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Publication Date: July 4th, 2026

A clean charter that drives accountability and outlasts bad leaders, economic and population growth, real civic ambition; why does America's first chartered city lack all three?

Image remixed creatively from The Economist Magazine.

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The Briefing Box:

• HCS Claim: The world is copying America at 250. The one place not copying it is America's first chartered city, which keeps beating yesterday's Hudson and calling it victory.
• US & Hudson Founding, Key Difference: America's founders built a self-correcting constitution. Hudson's built a grid, a port, and a wage economy 80 years ahead of the nation, then never fixed the charter.
• Our Diagnosis: Hudson is not the problem. Its government is. Our people, our artists, and our businesses thrive in spite of a City Hall and a school system that are, with some notable exceptions, deadweight.
• The Capture: Very expensive, mostly failing public schools; a parade of deeply flawed, self-interested mayors with Albany aspirations; and ever-higher taxes that buy fewer core public services, with residents now billed separately for their sidewalks and charged by the bag for their own trash.
• Our Ask: Do not ask how Hudson today can be better than Hudson yesterday. Ask how it can be more American, and finally realize its potential. </aside>

First US city chartered. Last city to fix its charter and grow up?

America at 250 Is Winning*

Say what you like about who sits in the White House. America at 250 is winning. Per person, Britain, the empire we left, is now poorer than every American state, Alabama and Mississippi included. We put more mass into orbit than the rest of the planet combined, much of it on rockets built by an African immigrant. We run the largest satellite network in history and our AI labs are leading the world. This summer we co-host (with Greater Mexico and Greater Alberta) the largest sporting event the world has ever staged, and the world’s soccer fans and travelers are arriving to find neither the poverty nor the ignorance they were promised.

Immigrants the world over make enormous sacrifices to reach our shores because they want what we have. Over the past two years even the democracies and kleptocracies of South America, tired of the old cycles of stagnation, have turned toward markets and growth, not away. The American model is not on trial. It is being copied and admired the world over.

Yes, our Union is not perfect. We are the only rich World Cup nation without universal healthcare, they say, though the comparison is not quite fair. And that is the point. America runs on liberty rights, not entitlement rights: the freedom to try, not the promise of a result. Talent notices. The striker leading the United States at this World Cup was born in New York and raised in London. He could have worn England's flag. He chose America's, and now he is our top scorer at the tournament on our home soil.

We are messy, loud, and built to improve. The proof came this week, when the Supreme Court, 6 to 3, struck down a presidential order and affirmed birthright citizenship for nearly every child born on American soil. The branches checked each other in public, as designed. Anyone who calls the American glass half empty has not lately visited the places people are still desperate to leave, and tried to drink a glass of their water.

Hudson Was First, and Got the Founding Right

New York once shared the ambition. Excelsior, "ever upward", was not irony. No Albany labor union existed to block it. And the first city chartered after thirteen colonies became the United States was not Albany, not Boston, not Manhattan. It was Hudson. In 1783 a band of Nantucket and Rhode Island Quakers who called themselves the Proprietors sailed up the river, bought a bluff, and laid a street grid before they moved their families in. By 1785 Hudson had a city charter; by 1786, wharves, warehouses, and 1,500 residents, keeping pace with the great coastal towns. It had a deep-water port, a planned city, unashamed capitalists for founders, and one more advantage: the Proprietors built their fortune on wages and whale oil, not on the enslaved labor the Dutch farms they bought out ran on. The record is imperfect; a few Proprietors' own runaway-slave ads survive, and the distinction is one of economy, not sainthood. Hudson got the founding principle right at the founding. The United States republic needed another 80 years and a civil war to catch up to Hudson.

Hudson Is Great. Our Civil Servants Are Great. Our Career Politicians And Our Municipal Government Is Not.

Here is the thing worth saying plainly: Hudson is a wonderful city. Our people are our glory, our artists and makers are the envy of the valley, and our small businesses thrive against odds that would close most shops in other towns. None of that is the problem. The problem is the municipal government, as designed and lead by career politicians. The municipal apparatus and the school system are outdated. They never worked well. Today they are mostly deadweight on a city that would fly without them. That is the American lesson turned on its head. Americans are not weighed down by their government. Hudson is.

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FYI: Civil Servants are not Career Politicians

Our message is not aimed at Hudson's excellent cops, clerks, and crews, who keep a creaking machine running, nor at the elected resident leaders bravely serving a tour of duty to tame it. You are rare, needed, and thanked. We are criticizing the career politicians and paid party operatives, the Welfare Brokers, who fight to keep Municipal Capture exactly as it is. If you serve Hudson taxpayers and residents, this is not about you. If you serve the Machine or yourself, it is.

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"Most Americans are not weighed down by their government, but Hudson residents certainly are"

Image remixed creatively from The Economist Magazine’s America at 250 coverage. Read more here.