Prosperity Has Rules. They Are Out of Date.

Markets are not natural objects. They are made of contracts, currencies, and courts — institutions that humans build and that humans can rebuild. The American economy of 2026 still runs on rules drafted for an economy of factories, paper records, and one wage-earner per household. The result is an economy whose top decile has captured almost all of the productivity gains of two generations, while housing, healthcare, education, and childcare have outrun ordinary wages by a factor of three.

The proposals in this pillar accept that markets remain the most powerful tool ever devised for allocating effort. They do not propose to replace them. They propose to update the rules under which they operate: a tax code aimed at consumption and economic rent rather than labor; trade policy that distinguishes between competition and coercion; labor law that recognizes a workforce that is no longer ninety percent W-2; antitrust authority that can keep up with platforms whose marginal cost is zero.

What follows are eight topics, the largest cluster in the Compact. They are organized by what part of the economy each touches: how it is taxed, how it is traded, how its workers are protected, where new ideas come from, and what it costs to live a normal life under it.