their school is their most significant employer. The story goes that if a private school pops up in a small town, it could draw all the students away from that public school. Then, the public school would have to shut down. If the public school is bad enough that most students leave, it shouldn't have been there in the first place. But even if that does happen, all those people can still work at the private school serving just as many kids. The sixth argument is that some people in nice neighborhoods might lose home equity if school choice passes. That is true. Some people in bad school districts also might gain home equity. The seventh argument is that these schools don't have accountability. And in the traditional sense, that is correct. A private school can choose its metrics to measure its success, and the state cannot shut it down without cause. But the massive increase in accountability is parents. If a private school isn't working, the parent can leave and go to another school, public or private. The market is the accountability system for private schools. And finally, the last argument against school choice is the strongest one. Public schools have too much red tape and cannot compete with the flexibility of a private school. There is no way for them to win this fight. This argument is entirely accurate and is one of the reasons we need choice. So how can we fix that last problem? School choice, at its core, is a funding question. How do we fund the education of minors? We already have several options: homeschool, private school, public school, charter school, and magnet school, but they are all funded differently. That's the problem. We need to unify school funding and remove the red tape to let these models compete. ESAs could be the vehicle for that. We can decide how much funding per student each year and let all parents choose where that funding goes. All the different choices will set a price, and the parent will decide. But that means that all the red tape would have to go away, and we would have to learn to be okay with different types of education we don't like. Yes, there will be Christian schools. There will be Islamic schools. There will be liberal schools, and there will be conservative schools. We have to be okay with that. The left talks about coexistence, and the right talks about freedom, but this is where we can live those values. So what do you think? Is changing school funding at its core too much? Let me know in the comments.

Everything has changed in the Presidential Race since the debate. And maybe nothing has? All eyes are on the Democratic National Convention on August 19th. Do Democrats move on from Biden? Can they? Parties aren't part of our federal government or our Constitution, so who decides how they operate? And how do they operate? We will answer all of those questions and more with today's video. Join us as we bring you through a story with assassinations, secret plots, backroom deals, and not one but two Robert F Kennedys. This history begins in 1968. Before 1968, Party insiders picked presidential nominees in sometimes quite literal smoke-filled rooms. Some states had primaries, and some states had caucuses, but they only existed to show those party insiders that candidates had popular support. But the 1968 Democratic nominating contest changed everything. First, let's introduce the cast of characters. First, we have Lydon B Johnson, the sitting president. You need to know that he hated the Kennedys, and the Kennedys hated him. LBJ originally ran against JFK in the 1960 democratic primary, and JFK only picked him as Vice President to unify the party. You also need to know that he was pro-Vietnam War or just pro-war. Second, we have Hubert Humphrey. He is Johnson's Vice President and is also pro-war. Thirdly, we have Robert F Kennedy or RFK. He was the attorney general under his brother JFK, and he was anti-war. Our fourth character is Eugene McCarthy, an anti-war Senator from Minnesota. Finally, we have George McGovern, a pro-Kennedy, anti-war Senator from South Dakota. At the beginning of 1968, McCarthy and Johnson were the only two candidates in the race, one anti-war and the other pro-war. Johnson led handily in polls at the time. Only 13 states conducted primaries, and only 9 assigned their delegates based on those results. In quick succession, Johnson's approval numbers plunged after the Tet Offensive in February. McCarthy won 42% of the New Hampshire Primary, and RFK entered the race in March. Johnson dropped out of the race on March 31st to get behind his Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, in April. We have a three-way race, but we have two different races. Kennedy and McCarthy were running campaigns to convince Democratic voters to support them. Humphrey was running a race for delegates. Humphrey didn't contest the primaries. He didn't join the debate with Kennedy and McCarthy. He sat down with influential people in each state and vied for their votes at the convention. You know the next part of the story. RFK is assassinated after winning the California primary. George McGovern decides to enter the race in Kennedy's stead, but the convention is what changes everything. At the convention, Hubert Humphrey won an absolute majority of the votes in a three-way race. In an environment where the left was overwhelmingly against the Vietnam War (and even Nixon ran against it in the general election), a pro-war candidate won without participating in any primaries. The activists on the left were furious, and George McGovern gave them their victory. Amid the chaos of the 1968 convention, George McGovern, who was on the rules committee, called for a commission to explore changing the nominating rules. As most delegates backed Humphrey, the rules committee voted this proposal down, but McGovern took a minority report to the floor. A minority report is just a way to bring something to a vote of the whole convention if it fails in committee. Historians disagree about this next part. Some say that McGovern whipped the votes using the same kind of backroom deals Humphrey made to secure the nomination. Others say there was mass confusion on the floor, and it passed accidentally. Either way, it passed, and McGovern went on to lead the McGovern-Fraser Commission. This commission recommended many reforms, but the one that changed everything called for states to open their processes for assigning delegates. In response, states moved in mass and adopted either primaries or caucuses. Twenty-five states passed laws implementing these reforms when the 1972 primaries came around. One state created such a convoluted multi-stage caucus system that it had to move its first round earlier than any other state. More about that later. Sixteen major candidates entered this primary because a person could win the nomination for the first time without establishment backing. The parties (yes, the Republicans, too) were now democratic for the first time. Since most of these reforms happened in state law, the Republican Party had to adhere to them. McGovern won this race and lost to Nixon in a spectacular fashion. He later said that he "opened up the doors of the Democratic Party, and 20 million people walked out." Even with the failure, primaries and caucuses were here to stay, and the battle between the grassroots and the establishment was just starting. In 1976, we had the first primary election, in which every state held a primary or caucus. Jimmy Carter won the nomination as a grassroots candidate by pioneering the Iowa strategy. Carter proved that an unknown candidate could win the nomination by putting all his eggs in the Iowa basket and using the momentum from that win to take the nomination. Since Carter, only Bill Clinton and Joe Biden lost both Iowa and New Hampshire and still went on to win their party's nomination. On the Republican side, Ford won as the establishment candidate after a hard-fought race with the upstart conservative challenger, Ronald Reagan. This race was the last time a major party nominee had not clinched the nomination by convention. In 1980, Carter barely won as an incumbent who faced Ted Kennedy as his establishment challenger. This time, it was the Republican's turn to have a grassroots nominee in Ronald Reagan. In the first contest between two grassroots candidates, Republicans won in a landslide. At the Democratic National Convention that year, however, the establishment struck back. North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt started a commission on how to take power back from the grassroots. That commission recommended Superdelegates. Superdelegates gained their status by position. The commission split these delegate slots between state party chairs, vice chairs, Democratic Congressmen, and other prominent elected officials. At first, these delegates comprised 14% of the delegate count, but they grew to 20% at their peak. In 1984, the Democratic establishment finally figured out the new system. After Ted Kennedy announced he wouldn't run, the establishment supported Walter Mondale with funding and endorsements. Even with the several challengers, he never trailed in the primary. 