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Chapter 94: Re-routing the Brains

A few months into his presidency, Julian Corbin accepted an invitation to give the commencement address at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He stood before a sea of the brightest young scientific and engineering minds in the world, a graduating class that represented a staggering concentration of pure, unadulterated intellectual horsepower.

He began his speech in the traditional way, congratulating the graduates on their immense and hard-won achievements.

“You are,” he said, his voice carrying across the sun-drenched lawn, “the architects of the future. You are the minds that will cure our diseases, that will build our new energy systems, that will take us to the stars. Our nation, and our world, is depending on your genius.”

He paused, letting the comfortable, familiar praise settle in. Then, he pivoted.

“But I am here today,” he continued, his tone shifting from celebratory to something more sober and urgent, “to tell you that our nation is suffering from a quiet, creeping, and catastrophic crisis. It is not a crisis of debt, or of defense, or of diplomacy. It is a crisis of allocation. We are suffering from a catastrophic misallocation of our single most precious resource: your intelligence.”

A confused murmur went through the crowd of graduates and their proud parents.

“For every one of you in this audience today who will go on to build something new, to create a new technology, to found a new company that pushes the boundaries of human knowledge,” he said, his voice now a sharp, diagnostic tool, “another of our nation’s brightest minds, a mind as brilliant as any of yours, will be drawn into a parasitic, zero-sum game.”

He detailed the two great siphons of the nation’s intellectual capital.

“First, the legal system,” he said. “They will go to our best law schools, and they will become experts in a system so needlessly and deliberately convoluted that its primary function is no longer to deliver justice, but to enrich the tiny priesthood of those who can successfully navigate its complexity. They will spend their entire careers, careers of immense intellectual potential, in endless discovery battles and procedural motions. They will be brilliant minds, trapped in a machine that is designed to consume human ingenuity in the service of conflict.”

“Or,” he continued, “they will go to Wall Street. And they will not go to fund the next great invention, the next Nexus. They will go to design high-frequency trading algorithms that can skim a tenth of a penny off a million transactions a second. It is a breathtakingly intelligent and sophisticated way to produce absolutely nothing of tangible value for society. It is a system that creates immense private wealth, but no collective good.”

He looked out at the faces of the young graduates, at the future of the nation.

“This,” he declared, “is the ultimate, hidden tax of a broken and overly complex system. It is not a tax on our money; it is a tax on our minds. It is a tragic and unsustainable brain drain, not to other countries, but into the unproductive, parasitic sectors of our own economy.”

He then laid out his final, optimistic vision, the grand, ultimate purpose of the entire MARG project.

“The ultimate goal of our project of radical simplification—of our tax code, of our legal system, of our regulatory state—is not just about economic efficiency. It is about intellectual liberation. It is about freeing up hundreds of thousands of our country’s most brilliant minds from these zero-sum games and re-routing that immense, trapped brainpower towards solving our real, existential problems.”

“With the rise of artificial intelligence and automation,” he concluded, his voice now ringing with a quiet, powerful hope, “the mundane and repetitive tasks of our civilization will be handled by machines. This will leave us with a surplus of our most precious and uniquely human resource: our ingenuity. We must not waste it. We must unleash it. Let us build a nation where our best and brightest are incentivized not to fight each other over the scraps of a broken system, but to work together to build a new and better one.”

The speech was met with a moment of stunned, thoughtful silence, which then erupted into a roar of sustained, and deeply felt, applause. It was a message that resonated with a generation that was hungry not just for a successful career, but for a profound and worthy purpose. President Corbin was not just offering them a job. He was offering them a mission.

The Discourse, 94; The Economics of Human Potential

Section 94.1: The "Misallocation of Capital" as a Core Critique

The speech articulates one of the most sophisticated and profound arguments of the entire MARG platform. It takes a core concept from economics—the "misallocation of capital"—and applies it not to money, but to human talent and intelligence. In a healthy, efficient market, financial capital is allocated to the ventures that are most likely to produce a high return, leading to economic growth and innovation. A common critique of a broken or over-regulated economy is that it misallocates this capital, funneling it into unproductive or "rent-seeking" activities.

Julian Corbin's genius here is to extend this argument to what he considers the nation's most valuable resource: its "intellectual capital." He is arguing that the American system is now so complex and dysfunctional that it is incentivizing its smartest citizens to pursue careers that are highly lucrative but socially unproductive. The two examples he uses are perfect:

• Complex Litigation: A zero-sum game where one side's gain is another's loss, and immense resources are consumed in the process.

• High-Frequency Trading: A form of financial "rent-seeking" that extracts tiny amounts of value from the market's infrastructure without creating any new wealth or societal value.

Section 94.2: "Parasitic" vs. "Productive" Economic Sectors

The speech draws a sharp and clear distinction between two types of economic activity, which can be defined as parasitic and productive.

• The Parasitic Sector: Consists of industries or activities that primarily exist to exploit the complexities and inefficiencies of the existing system. They do not create new wealth; they redistribute existing wealth, often while consuming significant resources. The legal-lobbying complex and much of the speculative financial industry fall into this category in Corbin's analysis.

• The Productive Sector: Consists of industries that create new goods, new services, and new knowledge. Science, engineering, entrepreneurship, and skilled trades are in this category. They are positive-sum activities that increase the total amount of wealth and well-being in a society.

Corbin’s argument is both a moral and an economic one. He is arguing that a healthy society must have a system of incentives that encourages its best and brightest to enter the productive sector. His entire project of "radical simplification" is presented here not just as a way to make life easier, but as a grand, national project to re-route the nation's "brainpower" from parasitic to productive endeavors.

Section 94.3: The "Liberation of a Generation" as a Core Vision

The speech is the optimistic, forward-looking counterpoint to the grim, defensive battles of the early presidency. It is a powerful piece of rhetoric because it is not just a critique; it is a deeply inspiring vision. The speech is aimed directly at the aspirations of a generation of young, talented people. It is not just offering them a better economy; it is offering them a more meaningful life. The vision is one of liberation—the liberation of human potential from the wasteful and soul-crushing drudgery of a broken system.

The final connection to the rise of AI and automation is a masterstroke. It frames this "re-routing of brains" not just as a good idea, but as an urgent historical necessity. In a future where machines handle the routine work, the only thing that will determine a nation's success is the quality and the focus of its human ingenuity. This speech is Julian Corbin's ultimate, long-term plan for "Making America REALLY Great." It is not about returning to a mythical past, but about building a smarter, more purposeful, and more human future.

Section 94.4: The Call to a "Creative" Class

Ultimately, the commencement address is a generational call to action. It is a direct appeal to the idealism and ambition of the next generation of leaders. It is a challenge to the prevailing cultural narrative that the "best" path is the one that leads to the most wealth, regardless of its social utility. Corbin is attempting to create a new definition of "success" for this emerging generation, one that is based not just on personal profit, but on productive contribution to the common good. This is a profoundly philosophical and almost spiritual argument. He is asking the next generation to be not just smarter, but wiser. He is asking them to be the builders and the creators, not the exploiters of a broken system. It is the most aspirational and hopeful message of his entire presidency, a final statement of his belief not just in the power of systems, but in the power of the human minds that design them.