Anyone who has ever built or fixed something knows it is far more difficult than breaking things. Every child learns this when protecting a hard-earned sandcastle against a bully. Yet, Senator Elizabeth Warren, a vocal bully motivated to break up Big Tech, ignores this life lesson.

When an Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage caused a tremor across the internet on Oct. 20, 2025—disrupting services like Netflix and delaying flights—engineers rushed to rebuild the “castle” and strengthen it for the future. In many postmortems, they devised resiliency strategies that any company can now use to mitigate risk.

By contrast, for Warren, the outage was not an opportunity to learn but to swing a kick. Just moments into the incident, she decreed: “If a company can break the entire internet, they are too big. Period. It’s time to break up Big Tech.”

Since then, she’s moved on to attack Big Tech for reasons like her disdain for data centers’ energy consumption. We can’t let the bully continue her destructive attack unimpeded.

After Warren’s threat, commentators stepped up to educate her. With only 30 percent market share, AWS cannot affect the “entire internet.” Furthermore, the impact wasn’t catastrophic for customers who chose to insure themselves through multi-region diversification strategies, whether relying on different cloud providers or alternatives within AWS itself.

But defenders of AWS have too benevolent a view of critics. Simply educating them about market share or elucidating strategic solutions will not persuade Warren to back off. It is like telling a bully that his victim’s exquisite sand castle is not such a big deal.

We must instead stress that Amazon deserves gratitude and admiration for the value its cloud computing provides. AWS offers instant access to storage and processing power on a global scale. It frees everyone from small college start-ups to large enterprises from heavy IT lifting, allowing them to focus on innovation while using world-class infrastructure at a disruptively low cost. Breaking up such an achievement would be profoundly unjust. In other words: Stay away, Warren, you bully.

Warren, an alleged advocate of economic opportunity, should be the greatest AWS fan for how it provides such opportunities on a massive scale. As a U.S. senator, Warren’s job is to protect the rights of builders, not to become their destroyer. Yet she issues threats without blinking. The power of Warren’s position makes her not a mere internet troll, but a mortal threat.

To rationalize the desire to smash, Warren and her allies fantasize that smaller versions of AWS would magically erase technical glitches and make building resiliency unnecessary. But AWS’s value lies precisely in its integrated scale. Disintegration would be a step back to a more primitive time of the internet when every company managed its own data infrastructure and was its own mini-AWS.

Warren’s false portrayal of AWS reveals a grotesque hatred for achievement and a desire to manipulatively recruit others to her destructive cause. We must challenge the true source of such hatred.

Warren and her ilk cannot accept that Amazon, a hugely successful profit-seeking company, is the source of extraordinary value. To them, the Amazons of the world are supposed to exploit us, not provide life-serving values. What else can they feel, if not hatred, when a company like Amazon proves such a worldview is glaringly false?

Unwilling to abandon the hatred of Big Tech, Warren evades the reality that profit-seeking makes values like AWS possible. Without the profit motive to lure Amazon into integrated cloud services, there would be no outage to worry about because there wouldn’t be a system to fail. But facts are an irrelevant bump on Warren’s destructive path. She would rather smash a producer like Amazon, no questions asked, and pretend that the castle it erected will somehow remain.

To defend producers like Amazon against mindless enmity, we must reject the belief that seeking profit is evil—a belief Amazon shatters by being a great productive benefactor. And we must stand up to bullies and proclaim Amazon’s right to pursue profit by creating amazing technology.

Image Credit: Kena Betancur / Stringer / via Getty Images

1. Epic Games has used antitrust law to force Google to open its Play Store—its full app catalog and outside billing—to rival app stores, undermining the global marketplace Google built, which has benefited billions of users and developers with its discovery, monetization, and security tools.

2. Android permits sideloading, letting developers avoid Play Store rules and fees, though Google warns users about risks and offers perks for staying on Play. Epic inserted code to bypass Google’s fee, was removed for violating contract terms, and then turned to antitrust courts to force Google to change its terms.

3. Google’s alleged crime is offering developers a choice: pay for their services, or sideload freely without the Play Store’s exclusive tools and protections. The courts punish Google for trying to preserve the value of what it built rather than letting others exploit its achievements.

4. Courts found Google guilty of monopolizing Android app distribution and in-app billing, rejecting its argument that it competes with Apple in the broader mobile-gaming market. By absurdly defining the market as the “Android-only app distribution” market, the ruling labels Google a monopolist because it created the very ecosystem in which it operates.

5. Epic can exploit Google only because arbitrary antitrust laws enable courts to define markets so narrowly that any successful business can be branded a monopolist, even when customers are free to use alternatives. But Google has the right to control the platform it created rather than be compelled to give competitors privileged access to it.

Would you call it absurd if Costco was forced by law to allow Walmart to set up shop and sell products within Costco’s Warehouse, rent free? Or, what if the law mandated that Disneyland allow anyone to set up a kiosk in the middle of the park and sell exact copies of Disney’s merchandise? If so, consider the antitrust court’s treatment of Google in their fight with Epic Games — which represents a similar act of injustice.

On Oct. 27th, 2025, Google petitioned the Supreme Court to reverse a ruling that forces Google to host competitor app stores inside Google’s Play Store, grant rivals full access to its three-million-app catalog, and let developers steer users to outside billing, denying Google its fees.^{1, 2} Although the Supreme Court now has a chance to reverse the damage, so far Epic Games, the developer of a blockbuster mobile game Fortnite, has succeeded in epically exploiting Google’s business.³

From Innovation to Indictment

With Android, Google created the world’s largest open platform, enabling myriad device makers to put a smartphone in the pockets of billions, creating vast new markets for ideas and commerce. The Google Play Store did for mobile apps what Google Search did for the web: created a global marketplace, where developers can instantly reach billions with built-in discovery, monetization, and security tools. Device makers, developers, and users all owe much of their ability to create, trade, and use a variety of valuable apps to Google’s development and stewardship of the Android ecosystem, including, crucially, the Play Store.

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Unlike Apple’s tightly controlled iOS and App Store (another of Epic’s targets in courts), Google’s Android OS allows “sideloading,” i.e., installing apps that need not comply with Play Store terms such as using Google Pay Billing services and paying 30% commission on in-app purchases.⁴ Within sideloaded apps, developers like Epic are free to use other payment systems and thus avoid Google’s fees (as Epic Games does with a non-Google Play version of Fortnite).

However, Google warns users when downloading anything from an unofficial source using “scare screen” notifications, which discourages many (about a third of all users would stop in the middle of sideloading Fortnite). Google also offers perks and benefits to app developers to stay exclusively on Play, making an alternative app store on Android a less attractive alternative. Thus, sideloading apps or other app stores on Android is a free, but not equal, alternative to Play Store.

Epic Games decided it did not like either option. It was both unwilling to pay Google the fee it demanded for its services on Play Store, and disgruntled with sideloading. So, Epic protested Google’s terms by purposefully violating them and inserting code directly into its Play Store version of Fortnite that would allow it to bypass Google’s fee, without sideloading. After Google removed Fortnite for a clear violation of contract, Epic Games enlisted antitrust laws to help them exploit Google’s business. The courts complied.

What Is Google Supposed to Have Done Wrong?

Based on the logic of the case, Google’s “crime” was to offer developers an infrastructure (Android US) and a choice: do business with us (Play Store) in exchange for a 30% cut on transactions, and get instant access to billions of users with built-in discovery, monetization, and security tools; or, deal with users directly through sideloading, which we allow yet discourage.

Thus, Google is being punished for offering a free alternative to Apple’s ecosystem where sideloading is disallowed, but on terms some developers find less attractive than the Play Store. Google is being punished for trying to secure the rewards it earned through the achievement of having created Android and the Play Store.

Google’s appeal to the Supreme Court is their last line of defense. But given the nature of the laws used against them, the company faces an uphill battle.

Arbitrary Antitrust Laws Make Everyone Guilty

The appeals court found that the district jury was correct to find that Google “violated both federal and California antitrust law by willfully acquiring or maintaining monopoly power in [Android app distribution and Android in-app billing services] markets, unreasonably restraining trade, and unlawfully tying use of the Play Store to Google Play Billing.”⁵

In their defense against the “restraint of trade” charges, Google countered that the court inappropriately delimited the market where Google supposedly holds power to “restrain trade”: the Play Store or Google Pay Billing. After all, Google vehemently competes with Apple products. But the court considered it irrelevant, because the “Google trial focused on gaming within the Android ecosystem” — and within that system, the court held, Google has not made it easy for rival app stores to compete with them.⁶ But the court provided no good reason to dismiss the relevance of the wider “digital mobile gaming transactions” market in which Google and Apple compete. They offered only this silly analogy:

McDonald’s might compete against Chick-fil-A in the fast-food market yet not compete against Chick-fil-A in the hamburger fast-food market. . . . Although Google and Apple compete for mobile-gaming downloads and mobile-gaming in-app transactions, they do not compete in the Android-only app distribution and in-app billing markets.⁷

This is a terrible comparison because Google created the Android market — it’s a brand name. If we’re going to use fast food analogies, consider the competition between McDonald’s and In-N-Out. Calling Google a monopolist is like calling McDonald’s a monopolist because it is guilty of restraining competition in the Big Mac market, even though In-N-Out’s Double-Double is a clear alternative to it, even though McDonald’s works with franchisees (as opposed to the “walled garden” of In-N-Out’s fully owned chain) — and even though McDonald’s created the market for Big Macs. And that’s after we ignore that a hungry consumer can choose any non-fast food item, or cook at home. A Fortnite player can find alternative entertainment on PCs, myriad other consoles, VR, or just play boardgames.

It is clearly arbitrary to define the relevant market as the one a company “controls” only because it created it. By such a standard, no product faces any competition by definition, which is an absurd distortion of reality that grants inherently arbitrary power to antitrust prosecutors to target successful companies. The judges know it’s arbitrary, and admit that they’ve defined Android-only app distribution this way only because doing otherwise would “hamstring antitrust jurisprudence.”⁸

This should strike you as a grim joke on a stand-up comedy stage rather than as a serious argument in court where the rights and justly earned rewards of one of the greatest companies in history are at stake.

But it isn’t a joke. Antitrust laws have been threatening business in the United States with such arbitrariness since 1890. Under these laws, simply offering a product which your customers are free to refuse, whether there is an alternative option or not, is a crime, which means antitrust prosecutors can find a reason to persecute any and every successful business if they wish by delimiting the market until it’s narrow enough to involve little if any competition. While Epic Games carries significant blame, they would have been helpless to exploit Google without the antitrust tools government granted them with which to disarm Google.