1988 would mark the first time since the 1968 reforms that both parties would have a competitive primary without an incumbent. On the Democratic side, the presumptive nominee, Gary Hart, who was the grassroots challenger to Mondale, dropped out of the race after an extramarital affair became public. Then, a lesser-known candidate, Joe Biden, dropped out after plagiarising a speech, and the media uncovered past plagiarism from law school. With no establishment favorite, Dukakis won out over second-place finisher Jesse Jackson. On the Republican side, George H.W. Bush ran on Reagan's record and won handily. A real estate developer named Donald Trump considered entering the Republican primary that year, making 1988 the first cycle that both of our candidates from this year started running for president. In 1992, the Democrats once again had no establishment favorite. Because of Bush's 89% approval rating, no one thought he was beatable, and that pushed establishment candidates out of the race. A little-known candidate named Bill Clinton came from behind and won a majority of delegates and clinched the nomination against Jerry Brown and Paul Tsongas. On the Republican side, George H.W. Bush had a conservative challenger, Pat Buchanan, who never won a state but showed George H.W. Bush's weakness and encouraged Ross Perot to mount a third-party challenge. In 1996, the establishment candidate Bob Dole won the nomination against Pat Buchanan and Steve Forbes, with the two grassroots candidates splitting the vote. In 2000, the Democratic primary was barely competitive, and Al Gore won the nomination without losing a single primary. On the Republican side, George W. Bush wrapped up establishment support and funding early and handily won the nomination. 2000 was the peak year for establishment control of the primaries. Republicans hadn't picked a grassroots candidate since Reagan in 1980, and the Democrats had finally coalesced early behind a candidate. In 2004, the Democrats saw what was about to change everything. Howard Dean gained early support as an anti-war candidate and started challenging the more establishment candidates in fundraising through the Internet. Dean even led in many polls in 2003 and outspent every candidate in Iowa and New Hampshire. However, through negative advertising and bad luck, he drove away enough support to lose both contests, ultimately handing the nomination to John Kerry. In 2008, the Democratic Party saw the best example yet of the establishment versus the grassroots. The establishment lined up early behind Hillary Clinton, and Barrack Obama used the Internet and supporters like Oprah to gain grassroots support. The primary was hard-fought the whole way through, but Obama clinched the nomination with the help of superdelegates in June. On the Republican side, the advent of winner-take-all primaries shortened the race considerably. State parties could choose to allocate delegates however they wanted. So, several state parties moved to winner-take-all contests to increase the importance of their state's primary. Although there was no clear establishment candidate in a competitive race, McCain wrapped up the nomination by March 4th due to these winner-take-all contests. Despite being a competitive race, Mitt Romney, the second-place finisher in 2008, won the nomination in 2012 over a heavily splintered field. In 2016, the Democrats once again got behind Hillary Clinton; this time, it worked. The Republicans, on the other hand, had the largest primary field in history with no clear establishment consensus candidate. In all, there were 17 major candidates. With such a diverse field and the winner-take-all states, Donald Trump won the nomination with the lowest percentage of votes since the primary process began. Not to be outdone, the Democrats had 29 major candidates in their 2020 primaries. Joe Biden led in the polls for most of the race but badly lost the first three contests to Bernie Sanders. Nobody knows exactly what happened after that, but the two major, moderate candidates still running dropped out and endorsed Joe Biden. This consolidation occurred despite both candidates performing better than Biden in the early contests. Biden then went on to win handily. We have finally reached the present day and are seeing a rematch between Trump and Biden. Both handily won their primaries but haven't yet had their convention that would make the nomination final. That's the backdrop under which the worst debate in history occurred. CNN hosted a debate between Biden and Trump, and Biden melted down. Biden stumbled over simple concepts and, at times, was utterly unintelligible. Since then, support for Biden has plummeted in the polls, and major Democrats have called for him to step down and free delegates to vote for whoever they want. This convention would be the first time the party's nominee had not been decided before the convention since 1976 with Ford and Reagan. It would also be the first time a party would pick a nominee without the assistance of primaries since 1968. But that's if Biden steps down before the convention on August 19th. What happens if he doesn't? The crazy thing is that anything could happen. Before the Democratic National Convention votes on its nominees, it will vote on its rules. That's right. Delegates set the rules for a primary after that primary occurs. The rules committee could decide that delegates could vote for whoever they wanted to in the nomination fight. As long as most delegates agree, the nomination will be open. Even if the convention keeps the rules the same, delegates are allowed to "in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them." This rule means that delegates could vote for someone else in extreme circumstances, creating a contested convention. Those options are extreme but possible after the debate and subsequent interviews. The past week has shown just how fragile our nominating process is. So, let's spell out the problems. The first problem, and the one that all future problems flow from, is that the primary process was not thought out. The process was born from the chaos of 1968, states using their power over ballot access to control state parties, and reforms that offered small fixes for structural problems. The second problem is predictability. With delegates setting rules at convention, presumptive nominees have to count on the delegates keeping the rules the same before the nominating contest. The third problem is a lack of purpose. The structure of the nominating process doesn't accurately optimize for democratic voters' opinions, swing voters' opinions, electability, ideological purity, or any other goal that a party might want to optimize for. So, how do the parties fix this? The first thing they need to do is decide what they want to optimize for. They can choose multiple goals, but they do need to choose. Then, they can design a system. If they want to emphasize electability, they can add weight to voters in battleground states and allow swing voters to vote in primaries. If they want to emphasize ideological purity, they can set a small donation requirement for voting in the primary that goes to the party and require debate attendance for candidates. If they want to emphasize fundraising, they can send that money to the eventual nominee. Here's my solution, at least for the Republican Party. I want the party to optimize for the long-term growth of the party. Here's how we do that. We give everyone one vote that is weighted the same. If we only focus on battleground states, we will slowly lose the red states and never pick up the blue ones. Then, we require voters to be registered to vote in the general election and charge them something like $10 to participate in the process. Make the dollar amount small enough to where it's not a burden but significant enough to prevent saboteurs from participating. Then, you set a timeline of six months over which candidates will compete from July 1st to New Year's Eve, allowing the nominee to run a general election campaign over ten months. The party will set up an online voting system to track real-time vote totals while preserving a secret ballot. Cryptographic technology exists today to make this possible. Voters will be able to cast their votes as soon as July 1st and change their votes until December 31st, enabling the measurement of real-time support and not relying on polls. Then, on August 1st, the field is narrowed to candidates who have reached 1% of the vote totals, and the RNC hosts the first debate in early August, producing the debate and collecting the profits from it. The RNC would host monthly debates, and the field would winnow down candidate by candidate, ending with two candidates on December 31st. The leading candidate would then be the nominee. The schedule could look something like this: Aug 13 - 20 Candidates Aug 20 - 19 Candidates Aug 27 - 18 Candidates Sep 3 - 17 Candidates Sep 10 - 16 Candidates Sep 17 - 15 Candidates Sep 24 - 14 Candidates Oct 1 - 13 Candidates Oct 8 - 12 Candidates Oct 15 - 11 Candidates Oct 22 - 10 Candidates Oct 29 - 9 Candidates Nov 5 - 8 Candidates Nov 12 - 7 Candidates Nov 19 - 6 Candidates Nov 26 - 5 Candidates Dec 3 - 4 Candidates Dec 10 - 3 Candidates Dec 17 - 2 Candidates The slow winnowing would prevent a factional or establishment candidate from just walking away with the nomination and would reward candidates who brought people into the party. The eventual nominee would then have the backing of a well-funded party with a strong base of supporters that it could turn out in November. The only thing left would be a safety valve in case of emergency. The party could keep the voting open, and if four-fifths of the body at any time supports reopening nomination, they could. So, what do you think? Would that system be too convoluted? Let me know in the comments.

