Defenders of Capitalism Newsletter – Summer 2026
Welcome to the Summer 2026 issue of the Defenders of Capitalism newsletter. Each quarter, we examine economics, culture, and history through a simple but often neglected lens: the human mind as the source of value and prosperity.
In this Summer Edition, we show that threats to capitalism do not all wear the same uniform. Some arrive through the worship of political power; others through the belief that human progress, production, and prosperity are problems to be restrained. As America marks 250 years, the Founding’s promise remains clear: individual rights, limited government, and the freedom to think, produce, and flourish.
Quote of the Day
“Making thyself neither the tyrant nor the slave of any man.”
The Wrong Question About AI
Why Universal Basic Income Confuses Distribution with Production
by Michael Williams
Some of the people leading the artificial intelligence revolution are also warning that AI may eliminate so many jobs that society will need a Universal Basic Income. The argument sounds straightforward: machines do the work, people lose their incomes, and government provides everyone a check. It may even sound compassionate to some. But it starts with the wrong question.
Instead of asking how we will distribute income, we should first ask: Where does wealth come from?
For centuries, technology has eliminated jobs. Mechanical looms displaced weavers. Tractors replaced millions of farm workers. Computers eliminated typists, switchboard operators, and countless other occupations. Yet these innovations did not create permanent mass unemployment. They increased productivity and freed human beings to solve new problems, create new industries, and pursue opportunities previous generations could scarcely imagine. AI may prove different. It may replace an extraordinary number of today’s tasks and occupations. None of us knows.
But AI cannot repeal a fundamental economic and moral principle: Production precedes consumption.
“Jobs” don’t create wealth. Production does. Government can create jobs digging holes and filling them back in, or distribute checks. Neither creates wealth—or the self-esteem that comes from productive achievement. Wealth is created when human beings use their minds to transform ideas, labor, capital, and natural resources into things they and/or other people value.
Oddly, some of the brilliant entrepreneurs creating AI seem to fall into an old trap that has ensnared capitalists for generations: the false choice between redistribution and social upheaval. If technological progress makes some enormously productive while displacing others, the reasoning goes, the winners must pay off the losers through the welfare state—or eventually face their wrath. UBI simply gives this old bargain a futuristic name.
But people do not have to be bought off from progress. They need the freedom to participate in it.
If AI creates extraordinary abundance, wonderful. But who developed the technology? Who invested the capital? Who took the risks? Who will build the infrastructure, discover new applications, and create the next breakthrough?
Before wealth can be distributed, someone must create it. There is a deeper moral question, too. Productive work is more than a paycheck. It is one of the primary ways we exercise our minds, develop our abilities, achieve independence, and create value for others. A society that permanently disconnects millions from production risks replacing independence with dependency and achievement with entitlement – and ultimately embraces a diminished view of human beings: not as creators and producers, but as dependents to be maintained…as merely mouths to be fed.
For most of human history, poverty was mankind’s normal condition. Capitalism changed that—not by guaranteeing everyone a job or an income, but by liberating the ultimate source of wealth: the human mind. And AI itself is spectacular evidence of that fact.
If artificial intelligence becomes one of the greatest productivity tools ever invented, the answer is not a massive new redistribution scheme. It is greater freedom to adapt, invest, innovate, own productive assets, start businesses, and discover forms of value we cannot yet imagine.
The great question raised by AI is NOT how government will distribute the abundance. It’s: what will free human minds do with it.
For Your Consideration
- A Royal Paine | The Dispatch (paywall) – Thomas Paine was the pen of the American Revolution. It’s only appropriate that the Dispatch reminds us of how important he was.
- Democrats Fall for Socialism Again | Wall Street Journal (paywall) – Socialism’s latest makeover hasn’t improved either its economics or its electoral appeal—but Democrats seem determined to relearn both lessons the hard way.
- The Republicans Who Enable Socialists | Wall Street Journal (paywall) – Republicans who enable socialism don’t merely lack fiscal discipline—they fail to understand that freedom means protecting the individual’s right to his own life, property, and achievement.
- JD Vance and the Dismal Science | Cato Institute – Our vice president attacks the “dismal science” with a phrase coined to condemn economists for defending free labor—a neat display of economic ignorance wrapped in moral vanity.
Want to Become a Better Defender of Capitalism?
The Leadership Program of the Rockies (LPR) is recruiting its 2026–27 class, with upcoming events offering a chance to learn more. Defenders of Capitalism™ is proud to partner with LPR, providing materials and training that make both the economic and moral case for capitalism—grounded in individual rights, reason, and human flourishing. Attend a recruiting event, meet the community, and consider applying.
America at 250: The Degrowth Movement Is the Antithesis to Our Individual Rights
by Anders Ingemarson
As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, we find ourselves at a historical crossroads, not merely reflecting on a milestone of longevity, but engaged in a civilizational debate over our founding principles. Two and a half centuries ago, the American experiment was launched upon a revolutionary moral premise: that each individual is created equal and is endowed with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This self-evident truth did not merely change political structures; it altered the human trajectory. It declared that the individual is the ultimate unit of moral value, and that society’s proper function is to protect individual rights: the freedom to think, create, build, and prosper, while respecting that others have the same rights.
