The Infield Fly Rule
Why a republic needs rules that make corruption pointless
Yesterday a writer named Vivify Mariposa restacked my article on the unfinished 28th Amendment and left a comment that did something I have failed to do across more than a dozen articles. She named, in a single question, what this entire project is actually about. She wrote that the real question is not who we trust, but “what architecture makes abuse harder even when the wrong people hold power?”
That is the question. I have spent article after article describing specific rules — a ban on federal borrowing, a population-anchored currency, a credit mechanism that returns principal to the borrower — without ever stopping to explain what kind of thing those rules are or why they all take the same peculiar shape. A careful reader noticed the shape before I named it. She observed that most political conversation argues about personalities while the machinery stays intact, and that any reform depending on the federal government restraining itself is already compromised, because no system can be trusted to police the exact powers it profits from abusing.
She is right on every count. Her own writing at No Filter. Just Facts. works the same seam from her own angle, and if you find what follows worthwhile, you should subscribe to her too. So this is the article I should have written first. It is the explanation of what the Restoration Project is, why it exists, and why every proposal in it is built to do one specific job. I owe the framing to her, and I am grateful for the prompt.
We Are Not a Democracy
Before anything else, a word about a word. Democracy gets thrown around constantly in American political talk, by people across the whole spectrum, as if it were the name of our system. It is not. The United States is not a democracy. It is a democratic elected representative republic, which is a different thing, and the difference is the whole point.
Democracy is direct majority rule. Whatever fifty-one percent want, fifty-one percent get. The old line captures the problem exactly: democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what is for dinner. The sheep loses every time, and the vote makes the loss look legitimate. Majority rule with no higher law is just the strong eating the weak with a show of hands. The Founders understood this, which is why they built something with brakes on the majority — a structure of law that the majority itself cannot simply vote away.
The full case for why the distinction matters, and how far the confusion has spread, is its own article for another day. For now the short version is enough: we elect representatives, those representatives operate under a written law that constrains them and us alike, and that written law is what makes us a republic rather than a mob with a ballot box.
What the Republic Actually Is
The word republic comes from the Latin res publica — the public thing, the matter that belongs to everyone rather than to a ruler. A republic is government by law rather than by the will of a man. Rule by law, not rule by ruler. That is the entire wager of the American founding.
A king governs by his own will. His mood, his interests, his judgment on a given morning are the law. A republic replaces the king’s will with a set of rules that apply to everyone, including the people who hold office. The promise is that the rules govern the rulers, rather than the rulers governing through whatever rules happen to suit them.
This is why the people we send to office are properly called representatives, and why the older word for them is servants. They do not own the public thing. They administer it on behalf of the people who own it, which is all of us. They are granted power by the people, for the benefit of the people. They are not royalty. They hold no station above the citizens who lent them the authority, and the authority is a loan, revocable at the next election, not a possession.
Many who reach office forget this. The forgetting is so common that it is worth saying plainly, as a gentle reminder: a representative who behaves as though the power is his own, to be used for his own ends, has misunderstood the job at the most basic level. The power was never his. It was ours, handed to him to hold in trust. That is what it means to live under rule by law instead of rule by a man.
The Trouble With Servants
Here is the difficulty the Founders knew and we keep rediscovering. Wherever power exists, the people most willing to abuse it are the most eager to obtain it. Power is a magnet, and it pulls hardest on exactly the personalities least fit to hold it. This is not cynicism. It is one of the oldest observations in political life, and it is true regardless of party, era, or country.
Tom Woods recently interviewed Doug Casey, a self-described anarcho-capitalist, who put the diagnosis about as bluntly as it can be put. Casey argued that a certain percentage of people are simply destructive by nature and that they gravitate toward politics because politics “lets you control other people… without producing anything in exchange.” On that point he is not wrong. Office offers the corruptible a way to command others while creating nothing, and so the corruptible come for it. Casey sees the disease clearly.