Our founding fathers created the US as a federalist system that split powers between the federal government and the states. While Congress has blurred that line over the years, the line between the Texas government and its municipalities has been even less clear. Can a city decriminalize marijuana? Can a city add to already onerous labor and construction regulations? Is there any limit to city government? And did all that change with the Death Star Bill that took effect last year? Today, we are exploring the divide between the Texas State Government and its municipalities. The start of cities in Texas is chaotic. From 1836 to 1858, through being a Republic and State, legislation was the only way to incorporate a city. This process produced cities with different powers and lines between the state and the city. The one constant was that cities only had the powers expressly defined in their charters. Then, in 1858, the legislature allowed for general law cities. These cities do not have to be approved by the legislature and only have the powers expressly given to them by the state legislature. The population requirements for these cities and the different structures for these cities changed over the years, but the concept stayed the same. Then, in 1912, the Home Rule Amendment to the Texas Constitution was passed, and its home rule cities are the focus of this video. It provided for the creation of home-rule cities for areas with more than 5,000 people. So what is a home rule city? For the first time, instead of having a defined set of powers, home-rule cities were allowed to create any ordinance that wasn't explicitly prohibited or preempted by state law. This increased city powers substantially. They were now mini-states, making public policy on their level as long as the state hadn't spoken. This preemption portion was watered down four years later in 1916 when the Court of Criminal Appeal said, "The power of the city to act is as general and broad as is the power of the Legislature to act." The state now had to specifically say they were preempting a section of law to limit city's powers The number of home-rule cities exploded. Cities could now create their own form of government (within some guidelines) and have nearly as much authority as the state. Today, we have 389 different home-rule cities, which has only increased. We could find no record of any home-rule municipality ever being abolished, and only 30 general-law cities have the population for home-rule and have yet to choose to incorporate as such. The back and forth between the cities has caused uncertainty and caused more regulation at the state and local levels. Here are some examples In 1935, Texas returned alcohol regulation to the cities and counties after prohibition ended. Cities and counties then returned to pre-prohibition rules, and many adopted even more restrictions. Then, in 1977, the pendulum swung back to state preemption with the first extensive preemption legislation saying, "Unless otherwise specifically provided by the terms of this code, the manufacture, sale, distribution, transportation, and possession of alcoholic beverages shall be governed exclusively by the provisions of this code." The state has since expanded that preemption in 1987, 1991, 1995, 2001, 2011, 2015, 2019, and 2023. In the 1980s, Richardson adopted bans on specific dog breeds. The Texas Supreme Court upheld it because of a lack of dog legislation or prohibition at the state level. Then, the Texas Legislature created dog regulations and prohibited breed-specific dog ordinances. They added language both explicitly preempting cities and prohibiting these powers. In 2003, Texas got in front of the cities creating their own minimum wages and prohibited it. In 2014, Denton banned fracking. Instead of challenging it in court, the legislature just prohibited many different types of oil and gas regulation and specified in the law that state oil and gas regulation preempted local ordinances. Again, they added language both explicitly preempting cities and prohibiting these powers These are just a few stories of the constant struggle between the cities and the state. Cities enact ordinances in a new area, and then the state comes in and creates its own regulations to preempt cities. It occurs with building regulations, business regulations, environmental regulations, political sign regulations, and so much more. In 2017, Governor Greg Abbott declared war on local regulation altogether. He said that liberal cities were turning Texas into California and equated this back-and-forth strategy to firing single rifle shots. Abbott then proposed that Texas end home rule altogether and only let cities regulate what the state allows. He never repealed home-rule cities, which would require a constitutional amendment, but he signed the so-called "Death Star" bill into law in 2023. The right and the left have sensationalized this bill, but it's not very radical. There are two main parts to this bill. The first is to add language like the following to the Texas codes for agriculture, business and commerce, finance, insurance, labor, local government, natural resources, occupations, and property. "Unless expressly authorized by another statute, a municipality or county may not adopt, enforce, or maintain an ordinance, order, or rule regulating conduct in a field of regulation that is occupied by a provision of this code. An ordinance, order, or rule that violates this section is void, unenforceable, and inconsistent with this code." These provisions tell the Texas Supreme Court and Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to recognize that preemption limits city authority. Theoretically, we are just returning to constitutionality here. Then, a provision allows citizens to sue cities violating these laws. The cause of action is minimal. You must warn the city three months in advance that you will sue. If you win, you only receive legal fees, and if the judge considers your lawsuit frivolous, you have to pay the city's legal fees. After the governor signed the bill into law, Houston, joined by San Antonio and El Paso, sued the state in a Travis County courtroom, claiming the law was unconstitutional. That judge ruled in Houston's favor but did not issue an injunction striking the law down. Therefore, the law is in effect now, but no other significant lawsuits have come down the pipeline. The next significant action in municipal preemption is happening right now. Since 2020, several cities across the state have passed ordinances that forbid police from enforcing marijuana laws, including Austin, San Marcos, Elgin, Denton, and our very own Killeen. (Harker Heights did, too, but it never went into effect.) Many people have called this action decriminalization, but that's not correct. Decriminalization is when the legislature changes a crime to a civil offense (basically, turning any possible jail time into a fine). These ordinances order city police not to enforce the law. The sheriff's department, DPS, and constables can still enforce marijuana laws in the city, just not City PD. You can see how much confusion this could cause. Texas law is weirdly specific about this circumstance, saying, "The governing body of a municipality... may not adopt a policy under which the entity will not fully enforce laws relating to drugs." So, predictably, the lawsuits started. They started at the county level, but the state got involved at the beginning of this year. The AG sued all five cities I mentioned to stop these ordinances. The Texas Supreme Court hasn't ruled on either of these issues, and I hope to bring you updates as they progress, but that's where they stand now. That's the history of municipal preemption, so what are the problems? The first problem is unpredictability. Theoretically, home-rule cities had the most power in 1912, and their powers just chipped away as time passed. This uncertainty does not allow for long-term planning for cities or successful activism by voters. As a voter, if you don't know whether you should lobby the state or your city for a specific issue, that's a problem. The second problem is growing regulations. Cities regulate certain behaviors when the state doesn't. Then, the state adds more regulations to stop the cities from regulating those behaviors. This effect is a vicious cycle that grows state and city governments. The third is the famous patchwork quilt problem. If you are expanding your business in Texas, you must deal with nearly 400 different regulations. That amount of regulations cripples small businesses, which in turn slows the economy and kills jobs. So, with these problems, what's the solution? You just need one solution for this problem. The solution is to define the powers of a city. Many people will disagree on what those powers should be, and that's ok. Any set of defined powers is much better than our current status quo. You could even have a list of powers a city could choose from when they write their charters so each city can choose to create parks or public libraries. In my opinion, cities should be limited to three roles. They should run a police department, build and maintain roads, and run utilities. That's it. So what do you think? Should cities have uncapped powers? Is limiting them to three powers to much? Let me know in the comments.

