Who decides?

As what I believe is an unusually pivotal midterm election draws near, it strikes me that this midterm is less about the usual partisanship and more about a fundamental question regarding governance.

“Who decides?”

As in, who decides how we order our lives? Do we, as free citizens, decide for ourselves, from the bottom up, through millions of individual choices made by families, workers, entrepreneurs, consumers and communities? Or do we increasingly turn those decisions over to an elite ministerial class that believes it knows better and therefore seeks to govern from the top down?

In 20-plus years of writing these pieces for radio, TV and the web, I have consistently made the case for the former while strongly rejecting the latter.

For nearly two and a half centuries, America has conducted a remarkable experiment in bottom-up decision-making.

“Bottom-up” was a radical idea in 1787 as delegates from the 12 of the original states gathered in Philadelphia to draft the U.S. Constitution. For almost all of history, “top-down” was the default.

The Founders believed that authority should originate from the individual choices of free citizens and move upward. Families should decide what matters to them. Workers should decide where to work. Consumers should decide what to buy. Entrepreneurs should decide what risks to take and be free to allocate capital accordingly. Communities should decide what they value.

Government isn’t absent in this vision, nor could it be. Government’s role is indispensable. But under the American arrangement, it is intended to be the servant of this vast, unruly, decentralized process, not its master.

Bottom-up has never been tidy. In fact, it has often been quite messy and sometimes downright ugly. Free people make mistakes. Markets misallocate. Voters get things wrong.

But the genius of bottom-up decision-making is that mistakes remain dispersed and correction remains possible. Millions of people continuously test ideas against reality. What works spreads. What fails is abandoned.

The results have been compelling. A nation that began as a thinly populated collection of former colonies became the most prosperous and innovative society in human history. Bottom-up America produced astonishing abundance, technological progress, social mobility and individual opportunity.

Contrast this vision with top-down.

Top-down concentrates decision-making in an elite ministerial cohort — politicians, regulators, administrators, academics and credentialed experts — whose defining conviction is that complicated societies can only succeed if sufficiently enlightened people are given sufficient authority to manage them.

The irony considering the 2026 midterm campaign is hard to miss. Many Americans now advocating more top-down control have lived extraordinarily comfortable lives amid the prosperity, freedom and abundance produced by the system they increasingly distrust. They inherited the fruits of bottom-up America and now propose consigning their liberties to the ministers of top-down.

And this should not be overlooked: Every decision transferred upward makes the next transfer easier – until one day there’s nothing left to transfer.

So, forget about party labels. Forget about the likeability or lack thereof of this or that candidate. Instead, ask yourself this one question.

Who decides?

And then vote accordingly.