Freedom Is Worth the Risk

By David Bahnsen

Friday, June 05, 2026

 

I am not just here today as a lover of freedom and markets, but I am here as a particular lover of National Review, of its history, its founder, its legacy, and its role in conserving the ideals that are worth conserving. But it is a very recent development that has me particularly animated and has reignited my love of National Review. Socialism existed in American faculty lounges in the 1990s. William F. Buckley attacked radicalism on college campuses as far back as 1955. We all know that the ethos of anti-Communism was central to the history of National Review.

 

But there is a massive uprising on the right involving those opposed to free markets, turning terms like “market fundamentalism” into pejoratives and making a case against free trade — people who believe that capital and labor are at diametrical odds with one another. The giants on whose shoulders we stand — Meyer and Buckley and Chambers, but also Hayek and Friedman and Smith — would expect us to fight this “new right” temper tantrum with every ounce of breath in our bodies.

 

The current debate over economic vision is not merely about policy preferences, tax rates, election cycles, or trade particulars. At the core of those who believe in free enterprise, who believe it is a core tenet of our nation’s founding, who believe that what is at stake is crucial if we are to preserve not only the American experiment but Western civilization, is this: a distinct view of the human person, of freedom, and of the kind of society that best allows people to flourish.

 

Do we still believe that free people, acting with virtue and responsibility, are capable of building a good society without coercion from above?

 

Because beneath the daily noise of politics, beneath the headlines and outrage and social media chaos, there is a much more fundamental struggle underway — a struggle over the dignity of the human person and the future of freedom itself.

 

Economic freedom is not merely an efficiency mechanism, and it never has been. It is not merely a system that produces more goods and services. It is not merely a way to maximize GDP. It is, surely, all of those things, by the way. It just is not only those things. Economic freedom is a moral necessity because the human person possesses dignity, agency, creativity, and responsibility. When a society forgets this, it does not merely become poorer. It becomes smaller, more cynical, more dependent. It possesses less character and less agency. And this is to say, it becomes less human.

 

The great crisis of our time is not merely inflation, debt, regulation, political polarization, and technological disruption. Those things matter. But beneath them lies something even more dangerous: a growing loss of confidence in the moral capacity of free people.

 

More and more, we are told that freedom is too risky. That ordinary people cannot be trusted. That experts must decide. That bureaucrats must manage. That central planners must be tasked with the role of allocating resources. These authorities, we are told, will save us from uncertainty, inequality, and instability — from the failures of a market system — you know, that incredibly free and open and low-tax and low-regulation market we have all been living in.

 

Yes, the Bernies and Warrens and AOCs and university professors who have never run a P&L tell us all these things, and most of these folks have said so for many years — whether they be extreme statists or overconfident technocrats. But the urgency of the message today is not about the message we are countering but the direction from which it is coming. The so-called new right economic manifesto has accepted all of the underlying tenets of central planning, and the road to which this goes is not ambiguous or unclear.

 

But history teaches us something profoundly different. The greatest achievements of civilization have not and cannot come from centralized power. Our duty as lovers of freedom and believers in the God-given dignity of the human person is to promote unleashed creativity. Risk-taking and entrepreneurialism are indispensable to this. So is the allocation of capital. The demonization of the investor class has become crass and cynical, and maybe effective, politics, but it is ideologically and practically insane. Those who claim to value family businesses and strong communities demonize capital formation and innovation to the peril of their own stated agenda.

 

The moral, communitarian, and interpersonal character we want in our vision for society as conservatives is not threatened by free enterprise, but it is threatened by central planning. It is threatened by confiscation. It is threatened by the dulling of our senses and agency that comes with an unending creep of state power. The result is the stagnation that comes from subpar allocation of resources, from the centralization of decision-making that inevitably leads to uninformed decisions and flawed incentive structures.

 

The right spent the second half of the 20th century claiming that bureaucrats create European stagnation, that committees cannot replicate what free people create voluntarily, that planners lack dispersed knowledge. We argued for entrepreneurial imagination and accurately said that the state cannot replace the moral energy that comes from human beings acting responsibly in freedom.