ERCOT, and our Texas Electrical System, is not a free market. Today, at Imagine Better Media, we are going through the history, structure, problems, and solutions to our Texas electrical grid. In recent history, we've seen some significant failures and great successes from ERCOT. We all remember Snowmageddon, and none of us like the constant pleas from ERCOT to reduce our electricity consumption. On the other hand, the low prices and wealth of choices unique to Texas are fantastic. So good, bad, and ugly, we are diving into the most electric part of Texas politics. Electricity in Texas starts with ice companies in the late 1800s. They had power plants on site to run their condensers and sold excess electricity to surrounding houses and businesses. In 1880, we got our first power plant in Galveston, TX. Small electric generators started popping up around the state as the demand for electricity grew. These generators built their own transmission lines to move and sell the electricity. That wasn't the route everyone took, though. In 1891, Greenville, TX, built the state's first fully government-owned electrical system. The city owned the generation, transmission, and electric company. It was so efficient and productive that the city of Greenville became a center for industry in the state. Oh, wait. It didn't. These systems and similar systems are in the background of our whole story but aren't significant, so we won't focus on them. The state's electric system grew in different ways over the next few years, with government and private industry filling all the roles in various ways. In 1905, the state started inching its way into the game. First, it gave authority for district courts to settle disputes between cities and private utilities (companies that controlled the generation, transmission, and sold directly to the consumer). Then, Texas gradually increased the power that municipalities had over electric utilities, shifting the balance of power from the companies to the government. Cities now had the power to set prices that were a maximum of 10% over costs. The artificially low prices and increased regulation pushed companies to grow larger and larger to try to be profitable. Then, in 1924, they started to interconnect their grids to improve the reliability of their systems. At this point, many of the grids in Texas connected themselves to out-of-state grids at many locations. That's when FDR changed the game and incentivized the creation of the separate Texas grid. He signed two bills into law. The first was the Public Utility Holding Company Act, which gave companies an ultimatum. They could divest from grid companies in multiple states, physically connect those grids, or submit to regulation by the SEC. The second was the Federal Power Act, which gave companies another ultimatum. They could disconnect their grids across state lines or be subject to regulation by the new Federal Power Commission. So, over the next ten years, most parent companies that owned the major Texas grids sold them off to escape regulation by the SEC. Then, those companies agreed not to run connections over state lines to escape regulation by the Federal Power Commission. The isolation of the grid could happen in Texas and not other states because the utilities composing the grid were mostly private companies (although heavily regulated ones), and Texas was large enough to benefit from economies of scale. Around the state's edges, utilities chose interconnection over deregulation, which is why the Texas grid doesn't cover all of Texas. Importantly, these interconnections were temporarily resumed for the war effort in 1943 when FDR suspended FPC rules. By the end of WWII, the Texas power companies consolidated into two grids, north and south. Those two systems joined in 1967, creating the Texas Interconnected System, agreeing not to connect their systems out of state. Then, a few years later, in 1970, they created a nonprofit organization called the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT. At first, this organization was to assist in the planning, operation, and restoration of members' transmission infrastructure. They were essentially there to monitor the system and give advice. Five years later, in 1975, the state got involved and passed the Public Utility Regulation Act, creating the Public Utility Commission of Texas, or PUC. This organization's main power was setting rates for all state private utilities and is the primary regulator for the rest of the story. We must pause for a second for everybody's favorite Texas Electrical Grid story, the midnight connection. Essentially, an Oklahoma utility company was envious of the low Texas electricity rates, so they secretly connected with a Texas utility across the border against every agreement the Texas company had signed. Several Texas Utility Companies disconnected from the TIS for fear of federal regulation, and lawsuits sparked from every side. You should read this story because it's fascinating, but it has no long-term effects, so we aren't going to dive deep here. Back to our main story, in 1981, the members of ERCOT (still a completely private company) voted to give the operation of their whole transmission infrastructure system over to the company. In 1995, the Public Utility Regulation Act was expiring, and Governor George W. Bush had his sights set on massive reform. This reform changed how the energy markets worked in many ways, but we will focus on the big two. The first was the unbundling of the electricity market. There were going to be three distinct groups that participated in a competitive market: generators, transmission, and providers. Remember that, at this point, the only providers were utilities, who still had regional monopolies. Second, they restructured ERCOT again to become an independent system operator or ISO. ERCOT would now ensure that all qualified generators can connect to the grid, operate all transmission lines under a uniform policy, and ensure that all wholesale purchasers, or providers, get access to the same rates. Four years later, the legislature allowed new entities called Retail Electric Providers to purchase electricity and sell it to end users. So, let's dive into the structure of the Texas Electrical Market. Over the first decade, there were many debates and transitions the Texas Electric System went through. The first problem to solve is how to let new companies enter the electricity provider and generation markets without the established utilities crowding them out. The legislature created a "price to beat" that the established utilities could not sell beneath. The utilities could also not hold more than 20% of generation capacity in this period, forcing some companies to auction off power plants. This new system started in 2002 and ended in 2007. Just long enough to allow new companies to establish themselves. These reforms worked. By 2008, 85% of users had tried at least two service providers, and 40% of the users were with new providers. The next problem was dealing with the congestion of transmission lines when deciding where power would originate. The two options were zonal and nodal systems. A zonal market would split ERCOT into regions to keep generation close to consumption and only charge congestion pricing when moving across those regions. A nodal market would charge congestion pricing by the wire with no regions. Long story short, ERCOT went with the zonal model, which collapsed in three weeks and transitioned to the nodal model, which we use today. Another problem is resource adequacy, which is just a fancy phrase for generation investment. How do you ensure that companies will invest enough in energy production? The first option is to allow prices to direct investment. When prices rise, they encourage companies to invest. The second option, the rest of the options thrown together, is to incentivize excess capacity in one way or another. Because option two would require massive investment in inspections and checks, ERCOT went with the first option and saw world-leading investments in generation capacity. In a pure market system, they would do away with the energy price cap altogether, but they decided to just increase it. They also added market transparency to increase trust but delayed it to a sixty-day lag to prevent collusion. Then, we have the transmission market. Texas, unfortunately, did not create a market in this instance. Transmission infrastructure is mandated and approved by the Public Utility Commission of Texas. It is a top-down design that guarantees a specific rate of return to transmission companies. Unfortunately, you have two programs far from the market standard: Renewable Energy Credits and the Energy Efficiency Resource Standard. The first is an incentive to build more renewable energy power generation, even if that's not what the grid needs. The second incentivizes power retailers to shave demand at peak times, taking away incentives to provide excess capacity. So, Texas created a "competitive market" for electricity, which provided one of the highest amounts of electricity per capita at one of the lowest costs in the US. So now we can complete the history with the crashes of 2011 and 2021. These crises were a lot simpler than they seemed. Demand spiked during record-cold winters because Texas heating systems are very energy-inefficient. High demand paired with low supply as power generation systems froze. No. It wasn't just wind farms or natural gas that froze. All types of power generation, including coal and even nuclear, froze. So, in 2023, the Texas Legislature created a fund to offer low-interest loans to power generators to construct "dispatchable power." This reform was utterly antithetical to the Texas system. So, what are the problems with the Texas Electric System? The first problem is incentives. Between ERCOT and the PUC, no one has complete responsibility, and because both are now government entities, they have sovereign immunity and can't be sued. Nothing bad happens to these people if they mess up. The second problem is the transmission market. It is underdeveloped because it is run by bureaucrats and not as a market. That is one of the reasons we have solar farms in Bell County. If we had a more robust transmission infrastructure, they would be in West Texas, sending power over long-distance lines. The third problem is poor incentives. The government is spending money incentivizing renewable energy, natural gas, and energy efficiency. All of these distort a market that is better equipped to operate on its own. The solutions to the Texas Electric System follow, but I'll present them in reverse order. The first is to eliminate any incentive programs that the state has to conserve energy or favor one type of power generation over another. Then, we can add a tax on everything the federal government subsidizes to return to the market prices. You could put the money from that tax in a sovereign wealth fund. Just don't give it directly to the general fund. This fix would ensure that Texas arrives at the right blend of power resources, not just the blend of the people who spend more on lobbying. The second is to turn the transmission system into a decentralized market, as we did for generation and retail consumption. This solution would incentivize more investment in transmission infrastructure and remove market power from the few established players. The third and final step is to eliminate the PUC and restructure ERCOT into an organization liable for its wrongdoing and financially incentivized to do better. Private markets work better because they are liable for their failures and rewarded for their successes. We've proven that markets work better than state direction. Let's go all in. What do you think? Do we need the state to incentivize the market? Let me know in the comments.

