Braddock, Pennsylvania — a steel town that once fed this nation's industrial spine — has shed nine in ten of its residents over the decades, according to a recent account from the town's former mayor. What deindustrialization and neglect built there is a monument to what happens when Washington serves the boardroom and forgets the mill.
The Founders understood that a republic rests on the dignity of its working people, not on the comfort of distant creditors. Lincoln called labor the superior of capital. When whole communities hollow out and stay hollow, the question is not whether the market spoke — it is who rigged the auction.
The long memory of the American experiment does not forget Braddock. Duty demands we ask which policies, which trade deals, which captured regulatory agencies wrote that town's obituary — and whether we have the honor to write something different.