Google perfected a market that has not existed before, making mobile gaming possible and profitable. It deserves the freedom and right to control its product and reap the rewards. Epic Games and the like should extend their gratitude, not a court order, to those who opened up a whole mobile gaming industry for them. But only a full rejection of antitrust — a hammer always hovering above the heads of successful businesses — will suffice to protect producers like Google against legally empowered looting.

Robertas Bakula

Robertas Bakula is an Associate Fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute. He holds a MA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from CEVRO Institute in Prague, Czech Republic.

1. Google LLC v. Epic Games, Inc., Petition for a Writ of Certiorari (U.S. Sup. Ct. Oct. 27, 2025).

2. Epic Games, Inc. v. Google LLC, Permanent Injunction (N.D. Cal. Oct. 7, 2024).

3. Meanwhile, Google is also trying to minimize the damage of the permanent injunction through a settlement agreement filed with Epic on Nov. 5^th. In the settlement, Google is agreeing to extend the expiration rate of the provisions of the original injunction from three to six years, and add a new provision to cap in-app purchase fees at 9% or 20%, depending on a transaction type (plus 5% fee if developers use Google Play Billing). In exchange, Google asks to remove the most intrusive, complex duties of the original injunction that required Google to grant third-party app stores access to the Play Store’s catalog and permit their distribution directly through the Play Store. Instead, Google would introduce a “registered App Store” process, streamlining installation of certified third-party stores on Android. Epic is on board with the scheme because it would apply globally, not just in the US as the original injunction. Epic also knows that it will easily become one of the few Registered App Stores given their existent audience and market and will benefit from such an arrangement. Judge Donato ordered hearings on the settlement, expressing skepticism that Google and Epic, “two mortal enemies who pounded each other relentlessly in this courtroom for many years – are suddenly BFFs.”

4. Robertas Bakula and Marek Michulka, “How Epic Games Is Looting the Store That Apple Visionaries Built.” New Ideal, July 16, 2025.

5. Epic Games, Inc. v. Google LLC, 24-6256 (9th Cir. July 31, 2025). p. 3.

6. Ibid., p. 23.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid., p. 24.

1. Government regulations have caused a housing shortage in America, now worsened by Trump’s mass deportation agenda, which is driving away the immigrant workers who make up 30% of the construction industry.

2. While the administration claims that ICE raids target criminals to keep the country safe, they mostly detain peaceful workers, scaring entire crews away from construction sites, thus aggravating the industry’s labor shortage.

3. America’s immigration system discourages legal employment: strict visa limits prevent construction firms from hiring legally, forcing reliance on illegal immigrant workers—now threatened by deportation, which could strip the industry of more than 1.5 million needed laborers.

4. With fewer construction workers, housing costs will rise, projects will stall, and basic home repairs will be delayed, forcing many Americans to face higher rents or even relocate.

5. The government should protect Americans’ individual rights from foreign threats, but restricting them from hiring immigrant workers violates their rights to trade and work freely.

For all the talk about a housing shortage, there’s proportionately little attention paid to how the U.S. government is aggravating the situation by kicking out the workers who want to trade and build homes in America.

Shortages are caused by government regulations that prevent, discourage, or make it too onerous for people to build. With a housing market already strangled by government controls, and a construction industry composed of 30% immigrant labor, the Trump administration’s “mass deportation” agenda means an aggravated housing shortage.

Construction companies have long struggled to find and retain workers, and Trump’s immigration agenda is making this worse: not only is the administration targeting construction sites for immigration raids, but raids and threats to immigrants are notorious for having a chilling effect on workers. “Whole crews are not coming to work because they’re fearful of a raid,” the president of the National Association of Home Builders told ABC News in June.

While the administration claims that it’s focusing its enforcement efforts on “criminal aliens,” the truth is that, according to recent data, it’s mostly detaining peaceful illegal immigrants (as of September 5, 70% of detainees had no criminal convictions), and detaining and scaring even legal ones. Anyone here unlawfully is fair game for deportation, no matter how peaceful, given our draconian immigration controls. But the prioritization of workers for deportation, and the targeting of workplaces for raids, does nothing to “make America safe.” It, in fact, exacerbates the detrimental impact of existing government controls in the construction industry.

America’s atrocious immigration system prevents workers from immigrating legally to work in the construction industry. As many have explained before, it is nearly impossible for most workers to immigrate to America legally. Even the visa program designed to attract temporary construction workers, the H-2B visa, places severe restrictions on sponsors, making hiring extremely burdensome. This is partly because the program is capped at 66,000 visas annually for the entire country — less than 1/10th of 723,000, the estimated average number of job openings in the industry (according to the National Association of Home Builders). While the government has authorized extra visas in the past, construction companies continue to plead with the government to create more avenues for international workers to come build in America — so far unsuccessfully.

In turn, builders often hire illegal immigrants to fulfill the open positions in their companies.

The shortage caused by this pre-existing, anti-business system is now aggravated by indiscriminate enforcement, and cripples builders’ plans. The American Immigration Council estimates that President Trump’s deportation agenda could remove 1.5 million workers from the construction industry, causing unprecedented delays and damage to construction businesses and their customers. All due to arbitrary restrictions on work.

Homes in America will go unbuilt, rooms will go unpainted, plumbing will go unrepaired. Fewer workers will mean increased prices, longer wait times, and fewer maintenance services available for homes in the U.S. This means that homeowners won’t be able to promptly find a handyman to repair water damage and avoid further harm; fewer houses and rising rent prices will push people to leave their cities and their life plans.

The federal government should protect the individual rights of everyone on American soil and keep out foreign threats, in part by having a strong and secure border. But keeping residents from hiring a contractor to fix their roof is not a protection of their rights — it’s a violation of them. Peaceful immigrant workers are here to make money and build a life by engaging in trade. Attacks on these workers are also attacks on the individuals seeking to trade with them for their services. Instead of spending billions of dollars on deporting workers, the federal government should push legislation to expand the avenues for them to come here legally and allow employers and employees to come together in America.

Agustina Vergara Cid

Agustina Vergara Cid, LLB, LLM, is an associate fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute.

A version of this article was originally published by the Southern California News Group.

Image Credit: Lindsey Nicholson / UCG / via Getty Images

1. Trump’s firing of the Labor Statistics Commissioner echoes Argentina’s manipulation of data under the Kirchnerists: Both sought to suppress “unfavorable” information to sustain a political narrative.

2. Though nominally on opposite ends of the political spectrum, both camps share many of the same destructive tendencies—such as economic protectionism and attacks on business and the independent media and judiciary—which eroded Argentina’s freedom and now threaten America.

3. These parallels stem from a shared premise: nationalism, the idea that individual freedom should be sacrificed for the alleged “greater good” of the nation, whether in the name of the Argentinian “Homeland” or to “make America great again.”

4. Philosophically, nationalism is a form of collectivism, the view that individuals should subordinate their minds and liberty to a collective goal.

5. Nationalism betrays America’s founding principles, namely that government exists solely to protect the individual’s freedom, not to sacrifice it for the supposed good of “the nation” or any other collective.

When President Trump fired the Commissioner of Labor Statistics last month, hours after a weak jobs report, it gave me déjà vu from my youth in Argentina. In 2007, leftist President Néstor Kirchner also fired those responsible for government statistics and installed loyalists who’d issue “friendlier” numbers.

Trump and the Kirchner coalition are members of nominally opposed left and right-wing political tribes, yet they share startling commonalities. There’s a deep reason behind these similarities: the underlying philosophical premises shaping their signature policies. The collapse of the Argentinian economy and the attacks on individual freedom the country sustained are a warning of where America may be headed.

The Kirchnerist coalition was an offshoot of Peronism (a movement blending strong executive leadership with nationalism), and it governed Argentina for nearly 20 years — from 2003 to 2015, and then again from 2019 to 2023. Kirchnerist presidents alternated between the late Néstor Kirchner, Cristina Kirchner, and Alberto Fernández. During that time, their left-leaning nationalistic protectionist policies caused a 211% annual inflation rate and crushing poverty in a once prosperous country. They are largely responsible for the long-standing chaos that the current president, Javier Milei, is attempting to fix.

From 2007 to 2015, the Kirchner government manipulated statistics on poverty and inflation. Néstor Kirchner took control of INDEC (the National Institute for Statistics and Census) after it issued allegedly “inaccurate” reports that reflected poorly on the government. INDEC then began issuing reports that favored the regime (for example, by claiming poverty was at 4.7% in 2013, when independent agencies put it at 26-27%). It then stopped issuing statistics altogether. These fake numbers were meant to manipulate Argentinians and make them question their own eyes.

Similarly, President Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics due to the numbers being allegedly “rigged” against him, but presented no evidence for his claim. He’s nominated E.J. Antoni, a partisan pick widely criticized even by other conservative economists. We don’t yet know whether “friendlier” numbers will be issued in the future, but we do know the Trump administration has a history of attempting to re-write facts (e.g.: by claiming that Jan. 6 was “a day of love”).

The resemblance doesn’t end there.

The Kirchners’ nationalist agenda imposed import restrictions that forced companies to manufacture locally or “balance” imports with exports. Likewise, the Trump administration is trying to force companies to onshore their manufacturing and employment by imposing hefty tariffs on foreign goods.

When businesses raised prices due to myriad strangling regulations, the Kirchners admonished them, alleging that they were “looters,” threatening and condemning them for trying to make a profit. Trump also recently scolded and threatened Walmart for raising prices due to tariffs, declaring that they should “eat the tariffs” (because they had “made billions of dollars last year”). He warned that he’d be “watching.” Earlier, the White House had called Amazon’s plan to display the cost of tariffs to costumers a “hostile and political act.”

The Kirchners attacked critical media, framing them as enemies, and sponsored an antitrust media law for large media groups they disapproved of. In parallel, Donald Trump has said that critical “fake news media” are “the enemy of the people” and is targeting media companies for content he dislikes, threatening to take away their broadcast licenses and persecuting them with antitrust actions.

There are still more commonalities: both the Kirchners and Trump attacked the independent judiciary and praised foreign dictators. Those actions helped destroy the Argentinian economy and erode freedom in the last 20 years. They will do the same to America.