Yet, as we look to the next century, this spectacular legacy is threatened by an intellectual counter-revolution gathering strength in Western academies and international policy forums: the degrowth movement. Championed by intellectuals like Thomas Piketty, Joseph Stiglitz and others, recently in the limelight for their article We economists have done the maths: ‘growth’ is a doomed strategy – there is a better way, this movement frames economic contraction and environmental asceticism not as an unfortunate necessity, but as a moral imperative. When stripped of its academic jargon, eco-humanitarian veneer, and shoddy “science,” degrowth reveals itself as fundamentally anti-human flourishing and, by extension, anti-American.
The essential flaw of the degrowth doctrine lies in its inversion of the relationship between man and nature. The American founding was built on the Enlightenment ideal that human reason can understand, harness, and improve the physical world to serve human life. Human created growth in all its forms is the material and immaterial manifestation of human intelligence translating freedom into flourishing. It is the mechanism that lifted billions out of destitution, cured diseases, and expanded human horizons. Degrowth, conversely, is built upon the immoral premise that the earth comes first, and that human beings are static resource-consumers whose ambitions must be actively suppressed to preserve a pristine, unchanging planet.
By placing a mystical eco-collectivism above the requirements of human life, the degrowth movement inevitably depends on a heavy-handed, statist foundation. Economic growth cannot be stopped or reversed voluntarily, because the desire to improve one’s life is innate to humans. To halt this, the state must expand its power to unprecedented, totalitarian dimensions. Piketty’s prescriptions for punitive, near-confiscatory taxation and global wealth registers are not merely tools to redistribute wealth; they are explicit mechanisms designed to cap human ambition. Stiglitz’s constant calls for pervasive state management of the economy similarly assume that a bureaucratic elite is better suited to dictate the limits of human enterprise than individual citizens operating in a free market. Both personify the evils of collectivism.
This statist structure directly violates the unalienable individual rights guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence. When the state shackles the economy to achieve an arbitrary zero-growth or negative-growth target, it is shackling the individuals who comprise that economy. It tells entrepreneurs that their vision is a social liability. It tells scientists that their energy-intensive breakthrough is an ecological crime. It tells ordinary workers that their dreams of a larger home, a better car, or a more prosperous future for their children must be sacrificed on the altar of CO2 emission reductions.
This is the collectivist premise in its purest, most immorally destructive form: the assertion that individuals have no right to their own ambitions, visions, and dreams if those conflict with a centrally planned ecological mandate. Under a degrowth regime, the pursuit of happiness is replaced by the enforcement of stagnation. Liberty is exchanged for a web of suffocating regulations designed to manage human rationing. Life itself is devalued, treated as an environmental burden rather than an end in itself.
It is tempting to brush off the degrowth movement as the latest in a long line of environmentalist assaults on individualism, individual rights, limited government, capitalism and human flourishing. After all, warnings of potential catastrophic effects of global cooling, global warming, and most recently climate change have all been rebuked. But we must remain vigilant and explicitly reject the false dichotomy that we must choose between a healthy planet and a prosperous humanity. The solution to actual environmental challenges has never been the retreat into poverty, but the advance into greater technological sophistication. Free individuals, motivated by the rewards of a free market, possess the creative capacity to develop clean energy, engineering marvels, and efficient systems that protect our surroundings without impoverishing our people.
As we celebrate the country’s 250th anniversary, our responsibility to the future is clear. We must proudly champion the morality of individualism and protection of individual rights over the immorality of collectivism and statist rights violations. We must proudly champion a vision of abundance, innovation, and freedom, recognizing that human life and human flourishing is the ultimate standard of the good. The degrowth movement offers a future of managed decline and shared misery. America’s promise has always been, and must remain, a future of limitless potential, fueled by the uncompromised liberty of the human mind.
Capital Idea Podcast
On a recent episode, delved deep into history–the egomaniacal reign of Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep III. Through a far-reaching discussion into the tides of history, Mike and Mitch explore why the American Experiment is so special… and why it should be defended against civilization’s oldest villain: self-enamored autocrats. Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Why Defenders of Capitalism?
Defenders of Capitalism exists because the moral case for capitalism is rarely understood or stated clearly—and too often abandoned altogether.
Capitalism is not primarily about economics. It is a social system grounded in a simple truth: the human mind is the source of value, and freedom is the condition that allows it to function. When individuals are free to think, create, and trade voluntarily, abundance follows—not by decree, but by reason applied to reality.
This project is not about defending “the rich” or markets for their own sake. It is about championing the individual – the producer, builder, and creator—whose efforts make human flourishing possible. Defenders of Capitalism is also not a partisan project. The erosion of individualism, reason, and responsibility is not confined to the political left or right. Collectivism wears many costumes. We are interested in ideas, not tribes.
We reject the framing that treats capitalism as a moral compromise. A system grounded in voluntary exchange and individual rights is not at odds with human values—it depends on them.
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