EATING THE SEED CORN

I’ve spent most of the past decade living outside the United States. Distance has given me something most Americans don’t have: a reference point. And what I see when I look back is a country that has quietly, systematically replaced its instinct to build with an instinct to extract.

This is an attempt to explain what I mean by that — and why I think it explains almost everything.

WELCOME TO AMERICA

Need help with your luggage? That’ll be $9.

You land in San Francisco — gateway to Silicon Valley, the innovation capital of the world — exhausted from a long flight. And before you can even get a whiff of Bay air, you swipe a credit card to use a metal trolley for five minutes. Nine bucks. In the richest nation in the history of human civilization.

A post about this caught my eye, and I haven’t been able to shake the thought: you can tell if a nation is rising or declining within five minutes of entering its airport. 

Lee Kuan Yew made Changi Airport Singapore’s business card to the world. More than 40 years later, it’s still the gold standard — winning Skytrax’s top honor again and again. Baggage trolleys are free, and Singapore surpassed the U.S. in per-capita GDP in 2017 and hasn’t looked back. 

Meanwhile, the United States — the country that invented modern aviation — has zero airports in the Skytrax top 20. When I fly back home to Washington-Dulles, I have about a 40% chance that any given escalator or moving walkway is actually working. 

The post’s core thesis was simple but devastating: one mindset invests, the other extracts. Free trolley = we are building something, come and be a part of it. Paid trolley = we built it decades ago, and now we’re trying to squeeze every last dollar out of it.

I’d go further. The $9 trolley isn’t just about airports. It’s a fractal. The same philosophy — extract from what was built rather than invest in what comes next — shows up at every level of American life now: infrastructure, politics, culture, and who we celebrate.

To understand how we got here, start with a man who stepped down from power 230 years ago.

THE INVESTMENT THAT FOUNDED AMERICA

In 1796, George Washington could have remained president indefinitely. No law prevented it. No army would have removed him. He was the most trusted figure in a fragile new republic.

He walked away anyway.

Because he decided that the long-term health of this new country was worth more than his continued hold on power. He chose personal cost for collective gain. He invested in a future he wouldn’t fully live to see.

That decision — voluntary restraint, self-subordination to the collective — is the actual founding act of America. Not the Declaration of Independence. Not the Constitution. Not the Revolutionary War. The moment a man with unlimited practical power gave it back is when the American experiment became real.

Washington didn’t create a law. He created a norm. And norms are fragile: they only hold when enough powerful people choose to pay the cost of honoring them because the collective benefit is worth it.

For more than 200 years, that norm held. Imperfectly, unevenly, with plenty of abuses — but well enough that the peaceful transfer of power became the bedrock assumption underneath everything else. It gave everyone the basic confidence that tomorrow in America was going to be fine.

That’s what investment is: present sacrifice for future return. The opposite of extraction.

THE BUSINESSMAN WHO ONLY KNEW HOW TO EXTRACT

Now consider a different model.

Donald Trump has been a plaintiff or defendant in over 4,000 lawsuits. That’s not an accident. It’s a strategy: sue everyone who pushes back. Make resistance more expensive than compliance. Use the legal system not to seek justice, but to impose costs until people fold.

He filed for bankruptcy six times. Each time, the same pattern: take what could be taken, restructure the obligations, and walk away while contractors, employees, and small businesses absorbed the losses. From painters to plumbers to piano sellers — hundreds of documented cases of people who did the work and never got paid, because Trump calculated it was cheaper to stiff them than honor the agreement. 

He celebrated this as genius. He said on camera that not paying federal taxes “makes me smart.”

I didn’t like paying taxes at first. I still don’t love it. But my framing of it changed in 2005, when my childhood friend, Staff Sgt. Leroy Alexander, was killed in Afghanistan. I never served. After Leroy died, paying taxes started to feel like the least I could contribute to something bigger than myself — the minimum buy-in to a collective I was asking to protect people I loved. The idea that avoiding that contribution makes you “smart” — from the president (who never served) of a country still sending kids home in flag-draped coffins — tells you everything about what the extract mindset does to the idea of citizenship.

Trump’s philosophy is simple: take as much as possible from any system while contributing as little as possible. Winning means extracting more than you put in. The system — its rules, obligations, and expectations of reciprocity — is for suckers.

Then he applied the same model to the office of Washington himself.

