There are some Americans for whom earnings per share are more precious than democracy, and who care more for the purchasing power of foreign middle classes than their own. In their relentless pursuit of wealth, some of these men have accumulated fortunes exceeding the total wealth of 10,000, 100,000, even 1,000,000 middle class households.

In 1776, the richest American was closer to 1,000x the median.

For lack of any better word we will call these men the “Sith”. The Sith are comprised of actual and aspiring billionaires, and their counselors and servants in finance, law, government, and media, who’s love of money exceeds their love of country.

The Sith deploy every trick they can imagine to directly or indirectly siphon wealth from the American middle class, saddling it with the burdens of war, of defense, of infrastructure, of education, and of caring for the sick and the poor. Their all-consuming pursuit of wealth, their global deal-making to reduce domestic labor costs, corrupts and sacrifices American youth, impressing aging parents into unremitting duty as wards and caretakers of their children, condemning future generations to live beneath the level of their parents.

By their words, the Sith espouse the plunderer’s lie that any check on their unbridled avarice is bad, backed by the traitor’s threat to retaliate with layoffs and outsourcing should anyone intervene. Yet by their hypocrisy, the Sith manipulate the government to write laws that serve their own interests. They shift the proper burden of taxes from themselves onto the middle class. They coerce politicians to subsidize their enterprise, raiding the public treasury to line their own pockets. Promising to create jobs or threatening to destroy them, they blackmail and accept bribes from local governments, turning officials at every level of government into their accomplices.

In laissez-faire’s twilight, the Sith’s insatiable greed drives everything human from all industry, crushing the noblest endeavors of all mankind beneath the oppressive dominion of the institutional investor, earnings per share, and the almighty stock market. In these crimes they are given aid and comfort by frail securities and tax regulators.

The fleecing of America’s middle class has been concealed and numbed behind debt and subsidies. But now, America’s debt exceeds its entire gross national product and the bulk of its population is becoming dependent on government for its subsistence. We cannot allow our national plunder to go on forever. Look what’s happening. To offset the destruction of the middle class and mitigate precarity, a rising chorus calls for Universal Basic Income, the modern-day grain dole.

Unrestrained capitalism is bringing our republic to the brink of ruin. The unmoderated pursuit of gain has driven out all honesty, modesty, and civility from our society and government. Our great democratic republic is under siege. Not by the agents of any malevolent design, not by a thousand-year plot to topple democracy, not even by any foreign rival, but by the sum total of selfish, reckless, unthinking, uncaring economic action.

To be sure, many of the Sith have no idea what they’re doing. In many cases, they simply answer the call of fiduciary duty, falling deaf to patriotic duty. The slow death of our middle class is more attributable to neglect than to malice. It is the cumulative result of a million mathematically rational corporate decisions – closing a factory here, mass layoffs there, outsourcing these jobs, automating those jobs – which decisions are made based on countless models, spreadsheets, and projections which have over the past half century served to accumulate virtually all wealth in the hands of a few shareholders.

To defend ourselves and our democratic society and prevent further injury of our republican institutions and workers we have a right and duty to intervene. Whatever their race, color, or creed, or country of origin, all Americans devoted to America’s founding principles of an independent egalitarianism are the heirs of the Founding Fathers. We have the right and duty to intervene on behalf of the middle class as surely as we have a right and duty to intervene if we’d witnessed a robber or a rapist assaulting our own mothers. We no longer have the luxury of Ronald Reagan’s globalist neoliberalism. To be middle class, or to harbor an authentic hope to rise to the middle class, is America’s birthright. There is no punishment or penalty too severe from those who would steal the American dream from us.

We must intervene. We must bring balance to the Force. But how?

We shall accomplish this by enforcing the Ratio: 10,000:1. This is Rationism.

To enforce the Ratio, simply let no household accumulate more than the wealth of ten thousand middle class households, measured against the median household net worth. Thereafter, as the median household net worth increases, so too does the fortunes of the Sith. But if the middle class should slip, so too shall be the fate of the Sith.

Going forward, we must anchor the top households to the middle class. We should encourage entrepreneurs to accumulate vast fortunes to reward useful innovation. But we must always remember that while ideation may flow from one or a few minds, execution flows from many hands. Capital can achieve nothing without hard work. And it can sell nothing without robust consumers. We cannot allow anyone or anything of great wealth to undermine the modesty, labor, dignity, security, and above all, the independence of ordinary men and women, to infiltrate our government, to mortgage our children’s future, or betray our nation. To save our Republic, adopt our creed: 10,000:1.

Do this, enforce the Ratio, and the Sith are no longer Sith. Enforce the Ratio, and the Sith become Jedi.