 

2008 was the seminal moment in which so many things changed. The right has still not wrestled with the implications of what took place in 2008. I am well aware that it was a pivotal moment in my own life and career, but I have become convinced over the years that it was a paradigmatic moment for our movement and our country, too, in which the right’s reliance on efficiency arguments for free enterprise would no longer be taken for granted, and when our inability to connect free enterprise to deeper transcendent truth would leave us on our back feet. Many people may not understand what actually created the 2008 financial crisis, but what I do understand is how the mood shifted in the aftermath. And it was a long time coming.

 

We now must restate pro-market arguments to some who were once our own people. We need to reframe markets as ecosystems of human action and demand that the discussion center around a coherent view of the human person — an anthropology worthy of the conservative worldview.

 

Every political philosophy contains an assumption about what human beings are. And the defenders of economic freedom must never concede this argument. We are not defending markets because we worship money. We are defending markets because we believe people matter. The central planner sees populations. We see human beings. The planner sees units. The free society sees souls. The planner sees problems to manage. We see human beings made for purpose, creativity, sacrifice, and contribution.

 

Free markets help to build wealth, they lift people from poverty, they extend life expectancy, reduce disease, expand opportunity, democratize consumption, and create prosperity on a scale previous generations could not imagine.

 

Those are all necessary but insufficient claims.

 

The new right and the old and new left suggest they can produce similar outcomes with more control, centrally manage efficiency, and use their preferences to create their vision of fairness. And if our only argument is material output, we will eventually lose to whoever promises enough comfort. But the deeper argument for freedom, including economic freedom, is moral.

 

Human beings are moral actors. And moral action requires choice. Responsibility requires freedom. Virtue requires agency. And this is why the defense of economic freedom must always be connected to the defense of civil society, family, faith, local institutions, and moral responsibility. Freedom detached from virtue collapses into decadence. Virtue detached from freedom collapses into coercion.

 

This is why the old fusionist project mattered so much. Fusionism understood something profoundly important: that economic liberty and moral order are not enemies. They are partners. Fusionism rejected two false choices. The first false choice was the idea that society must choose between moral order and economic freedom. The second false choice was the idea that markets alone are sufficient to sustain civilization. Both are wrong. A healthy society needs free institutions and virtuous people. It needs entrepreneurship and character. It needs prosperity and responsibility. It needs liberty ordered toward transcendent truth. The fusionist understanding recognized that the state cannot manufacture virtue. But it can certainly destroy the institutions that cultivate it. Families cultivate virtue. Churches cultivate virtue. Communities cultivate virtue.  Voluntary associations cultivate virtue. Work cultivates virtue. Responsibility cultivates virtue. The state does not — and cannot.

 

Markets do not replace morality. But they are the venues for morally formed human beings to create, grow, and innovate. Fusionism protects markets from unconstrained nature because it properly orders jurisdictions and disentangles confused roles — a paternalistic state, most importantly. The paternalistic state increasingly seeks to absorb the mediating institutions that stand between the individual and centralized power. The more dependent people become on centralized systems, the weaker families become. The weaker local communities become. The weaker religious institutions become. The weaker personal responsibility becomes. Dependency is not morally neutral. And neither is confiscatory statism.

 

A society that transfers responsibility upward inevitably drains initiative downward. And eventually people begin to lose confidence in themselves. One of the greatest tragedies of this modern political moment is that too many people have come to see themselves primarily as claimants rather than creators. Recipients rather than builders. Victims rather than agents.

 

National Review continues to stand athwart history saying that free enterprise is a system worth defending because it values the human person in the right way. Because capital markets are fundamentally about belief in the future. Think about what capital allocation actually is. An investor says:

 

“I believe this entrepreneur can build something valuable.”

“I believe this worker can create.”

“I believe this company can innovate.”

“I believe tomorrow can be better than today.”

 

Capital formation is an act of optimism. It is an act of trust. It is an act of confidence in human possibility. And this is why attacks on capital markets are so misguided.

 

Of course, markets are imperfect, because human beings are imperfect. There are bubbles, excesses, frauds, manias, greed, and speculation. There always have been. But the answer to fallen human nature is not concentrated power. Because concentrated power is exercised by fallen human beings too. The question is never whether flawed people will exist. We know too much about human nature to assume otherwise. The question is whether power will be decentralized or centralized. Whether failure will be distributed or consolidated. Whether correction mechanisms will exist. Whether people remain free to act, fail, learn, build, and try again.