The Kirchners were on the “left” while Trump is on the “right.” What explains these parallels in seemingly ideologically opposed leaders?

Trump and the Kirchners are not truly opposed. They both attack freedom because they are nationalists. Note that nationalism is the core premise behind their policies: trade barriers and attacks on businesses. These policies demand producers to sacrifice for a nationalist agenda — in the name of the Argentinian “homeland” or to “make America great again.”

To the nationalists, it doesn’t matter if producers don’t make a profit or lose money. It doesn’t matter if consumers aren’t free to pursue their goals and to purchase the goods that they want (Trump recently said “[American kids might] have two dolls instead of 30 dolls,” admitting his policy requires consumers to sacrifice). What matters is pushing the alleged “greater good” of the nation— individual freedom be damned.

To the nationalists, it doesn’t matter that their policies of censorship and meddling with statistics are anti-individual freedom. What matters is that reporting the facts harms their agenda, and people must be made to think their policies work and are moral.

Nationalism is a form of collectivism, the view that individuals (including businesses) are merely cogs in a machine and means to serve the nation, for which they must sacrifice. Individual freedoms and rights (to trade, to speak and dissent, to run one’s own business) don’t matter — what matters is fulfilling a nationalist, collectivistic goal decided by the leaders, and individuals matter only insofar they serve that goal.

Trump promises to “make America great again.” But America was founded on the opposite ideal to the nationalism he is pushing. America’s system of government was predicated on the sovereignty of the individual. The Founders held that government exists solely to protect the individual’s freedom, not to sacrifice it, whether to the government or the collective.

Trump isn’t our first collectivist in power. But he should be the last. Americans should look at Argentina during the Kirchner government as a warning of what might come if we continue embracing nationalism and betray our founding principles.

Agustina Vergara Cid

Agustina Vergara Cid, LLB, LLM, is an associate fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute.

A version of this article was originally published by the Southern California News Group on August, 24, 2025.

Image Credit: Kevin Dietsch / via Getty Images; Tomas Cuesta / Stringer /via Getty Images

1. The Trump administration’s tariffs and immigration restrictions are anti-trade policies that curtail Americans’ right to trade and associate freely with foreigners, and, although not often noted, they also damage the tourism industry.

2. Tariffs, hostile border enforcement, and highly publicized detentions have soured relations with foreigners and frightened travelers off, reinforcing the notion that they are unwelcome.

3. Foreigners are treated as enemies, thus tourism has plummeted. American businesses and workers are suffering heavy losses in profits and jobs as a result.

4. The U.S. government should protect our borders from threats, but Trump’s arbitrary and nonsensical anti-trade policies are instead sacrificing the rights of Americans to earn a living.

Since January 20, 2025, headlines about tariffs and immigration enforcement have been ubiquitous. Notably, both policies are anti-trade. Tariffs restrict Americans’ right to trade with companies abroad, and immigration restrictions violate Americans’ right to associate with foreigners.

An underappreciated consequence of these anti-trade measures is that they motivate boycotts of the U.S. as a travel destination and scare away tourists. Foreigners rightly object to the tariffs on their country and on the prospect of arbitrary immigration and border enforcement, which severely impacts businesses in our own tourism industry.

Before tariffs, travel bans,1 entry fees2 and aggressive immigration enforcement went into effect, tourism to America had been increasing since the end of the pandemic, and international arrivals were initially projected3 to surpass 2019 levels. As of 2024, the U.S. was still a big travel destination that welcomed visitors: more than 70 million people visited4 that year. Tourists and Americans benefited from the exchange.

But tourism numbers are now dramatically down and expected to remain so.

In April, Axios reported5 a sharp decline in the number of foreigners entering the U.S. at the 10 busiest airports. This matches6 the lower turnout of visitors reported by business owners in places like New York this year.

A report7 by the World Travel & Tourism Council found that travel spending in the U.S. is projected to decline by $12.5 billion this year compared to last year. The U.S. may be the only country among 184 developed economies to see lower visitor spending in 2025.

Theme parks, which have a big international client base (for example, Disney World’s is approximately 23%8), are already taking a hit9 from the decline in tourism. So are other businesses around them, like travel agencies and hotels. Smaller businesses, such as souvenir shops or the taxi and Uber drivers who service airports, are also affected.10 All want to work to earn foreigners’ business and make a profit. All are prevented from doing so by asinine anti-trade policies.

Americans will be worse off: the business owners, waiters, and hotel workers, who work in the travel industry and rely on trading with international travelers to make a living, will earn less or lose their jobs due to the government’s capricious policies.

What explains travelers’ new reluctance to visit America?

The administration is sending a clear message to foreigners: you are the enemy, we don’t want to trade with you or let you visit America either. It’s precisely because foreigners want to trade with America that they’re being rejected.

This anti-trade mentality has prompted travel boycotts of the U.S. A boycott doesn’t violate the rights of American businesses. But in this case, government policies these businesses didn’t ask for are prompting the boycotts, unfairly impacting their business.

Tourists are especially worried about border policies. Reports11 of tourists being detained for weeks or turned back at the border have increased under Trump, and his violent immigration crackdown has sent chills down the backs of would-be tourists worldwide. Travelers entering the U.S. have long been detained sporadically. But the Trump administration’s highly publicized detentions, which have prompted travel advisories12 worldwide, are sending a clear message to foreigners: don’t even try to come trade with us or you might be sent back or jailed for days. Prospective visitors rightly fear falling victim to such arbitrary power.

An Australian traveler recently told CNN that “There is doubt as to whether people will get in [to the country] . . . and that causes people to think of a better destination to visit than the USA.” That uneasiness is shared13 by many people worldwide and is a logical response to the administration’s hostile message to foreigners.

Tourism can always decline for market reasons, as when new and better travel destinations pop up. Businesses can address that by making their offers more attractive and can plan according to foreseeable risk. But when government uses force to dramatically reduce tourism overnight, rational planning is impossible.

The right of Americans to earn a living is being sacrificed in favor of arbitrary and nonsensical anti-trade policies.

The federal government should protect U.S. borders against threats, as it has been doing for decades with an extremely high degree of success.14 But there is no justification for threatening peaceful foreigners or restricting their commerce with Americans. It’s an attack on their rights and on the rights of Americans.

Agustina Vergara Cid

Agustina Vergara Cid, LLB, LLM, is an associate fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute.

A version of this article was originally published by The Hill on September 3, 2025.

1. Apple built the App Store’s secure, global infrastructure from scratch, benefitting countless businesses and their customers—a revolutionary achievement now met with government retribution.

2. In 2020, Epic Games breached Apple’s terms by bypassing the Store’s 30% fee, leading to a lawsuit wherein the courts forced Apple to allow external payments in the name of users’ “informed choice.” Apple’s efforts to limit the impact led to a 2025 contempt ruling, leaving its business model under serious threat.

3. Apple has the right to control and profit from the platform it built and maintains, and Epic’s supposed crusade for “freedom for creators” is merely a guise for free-riding on Apple’s productive work and creative achievements.

4. Forcing Apple to allow developers to bypass paying for Apple’s services legalizes plunder and invites other companies to exploit the opportunity.

5. Justice demands not punishing the successful but protecting creators’ rights to their own work and repealing laws that enable looting

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Imagine a local merchant barging into the glittering halls of a wildly popular marketplace and demanding the prime stall, rent‑free. When refused, he summons armed muscle to seize the premises in the name of marketplace “freedom.” The marketplace has no recourse, because the armed muscle it would have called for help is the one turning against it.

Today, Apple’s App Store is that lucrative marketplace; Epic Games is the exploitative merchant, and the government, armed with antitrust laws, is the hired muscle.

Epic’s Sneak Attack on the App Store

The legal showdown began in August 2020, when Epic smuggled an unauthorized payment workaround into Fortnite to avoid Apple’s 30% transaction fee. Facing such an egregious violation against its App Store terms, Apple rightly removed the game. Epic sued, accusing Apple of “monopolizing” iOS distribution and payments. A 2021 ruling rejected the federal antitrust charge but held that Apple violated the California Unfair Competition Law (UCL), effectively a state-level antitrust law.1

The court claims that Apple prevented “informed choice among users of the iOS platform” by prohibiting links to outside payment options.2 The court of appeals affirmed the argument, deciding that without those restrictions, competitors like Epic Games Store, which offers a 12% commission compared to Apple’s 30%, would “offer iOS users alternatives” that consumers could reasonably be expected to accept.3 The result: Apple has to allow external payment options, putting its whole business model at risk.

In April 2025, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rodgers held Apple in civil contempt for violating the injunction, emphasizing that Apple attempted to “maintain its anticompetitive revenue stream over compliance.”4 While allowing external payment options, Apple introduced external link design restrictions and “scare screens” (full screen warnings that the customer is leaving the App Store and a third-party payment processor might not protect privacy, security, or offer subscription management as Apple does) to steer users away from following external links, and a new 27% fee on external purchases to capture revenue from those who still do. Since the contempt order, Apple has been forced to allow external payments with no new fees or warnings.5

While Apple did receive some monetary damages on the basis of their counterclaim for Epic’s admitted breach of contract, it is little condolence in the face of this threat to the future of their business.6 The law and this decision represent a total inversion of justice.

Apple’s Revolutionary Achievement

Think of what lies behind a single tap on an iPhone icon. In that split second, Apple’s custom silicon authenticates you, encrypted enclaves unlock credentials, and a globe-spanning delivery network pushes code while reconciling taxes in 200 jurisdictions and filtering fraud — every millisecond funded and engineered by Apple. All of this makes it possible for a college student in Mumbai to polish an idea for a new app at midnight and ship it to a billion pockets before sunrise.

None of the amazing infrastructure of the App Store existed until Apple staked the future of its business on the conviction that people would prize a cohesive, secure mobile experience. Every hardware encryption, every human review, every petabyte of telemetry bears the thoughtful, consumer-focused signature of the company that built it.

Because Apple proved so spectacularly right, the App Store didn’t just host software, it awakened a colossal global appetite for it. A multibillion‑dollar marketplace materialized almost overnight, and businesses of every stripe raced to meet the demand: ride hailing, same‑day grocery delivery, indie film studios, and Epic Games’s own Fortnite — with its stadium‑size tournaments and billion‑dollar in‑app economy — all rushed to stake their claim on the platform Apple envisioned and tirelessly maintains.

Instead of gratitude for its achievement, Apple received a court order.