Everyone is lying to you about inflation. The left says corporate greed causes inflation, and the right says deficit spending causes inflation. They are both wrong, and they know it. We are going through the history of inflation, how it is caused and managed today, and what we can do to eliminate it for good. First, we need to define inflation. Inflation is not rising prices. Inflation is the decrease in the value of money. Rising prices are just a symptom of inflation, not the actual thing. Keep that in mind as we go through the history. Inflation has existed for as long as we've had money, so we will do a lightning round for historical examples before we jump into US History. First, in Ancient Rome, from Nero onward, Rome kept mixing less valuable metals into their silver coins, increasing supply and making them WORTH LESS. Ancient China switched from metallic money to paper money and printed more and more as needed, making it WORTH LESS. Mansa Musa brought so much gold to Ancient Egypt that he significantly increased the supply of money, making it WORTH LESS. After discovering the Americas, Spain imported so much gold and silver to Europe that the supply significantly increased, driving down the price and making it WORTH LESS. Recent history gets even crazier with inflation. Once countries switch to fiat currencies, it is much easier for them to print more money and cause inflation. Dozens of countries even experienced hyperinflation, when a country experiences more than 50% monthly inflation. The most prominent example is the Weimar Republic in Germany after WWI. Instead of balancing their budget, they just printed more and more money, driving down the value of their money and making it WORTH LESS. So, it is evident that increasing the money supply causes inflation. A drop in demand for a currency also causes inflation, but that almost always occurs after inflation has already started, just making the problem worse. There are no significant examples in world history of a stable currency experiencing a drop in demand large enough to cause significant inflation. So now that we know the history of inflation and that an increase in the money supply causes it, let's narrow our focus to the US. We start our country off with a period of inflation. The Continental Congress issued the Continental Currency in 1775, but they printed so much of it by the war's end that it became worthless. After learning that hard lesson, the country turned to a competing currency system. The federal government minted coins but did not issue paper currency until 1861. During this time, state-chartered banks issued over a thousand currencies, each with its own inflation rate. Inflationary currencies eventually died, and stable currencies won a larger market share. People started companies that carried out many of the functions that the government carries out today, including lenders of last resort, deposit insurance companies, and private clearing houses. The US did have "National banks" during this period, but they were not central banks. They were commercial banks owned in part by the federal government. They did issue currency, but that currency had to compete with all other currencies from other private banks. The Bank of North America, the First Bank of the United States, and the Second Bank of the United States were the three banks of the United States. Still, the federal government eventually sold them all to private investors. This system ended with the advent of the Civil War. The Union ran out of money and passed two pieces of legislation that changed American history. In 1861, Congress passed a bill authorizing the US to print paper money, and in 1862, it passed a Legal Tender Law requiring people to accept it as payment for any debt. From here, the US started massively centralizing the Banking System. The federal government put a 10% tax on all state bank-issued currency and created a system of nationally chartered banks that had to follow much stricter and more uniform regulations. They also required bank currency to be issued backed by a certain amount of gold, designed in a certain way to all look the same, and to be mandatorily interchangeable. The US had created a national currency in all but name. Then, in 1913, the US created the Federal Reserve System (which deserves a video all its own). Long story short, the Fed had the power to change the money supply, regulate banks, and be the lender of last resort to failing banks. However, one thing holding the Fed back from increasing the money supply was the gold standard. It could still only print money if it had the gold to do so. WWI gave the Fed all the gold it needed. Because Europe was in a war that needed massive financing, most countries dropped the gold standard and started wildly printing money. Dropping the gold standard drove gold to American markets and drastically increased the money supply, causing yet another round of double-digit inflation. By this point, the US had so much of the world's gold (around 40%) that the resulting inflation was much smaller when WWII came along. That all changed in 1971. Since the beginning of the Fed, anyone could exchange a US dollar for a certain amount of gold. That pegged the dollar to the price of gold. Throughout WWI and WWII, almost every other country abandoned that exchange rate. Because of the gold standard, the US dollar became the currency used worldwide to store value and trade in international markets. It had no competition. And because it didn't have competition, the Fed cheated. The Federal Reserve had printed four times the amount of money the US had in gold reserves, more than any central bank combined. The gold standard was dead, and the Fed killed it. All that was left was to let the world know. In 1971, Nixon signed a bill into law that officially ended the gold standard before a run on the nation's reserves could happen. The inflation of the 1970's didn't happen because of OPEC and oil. It happened because the world realized the money supply was four times higher than they believed. From there, the Federal Reserve was given a dual mandate in 1977 to stabilize prices and minimize unemployment. Unfortunately, those two goals oppose each other in monetary policy, and the Fed decided to print more money to fight unemployment. From that, we have the country's worst inflationary crisis. That brings us to today. As you can see, we can always explain these inflation case studies with increased money supply. So, what does the money supply look like today? Before the COVID lockdown, the M1 money supply in February 2020 was $3.9 trillion. In June 2020, the M1 money supply was $16.6 trillion. That's where inflation comes from. 2020 is the first time we have seen anywhere close to that kind of an increase in the money supply. The scary part is that $4 trillion has yet to hit the market. Since 2009, one way the Fed has controlled the money supply is by creating bank accounts where banks can deposit money and receive risk-free interest. Right now, those accounts have $4 trillion in them and are paying out over $200 billion of interest yearly. That means that on top of the inflation we are seeing today, there's much more to come. So that's the history. What's the problem with inflation? Inflation first hurts people who hold cash, whether physical or in a bank account. It makes their savings worth less, acting like a tax. In my opinion, the more significant effect is that it depresses wages. Even when there is relatively low inflation, at 2% or so, workers must ask for a raise if they want to make the same amount. In a world without inflation, workers could fight for raises that would increase their actual salary. So, what's the solution here? Many people say we need to return to the gold standard, but we've learned that throughout history, the gold standard can also cause inflation. We need a system that has fully stable money. The first step is to remove the Fed's dual mandate. The Fed should only worry about stable prices, not unemployment. The next step is to strip the Federal Reserve of all its powers except its ability to control the money supply by buying and selling government bonds. The Fed should target an inflation rate of 0%. Then, the US should repeal legal tender laws, allowing consumers and producers to accept whatever currency they want. Alternative currencies will provide competition for the US dollar and keep the Fed honest. Don't worry. As long as the US keeps its inflation rate at 0% and you pay federal taxes in US dollars, the US dollar will stay the world's reserve currency. But if the government lies, then the private market can step in and do a better job. What do you think? Are competing currencies too confusing? Let me know in the comments. If you made it to the end, thank you so much. Here's how you can help us. First, you can follow Imagine Better Media on all the social media platforms you use regularly. After that, please share us with as many people as possible, both on social media and in person. Finally, you can go to ImagineBetterMedia.com and sign up for one of our subscriptions. Thank you to our VIP subscribers who help make these videos possible: Steve Moody Levi Bannigan Let's imagine better and make it happen.

The US Government is spying on you... probably. For the last 23 years, the US government has collected vast amounts of data from the Internet and various electronic forms of communication. And that's just what we know about. Join us as we go through the history of FISA. We'll talk about the CIA drugging college kids, secret courts, Presidents breaking the law, spying on presidential candidates, and what we should do about all of it. We are going through the history, problems, and possible solutions to FISA courts. The story begins in the "Year of Intelligence": 1975—the annoying little sister of the summer of love. In previous years, the media kept uncovering misconduct by the government, especially intelligence agencies. So, on January 27th, 1975, the Senate created the Church Committee and tasked them with investigating the overreaches of the intelligence agencies. There were also the House's Pike and the President's Rockefeller Commissions, but we will focus on the Church Commission for time's sake. The Church Committee's work was unparalleled. It produced a report on the intelligence community that was the most comprehensive in Congress's history and, quite likely, the most extensive ever conducted. Even the declassified portion alone numbered more than 50,000 pages, a testament to the thoroughness of their investigation. The Commission revealed programs such as MKULTRA, where the CIA tested drugged interrogation and brainwashing tactics on US citizens (including unwitting college kids); COINTELPRO, where the FBI infiltrated and undermined various political organizations like the Communist Party, Martin Luther King's movement, and the KKK; and Family Jewels, where the CIA assassinated foreign political leaders. However, the primary revelations related to our story are Projects MINARET and SHAMROCK. The National Security Agency, a previously unknown entity, intercepted domestic electronic communications through MINARET and communication between Americans and foreigners under SHAMROCK. They were intercepting millions of communications a year at their peak. By today's standards, that doesn't sound like much, but this was the 1970's. They didn't even have smartphones then. The public was understandably up in arms. People demanded accountability and that Congress stop the Executive Branch from overstepping and violating their constitutional rights. That brings us to President Carter's signing of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act into law in October 1978. For those of you following along at home, that's where we get our FISA courts. If you believe the authors, FISA was supposed to reign in Executive Branch overreach. It was supposed to establish a system where the NSA, FBI, and other agencies had to get permission to collect communications involving Americans or American soil, even when the target of that collection was a foreign power. The FISA Court, or the FISC, was supposed to review the facts of a case and find whether the agency had probable cause that the target of surveillance was a "foreign power" or "agent of a foreign power." The issue with these proceedings was twofold. First, the judges were not appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate; the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court appointed them. Second, the