But look at the cure he prescribes. Because the people drawn to power are bad, Casey concludes, political solutions are hopeless, and the only sane move is to withdraw — to abandon politics entirely and build a good private life beyond its reach. This is the anarcho-capitalist answer, and it rests on the belief that nearly everything in human affairs can be handled privately, by voluntary contract between consenting parties, with no governing authority above them.
It is a tempting picture, and it is wrong. It fails the moment you ask it to handle the people who refuse to consent to anything.
Consider three questions I put to anyone who holds the contract-only view. First, the free rider: the neighbor who enjoys the safety of a patrolled street but refuses to pay a cent toward the patrol. Who makes him contribute to the protection he benefits from? Second, the refuser: the man in a dispute who simply rejects arbitration altogether, who will not agree to any private judge and will not abide by any ruling. Who compels him to answer for the harm he has done? And third, the hardest case: the parent who abuses his own child. The child cannot contract. The child has no bargaining power, no money, no standing in a world made only of voluntary agreements. Under a pure contract-and-property frame, the child is effectively the property of the abuser, and no one has the authority to intervene unless the abuser consents to be intervened upon, which he never will.
No decent person accepts that conclusion. The child is not property. Someone must have the authority to act on the child’s behalf, and that authority cannot derive from the abuser’s agreement, because the abuser will never give it. Which means a non-consensual protective authority must exist. There are problems that only such an authority can solve, and the abused child proves it beyond argument.
So the anarcho-capitalist, pressed honestly, has to come away from his position. Once he admits the child must be protected, he has admitted that some authority above private contract must exist. The question was never whether to have government. The question is how much, and of what kind. My answer is the minimum amount of government necessary to maximize both freedom and security — no more, but no less. Enough to answer the three questions. Not an ounce beyond that.
The Real Question
Now put the two halves together. Casey is right that power attracts the corruptible. The anarcho-capitalist is wrong that we can therefore do without authority, because the abused child and the free rider and the arbitration-refuser all require an authority that does not ask the wrongdoer’s permission. So we are left with a hard fact: an authority must exist, and that authority will attract exactly the people most likely to abuse it.
This is the trap that makes people throw up their hands. If we must have power, and power corrupts, and the corrupt come for it, then what hope is there? Casey’s answer is to flee. But fleeing does not empty the field. It fills it. When the decent withdraw, the authority does not disappear — it falls entirely into the hands of the very people Casey warns about. Surrender guarantees the outcome it fears.
There is a better answer, and it is the one Vivify named. The problem is not, in the end, that bad people exist. Bad people will always exist and will always seek power. The problem is that our rules reward them — that the machinery, as currently built, pays out to the corrupt. So the task is not to find good enough people to be trusted with badly built power. The task is to build the power so that it cannot be abused profitably, no matter who holds it. What architecture makes abuse harder even when the wrong people hold power? Everything that follows is the answer.
Every Set of Rules Develops Loopholes
Start with a fact about rules themselves. No matter how carefully they are written, the people who operate under them eventually find the gaps. A loophole is a place where the rules, exactly as written, permit a move the rule-makers never intended and would have forbidden if they had foreseen it. The player who finds the loophole gains an advantage. And because the move is technically legal, nothing stops the advantage from compounding. The exploit becomes the standard play. Everyone who refuses to run it loses to everyone who does.
This is not a flaw in any one rulebook. It is a property of rules as such. Language cannot anticipate every situation. The people who wrote the rules were solving the problems they could see, not the problems a century of clever people would invent by probing for gaps. Loopholes are not proof that the rule-makers were foolish. They are proof that rules are living things that require maintenance.
And the maintenance has a specific form. When a loophole is found, the answer is a new rule that closes it. Not a sermon about how players ought to be more honest. Not an appeal to elect better players. A new rule that makes the loophole stop working.
The Cleanest Example in the World
The best illustration of how a good rule closes a loophole comes from baseball, and it has nothing to do with money or government. It is the infield fly rule, and it is worth walking carefully, because it shows the principle in its purest form.
Picture a runner on first base, fewer than two outs. The batter hits a high, easy pop fly to an infielder. Under the ordinary rules this creates a trap. The runner on first cannot stray far from the base, because if the infielder catches the ball the runner must be standing on first or he can be doubled off. So the runner waits near the bag.