Epic’s Epic Distortions

Like any producer, Apple has the moral right to decide who it trades with, on what conditions, and at what price. It was fully within its rights to remove all Epic Games content from the App Store for breaching contract. The courts, however, demanded that Apple take no action against any Epic Games product beyond Fortnite.7But Apple should be free to evict vendors from its App Store at will. It built the App Store platform, and therefore owns it.

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney casts the lawsuit as a crusade for “the freedom for creators to distribute as they choose.”8 Yet Fortnite’s distribution thrives, without Apple, on PCs, Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, and Android’s billion‑plus‑user marketplace. The only “freedom” it lacked was the “freedom” to use Apple’s market while dodging the toll. After hitching a ride on Apple’s rails to an instant worldwide audience, Epic now insists on riding first class for free, demanding the legal power to tap Apple’s infrastructure, brand, and user trust while refusing to pay for it.

Because Apple financed, engineered, and continues to safeguard their platform, its 30 % commission is not a “tax,” as Sweeney likes to deride it.9 It is the price of admission, which companies pay voluntarily to access the value Apple created. To brand this arrangement “exploitation” is a moral travesty: it demands Apple surrender justly earned rewards. Epic never had to offer Fortnite on the App Store. They chose to — in implicit acknowledgment of the value of Apple’s platform.

The court claims that Apple impedes “informed choice.” Yet, besides the fact that the App Store itself is an engine of information about what apps are available (about 1.8 million of them!10), Apple pioneered the mechanics that inform customers on multiple fronts such as ratings, reviews, and privacy labels. Informing customers is good business.

But spotlighting rival payment routes and cannibalizing your own store is obviously not good business. Ordering Apple to plaster its storefront with rival payment links is like forcing a bookstore to tape competitors’ coupons across its windows. Such a mandate is an enormous injustice that strips Apple of the right to profit from the value it has created. Thus, it is not Apple we should hold in contempt for trying to protect its revenue stream from the App Store through introducing “scare screens” or a new 27% fee. What we should hold in contempt is the legal framework leading to an unjust expropriation Apple understandably tried to mitigate.

One fitting response from Apple is found in the private text message exchange (now in the courts’ public record) by Apple’s communications director: “It’s our F*****G STORE” [redacted].11 It sure is.

End the Legalized Looting

Publicly, Apple has to be more reserved as it is still working on an appeal that will hopefully bring justice to one of the most valuable companies in history.

Meanwhile, Apple reinstated Fortnite to avoid more wrath from the judge, and other companies, enabled by Epic’s legal case, are already scrambling to cash in on the exploitation as well.12 The payment platform Stripe, mere hours after the 2025 contempt ruling, published detailed documentation showing businesses how to plug into its checkout system for a fraction of Apple’s commission. Spotify too made tweaks to its iOS app to allow users to bypass Apple and pay commission-free on the web. Even Amazon’s Kindle jumped on the bandwagon.

While major blame lies with Epic Games and other free riders on Apple, none would have been able to exploit Apple without the existence of the “unfair competition” laws. Epic Games couches its campaign in the language of “liberty,” but it uses the force of the law against the very thing that liberty protects: freedom of contract.13 A system that seeks to deprive producers of control over their businesses is institutionalizing plunder.

Justice demands that those who create have the right to decide the terms of trade and to claim the rewards that result. To achieve that justice, we need to eliminate the tools of legalized looting. This means repealing legislation like California’s Unfair Competition Law and the federal antitrust laws.

Robertas Bakula

Robertas Bakula is an Associate Fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute. He holds a MA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from CEVRO Institute in Prague, Czech Republic.

Marek Michulka

Marek Michulka, a B.A. in physics from the University of Chicago, is a participant in the ARU Honors Program.

1. Following NASA’s Apollo program, space progress stalled for decades, as the agency’s monopoly on launches ensured that prices remained exorbitant and innovation waned.

2. From 1984 to 2014, deregulation dismantled legal barriers to private launch services, ending government control of the industry.

3. Freed to compete and prove their value, private companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin have been able to engineer the much-needed cost reductions in space travel, making ventures such as space mining and private planetary missions at last feasible.

4. Progress stems from an alliance between scientists, who identify what is technologically possible, and entrepreneurs, who make it economically viable and profitable—an approach absent when the government expropriates taxpayer dollars and awards them to agencies that face no pressure to deliver more value than they consume.

5. The space-exploration renaissance was made possible by the industry’s newfound freedom to think, to produce, and to trade, unleashing human ingenuity from arbitrary government controls.

It’s been fifty-six years since Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. In 1969, no one would have thought that the last man to set foot on the moon would do so a mere three years later. Mid-century Americans expected a future of lunar colonies and space stations. The first man to step on Mars, they thought, would probably be a young boy who had watched Armstrong’s first steps with his parents. Mid-century science fiction projected that, by the end of the 1900s, space travel would be as common as air travel, that humanity would have colonized the moon and Mars, and that daring astronauts would be exploring the moons of Jupiter. And NASA was working to make these expectations a reality: Werner von Braun, chief architect of the Apollo Saturn V rocket, had worked out a plan to bring man to Mars by the 1980s.1

None of this materialized.

Now, a quarter of the way through this century, last century’s projections of the future seem possible again — and possibly right around the corner. SpaceX’s founder and CEO, Elon Musk, has announced his company’s intention to land their Starship rocket on Mars at the end of 2026 and to send the first manned Starship as early as 2029.2 Their competitor, Blue Origin, aims to “harness in-space resources” from the moon and other celestial bodies. They and their collaborators plan to have the first privately owned space station, Orbital Reef, open for business in 2027.3

Why has progress in space been so slow? How could the same generation of people who built the Apollo program have been so far off in their predictions of humanity’s future in space? The cause of their industry’s stagnation and the cause of their failure to predict the future are identical. Progress, whether in space or any other domain, requires freedom. This is a point which almost no one in the space industry, and few of its supporters, has fully appreciated. It’s taken until well into the twenty-first century to see the return of a progressive and inspiring space industry, because until recently the industry’s core service, launching rockets into space, was unfree. To continue and accelerate this progress, the industry must come to appreciate and defend its newfound freedom.

Private industry’s progress

Almost every vision of the future from mid- to late-twentieth-century futurism and science fiction depicts a world in which space faring is dominated by government entities, whether NASA (or its equivalents) or the military. For example, Arthur C. Clarke’s novels and their movie adaptations depict NASA’s efforts to explore the solar system. The 1960s television series, Star Trek, envisions exploring “the final frontier” as a quasi-communist endeavor of an interstellar equivalent of the U.N.

Historically, space advocacy groups primarily sought to convince the public to support government space agencies, or to convince those agencies to adopt their plans and suggestions.4 While some space advocates saw a substantial role for the private sector, no major twentieth-century proponent of science and space exploration advocated the freedom necessary to make this a reality. Even as late as 2015, science popularizer and astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson was insisting that NASA would continue to lead the exploration of space.5

Very recently, many of these groups and individuals have warmed to the private space industry, likely owing to the undeniable fact that NASA’s plans have progressed like molasses, while companies like SpaceX, Rocket Labs, and Blue Origin are moving so fast that the awe-inspiring achievements of autumn become routine by spring. But the space community has celebrated the private sector’s results without fully appreciating their cause.

The key to accomplishing the industry’s ambitious goals is to radically reduce the cost of reaching orbit. Whether the goal is scientific research, exploration, commercialization, or military defense, the fundamental constraint on the utilization of space is the cost of escaping the earth’s gravity.6

Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos explains his company’s mission by analogizing the current space launch industry to the telecommunications industry of the early internet days. He wants to enable cheap and easy transfer of mass to orbit in just the way that early internet companies enabled cheap, reliable, high-speed transfer of data across the globe. A successful space launch industry will enable dorm-room space startups by making space accessible to entrepreneurs and consumers in just the way that companies like MCI and Cisco enabled Facebook to be founded in a Harvard dormitory.7

To achieve this goal, Blue Origin has designed its New Glenn rocket to ferry cargo to lower earth orbit for under $1k/lbs.8 This is comparable to SpaceX’s industry-leading Falcon Heavy’s ~$700/lbs.9 SpaceX’s ambition for Starship is <$100 per pound.10 In contrast, NASA’s refurbishable Space Shuttle cost ~$29k/lbs. and its expendable Space Launch System (SLS) costs ~$19.5k/lbs.11 To borrow a turn of phrase from Richard Nixon, when space was dominated by the government, the costs of astronautics was astronomical. It’s taken the private sector to bring the cost of space down to earth.

It’s difficult to imagine the full range of possibilities that such a radical cost reduction will open, but we’re already seeing some of the results.

Rocket Labs, a third player in the new space launch market, has been radically reducing the cost of scientific research in space. In partnership with MIT, they aim to launch the Venus Life Finder mission in summer 2026. The mission will be the first privately led and funded mission to another planet and costs under $10 million. In addition to the contributions from Rocket Labs and MIT, funding comes from philanthropy.12

Another new possibility is space mining, which requires affordable ways of moving mining equipment hundreds of millions of miles and of returning mined materials back to Earth. Asteroid mining company AstroForge’s February 2025 mission, Odin, though failing to achieve its primary objective due to communications issues, marked the first serious attempt at a commercial, deep-space mission. Its follow-up mission, Vestri, aims to achieve the first private landing on an asteroid.13

Notable by its absence from the new space race is NASA, but not for lack of trying.

NASA’s stagnation

NASA had an earned reputation as the leader in space technology because of Apollo’s success. But it was that very success which would ultimately lead to failure.

The goal of the Apollo program was to put a man on the moon, and to do it before the Soviets. While the motivation of the scientists and astronauts responsible for Apollo’s success was to innovate and explore, the program’s motivation was political. It’s the nature of such government programs that their success becomes their undoing: there’s no reason to continue running a race you’ve won. So, unsurprisingly, after NASA won the space race, politicians became less willing to fund ambitious, risky ventures. NASA’s mission became less well-defined and, as a result, the care with which NASA managed its programs deteriorated.

NASA’s defenders can point to post-Apollo programs that made real advances. For instance, in this period NASA ironed out the requirements for long-term human presence in zero gravity. But if space technology is to ever develop beyond a political curiosity, radical cost-reduction is the essential advance needed. NASA’s post-Apollo advances are only achievements if we ignore the context of its failure to achieve that cost-reduction.

