About Nature's God America was founded on freedom, supposedly. So how come government intrudes into every aspect of our lives now? How come tyranny is back? Socialism, the modern term for tyranny, was not yet in use in 1776. But the Founders would have had no difficulty recognizing that the socialist redistribution at the core of American policy today is incompatible with the unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness that they thought they put in our Declaration of Independence and protected in perpetuity with our Constitution. What happened? Nature's God describes how Western governments all became functionally socialist, and how the United States, ironically the most deliberately free country ever, is leading the march to this new tyranny. The origins of redistributive socialism are discovered to be ancient and rooted in the primitive instincts of war. But their modern manifestation began with Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and Civil War, which created the paradigm of socialist intervention that threatens us today. Surprisingly, it was "the great emancipator" that set us on this trajectory, one that is now less about freedom and more about global conquest, as the War on Terror becomes the chief danger to our economic and physical security. Domestically, redistribution is creating economic decline and unemployment. Abroad, it is creating enemies that want to blow us up. "Redistributionism" has become the functional equivalent of a state religion in spite of the First Amendment, and is now the central moral value underlying an interconnected lattice of government solutions to all problems, foreign and domestic. Occupy Wall Street's concerns over inequality and the 99% are consistent with the concerns of the SEC and the level playing field the Commission's National Market System was supposed to create. Instead, it produced high frequency trading and dysfunctions like the Flash Crash of May 6, 2010, the Facebook IPO and the Knightmare of August 1, 2012. These are the latest flashpoints on the path of decline that redistribution is taking us down. And they are signs that, for all the freedom we Americans still espouse, our legacy is in danger of bearing more resemblance to the horrific socialist tyrannies of the twentieth century, namely Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany and Soviet Communism. If we are able to avoid this fate, it may be because modern network science will help us rediscover what our Founders were talking about. Network effect theory can show us where we went wrong when, for example, we deliberately destroyed under antitrust the most fundamental and valuable elements of our infrastructure, such as the stock exchanges that create new companies, jobs and wealth. The new science of networks can give meaning again to the freedom our Founders had in mind, and may point the way back to an America living under "The Laws of Nature and of Nature's God." In Nature's God, the reader will discover that there is a practical way back to freedom. It is a way that is very different from what all the politicians talk about. But it is a way that will actually work.
About the Author: Steve Wunsch, the author of Nature's God, is a recognized expert on stock market structure and regulation who has written and spoken on these topics for over three decades, including several times before congressional committees. He is a holder of two patents for the ISE Stock Exchange, launched in 2006, and is the founder of the Arizona Stock Exchange, launched in 1992, both regulated markets that provided an inside look at how the SEC operates. Wunsch saw up close how today's market structure problems, such as high-frequency trading and the collapse of IPOs, had their roots in SEC regulation, as he predicted in testimony, comment letters, articles and speeches going back to the 1990s and 1980s, which are collected in his earlier Kindle books. His new work, Nature's God, dives deep into the regulatory fallacy causing the disintegration of the stock market, and finds a reflection of the inequality debate tearing America apart today. This discovery thoroughly upends traditional market structure theory. But far more important, it provides the key to settling the increasingly uncivil class wars dividing America and the world.