Now the infielder sees his chance. If he deliberately lets the easy ball drop instead of catching it, the ball is suddenly live and in play. The runner, who was waiting near first, is now forced to run. The infielder scoops up the ball he intentionally dropped, steps on second for one out, throws to first for another, and turns one lazy pop fly into a double play. The defense is rewarded for not catching a ball it could have caught in its sleep. The honest play — making the catch — yields one out. The dishonest play — dropping it on purpose — yields two. The rules, as written, pay a premium for deception.
The infield fly rule closes this loophole. When the conditions are met, the batter is automatically out the moment the umpire judges the pop fly catchable, whether or not the fielder actually catches it. And notice exactly how the rule works. It does not punish the fielder. It does not require the umpire to read the fielder’s mind or prove he meant to cheat. It does not add a penalty for dropping the ball. It simply removes the reward. Once the batter is out either way, the fielder gains nothing by letting the ball fall. The dishonest play and the honest play now produce the same result, so the dishonest play disappears. Not because fielders became more virtuous. Because the rule made cheating pointless.
That is the whole principle. The best rules do not police behavior. They remove the incentive that made the bad behavior pay. Take away the reward, and the exploit vanishes on its own, with no enforcer required to judge anyone’s heart. This is the answer to the trap. We cannot make the corruptible virtuous. We can make their corruption worthless.
The Constitution Is a Set of Rules With Loopholes
The Constitution is the rulebook of the American republic. The Founders wrote it well — well enough to outlast every comparable written constitution on earth. But they were writing rules, and rules develop loopholes, and two centuries of clever people have found the gaps. They did not fail to write a good document; the document was abandoned at specific, identifiable moments when no one turned the lock.
Consider a few. The Founders did not forbid the federal government from borrowing without limit, because in their world borrowing was an emergency measure for wars, expected to be repaid promptly afterward. They did not foresee a government that would borrow perpetually, in peacetime, as a permanent substitute for taxation. That is a loophole. It lets the government spend money it never has to ask the citizens to provide, severing the connection between what is spent and what the people are willing to pay. I have written about this in The Parable of the Toxic Spouse and the case for the borrowing ban.
The Founders did not anticipate that banks would create the money they lend out of nothing, as a bookkeeping entry against the borrower’s promise, and then keep the principal that the borrower’s signature created. That is a loophole. It lets an institution collect on value it never provided, treating the borrower’s own created credit as the bank’s permanent property. I have written about this in Credit Never Dies, The Security You Didn’t Know You Issued, and Your Credit, Your Property.
The Founders funded the government through tariffs and excises for the republic’s first 137 years, with no tax on income, because a direct federal claim on a citizen’s earnings was exactly the kind of power they had fought a revolution to escape. The income-tax loophole, opened in 1913, gave the government a bottomless revenue source that funds the borrowing and the spending the other loopholes enable. I have written about the alternative in The High-Value Nation.
Each of these is a place where the original rules permitted a move the Founders did not intend. Each became the standard play. And in each case our politics has offered the wrong kind of response. We argue about which party should hold the powers these loopholes created. We argue about whether the people running the exploit are good people or bad people. We argue about personalities while the machinery stays intact — exactly as Vivify said.
What the Restoration Project Actually Is
The Restoration Project is a set of new rules designed to close the constitutional loopholes the same way the infield fly rule closes its loophole. Not by electing better people. Not by trusting the right party to wield the powers responsibly. By removing the reward that makes the exploit profitable, so that the exploit stops on its own.
The ban on federal borrowing does not ask Congress to be disciplined. It removes the ability to spend without taxing, which removes the reward for hiding the true cost of government from the citizens who pay it. The Population Principle does not ask central bankers to be honest. It removes the discretion that lets the money supply be manipulated, by anchoring the currency to the living population — a number no official can quietly adjust. The Reverse CD Loan does not ask banks to be generous. It removes the bank’s ability to keep principal it never owned, by returning that principal to the borrower who created it, the same way a Certificate of Deposit returns a saver’s principal at maturity. The bank still earns its fee for the service it actually performs. It simply can no longer keep what was never its property.