Following Apollo, NASA’s most ambitious program was the Space Shuttle, which had the goal of making a reusable spacecraft and, as a result, radically reduce the cost of reaching lower earth orbit.14 It is now well-understood that reusability is essential to cost reduction. This is why the launch vehicles currently in development, whether government or private, American or Chinese, incorporate some degree of reusability.

Though many Americans remember the Space Shuttle program fondly, it was a failure. According to some estimates, the Shuttle was over ten times more expensive than the Saturn V at getting mass to orbit.15 And the Shuttle was unsafe, suffering two tragic, catastrophic failures.16 Furthermore, because the Shuttle program was functional and semi-reusable, the reusable Shuttle’s failure to lower costs led many to question whether reusability as such was as important for cost-reduction as hoped.

Given the failure of the Shuttle program, it’s tragic that NASA killed the McDonnell Douglas Delta Clipper program in favor of second-generation space plane projects.17 The Delta Clipper was a single-stage-to-orbit, reusable, vertically landing rocket. As is now evident from the achievements of SpaceX, vertical landing is key to reusability, and hence to cost reduction. The Clipper was developed as part of the Strategic Defense Initiative and was transferred to NASA in 1996. While under development by McDonnell Douglas, a prototype became the first rocket to achieve a powered vertical landing in 1993. That’s twenty years before Blue Origin and SpaceX were able to develop vertical-takeoff, vertical-landing rockets and twenty-five years before Falcon rockets proved that this approach could achieve radical cost-reduction. After NASA took over the program from McDonnell Douglas, an early test flight crashed and NASA canceled it.18 Because NASA and the Department of Defense were the only entities then operating space launch vehicles, the idea that would ultimately revolutionize spaceflight was left unexplored for over a decade.

Today, NASA’s Artemis program aims to reach the moon by 2027 and establish a permanent moon base in the following years. But Artemis is more likely to make headlines because of delays, cost overruns, and decisions to outsource ever more elements of the program to private companies. By all accounts, the SLS rocket that is the program’s workhorse is mind-bogglingly expensive and obsolete compared to private-sector rockets.19

Explanations of the post-Apollo slowdown in space exploration center on NASA. After Apollo, NASA became far more risk averse, especially compared to present-day industry-leader SpaceX. It outsourced work to the private sector using cost-plus contracts to politically favored cronies, which further inflated costs.

But these are effects, not causes. They are effects of the government’s decision to centrally plan the space industry using NASA and the Department of Defense as the sole providers of space launch services. Since launch capacity is the key infrastructure for the space industry, it should have been expected that, until the launch industry was free, space development would stagnate. The cause of the space industry’s failure to live up to its potential was the lack of freedom in its fundamental service. The cause of the twenty-first century’s renaissance in space exploration is the freedom granted to space launch during the last two decades of the twentieth century.

The birth of freedom in the space launch industry

Until 2004, there was limited freedom in the space-launch industry. The freedom finally achieved in the early years of the twenty-first century was the culmination of twenty years of efforts to free private entities to commercialize space launch services.20

Prior to the Commercial Space Launch Act of 1984, only NASA and the Department of Defense were permitted to operate space launch vehicles in the United States.21 The act was, in part, a response to Space Services, Inc. of America’s (SSIA) effort to build a private, commercially viable launch service business. SSIA was founded by David Hannah in 1980 when, while technically not illegal, private launch was a legal and regulatory gray area.22 There was no framework in which private rockets could be licensed, insured, or even integrated into national airspace systems. So, while not clearly legal, a private launch was also not illegal.

The legal gray area in private launch made private launch services far riskier than it otherwise would be. On top of the inherent riskiness of rocketry or of starting a whole new industry, SSIA was taking on the risk that the government could shut the entire thing down at any point.23 But Hannah and others saw an opportunity in the Reagan administration’s enthusiasm for private enterprise and skepticism of regulation to take the risk. SSIA proactively informed the FAA, DOT, NASA, and the DoD of their plans. In 1982, their Conestoga I became the first privately funded rocket to reach space.24

SSIA failed to become the first commercially viable space launch company. But they were right in their judgment that the political climate of the time presented an opportunity to begin a revolution in the space industry.25 Their successful launch demonstrated both that private enterprise could reach space and the need for legal and regulatory clarity on the possibility of private launch. Rep. Daniel Akaka (D-HI) and Sen. Harrison Schmitt (R-NM) (a former Apollo astronaut) took up the cause of commercial space launch legalization.26 The result was the Commercial Space Launch Act.

The 1984 act explicitly granted private entities the freedom to launch and limited the power of government agencies to regulate space launch “only to the extent necessary . . . to ensure compliance with international obligations of the United States and to protect the public health and safety, safety of property, and national security interests and foreign policy interests of the United States.”27

Unfortunately, NASA used the Space Shuttle program to crowd out private competition by pricing launches at deeply subsidized rates.28 It wasn’t until the Challenger disaster grounded the program, and the 1990 Launch Service Purchase Act required the government to purchase some launch services from private providers, that NASA’s control of the market waned.29 The 1990 changes in the law led the government to select Boeing and Lockheed Martin to each develop and operate launch vehicles that would compete for government contracts.30 Only then did launch-service start-ups begin to form.

Progress was further cemented by the Commercial Space Act of 1998, which adopted the commercialization of space and the protection of free markets as explicit goals: “The Congress . . . declares that free and competitive markets create the most efficient conditions for promoting economic development, and should therefore govern the economic development of Earth orbital space.”31

The last step in the freeing of private space launch was the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004, which established a legal framework for private crewed space launches.32 The act clarified the role of the FAA and established a so-called learning period during which the FAA’s power to regulate human spaceflight is severely limited. (The learning period has been extended multiple times and is currently set to expire in 2028.)33

The final barrier to the formation of a free market for space-launch services was the still-existing special privileges granted to United Launch Alliance (ULA), a company formed at the behest of the government, combining the launch services of Lockheed Martin and Boeing. In 2014, SpaceX sued the government, alleging that the Air Force was illegally excluding it from bidding against ULA for military launch contracts.34 SpaceX dropped the lawsuit after the Air Force agreed to open competition and SpaceX was able to provide launch services for a quarter of ULA’s price.35^,36 The lawsuit opened a new source of revenue for SpaceX and its competitors.

The twenty-year period of legalization and deregulation freed Americans to innovate in space-launch services. After the SpaceX lawsuit, companies historically protected by the government lost their last privileges and new players became able to compete on fair terms for lucrative military contracts. Space was now open for business.

Why freedom makes the space industry’s progress possible

Without an appreciation for the fundamentality of freedom to technological progress and industrial development, the best industry observers find themselves in the position of Casey Handmer, former NASA JPL scientist (and current NASA critic): “There’s no law of physics which says that government has to be conspicuously less productive than private industry, but it certainly seems to happen a lot.”37

There may be no law of physics that says that government can’t be productive. But there is a socio-economic principle that explains NASA’s failure: productivity is only possible to the extent that we are free to think, to act, to create, and to trade.

Along with the freedom now extended to private industry comes a responsibility: space must be profitable. That is, any entity which invests in space technology must come away with more value than it put in. The result of this alignment is the sustainable, long-term technological progress that characterizes every industry in which both scientific curiosity and economic profitability are driving forces.

Now that the space industry is free, scientists and space companies must prove that their work is valuable by convincing investors and customers to freely invest in or buy their services. Only in a system in which all parties participate voluntarily can technological progress reach its productive potential. Technological progress requires entrepreneurial thinking, which is only possible to the extent that investors, producers, and consumers are free.

By contrast, scientists and administrators at NASA never had to justify their work to persuade someone to voluntarily pay to use their programs. From NASA’s perspective, their work was important enough to give them the “right” to coercively expropriate wealth from productive members of society and to prevent those same people from competing with them.

In a free market, entrepreneurs face the question, “How can I make a valuable product for my customers to earn a return for my investors?” Elon Musk and Gwynne Shotwell from SpaceX must think about how to lower the price of launch services to attract customers away from ULA and to launch more advanced Starlink satellites; Jeff Bezos and Dave Limp from Blue Origin must think about whether to build a rocket which will directly compete with SpaceX or to find an unserved niche. Those high-level decisions become a factor in product design. For instance, is it better to build a cutting-edge rocket out of aluminum-lithium alloy (New Glenn) or stainless steel (Starship)?

How are these questions to be answered? When innovation is administered by government, “success” is measured by compliance with the ephemeral and unpredictable edicts of politicians. When business is free, success is measured objectively by long-term, self-sustaining profitability, which makes possible increased investment in new research and technology by successful firms and their investors. This is the virtue of profit seeking, which the critics of private spaceflight refuse to understand.

Entrepreneurial thinking is exactly what’s been missing from the space launch industry since its beginning, so it is unsurprising that many of the leading figures of the new space industry were leading entrepreneurs in traditional tech. The old space industry employed many brilliant, creative scientists, but it lacked brilliant, creative entrepreneurs. And until very recently, the entrepreneur’s way of thinking, the kind of thinking necessary to make space a new frontier, was illegal and therefore impossible in the space launch industry.

It is the scientist who solves the problem of how to design a rocket engine that can escape earth’s gravity. But it is the businessman who solves the problem of how to profitably organize the resources necessary to make the scientist’s designs a reality. In a free economy, the scientist discovers what is physically possible while his partner, the businessman, discovers what is economically possible.

One dramatic example of the intersection between technological and economic thinking is the industry’s approach to second-stage rocket reusability. In his interview with Lex Fridman, Jeff Bezos explains that the cost of a second stage can be lowered in one of two ways. Either the stage is expendable but much cheaper to manufacture or is reusable but more expensive to manufacture. In his judgment, “[it] is actually not obvious which one is better.”38 In other words, just because it’s technologically possible to build a reusable second stage doesn’t mean it’s profitable to do so. The way to find out is to do it and see. Can a fully reusable two-stage rocket outcompete a partially reusable two-stage rocket? The Starship program is the first experiment to find out. How to make industry progress is neither solely a scientific nor an economic problem but their union. Solving that complex problem requires the extraordinary thinking only possible when entrepreneurs are free.