requests and surveillance were secret, removing accountability. According to executive branch policy, law enforcement was not allowed to access the information on Americans that agencies incidentally collected from this surveillance. We don't know much about the abuse in the decades following its passage, but we do know that FISA courts accepted every warrant request from its creation until 2003. That's not a check—that's a rubber stamp. After September 11th, the USA PATRIOT Act changed everything. The PATRIOT Act dismantled the separation of foreign intelligence and law enforcement, known as the FISA wall. That change means that if foreign intelligence agencies like the NSA "incidentally" collect information about a US citizen, they can tell the FBI, and the FBI can then request a warrant to view that information and use it in criminal proceedings. The PATRIOT Act also created Section 215 orders, under which the NSA could collect all business records (usually used for financial records) and non-content communication data (think location data, times, call length, and callers' identities). The only thing the NSA needed to prove to the FISA court was that the information was relevant to foreign intelligence. Fortunately, it also added a sunset amendment to FISA, requiring parts of the law to be reauthorized in four years. After several years of operating under this new regime, journalists at the New York Times and later Bloomberg reported that the Bush Administration and the NSA conducted bulk surveillance of American communications with foreigners without even a FISA warrant. That's when the Bush Administration introduced the Protect America Act. This law was a stopgap that would suspend warrant requirements for their surveillance programs for 180 days while they negotiated amendments with Congress. The Bush Administration and Congress negotiated our last significant change to FISA legislation and passed the FISA Amendments Act in 2008. We will focus on the infamous section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. This section made communication collection legal with authorization from the Attorney General or the Director of National Intelligence. The NSA did not have to get a warrant, only an annual approval from the court. The NSA runs PRISM under these authorizations. In 2013, Edward Snowden told the world how the NSA was using the first part of Section 702. An NSA analyst will create a surveillance target and send it to the FBI. The target can be as large a group of people or criteria as desired. Then, the FBI will go to the relevant technology company with an order for that information and any possible assistance needed. For instance, Microsoft puts data aside to go to the FBI before encryption. Then, the FBI gives that data to the NSA and sometimes the CIA while keeping it for itself occasionally. At a minimum, PRISM collects data from Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, YouTube, AOL, and Apple. And these are just the companies we know for sure. In 2016, the NSA spied on the Trump campaign with a FISA warrant under the justification that Carter Page, a person who worked for the Trump campaign, was a foreign agent. Again, this was legal under the FISA Amendment Act. After these revelations, Congress authorized Section 702 for six more years in 2018, and last week, President Biden signed another two-year reauthorization into law. So, what are the underlying problems with FISA? When conservatives talk about the economy, we have it easy. Free markets are morally good and effective. We can argue from both sides and win. That is not the case with civil liberties. If we had a massive surveillance state that required every citizen to have a body cam that immediately transmitted to the state, then we would catch nearly every crime. And if we had the death penalty without a trial for every infraction, people would stop breaking the law. The reason the US doesn't do this is that it is morally wrong, and we have a Constitution that prevents us from doing so. The Constitution doesn't address the privacy rights of foreign citizens. The Constitution primarily delegates foreign policy to the executive branch without any checks apart from the power of the purse. FISA aims to address what happens when the Wild West of foreign policy meets the Constitutional protections of domestic policy. Right now, the NSA and FBI are collecting American citizen's data and handing it to law enforcement. The Fourth Amendment says, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized." In other words, for the government to search or seize a person's self, house, papers, or effects, they must get a warrant supported by sworn probable cause that specifies what the government will search and what it will seize. Incidental collection through Section 702 programs violates the Fourth Amendment. Finally, some good news! How do we solve this? First, we must roll back FISA to its pre-2001 form. There are no bulk collection programs, and the NSA needs warrants. Second, FISA court judges must be appointed by the President and approved by the Senate. Article III courts work. Let's use them. Third, Congress should codify the FISA wall into law. You should not interact with law enforcement if you work in foreign surveillance. Finally, the FISA court needs to give all requests to the intelligence committees in Congress. The executive branch needs as much oversight as possible. What do you think? Do I have it right or wrong? Let me know in the comments. If I made any mistakes, let me know that, too. As always, please like, subscribe, and ring the bell to get notifications when our next video is out. Then, go and follow us on your social media of choice. 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What role should Universities have in shaping dialogue on their campuses? When does speech become destruction and theft? How far is too far? And is there a sneaky solution hiding in plain sight? We will explore the recent UT protests, the protests in Columbia that sparked them, and a couple of solutions that might sound pretty crazy. On April 17th, Congress scheduled the President of Columbia University to speak about antisemitism on college campuses. Unlike some of her fellow college presidents, the public expected her to take a hardline stand against antisemitism. In response to a leaked outline of her testimony, an organization called Students for Justice in Palestine organized what they called an occupation of part of Columbia University. Students set up tents at 4 a.m. on the South Lawn to "occupy" Columbia University until they divested from Israel. At 12 p.m., Columbia University offered the occupiers amnesty if they left the lawn before 9 p.m. At 1:20 p.m. the next day, more than 24 hours after the University's initial warning, the NYPD arrested the 108 students still left in the encampment under the University's authorization. Immediately after the arrests, students, faculty, and staff reoccupied the western half of the South Lawn, filling the mainstream media for the next week. This event sparked similar protests nationwide at Universities with Students for Justice in Palestine clubs. That's when our story reached the University of Texas. On April 20th, the Palestine Solidarity Committee announced their "Popular University for Gaza" event, later clarifying they would "[Reclaim] our space" and "occupy the South Lawn" in the "footsteps of our comrades at Columbia." The UT administration saw the initial announcement and requested a meeting with the PSC. The PSC agreed to meet but subsequently did not show up. After the no-show, UT sent a letter to the PSC canceling the event. Then UT provided (in their own words) "an abbreviated list of rules related to conduct during protests, including typical consequences as a result of being arrested for criminal trespassing. This notice was provided as a courtesy to all protesters — students and non-University affiliated persons — to help them understand potential consequences for decisions to violate University rules." It is under these conditions that the events of April 24th unfolded. At 11:20 a.m., 20 minutes before the planned walk-out, police arrived at the campus, and protesters gathered a few minutes later. About an hour later, the students started walking towards South Lawn to occupy it and set up tents. Police (University Police, Austin PD, and DPS) told the protesters to disperse or be arrested. Most of the protestors continued to move towards South Lawn, and the police arrested nine of them. At 2 p.m., the protestors started to set up tents on the South Lawn to create a "liberated space." At that point, police started arresting more protestors and pushed the remaining ones off campus. The police arrested a total of 55 protestors, 26 of whom did not affiliate themselves with UT. Since this protest, PSC attempted to "occupy" the South Lawn again with very similar results. The police arrested 79 protestors this time, 45 of whom were not associated with UT in any way. This time, there were also accusations of violence from the protestors and police, but none resulting in any permanent injury. Besides the two attempts to occupy the south lawn, other organizations have held several Pro-Palestinian protests that occurred without a single arrest, including April 25th, the day after the initial occupation, and just this last Sunday. That brings us to today. So, what are the problems here? How does the First Amendment apply, and was it broken? The first important detail is the big difference between Columbia and UT. Columbia is privately owned, and the state of Texas owns UT. That means Columbia has much more leeway to regulate speech. Just like HEB can say that you can't walk around their stores waving a vote Biden sign, Columbia can easily restrict speech on its campus. Since Texas owns UT, the First Amendment applies. The Supreme Court ruled in Healy v James that state-owned colleges must protect speech, but they can restrict that speech's time, place, and manner as long as it is content-neutral. In other words, students' speech couldn't "infringe reasonable campus rules, interrupt classes, or substantially interfere with the opportunity of other students to obtain an education." This is open and shut, correct? The police didn't arrest students until they violated those reasonable campus rules. The protestors clearly meant to substantially interfere with other students' opportunities to obtain an education. There was no content discrimination, just the enforcement of campus rules. Except I left out a whole part of the story. On March 27th, Greg Abbott issued an executive order telling campuses to change their speech policies to "address the sharp rise in antisemitic speech and acts on university campuses and establish appropriate punishments, including expulsion." That is viewpoint discrimination, which lends to a motive for the Governor's actions. That and several social media posts are all it takes to muddle the waters in an otherwise clear situation. So, how do we fix this situation? What is the solution? The first solution is simple. Greg Abbott needs to rescind his executive order and issue a new one asking campuses to enforce their policies in a content-neutral way. The following solution allows the Governor to address the antisemitism on college campuses, but it is quite radical. He could make UT and other Texas colleges private. He could do this by putting them in their own non-profits and even giving them each an endowment so they can continue to offer scholarships to low-income students. The icing on the cake is that he could be the person, along with the State Legislature, to write the rules for how each of these Universities function and choose their boards. Texas could simultaneously free its public universities from the restrictions of the First Amendment and create the most extensive grouping of private conservative colleges in the world. What do you think? Which solution do you prefer? Is the second going too far? Let me know in the comments. If you made it to the end, thank you so much. Here's how you can help us. First, you can go follow Imagine Better Media on all of the social media platforms you use regularly. After that, please share us with as many people as possible, both on social media and in person. Finally, you can go to our subscription page at ImagineBetterMedia.com/Subscriptions and sign up for one of our subscription packages. Thank you to our VIP subscribers for supporting our efforts. Let's imagine better and make it happen.

