I am a capitalist.

If you are a liberated person, you are a capitalist. If your nation is liberated, it is a capitalist nation. If you are fighting for individual freedom, in any corner of this globe, you are by extension also fighting for capitalism, because there cannot be freedom without capitalism. Individual freedom has illuminated our human existence. There has never been a force for good in this world as powerful, or as important. Consider the painting that moved you to tears, the composition that catalyzed your philosophical awakening, the computer — lightning in a bottle! Behind every work of genius is a free mind, a single man or woman who laid their hands to the world and shaped it into something new. But today capitalism is at risk, and with it the progressive potential of the human race.

Since the Industrial Revolution proponents of capitalism have ceded intellectual ground to ideological cancers ranging from the confused to the nihilistic. The nature of capitalism has been challenged. The fruits of capitalism have been challenged. Today even the definition of the word — capitalism — is challenged. The failure of the capitalist to defend his position has been so complete as to corrode even the thinking of our own. Many who defend capitalism today now freely accept, and even drive forward, the utterly absurd, demonstrably false notion that the free nations of Europe are no longer capitalist. Many argue similarly ignorant positions concerning the injection of some additional “empathy” into capitalism, as if it were a way of life, and “new kinds of capitalism,” as if man’s right to freedom came in numerous varieties as apples at the grocer. The future of our free people has never been so precarious, but our contemporary tragedy is this: we are not staring at liberty’s collapse in popularity because slavery is a new and compelling idea. Every philosophical threat the free world faces can be ascribed to a failure on the part of capitalists to make their case for freedom — a failure to fight. I believe freedom is worth fighting for, and that we must.