In a well-functioning commercial enterprise, the work of the scientist and the businessman each set a context within which the other must solve his share of the industry’s problems. Elon Musk is well known for his first-principles approach to engineering and the “idiot index.” The first-principles method begins by identifying what are the fundamental physical constraints on a problem and ignores any considerations not dictated by those constraints. The physical constraints on rockets are the rocket equation and the structural efficiency and thermal properties of component materials, among many others. The idiot index compares the cost of a finished product to the cost the raw materials. The higher the ratio, the more inefficient the productive process. In combination, the two approaches imply that if the raw material costs are only a small fraction of the product cost, the costs are not the effect of physical limitations and are likely due to product design and manufacturing. Musk explained this approach in a 2012 interview:

I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. What is a rocket made of? Aerospace-grade aluminium alloys, some titanium, copper and carbon fibre. And then I asked, what is the value of those materials on the commodity market? It turned out that the materials cost of a rocket was around two percent of the typical price — which is a crazy ratio for a large mechanical product.39

His related method of engineering stresses the elimination of parts and the potential to automate production.40 Musk’s philosophy isn’t purely scientific or technological; it’s also economic. First-principles engineering tells him what is possible at the current stage of scientific knowledge. The idiot index tells him how much he can save by improving design and manufacture. Fewer parts means less maintenance (a cost), more efficient manufacturing (a cost), and more mass to orbit (revenue). These considerations pushed SpaceX’s engineers to design a rocket engine so impressive that one of its competitors assumed the engine must be a hoax, and to design a first-stage that doesn’t land but is caught.41 It’s precisely when business and scientific considerations inform each other that technology thrives and the near-impossible becomes commonplace. And that’s precisely what’s impossible for an institution like NASA, which uses force to maintain its existence.

If the activities scientists wish to explore are illegal, there’s nothing to think about. This was the case for private space launch until the 1980s. If the activities are legal but must be shaped to adhere to unjust laws and regulations, or if the government provides deeply subsidized competition, only two outcomes are possible. Either the cost of compliance will be so high no one will risk the effort, or as was arguably the case between 1984 and 2004, privileged firms can operate but regulation and subsidization stifle new market entrants.42 In either case the industry is unfree.

So, it’s wrong to think that it is privatization per se that makes an industry dynamic and progressive. The fundamental factor is freedom. This is why, though there have been private entities in the space industry since before Apollo, and there were private launch providers in the twenty years following the 1984 Commercial Space Launch Act, the industry only became dynamic when freedom rather than controls came to define the space-launch market.

The integration of scientific with productive considerations, by its nature, is hobbled or absent in controlled industries. At NASA, the question faced by administrators is: “How can I convince politicians that funding this program will please their constituents?” James Fletcher had to please Richard Nixon; Jared Isaacman’s nomination was withdrawn for failing to keep Donald Trump’s favor. Government institutions like NASA get funding by currying favor with politicians, who in turn expropriate wealth from taxpayers. By the nature of the job, it’s impossible for NASA administrators to think entrepreneurially about how they earn and spend this funding, because this funding is not a voluntary investment: it’s obtained by force. Leaders in private industry must think entrepreneurially because their very existence depends on their continued success.

The expansion of freedom in space launch is necessary for the formation of a dynamic space industry. But the government must do more than get out of the way. The first major step in this direction was the 2015 U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act (sometimes known as the SPACE Act).43 By defining clear property rights in space resources and clearly defining liabilities governing human space flight, the government has taken some early, necessary affirmative steps to protect and expand the industry’s newly granted freedom. Florida’s 2023 Spaceflight Entity Liability Bill and Texas’s earlier 2011 legislation are other steps in this direction.44 But more needs to be done. For example, as the cost-to-orbit continues to fall, earth orbital space will become more crowded. There is a need for well-defined rights and liabilities in the use of orbital space.

America is the leader in space science because it has led the way in expanding and protecting its citizen’s freedom. Preserving and enhancing the freedom of the space industry will not only enable the space entrepreneurs to flourish but will demonstrate globally that progress requires the freedom to produce and profit. By solidifying and expanding the legal frameworks that enable this freedom, the U.S. can ensure that the frontiers of space will continue to be explored, developed, and commercialized in ways previously limited to science fiction. To secure this future, the space industry must not only benefit from its freedom but actively defend and advocate the freedoms that make its progress possible.

Mike Mazza

Mike Mazza is an associate fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute, specializing in the application of Objectivism to the philosophy of science and technology. He holds a PhD in philosophy from Saint Louis University and previously taught philosophy, ethics, and critical thinking before joining ARI in 2020.

But what if they had the moral clarity—and confidence—to defend it?

In this new episode of The Ayn Rand Institute Podcast, we celebrate the release of Profit Without Apology, ARI’s brand-new manifesto for a moral revolution in how we view business. Part of our Atlas Circle initiative, this book challenges the conventional narrative that profit is something shameful—and instead defends it as a moral virtue.

In this episode, you’ll hear:

• Why Ayn Rand saw business as central to her moral defense of capitalism

• The philosophical roots of today’s anti-business culture

• How most people ignore the hard thinking that goes into business

• Why understanding the morality of the profit motive is essential to standing up for business

• The role of intellectuals in fostering a pro-business culture

Listen Now »

Business deserves to be celebrated.You can support this work by subscribing to this Substack and by purchasing Profit Without Apology.

In proud defense of profit,

The Atlas Circle Team

Key Takeaways

• The modern world was built by business: businessmen spearhead human progress by translating knowledge into wealth.

• But we live in an anti-business culture that views the pursuit of profits with suspicion. 

• The root of anti-business sentiment is a corrupt moral code—altruism—which damns self-interest and glorifies need, punishing producers for producing.

• In reality, the pursuit of profit is morally good: it is earned by businessmen who pursue their happiness through productive achievement and win/win trade.

• To create a pro-business culture, businessmen must stop apologizing and start fighting back.

• That is why we created the Atlas Circle: to stand up for business and to provide intellectual ammunition to help business stand up for itself.

Businessmen are guilty of a moral crime. Their crime is not that they’ve manipulated, defrauded, or exploited humanity. As a group, they are responsible for creating the world of abundance that has lifted most of mankind out of poverty and increased lifespans from 30 to 80. No, their crime is that they’ve been too timid, too apologetic, too hesitant to declare that what they do is good.

In a world that treats business as guilty until proven innocent and insists that successful businessmen have a moral obligation to “give something back” (as if they had taken something rather than created something), businessmen have not spoken out in their own defense. They have not said that business is a noble calling, demanding our highest virtues and worthy of our deepest admiration. They have not said that the profit motive fueling their achievements is honorable and that the profits they earn are deserved. They have not insisted on their moral right to freedom from government interference and control.

Instead, businessmen have responded to charges that they are greedy and exploitative with silence—or, worse, by trying to appease their attackers with assurances that their goal is not their own profit but some “social” goal like creating jobs, or paying taxes, or pursuing philanthropy. One way or another, they concede that the core activity of business—seeking profits through the production and trade—is dangerous and immoral, and that the moral high ground belongs to the blowhards trying to shame and shackle them.

“As a group,” Ayn Rand observed in 1971, “businessmen have been withdrawing for decades from the ideological battlefield, . . . Their public policy has consisted in appeasing, compromising and apologizing: appeasing their crudest, loudest antagonists; compromising with any attack, any lie, any insult; apologizing for their own existence.”1

Is it any wonder, then, that the public distrusts business and welcomes the regulatory state? If businessmen themselves will not speak out in their own defense, can the public be blamed for thinking it’s because the critics are right and there is something sordid about the work and fortunes of businessmen?

It’s time that businessmen stop apologizing for their success and start demanding moral recognition for their achievements—and the moral right to their own freedom. 

That’s why we created the Atlas Circle: to stand up for business and empower businessmen to stand up for themselves. We believe that the work of business is morally good. We believe that businessmen have been singled out for special attack: they are damned precisely for their virtues. And we believe that only by exposing and repudiating the ideas that fuel anti-business sentiment is it possible for businessmen to gain the recognition and freedom they deserve.

Who Moves the World?

We live in an era of incredible progress. Individuals in the advanced world are living longer, healthier, safer, wealthier lives than at any time in history. Not only has life expectancy at birth nearly tripled since the pre-industrial era, but life expectancy at age 50 has risen between five and 10 years since 1950.2 Deaths from accidents—car accidents, plane crashes, falls, fires, drownings—have all plunged by orders of magnitude over the last century.3 Deaths from climate-related causes, such as drought and storms, have declined by an astonishing 98 percent.4 On the whole, global prosperity has risen from $3 a day in 1600 to $33 a day, with individuals in the freest countries living on $100 a day—a 30-fold increase.5

We take progress for granted, but we shouldn’t. Progress is not a given. For most of history, the bulk of humanity lived at the edge of starvation, and economic growth was measured in centuries, not years. That changed around 1800. Why? Because it was only then, with the birth of capitalism, that a new figure entered the historical scene: the businessman. He sought to profit by constantly finding new and better ways of doing things. Inventors, innovators, and industrialists pioneered technologies and entire industries that transformed every aspect of human life.

The Energy Revolution. Energy empowers human beings to use machines to do our work for us. It was businessmen like Newcomen and Rockefeller who discovered how to produce low-cost energy to power those machines, creating the fossil fuel industry and unleashing dramatic improvements in every other area of human life.

The Transportation Revolution. For most of human history, human beings could travel no faster than a horse. Businessmen created steam ships, locomotives, cars, and airplanes to close the gap between distance and time. Thanks to entrepreneurs and inventors like Vanderbilt, Ford, and the Wright Brothers, we could move goods and ourselves further, faster, and at lower cost.

The Food Revolution. Throughout history, producing food has been mankind’s greatest concern and struggle. But thanks to businessmen, food has never been more abundant, convenient, diverse, or affordable. Because of innovations in agricultural technology, transportation, and refrigeration, fewer agricultural workers than ever grow more food than ever at a lower cost than ever. 

The Communication Revolution. Human beings survive by discovering and deploying knowledge. The more knowledge we can access and the faster we can access it, the more we can thrive. A long line of businessmen, from Bell and Edison to Gates and Jobs, brought us the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, the television, the personal computer, the internet, and the smartphones that have made virtually the whole of human knowledge available to us at the touch of a button.

The Health Revolution. Modern medicine gives us more years in our life and more life in our years. Business supplies our doctors and hospitals with MRI machines, pharmaceutical treatments, life-saving stents, and non-invasive surgery technologies that save and improve lives.

The Financial Revolution. Progress is only possible in a world that runs on money, and the financial industry helps deploy money profitably. Venture capitalists, private equity firms, and community banks help spark new ventures and revive failing ones by matching money and talent. They help us mitigate risk through insurance. They help us maximize our consumption through credit cards and other consumer loans. They help us live securely in retirement through low-cost index funds and financial planning services.