We know you just got a letter telling you that your house is worth more than you thought, and now you owe the government more money. Did it make you a little angry? Be honest. There's more to that history than you may think. We'll go into how the property tax used to be a wealth tax, how we eventually eliminated our state property tax, and how the state eventually took over our local property tax system. We will start the history of Texas property taxes in 1845 when Texas became a state. In 1845, the state property tax was a general property tax, or what we call a wealth tax today. It consisted of everything you owned, not just real property or land. The Constitution of 1845 stated that "taxation shall be equal and uniform throughout the state. All property in this state shall be taxed in proportion to its value, to be ascertained as directed by law, except such property as two-thirds of both houses of the legislature may think proper to exempt from taxation." Texas then passed legislation outlining how they would value said property. It stated that "each person should give a list of his property and its valuation, verified by oath, and that the unrendered property of non-residents should be assessed by the assessor at its cash valuation and no more." From 1845 to Texas' next and final Constitution in 1876, Texas property tax policy never stood still. Sometimes, the county a person lived in collected their property tax; sometimes, it was the county the property was in, and sometimes, it was the state. These three entities constantly fought over who would asses property value, collect property taxes, and spend the money from those taxes. The constant shifting never let the state even come close to collecting property taxes across the whole state, and the places where it was collecting taxes were undervaluing the property they were reporting. You can see why the early property tax was all over the place. This period is when we get the Comptroller, tax assessor, and tax collector positions, mainly to value the property of non-county residents. With the new Reconstruction Constitution (the same Constitution we have today), Texas implemented a 50-cent cap on property taxes. This cap changed in the Constitution several times but settled on a general revenue rate of 12.5 cents, a school rate of 35 cents, and a Confederate pension rate of 7 cents by 1923. The structures for assessing and collecting property taxes went through several iterations. Texas created the state revenue agent, the state tax board, the state tax commissioner, boards of equalization, and the automatic tax rate board. They passed several laws trying to define the value of businesses, the value of intangible assets, and the value of land. However, with every improvement in property tax collection came a subsequent drop as people found ways around high property valuations. Then, during the Great Depression, there was a 20 percent property tax delinquency rate, and the property tax as a percentage of revenue declined from 73.4 percent in 1915 to 18.3 percent in 1940. The decrease in the importance of the property tax and the complexity of collecting it caused several reforms in the 30s, like the ability to pay in two installments, the homestead exemption, and the discount for early payment. Then, in 1945, the State Auditor found that only seven counties correctly collected property taxes. That report, along with the continual decrease in the percentage of the budget, led to the abolition of the general revenue property tax in 1948, which took effect in 1951. That year, the general fund property tax only comprised 8.1 percent of state taxes. The Texas legislature repealed the school portion of the general state property tax in 1968 and the Confederate Veteran portion in 1979. In 1982, Texas passed a constitutional amendment forbidding Texas from creating another state property tax. So that it? Why do we still pay property taxes? We still pay property taxes because local governments can still tax property. Then why does it feel like we pay the state property taxes? That history starts where the last one ended. In 1973, in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, the US Supreme Court pointed out the massive inequalities in our local property tax system. The counties had all the problems the state had, but they did not have the resources to try fixing them. (Not that the state fixed them with all its resources.) And on top of that, there were now 254 different solutions without compatibility. So in the 1970s, Representative Wayne Peveto of Orange, Texas, advocated for standardization and passed a bill of his reforms in 1979 dubbed the "Peveto Bill." First and foremost, the bill limited the property tax to real property. This tax is what we think of as a property tax today. Then, it separated the assessing and collecting processes, creating county-wide Central Appraisal Districts. For Bell County, that's Bell CAD. These CADs existed so that each piece of property had only one valuation, not a separate one from each taxing entity. They were also required to reassess property valuations every three years. It also created a State Property Tax Board to oversee the CADs, which the legislature later gave to the Comptroller's office. The state set limits to tax rates, increases, and exemptions through this bill. They also set up a system that funded local governments through property taxes but only let those governments control a few factors of those taxes. Since then, the property tax system has undergone many small changes. So, instead of getting into those minutia and discussing the changes, let's examine our current system. Let's start with the Central Appraisal District. What is it, and how does it work? The Central Appraisal District's structure changed last year and takes effect on January 1st, 2025, so we will focus on that new structure. The CAD will consist of a board of nine directors. One will be the County Tax Assessor/Collector (he won't be able to vote), the county taxing entities will appoint five, and the people will elect the final three. The county's taxing entities vote on the five, weighted by the amount of money they bring in from property taxes. The board or three-fourths of the taxing entities can change this specific method. Stay calm here because this board only has three powers. It hires a Chief Assessor, can fire that chief assessor, and sets his budget. On January 1st, the legislature charges them with assessing the value of every piece of property in the county. The Chief Assessor and their team will send the initial property valuations to property owners by April 1st (or May 1st for non-homesteads), so they have time to protest their valuations by May 15th. Now, we get into the protest process. Your protest goes to an entity called the Appraisal Review Board. This board has jurisdiction to hear and rule on your protest. The Administrative District Judge appoints the ARB for the county, which hears both your and the Chief Appraissor's sides before ruling. They hear their first case around May 1st and generally wrap up around July 20th. Suppose you still aren't satisfied with the ruling. In that case, you have a lot of ways to appeal, either through Limited Binding Arbitration, Regular Binding Arbitration, the District Court, or the State Office of Administrative Hearings. Don't worry; I won't go through all of those. At this point, you are almost definitely paying a lawyer more than you would save in property taxes, and they can go through the minutia with you. This appeals process mainly ends on July 25th, when the CAD delivers the certified tax rolls to each taxing entity. That's when the fun begins. Now, the taxing entities go through their tax rate process. First, they must calculate two rates. One is the no new revenue rate. This rate is complicated to calculate but would bring in the same revenue as the previous year if no property had changed. The second is the voter-approved rate. Depending on the municipality, there is a set rate increase that the taxing entity has to get approved by voters if they go over. Usually, this rate is a substantial increase. The legislature set most of these limits in the 1970s, which means they experienced much higher inflation than we do today. Once the entities find these rates, they will create their budgets, set their rates (usually somewhere between the two rates we just spoke about), publish that rate, hold two public hearings about that rate, and finally pass that rate. All taxing entities will set their rates by October 1st when you and I will enjoy paying our property taxes. Then, on January 1st, the whole process starts over. So, what are the problems with this system? There are so many, but we'll just hit the highlights here. The first is obvious. Even with nearly 200 years of reform, this system is still insanely complicated and expensive. Compared with a sales or income tax, it's not even close. The complexity comes from the difficulty of estimating real property value. Sure, when you live in a subdivision with 100 other houses like yours that regularly go on the market, it's relatively easy to get a close estimate, but beyond that, it gets complicated. For a custom build, how do you know how the market will value that new porch you put in? How do you evaluate trendy designs? How do you value commercial property that the owner leased out to an overperforming company? What about a commercial property that only serves as an occasional meeting spot for a much larger, remote company? Texas's property valuation system is probably the best in the country and has a clear and robust protest system. However, wealth taxes will always be complicated and, at least, a bit subjective. The second issue is the morality and fairness of the system. A real property tax is a tax on a necessity. Unless you are homeless, you are paying property taxes directly or indirectly. Being a tax on necessity means that it is regressive. People who make less money generally feel the effect of property tax more than those who make more, even if they aren't directly paying it. And if a valuation on someone's home comes back wrong, then a wealthier person has more resources to challenge that valuation. The third problem is the problem with all wealth taxes, which discourage wealth accumulation. Property taxes do not take into account the taxpayer's ability to pay. Income tax refers to the amount of money coming in, and sales tax refers to the amount you spend. No matter how well it is calibrated and cleverly designed, a property tax has no relation to one's ability to pay. If someone bought a house that suddenly increased in value to the point where they could still pay the mortgage but not the taxes, they would have no remedy except to sell the house. So, how do we solve this? Texas has gotten rid of property taxes before and can do it again. In the 20th century, Texas restrained spending, bringing the property tax down from 73.4% of state revenue to 8.3% of state revenue. We can do the same today. Instead of occasionally buying down property taxes at the state level, the state should move more of the state sales tax revenues down to the local governments. As more money moves to the local governments, include sales taxes in the no new revenue rate calculation. Then, calculate the voter-approved rate as total revenue plus inflation and population. This way, local governments must get voter approval to increase real spending per capita. These steps would reduce the amount of property taxes paid every year until sales tax revenue completely replaced them. Depending on your growth and spending assumptions, this would occur between ten and twenty years from now, making Texas the only state without a property tax. Talk about an engine for economic growth. What do you think? Is eliminating property taxes too far? Let me know in the comments. If you made it to the end, thank you so much. Here's how you can help us. First, you can go follow Imagine Better Media on all of the social media platforms you use regularly. After that, please share us with as many people as possible, both on social media and in person. Finally, you can go to ImagineBetterMedia.com and sign up for one of our subscriptions. Thank you to our VIP subscribers who help make these videos possible: Steve Moody Levi Bannigan Let's imagine better and make it happen.

