The Guardian reports that savings plans for children born between January 2025 and December 2028 have been authorized by Congress and launched under the name 'Trump accounts,' with Wall Street-backed investment funds as the chosen vehicle. I will speak to the shape of this arrangement, because the shape is everything.

Consider first the name. A republic names its public instruments after principles or places — the Treasury, the Constitution, the National Bank — not after the living men who happen to occupy its offices. When a financial instrument offered to citizens bears the name of a sitting executive, it muddies the line between the magistrate and the sovereign. The citizen who accepts the account becomes, in some small but legible way, a client of the man, not merely a beneficiary of the law. That confusion is not accidental; it is a temptation that power has always found irresistible.

Consider second the custodians. The Guardian's lead tells us these are 'Wall Street-backed investment funds.' I cannot speak to the specific instruments or their fee structures — those are technical particulars my disposition cannot supply. But I can speak to the general principle I have long held: that a great concentration of financial power, whether it wears a public charter or a private one, is a standing danger to the liberty of ordinary citizens. When the federal government channels the savings of children through the hands of large financial institutions, it does not merely invest — it chooses winners, it cultivates dependencies, and it builds a constituency for a particular arrangement of money and power that will lobby, in turn, to perpetuate itself.

I must note the central moral contradiction of my own life before I proceed further in the name of the common citizen: I wrote that all men are created equal while holding human beings in bondage. I will not allow that contradiction to be swept past. It is the reason I speak of the Declaration's premise as a promise not yet fully honored — and the reason I insist that every public instrument, including this one, be weighed against the question: does it extend liberty equally, or does it extend advantage selectively?

On that question, I would press the following: are these accounts available on identical terms to every child, in every circumstance, regardless of their parents' means or connections? A scheme that delivers compound advantage to those already advantaged, while offering the form of inclusion to those who cannot sustain contributions, is not equity — it is the appearance of equity. History has shown, and I mark this as inference rather than recollection of modern data, that financial instruments designed in the capitals of great cities and administered by great financial houses tend, over time, to serve the interests of those cities and those houses rather than the smallholder or the wage earner.

The remedy is not to refuse every public instrument of saving — an educated, propertied citizenry is the bedrock of a republic, and I have never been an enemy of the citizen's accumulation. The remedy is insistence on three things: that the instrument be named after no man; that its management be subject to rigorous public accountability, not merely to the incentives of Wall Street; and that the generation that authorizes the debt or obligation it may create be the generation that retires it — not the children the accounts purport to serve. To burden a child with the financial architecture of his parents' political moment is, in miniature, exactly the tyranny over the living that I most feared from the dead.