He used the presidency to enrich his own properties, funneling government spending to his hotels and golf clubs (built by the aforementioned contractors he largely never paid). He subordinated foreign policy to personal financial interest. He pressured a foreign government to investigate a political rival. He attempted to overturn a legitimate election — not through legal means, which failed at every level, but by pressuring officials and weaponizing a mob. When he could no longer extract from the office, he tried to burn it down rather than hand it back.

And then we elected him again. Half the country either cheered or shrugged, like all of this was normal.

That response is the part that matters. Trump didn’t create the conditions that made him possible. He recognized them, monetized them, and gave the extraction mindset a hero’s narrative and a megaphone. The drift was already well underway, which means the problem doesn’t leave when he eventually does.

To understand that problem, you have to understand what replaced the investment instinct.

HOW ENTITLEMENT BECOMES GRIEVANCE

In 1955, being American meant resourcefulness. The operating code was simple: if it’s broken, fix it. If you’re failing, outwork it. If the path is gone, find another one.

It wasn’t a perfect era. The 1950s were also marked by segregation, exclusion, and brutality. The American myth was always partial. 

But the animating principle — effort matters, tomorrow can be shaped — powered extraordinary things. Post-WWII America earned its position through genuine sacrifice. They valued what they had because they remembered what it cost. 

Each subsequent generation inherited more and built less — a natural consequence of success. You can’t manufacture scarcity to build grit. But when deindustrialization made the old blueprint obsolete, the reaction wasn’t to scrap, figure it out, and find another way. We chose extraction instead: who took this from me? Who do I blame? Who owes me a replacement?

Extraction is easier. It asks nothing of you — no reckoning, no reinvention, no hard work with an uncertain outcome. It outsources the problem. And when you feel powerless and your sense of agency has drained away, extraction can feel like the only move you have. Investing requires believing the future is yours to shape. You can’t invest in a future you don’t believe in.

This is the psychological mechanism that isn’t talked about enough. The grievance isn’t just made up — it’s rooted in real loss. The anger many Americans feel is legitimate in origin. But the response to that anger has been captured and industrialized by people who profit from keeping it alive.

Grievance is a product now, curated and sold by media companies that discovered outrage is profitable. By politicians who learned that stoking it wins elections without requiring any actual governance. By an ecosystem of influencers and commentators who’ve built careers on being permanently, professionally aggrieved. The model is simple: you’re not the problem. They are. And I will confirm that for you every day in exchange for your attention.

It requires nothing from you. No accountability, no adaptation, and no investment. Just the comfort of righteous, frictionless anger.

Turn on American television for an hour and look at the commercials. Personal injury law firms promise to help you sue someone, anyone, for whatever happened to you. Sports gambling platforms sell the dream of free money without doing anything to earn it. These are now among the most advertised products in the country. Not tools to build something. Not investments in your future. Just two different flavors of the same promise: someone owes you, or luck will save you.

Trump didn’t invent that market. He just cornered it.

THE CRUELEST IRONY

Extraction works… when you have assets to extract from. Trump did: inherited wealth, armies of lawyers, leverage he never had to earn. 

His most enthusiastic adopters are the people with the least leverage of all. The coal miners waiting for an industry that automation and natural gas already buried. The rural communities that stopped investing in adaptation and went all in on resentment. The voters who want government off their backs and demand self-sufficiency — except for when the government should be restoring what the economy took from them.

The mindset becomes: **I** deserve what was promised to me. **They** don’t deserve what they’re asking for. The distinction isn’t about principle. It’s about who’s owed. And the answer is always: me.

Trump understood this perfectly, and extracted from his base most of all — their votes, their identity, their rage, their money, their willingness to storm a Capitol on his behalf — and he gave them a hat and a feeling in return. Not policy. Not investment in their futures. Not even honesty. Just validation. The man who stiffed hundreds of contractors and never cedes attention made tens of millions of working people feel finally, gloriously seen. 

Then he went back to Mar-a-Lago and charged the Secret Service $40,000 in rent to protect him. 

WHAT THE AIRPORT ALREADY KNEW

Old powers like the U.S. turned airports into toll booths. Every friction point became an opportunity to extract more from a captive audience. 

Rising powers treat airports like a 50-year argument, a signal about where the center of gravity is. First impressions compound, and Singapore treats theirs like the opening slide of a national pitch deck. They invest with a hunger that comes from not yet having what they’re building toward.

America is still living off a reputation built by investment — The Marshall Plan, the moon landing, the postwar order. That reputation has a long half-life, but it’s not infinite. You can’t keep extracting from it forever without eventually hitting the bottom. 

One mindset extracts from what was built. The other builds something worth extracting later. 