Our media landscape is dead. The media runs on trust, and everywhere you look, there's less and less of it to spread around. The cable news industries and national newspapers are out of touch, local news is struggling to stay relevant, and the "new media" focuses on getting as many clicks as possible while not caring about the truth. That's where we come in. We are imagining a better kind of media: one that focuses on the story behind the news. From national to local news, we will give you the history, problems, and possible solutions for stories in the world around us. The rest of this article will take you on a journey through our new venture, showcasing the storytelling format we will use for our stories in the future. But it's not just about us telling the stories. We want you to be part of this journey. Please read until the end, when we will share how you can contribute and get involved in shaping the narrative. The history of the news media could fill a full four-year degree and then some. We can't review everything here, but we can hit some highlights and roughly divide the history into four periods. The first period, I am calling the political era. It starts with the founding and ends with the Civil War. The first news organizations in our country were pretty overtly political, from partisan papers that had words like Federalist, Republican, and Democrat in the title to explicitly pro and anti-slavery newspapers. They were also primarily unprofitable during this era, funding themselves from parties, candidates, and patrons rather than selling papers. Yes, the printing press has existed for hundreds of years, but it wasn't enough to make regular newspapers profitable. Freedom of the press, enshrined in the First Amendment, and the growth of political parties drove the development of newspapers in this first era. The news was primarily political, mostly biased, and mostly local. Importantly, it was also mostly not a business but a political tool. The Civil War leads us to our second period, the investigative era. It started after the war and ended in 1920. After the Civil War, newspapers turned into businesses and were about profit over anything else. Three primary inventions drove the costs of producing a newspaper to record lows. The first was the rotary steam presses, which were now standard and cheap, making printing more affordable than it had ever been. The second was the invention of paper made from wood pulp in 1867, which drove down the cost of paper. The third was the telegram, which made getting national news cheap and quick. These advancements created an explosion of new, "independent," profit-seeking newspapers created to make money and the conversion of many of those partisan papers to nominally independent papers. So how did these newspapers convince you to buy their newspaper subscriptions over the other many choices? They broke the news. The investigative era was when breaking a corruption scandal made a newspaper—from the New York Times breaking stories about Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall to Ida B Wells breaking stories about Jim Crow in Tennessee to Upton Sinclair breaking stories about the meatpacking industry. If you broke a story about a systemic corruption scandal, whether true or not, you could have made your paper a lot of money and made a name for yourself. The aftermath of WWI leads us into our third period, the professional era. It started in 1920 and lasted until 1995. Reeling from the propaganda of WWI, the industry tried to fix itself and increase its journalism standards. Two events happened in 1920 to set off the era of professional journalism. The first was the publishing of the book Liberty and the News by Walter Lippman in response to the propaganda of WWI and other lies in major newspapers. He argues that since the will of the people controls a republic and the news controls the will of the people, journalism needs to professionalize and report only unbiased, objective truth. This professionalization leads to norms like not reporting a story without multiple sources and institutions like journalism schools at significant colleges. It also leads to the misunderstanding that humans can report the news without bias. The second event is the first radio news broadcast in November. Radio, and later TV, established a system where single personalities presented the news. As radio and TV became more popular, these anchors, or "talking heads," became trusted pillars of society. This centralization inside news organizations matched an increase in regulations that drove smaller competitors out of business, concentrating the industry into just a few organizations. The centralization grew to the point where the three big broadcast stations, NBC, CBS, and ABC, had an effective monopoly on truth in the US. The explosion of the internet leads us to our final period, the New Media Era. It started in 1995 and continues to the present day. After the FCC repealed the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 and the internet took off in the 90s, news media organizations were allowed to admit their bias and break stories that the big three wanted covered up. Between 1995 and 1996, we founded three media organizations that exemplified this. MSNBC, Fox News, and the Drudge Report were all founded as news organizations with a viewpoint that wanted to break news when it happened. The news media rapidly decentralized from here, with more cable news programs and internet news organizations. This decentralization has led to today's world with many low-quality news organizations. With this explosion of new media organizations, we have more problems. The first is that local news is dying. The internet has incentivized even the most minor organizations to focus only on the national media to gain the largest audience possible. The second is the need for more focus on the truth. Most organizations today care more about exaggerating headlines to get more clicks and, therefore, more ad revenue. Social media algorithms and Google both incentivize this. The third problem is the pace. Focusing on breaking news pushes organizations to refrain from explaining but report and move on. The news has become surface-level, with no exploration of the causes of the problems in our communities. Buzzwords and sound bites dominate today's media. The fourth is that we have moved from an era of no gatekeepers at the beginning of this era, when anyone could post anything online, to a situation where organizations like Google and Facebook can kill an organization with an algorithm change. These four problems are the ones we are trying to solve today. The first solution we have is using personal networks to make local news coverage possible and profitable. Our local news coverage will bring the community to you. With live events, meet and greets, and community groups, we will be your source for learning and interacting with your community. We will highlight local non-profits, elected officials, and business leaders you can meet in person or in our online groups. We will connect you with the right people if you want to be involved. We will be your favorite platform if you want to be an active observer. And if you wish to sit back from the comfort of your home, you can do that, too! The second solution focuses on the following two problems: the media's pace and lack of truth. Slowing down and being deliberate about reporting means we will never break the news. Still, it also means we can take the time to do the work, research topics, and let stories unfold before reporting on them. Long-form reporting allows us to go beyond buzzwords and into the nuance of how the world works. And yes, we are approaching the world from a conservative viewpoint. That doesn't mean we will always agree with conservative pundits. It means that when we look at a solution to a problem, the goal is almost always to include more freedom for more people. The third solution is going to be the diversification of platforms. We will push out content on all the major social media platforms and try to grow our audience there. Still, ultimately, we want people to interact with us directly on our website and in person. We will start with three weekly shows, investigating national, state, and local stories. We will soon add in-person events interviewing local community leaders that you can attend and meet those people yourself. Then, we want to add two shows, one business show and one lifestyle show, to round out the content. We will release our content in video, podcast, and written forms so you can consume it however you want. So that leads us to the inevitable question of how you can get involved and help us build. If you made it this far, thank you so much. The first thing you can do is like and subscribe buttons to the video above. Then, you can go on your social media of choice and follow Imagine Better Media. After that, please share us with as many people as possible, both on social media and in person. Then, finally, you can go to our site, ImagineBetterMedia.com, click on the subscription tab, and sign up for one of our subscription packages. We are pouring all of the money from this back into providing you with the best product possible. Let's imagine better and make it happen.