Every proposal in the framework has this shape. Each identifies a loophole, and each closes it by making the abuse produce nothing, rather than by trusting someone not to commit the abuse. This is why Vivify’s question is the right one, and why Casey’s despair is the wrong conclusion drawn from the right diagnosis. The framework does not ask who we trust. It asks what architecture makes abuse harder even when the wrong people hold power. The answer, in every case, is a rule built on the infield fly principle: take away the reward, and the exploit takes care of itself.
This is also why any reform that depends on the government restraining itself is already compromised. A rule that says the government shall exercise this power responsibly is not a rule. It is a hope, and it depends on the goodwill of the exact people who profit from abusing the power. The infield fly rule does not say fielders shall not deceptively drop the ball. It makes the deceptive drop pointless. A real rule does not request good behavior. It removes the conditions that make bad behavior pay.
Restoration, Not Revolution
I call this the Restoration Project, and the word is chosen with care. I am not proposing to replace the Constitution. I am proposing to repair it — to patch the rulebook the way any rulebook gets patched when the players find the gaps. The whole 28th Amendment is that patch, written out in legislative form. The wager of the founding was rule by law, and that wager is sound. It has degraded only because the rules developed loopholes that let rule by law slide, quietly and legally, toward rule by whoever controls the exploits. Closing those loopholes does not overthrow the founding. It restores it.
Some have called this idea Constitution 2.0, and the software metaphor fits in one specific sense. You do not throw out an operating system because someone found a vulnerability in it. You patch the vulnerability. The system keeps running, stronger for the fix. The Founders built version one and built into it, through Article V, the very mechanism for issuing the patches. They knew the rulebook would need maintenance. They left us the tools to do it.
The maintenance is overdue. The loopholes have stood open for generations, and the exploits that run through them have hollowed out the republic the rules were written to protect. But the fix is not mysterious and it is not radical. It is the same fix baseball reached for when it noticed the rules were rewarding fielders for dropping the ball. A new rule. One that makes the cheating pointless.
That is what every piece of this project is. That is what it has always been. It took a reader’s single sharp question to make me say it plainly, and I am in her debt for the prompt.
What architecture makes abuse harder even when the wrong people hold power? This is my answer. Everything else I have written is one application of it or another.
Where to Go From Here
If this is your first stop, the best on-ramps are How to Read This Substack and When You Eliminate the Impossible, which lay out the method behind everything else.
On how money and credit actually work: What Is Money?, The Paper Claim, It’s Not Money, Why Is a Bond Money?, Reserve to Treasury, The Mind Virus, Credit Never Dies, The Settlement Nobody Will Discuss, and Before Zero.
On the constitutional architecture and the remedy: The Toolbox, The Population Principle, The Security You Didn’t Know You Issued, Your Credit, Your Property, Spiral Logic, The Founders’ Spiral, The First Draft, An Open Letter to Congress, The Shell Game, You Are About to Be in Custody, and the keystone The Amendment That Restores America.
On how the extraction operates: Two Tapeworms, The Tithe He Never Earned, The Locusts, Selling What Is Non-Existent, The Company Store, The Parable of the Toxic Spouse, Feudal Serfdom With a Mailbox, The Velocity Trap, and Trickle Down Economics Could Have Worked.
On faith and first principles: The Arrogance of Scheduling God, The Mechanism of Infallibility, and The Counterfeit Catechism.
On geopolitics and foreign policy: The Achilles Heel (and Parts 2, 3, 4), The Pipe That Ends Iran’s Power, Why Churchill Couldn’t Make Peace, The Judo Move, and The High-Value Nation.
— — —
Beyond the Big Cycle: How Credit Enslaves Us — And the Amendment That Sets Us Free is my forthcoming book. Subscribe to this Substack to be notified when it drops.
— — —
theplummer is a retired law enforcement officer and plumber who has spent seventeen years studying monetary policy and institutional power structures.