We can point to problems and challenges in all of these industries. Every technology and new line of business introduces new risks and challenges. But car accidents don’t erase the value of cars. Air pollution doesn’t erase the value of low-cost energy. New achievements give rise to new problems for human ingenuity to solve. Progress involves the continual improvement in our ability to meet life’s challenges, including the challenges progress itself creates.

But at every step, the individuals driving human life forward are businessmen. Businessmen prosper by translating knowledge into wealth. The sciences expand the frontiers of knowledge, but it is businessmen who figure out how to use that knowledge profitably, how to create the products and services that we use to pursue our happiness. Scientists study energy—businessmen produce the power that runs our factories, farms, homes, and cars. Scientists study diseases—businessmen produce the instruments and drugs that cure disease and improve our quality of life. The businessman, Rand concludes, 

is the great liberator who, in the short span of a century and a half, has released men from bondage to their physical needs, has released them from the terrible drudgery of an eighteen-hour workday of manual labor for their barest subsistence, has released them from famines, from pestilences, from the stagnant hopelessness and terror in which most of mankind had lived in all the pre-capitalist centuries—and in which most of it still lives, in non-capitalist countries.6

Value creation is primarily intellectual, and here businessmen make an unmatched contribution. Their intellectual labor determines whether a worker produces ten outfits a day or ten thousand—a pencil or a computer—snake oil or a life-saving pharmaceutical. It is businessmen who introduce new products, new services, new tools, new methods of production. It is businessmen who formulate business strategies, and pivot when those strategies fail. It is businessmen who decide who to hire, who to fire, what prices to charge, and how a product should be sold. It is businessmen who risk their life savings and work for years without pay, with nothing but their conviction that the doubters are wrong and that success is possible. All of that takes thought, judgment, and courage. And it is through that intellectual effort that businessmen supply us with the knowledge, resources, and processes that lift our productive power to increasingly greater heights.

If you knew nothing else but that business drives progress, you would assume that it was the most heralded, celebrated profession on earth. The reality is far different.

Our Anti-Business Culture

We live in an anti-business culture. While we will sometimes celebrate top businessmen for their achievements, we nevertheless view them with an air of suspicion and categorically deny them any moral recognition for their work. 

Even our most successful, most respected business leaders are told they have a moral duty to “give something back.” We do not chastise successful scientists, artists, athletes, or even literal lottery winners about “giving back.” But to succeed at business is to “take something from society,” in Salesforce co-CEO Marc Benioff’s words, and the solution is for businessmen to “truly give back and have a positive impact.”7

This is actually the least negative way successful businessmen are described. The nineteenth-century industrialists who created the modern world were unjustly denounced as “robber barons” and “lords of industry,” equating them with the unproductive, oppressive aristocracy that ruled the feudal ages. Today, we condemn Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Auto, Big Ag, and any other successful business as greedy and exploitative. To be “Big,” i.e., successful, is to be bad. According to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “No one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars. . . . You sat on a couch while thousands of people were paid modern-day slave wages.”8 

Tarred as greedy and exploitative, businessmen become convenient scapegoats for every problem or crisis. Who took the blame for the Great Depression? Businessmen. Who took the blame for spiraling healthcare costs? Businessmen. Who took the blame for the 2008 financial crisis? Businessmen. Who took the blame for our recent bout of post-COVID “greedflation”? Businessmen. And despite the reality that each of these crises was caused, not by business, but by anti-capitalist government policy, the scapegoating was used to justify handing even more power to the government.9 “The greed of Wall Street and corporate America is destroying the very fabric of our nation,” claims Sen. Bernie Sanders. “[I]f Wall Street does not end its greed, we will end it for them.”10

The result of this anti-business rhetoric is an oppressive regulatory state that restricts the freedom of business to build, to innovate, and to profit. Federal regulations take up more than 90,000 pages, with government controls dictating in unimaginable detail how businessmen are permitted to function. Major building projects that took months a century ago now take years to complete (if they can be completed) solely because of regulations like NEPA and Certificate of Need laws that treat business activity as guilty until proven innocent. And a resurgence in antitrust lawsuits by both Democratic and Republican administrations has threatened our most successful companies precisely because they are successful.11

Why We Hate Business

Why is our culture so hostile to business? It’s not fundamentally because of any actual wrongs or misdeeds. The reason we evade the achievements of business and vilify businessmen is because we’ve been taught that their driving motive is dangerous and immoral. “Who on earth,” asks conservative luminary Irving Kristol, “wants to live in a society in which all—or even a majority—of one’s fellow citizens are fully engaged in the hot pursuit of money, the single-minded pursuit of material self-interest?”12 You can’t trust businessmen for the same reason you can’t trust a gangster: he’s after money and is willing to do anything and harm anyone in order to get it. 

This is utter nonsense. And to see that it’s nonsense, ask yourself this question: Why does anyone bother to work? Why does a farmer grow corn or a novelist spend hours a day carefully crafting a story? In short: to make a profit and earn a living.

Human life requires material values, and those values aren’t provided ready-made by nature—we have to create them. This is true of our most basic needs for food, clothing, and shelter. But it’s true of every value that sustains and enhances our lives. We work in order to eat—and to travel to a friend’s wedding, to listen to a soul-nourishing symphony, to spend an afternoon with our children at the zoo. Production is the fuel that powers all of our endeavors, and the proof of successful production is that we have created something more valuable than what we used up, i.e., we have profited.

This is why work itself is so often rewarding. Whether it’s a child building a block tower or an architect building a skyscraper or an entrepreneur building a company, there is something deeply fulfilling about exercising the thought and effort necessary to create new values.

The reason that we work, then, is because we value our own lives and our own happiness. To earn a living is an act of self-interest. We seek work that we find rewarding so that we have the material resources to build thriving, joyful lives.

The same is true for businessmen. They seek to earn a living by creating values—and the insignia of value creation in business is monetary profit. To create profits is to build something more valuable. Loss is a signal of destruction. An unproductive employee gets fired. An unproductive businessman goes bankrupt. If you are doing something morally good when you earn a paycheck as a doctor or software developer, then a businessman is doing something morally good when he earns a profit by creating a great business.

Is the problem “too much” profit? There’s no such thing. Profits don’t come at anyone’s expense. They aren’t taken from workers or customers. They aren’t taken at all. They are earned through countless win/win transactions. An author grows rich because millions of readers value the book more than its cost. A businessman grows rich because thousands or millions or billions of customers value his product more than it cost him to produce it. The greater his profits, the greater the value he has created.

What ensures that a businessman can profit only through creating value rather than through manipulation or exploitation? Freedom. In a truly free society, a businessman cannot force anyone to work for him or to buy from him. Nor can he run to government for favors. His only currency is the opportunities he can offer to others: jobs they want, products they desire, services that enhance their lives. If a business won’t pay me what I think I’m worth, I look for another job (or start my own business). If a company charges me too much or offers me too little, I take my business elsewhere. When people are free, all trade relationships are voluntary, and we only pursue them to the extent they are mutually rewarding.

It is only when people resort to force that someone can profit at another’s expense. When an executive defrauds customers he is acting as a thief. When a CEO grows rich on corporate welfare or protectionist tariffs, he is extracting benefits he could not achieve on a free market. But to the extent a society is free, the only path to long-term profitability is virtue: the exercise of rational thought and productive effort necessary to prosper through voluntary trade.

For anyone who values human progress, who recognizes the moral right of each person to grow, thrive, and prosper, who believes that the pursuit of happiness is the individual’s noblest quest, then the profit motive represents something good: it is a businessman’s desire to earn a living. To build the kind of life he wants to live and the kind of world he wants to live in. To live by his own thought and effort, dealing with others through mutual consent to mutual advantage.

But this is not what we have been taught. The reason we condemn the profit motive is because for more than 2,000 years we have embraced a moral theory that does not hold the individual’s pursuit of happiness as its goal but selfless service to others. Altruism, the moral doctrine that says our duty is to serve something “greater” than ourselves, teaches us that the profit motive must be immoral because its aim is not self-sacrifice but self-interest. From the New Testament’s condemnation of those who concern themselves with worldly riches—to Marx’s condemnation of profit as exploitation—-to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s warning that “[t]he profit motive . . . encourages a cutthroat competition and selfish ambition”13 -to Fed chief Alan Greenspan blaming the “self-interest” of businessmen for a crisis he helped manufacture,14 we have been indoctrinated with a moral view that teaches us to view businessmen with suspicion at best and hatred at worst. 

Altruism distorts our evaluation of business in two basic ways. First, it teaches us that need, not achievement, is what entitles a person to values. The economist Thomas Sowell once observed, “I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.”15 The answer, Rand understood, is embedded in the logic of altruism. The morality of altruism allows you to collect sacrifices and gain values—provided you don’t earn them. If you’re a producer, you don’t have a right to what you produce. That’s greedy. But if you produce nothing? That is precisely what gives you a moral right to what others produce. According to altruism, Rand observes, “it is immoral to live by your own effort, but moral to live by the effort of others—it is immoral to consume your own product, but moral to consume the products of others—it is immoral to earn, but moral to mooch—it is the parasites who are the moral justification for the existence of the producers, but the existence of the parasites is an end in itself.”16 To earn a fortune is selfish and immoral. To earn nothing is to be granted a moral blank check on those who create abundance.

Second, altruism teaches us that the only alternative to sacrificing yourself to others is to sacrifice others to yourself. Altruism rejects the possibility of living as a self-supporting trader, who forges mutually rewarding relationships with others. Either you value other people, in which case you must serve and sacrifice for their needs, or you callously ignore other people, in which case you reveal a willingness to trample over their welfare and rights in a brute quest for money, fame, and power. This is why altruists refuse to make a moral distinction between a Steve Jobs and a Bernie Madoff, a Sam Walton and an Al Capone.

But a moral theory that can’t distinguish a trader from a thief invalidates itself. A moral theory that casts blame and suspicion on those who create values and legitimizes those who seek to deprive producers of their freedom and their justly earned wealth is deeply unjust. A moral theory that teaches us to condemn the profession that has liberated us from poverty and built a thriving world is suicidal and anti-human.

We need morality. But not the morality of self-sacrifice. “The purpose of morality,” said Rand, “is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.”17 We need, in short, a morality of self-esteem.18 One that values each individual’s pursuit of happiness.

