PART VIII: WHAT COMES NEXT

Two futures diverge here.

The first requires nothing. It is what happens if no one acts. Compounding extraction. Shrinking options. A nation that once built the world’s industrial base reduced to managing its own decline while explaining why decline was inevitable.

The second requires a constitutional intervention. A specification, not a wish list. Seven sections designed to close the failure modes documented in this book. An architecture that assumes bad actors and makes their preferred outcomes structurally impossible.

This final section presents both futures. The default trajectory, extrapolated. And the alternative: what it would take to refuse the default and rebuild an ownership society before the window closes.