The Constitution: Floor Missing: A Revaluation of Founding Principles

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.

The American Constitution is the most admired founding document in the world. It is also missing something essential.

In DeShaney v. Winnebago County (1989), the Supreme Court confirmed what the text had always implied: the Constitution imposes no affirmative obligation on government to protect citizens from harm it did not directly cause. The Preamble promises posterity — food, housing, education, healthcare, and safety for the child who comes after us. The provisions never delivered it. That gap is the subject of this book.

The Constitution: Floor Missing applies one diagnostic tool to the constitutional architecture: the child test. What does any arrangement produce for the child with no buffer between herself and what the document actually delivers — not what it promises, but what it produces? The child who cannot compensate for structural failure is the most accurate measure of what any system truly is.

Drawing on forty years of clinical practice with America's most vulnerable children, on Patrick Henry and the Anti-Federalists who warned this moment would come, on Nietzsche's diagnosis of the great man of the masses, and on Nobel laureate James Heckman's finding that early childhood investment returns thirteen percent annually — more than equity markets — this book argues the absent floor is not an accident. It is a design. And the design can be changed.

Twenty-eight states have filed Article V convention applications — six away from a convention with no procedural guardrails. The promise of posterity is being captured by figures who would rather hold it over the people than build what it requires. The alternative is simpler than the politics suggests: build the floor. The walls will stay. Once the child is protected, the roof — social security and eldercare — becomes the next task.

The Constitution: Floor Missing is the sixth book in the Abundance Series. It follows Wisdom in Psychiatry (2025) and precedes The Abundance Life (2026).