 

The market economy works because it accounts for human imperfection better than centralized systems do. It disperses power. It allows adaptation. It creates feedback. It rewards value creation. Centralized systems entrench ruling classes. Markets disrupt them. That is why economic freedom matters. Not because every market outcome is morally ideal. But because freedom preserves the conditions under which human flourishing remains possible.

 

And we desperately need to recover the moral legitimacy of profit itself.  Profit is not theft. Profit is not exploitation. In a free exchange, profit is evidence that value was created for another person. When an entrepreneur risks capital, employs workers, serves customers, and allocates resources effectively, profit becomes a signal that scarce resources were directed toward productive ends.

 

Now, yes, cronyism exists — and never more so than in a system of imperialistic, discretionary tariffs. Corruption exists. Rent-seeking exists. Free enterprise is antithetical to an economy of political favoritism. We must fight against cronyism if we are to regain the hearts and minds of young people who are understandably jaded by what happens when the government picks winners and losers.

 

One of the most destructive lies in modern culture is the Keynesian notion that meaning is primarily found in consumption. It is not. Meaning is found in contribution, responsibility, and service. In creation. In work well done. The dignity of work transcends income and becomes about participation in creation itself. We were made to cultivate, build, organize, invent, and serve. And when societies suffocate enterprise under bureaucracy and dependency, they do not merely reduce growth rates. They diminish human purpose.

 

Now, let me say something especially important for this moment in history. Many people today feel anxious about technology, globalization, AI, financialization, and economic change. Some of those concerns are legitimate. Disruption is real. Communities can be destabilized. Transitions can be painful. But the answer cannot be a retreat into economic nationalism, centralized planning, or anti-market populism. History teaches us that prosperity does not come from insulating society from dynamism. It comes from channeling dynamism productively.

 

The answer to change is not paralysis. It is resilience. And resilience is built through strong families, strong communities, strong institutions, strong education, strong moral formation, and strong local cultures. Not through permanent dependence on centralized authority. We should absolutely seek policies that strengthen workers, families, savings, investment, ownership, entrepreneurship, and social mobility. But we must never forget that prosperity is created before it can be distributed.

 

And capital matters. Savings matter. Investment matters. Entrepreneurship matters. Productivity matters.

 

A culture that punishes capital formation eventually punishes workers, too. Because workers are more productive when equipped with better tools, better technology, better systems, and better enterprises. Capital and labor are not natural enemies. They are partners in production. The Marxian tragedy of progressive and new right economics is the attempt to pit them against one another as though prosperity were a fixed pie.

 

Human creativity expands possibilities. This is the miracle of free economies: They transform imagination into abundance. But none of this is inevitable. Freedom requires maintenance. Civilization requires stewardship. And economic liberty requires moral confidence. We must once again become willing to defend the free society not apologetically, but affirmatively.

 

And we should certainly not be embarrassed to defend the institutions of free enterprise that have done more to alleviate suffering and expand opportunity than any economic system in human history. But our defense must always remain rooted in a larger moral vision. Because a market is not the ultimate thing — the human person is. The economy exists for the person — not the person for the economy. And this is precisely why coercive statism ultimately fails. Because it reduces people into instruments of political administration. The free society recognizes something higher. That every individual possesses inherent dignity. That freedom is not merely procedural — it is deeply connected to what it means to be human. And so the challenge before us is not merely political. It is cultural. Spiritual. Civilizational.

 

Will we defend the mediating institutions that sustain liberty? Will we preserve the moral foundations necessary for economic freedom to endure? Or will we slowly trade freedom for dependency, dynamism for bureaucracy, responsibility for grievance, and aspiration for entitlement?

 

I remain hopeful because I still believe in people. And I still believe that when human dignity and economic liberty are joined together, extraordinary things happen.

 

The free society is worth defending because the human person is worth defending. And the task before us is to ensure that future generations inherit not merely wealth, but freedom itself.

 

My professional life has been and will continue to be in the capital markets, stewarding wealth, and utilizing the miracle of markets toward the achievement of financial aims. But accompanying the blessing that is my professional life is my moral duty to continue studying economic history and doing all I can to defend free enterprise for what it is: a moral architecture that promotes human dignity, constrains human nature, and feeds responsibility and flourishing of creatures made in the image of God.