Ben Cost reveals that our Constitution and legal system were intentionally designed to offer more rights towards the wealthy propertied class compared to the rest folks and exposes how this hamstrings our ability to effectively address a bunch of pressing social and environmental problems—and what we are able to do about any of it.

Many of today’s most serious issues—homelessness, gun violence, fracking, jail privatization, predatory financing, and many even more—resist resolution because the “rights of home” undermine about How Wealth Guidelines the World: Keeping Our Neighborhoods and Freedoms from your Dictatorship of Property the legal rights of people. Conditions that undeniably affect entire communities are determined by the courts to relate primarily to property, agreements, and corporations and so are removed from the public sphere and immunized from open public governance.

There’s a reason for this. Ben Cost tells the story of the way the Federalists—the more conservative faction of the Founding Fathers—secretly drafted the Constitution like a counterrevolutionary record. It restored towards the colonial 1 percent privileges overturned with the revolution, avoiding a favorite backlash by bestowing privileges on prosperity itself, instead of developing a British-style personal aristocracy. These rights of home deprive the majority of their ability to self-govern and weaponize government in ways that allow “minority from the opulent” (in Adam Madison’s term) use the Constitution to block local policies that contend with their interests.

Price information often shocking examples of how the supposedly unalienable rights of individuals and communities are blithely disregarded. But he also identifies how over 200 neighborhoods have drafted their own bills of privileges that rebel against the primacy of home and how we all can sign up for this struggle to come back America to what the revolutionary generation intended.