Top six Skytrax airports? All Asian. All free trolleys. All governed by some version of the same philosophy: we are building something. You are invited to be a part of it.

WHY THIS IS HARD TO REVERSE

Once norm collapse passes a threshold, it becomes self-reinforcing. Incentives invert. 

The network that dials down the outrage loses views and clicks. The politician who demands shared sacrifice gets primaried. Everyone with real agency to shift the dynamic pays a personal cost for trying. 

You can see the logic play out in the news every day: take something that works, slow-walk it, then blame the resulting dysfunction on someone else. Look at Global Entry — a fee-funded, largely automated program designed to reduce pressure on immigration lines. Stopping it costs more than running it, because everyone it handled now needs a human agent instead. The Trump administration suspended it anyway, to “save costs” during a government shutdown — then blamed the Democrats who hold no power whatsoever. Everyone involved knows it makes no sense. But that’s not the point. The point is theatre, and the resulting outrage. You can break something functional, blame your enemies, and count on the underlying system being sturdy enough to absorb the damage. 

For now. The problem is that enough people taking that same approach — extract political benefit today, let someone else pay the institutional cost tomorrow —- is precisely how systems that seemed unbreakable suddenly aren’t. Rome did not fall in a day.

I thought for a while that the extremity we’ve seen — Trump’s blatant disregard for American norms — would trigger some immune response. That enough people would be shocked back into sanity. 

The shock landed, but on people who were already sorted. The alarmed became more alarmed, but the loyalists doubled down. The persuadable middle no longer exists, carved away by media incentives and political dynamics that have sorted people into sealed camps without a common rulebook, scorecard or source of truth.

Reagan sold optimism. Obama sold hope. Right now, there is nobody in American politics promoting a vision that is genuinely about something constructive — about building, collective investment, and a future worth building toward. The void gets filled with extraction dressed up as patriotism. 

And here’s what makes it so hard to walk back: culture change tends to be a one-way street. Anyone who has watched a company turn toxic knows the pattern. Leaders model the behavior. The people who thrive under it get promoted. The people who can’t stomach it leave. Now the culture self-replicates — selected, filtered, and reinforced through every hire and promotion and firing since. You can remove the original toxic leader and wake up the next morning with exactly the same culture, because the culture was never really about them. They were just the permission structure. America seems to have crossed that line. Trumpism doesn’t need Trump anymore. The extraction mindset is now the culture. 

WHAT I SEE FROM HERE

I live in Tokyo now. Japan has its own real problems — demographic crisis, economic stagnation, social rigidity. It’s no utopia.

But when I fly back to the States, often through SFO, I feel it even before I clear customs: aggression, entitlement, complaint. A place that seems less interested in building than in listing what it’s owed. 

I grew up in Virginia, just down the road from where those norms were formed. From where George Washington lived. I know what America is capable of. Not the mythology — the actual capability: the Marshall Plan, the moon landing, the Interstate Highway System, the GI Bill. These were investments: far-sighted bets on a collective future. 

They required powerful people to put long-term building over short-term extraction, and ordinary people to believe the future was theirs to shape.

That instinct isn’t gone. It’s suppressed — by a media ecosystem that profits from grievance, by a political class that has learned extraction pays better than governance, by a culture that has made blame feel more noble than agency.

The countries winning the 21st century remember something the declining ones have forgotten: the purpose of power is to build something worth inheriting.

Washington knew this. Singapore knows this. The path forward is never going to be extraction from the past. It is always going to be investment in the future.

That’s the choice, at every level, for every actor in this story: extract from what was built, or invest in what comes next.

The $9 trolley at SFO is a choice. Every time we prioritize a fee over a functional system, or a viral “win” over a working norm, we are choosing to eat the seed corn of the American experiment. 

The investment mindset starts small. It’s the business owner who pays the contractor early because that’s how we do things here. It’s the athlete who would rather lose a fair fight than win by cheating — and come back to fight another day. It’s the refusal to buy the grievance being sold to you on a glowing screen.

We are living in a house built by giants who sacrificed their present for our future. We can continue to strip the copper from the walls and call ourselves “smart,” or we can remember that it takes work to maintain a house.

And the only question that matters is whether enough people remember what it feels like to build.

The path forward isn’t found in a nostalgic return to 1796 or 1955. It’s found in the simple, defiant act of building something — a business, a community, a norm — that is worth inheriting. 

America didn’t become a superpower because it was lucky or entitled. It became one because it was a nation of people who looked at a blank map and decided to build. It’s time we started acting like them again. 

And the only question that matters is whether enough people remember what it felt like to be building something instead.