April 15, 2026

I spent enough time in courtrooms reading financial statements to know that the most revealing information is rarely in the headline numbers. It’s in the footnotes. The same principle applies to industrial accident reports — and Craig Tindale has been reading them the way a forensic accountant reads a balance sheet.

His starting point was a zinc dust explosion in New York State — not one, but three successive fires at the same aluminum facility, each shutting down a Ford supply chain and costing hundreds of millions. One fire is an accident. Two fires is a pattern. Three fires is a signal.

Tindale’s methodology is rigorous: collect every documented industrial fire, explosion, and thermal event across North America, read the official investigation reports, and look for common factors. He’s reviewed 27 of them. The common factor is not sabotage. It’s decay. Deferred maintenance. Inadequate process controls. Workforces that have lost the institutional knowledge to safely operate equipment they haven’t run at full capacity in years.

When Biden’s green energy initiatives suddenly demanded dormant industrial capacity come back online, it met facilities on life support. The bill of materials to restart wasn’t there. The trained workforce wasn’t there. The safety protocols hadn’t been updated. The result was predictable to anyone who reads balance sheets: deferred maintenance becomes emergency expense, and emergency expenses are always larger than the maintenance would have been.

Industrial accident rates are a real-time measure of infrastructure decay that no financial model currently captures. That makes it an edge for investors willing to do the work.

Every time someone suggests the U.S. government should play a direct role in building industrial capacity, someone else calls it socialism. It’s a reflex, not an argument. And it reveals a stunning ignorance of American economic history.

Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, was the inventor of American state capitalism. His 1791 Report on Manufactures argued explicitly that a nation’s liberty depends on its manufacturing capacity, and that the government has an affirmative obligation to develop and protect that capacity. This wasn’t a fringe position. It was the founding economic doctrine of the United States.

Craig Tindale made this point forcefully, and it deserves to be repeated until it lands. State capitalism is not communism. It is the deliberate use of government financial power to ensure that the nation can produce the things it needs to remain sovereign and secure. Hamilton understood it. Eisenhower understood it. Churchill understood it. Menzies understood it.

What we practice today is stateless capitalism that treats national borders as irrelevant to production decisions. If it’s cheaper to make it in China, make it in China. The result is an economy extraordinarily efficient at producing consumer goods and catastrophically fragile at producing anything that matters for national security.

The weighted average cost of capital in the West runs 15-20% for industrial projects. China finances strategic infrastructure at cost — because the return is measured in geopolitical leverage, not quarterly earnings. We are not competing on a level playing field. We are competing against a state that plays a different game entirely. Recognizing that isn’t socialism. It’s Hamilton. And it’s long overdue.