Why Businessmen Must Stand Up

Businessmen are an oppressed minority. In any conflict with any group—workers, consumers, politicians—they are assumed to be in the wrong. Whatever the problem or crisis, they are assumed to be at fault. When they are subject to special laws scrutinizing, controlling, and penalizing them in a manner that no one else would tolerate, they are expected to shut up and be thankful for how good they have it.

The persecution of businessmen is overlooked because they are not helpless victims. Their victimization is not the result of lack of political or financial resources but of moral resources. Businessmen are oppressed because they will not stand up for themselves—and they will not stand up for themselves because they accept, or are afraid to challenge, the moral ideal of altruism that dominates our culture.

Altruism paralyzes businessmen. On some level, they know that what they do is good—but they also know that their motive is not the good of others but their own happiness. They know that they are in business because they want to make money doing work they love, not to selflessly serve the needs of others. And so when they encounter arguments that they are achieving “obscene profits” while some people’s needs are going unmet, or when they encounter charges that “the public interest” demands reining in their “unchecked greed,” they feel mystified, helpless, indignant, and vaguely guilty. Behind closed doors, they might complain about the irrationality of the assault on business. Publicly, they remain silent—or degrade themselves by appeasing and apologizing to their attackers. This isn’t merely a practical misstep—it’s moral surrender.

This needs to change. Businessmen should stand up for themselves: for the nobility of their profession and their moral right to freedom. Everyone who benefits from the abundance business has created—which means, everyone—has a responsibility to stand up and speak out for business. But if we are to move from business oppression to business liberation, businessmen must not only play a role—they must lead.

Every great movement for justice in American history has required victims of injustice to stand up and say: I will not accept this any longer. The American colonists declared their independence from a tyrannical crown. Abolitionists—many of them former slaves—refused to let slavery be accepted as a permanent fact. Women fighting for suffrage stood up and demanded political equality. Civil rights leaders took enormous risks to challenge Jim Crow and demand equal treatment under the law. More recently, the gay pride movement succeeded, not by appealing to pity, but by asserting self-worth: we will not be treated this way any longer.19

In every case, these movements succeeded when they were animated by the conviction that they were fighting not for special favors or exceptions, but for justice—for the recognition that they were moral equals, unjustly persecuted, and deserving of freedom.

Businessmen, too, are the victims of injustice. They are the only group in America routinely denounced not for harming others but for succeeding. They are subject to a regulatory regime built on the premise of preventive law—that because they seek profit, they inevitably will do wrong unless subject to surveillance and control. They are presumed guilty before any crime, their freedom preemptively curbed.

And yet, where is the moral outrage? Where are the business leaders declaring: I am not a servant. I do not apologize for my ability. I do not apologize for earning profits. I am a human being, and I demand to be treated as such? Until that happens—until businessmen stand up proudly and defiantly—we will continue to live in an anti-business culture that deprives businessmen of the recognition and freedom they deserve. But if they do stand up, history shows what is possible.

Speaking out against injustice can provoke retaliation—from the media, from political activists, from the government. We in no way mean to minimize the risks. But far more dangerous in the long run are the risks of not speaking out.

That is why we created the Atlas Circle. The Atlas Circle exists to stand up for business—and to help businessmen stand up for themselves. To provide them with the intellectual ammunition they need to defend the value of their work and to fight for justice and for freedom.

The fight for freedom is never easy, and it never has been. But it is winnable—if those with the most to lose also realize that they have the most to gain by speaking out. The battle for capitalism is, above all, a moral battle. And it can only be won when businessmen rediscover their own moral self-esteem—and demand justice.

Don Watkins

Don Watkins is the Vice President of Marketing and Fundraising at the Ayn Rand Institute. He is a bestselling author and a leading voice on the moral case for capitalism and business.

1. American businesses are under siege—not only from antitrust lawsuits and a sea of regulations, but also from a broken immigration system that undermines their right to hire freely.

2. Tech companies are warning foreign employees not to travel abroad, fearing their visas will be revoked—jeopardizing both individual careers and business stability.

3. The H-1B visa process treats both employers and foreign workers as pawns in a bureaucratic lottery, stifling rational hiring decisions and undercutting long-term planning, productivity, and innovation.

4. These policies rest on a destructive premise: that it’s preferable to deny Americans the benefits of productive collaboration than to let foreign talent work.

5. To protect the freedom of businesses to act on their own judgment, immigration policy must be reformed—starting with abolishing visa caps—and ultimately replaced with a system that fully protects the rights of employers and peaceful, productive individuals.

Silicon Valley has a lot to worry about these days. Antitrust persecutions, tariffs that will heavily impact their ability to trade, endless regulations and government controls they must comply with.

To this list they must now add an increasing concern over the immigration status of their workers. The Washington Post reports¹ that tech companies are telling their foreign employees not to travel abroad, as there’s a non-trivial chance that they will have their visas revoked at the border and won’t be allowed to get back in — a risk that has increased under the new Trump administration.

All of this further cripples American businesses’ right to be free to hire and produce.

The maddeningly burdensome worker visa system far predates Trump. Businesses fear for their foreign employees in part because procuring visas has long been a Kafkaesque process that strangles their capacity to hire talent, one that further restrains hiring processes that are already too difficult even for workers who are citizens.

The most popular visa for hiring skilled workers, the H-1B, is an example of this bureaucratic nightmare. It subverts an employer’s freedom to act on her own best judgment at every step.

The H-1B is exclusively for hiring workers in “specialty occupations,”2 such as engineering, medical sciences, or technology, that require at least a bachelor’s degree or the equivalent. The government decides what is classified as a “specialty occupation” and whether the degree an individual holds matches the desired U.S. job. What if the new hire doesn’t fit the government’s categories? What if the brilliant coder a company is eager to bring on never finished college? Essentially the government has the power to dictate whom businesses are allowed to hire, and for what positions.

Very few visas are given out each year: 65,000, plus 20,000 for workers with a U.S. degree. Each year3 demand for the visas far exceeds their availability. In FY2024, there were 758,994 applications, and 470,342 in FY2025. Thus only a tiny fraction of the over 50,000 unique employers who requested those visas could hire the foreign talent they wanted.

Furthermore, the program utilizes a randomized lottery system4 that makes workforce planning unreliable, forcing hiring decisions to depend on pure luck instead of careful, rational planning. This makes a mockery of employer’s diligence and effort in recruitment, and treats potential employees as fungible commodities instead of as individuals with unique abilities with whom employers wish to contract.

That’s not where the difficulty ends. To hire foreign workers, employers must prove, among other things, that hiring a foreign worker won’t somehow negatively impact working conditions for U.S. workers. Between government and other fees, hiring a single worker can cost upwards of $8,000 and countless lawyer and personnel hours5 — an enormous burden, especially for small businesses.

Because H-1B visas are temporary, a company that wants to retain a worker for more than six years must also go through the expensive, bureaucratic and unpredictable process of applying for their green card. Due to country caps, for some nationalities there is a decades-long wait for employment-based green cards. Some workers from India will have to wait more than 100 years.6 This makes rational planning impossible for companies and workers alike.

The uncertainty this system brings to already difficult hiring decisions impacts businesses’ productivity and the quality of their products and services. Because of how difficult it is to hire a foreign worker, companies are understandably concerned about losing them. If a company loses a key employee, it can be disastrous for the business and for the employee, who’s trying to build a life in America.

Imagine a hospital that like many7 in America is understaffed and wishes to hire nurses and doctors from abroad, but is unable to do so due to immigration restrictions. As a result, current workers are overworked and see fewer patients. Consider the thousands8 of people in rural areas who can’t find an obstetrician or a cardiologist to deliver life-saving care. The doctors who could have treated them didn’t win the H-1B lottery, or hospitals simply can’t afford the process.

These policies imply that it’s better to let Americans die or go untreated than to allow an immigrant doctor to work. Imagine this scenario playing out across the whole country and multiple industries — tech, research, education.

Finding an alternative is imperative — one that will unshackle businesses instead of continuing to oppress them.

Businesses have a right to hire and retain foreign talent. This right must be respected. Respecting it allows them to provide the best possible service to their customers and so to maximize their productivity and profits. They also have the right to make decisions about their own workforce and to make long-term plans with as much certainty as possible about the future. They shouldn’t have to comply with absurd regulations to bring in a worker, and they shouldn’t be made to fear that a simple trip abroad might spell disaster for their company if a visa is revoked.

Instead of further restricting businesses’ right to hire, the current H-1B system should be reformed to inch closer to freedom, for example by eliminating the annual caps. But ultimately, a much freer immigration system should be built in its place. A freer system will respect producers’ right to plan and execute their work to the best of their ability by allowing them to hire the workers that they want. It will allow peaceful people to live and work where they want and empower Americans to trade with them. American tech companies are successful in part because of their ability to attract top talent from around the world. They will stay successful only to the extent that we allow them the freedom to do that.

Agustina Vergara Cid

Agustina Vergara Cid, LLB and LLM, is an associate fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute and an opinion columnist at the Orange County Register.

A version of this article was originally published by the Southern California News Group on May 19, 2025.

Why not? Because the administration’s actions are only a vile escalation of the infringement on intellectual freedom inherent in any system of federal funding. Both are destructive and both must go.

Start with the Trump administration. Under the pretext of combatting the real problem of antisemitism on campus—this from a president who dines with anti-Semites—the administration is demanding intellectual control over Harvard’s faculty and student body. Harvard must submit to an audit of “its student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity.” Specific departments including the Divinity and Medical schools will get special scrutiny to see if they “reflect ideological capture.” Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs must end. Harvard must not admit any international student whom the government considers “hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence.” (Presumably foreign supporters of January 6^th—that day of love—are exempt.)

Harvard is right to balk. It is right to declare that no government “should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”

A private university like Harvard could choose to ignore the administration’s demands. But that means forfeiting federal research funding, which puts it at an unfair disadvantage when competing for students, faculty and donors with universities that continue to receive massive federal payouts.

If Harvard and other private universities truly seek freedom, therefore, they should demand that federal research funding be altogether phased out.

Harvard should argue that since any federal funding must have some government strings attached, it infringes on intellectual freedom. Instead, it welcomes more government funding and objects only to the specific nature of the strings or to the way they are currently being pulled.

For instance, Harvard does not challenge the government demanding that it do more to combat antisemitism, it simply laments that the present administration seems unwilling “to work with us to address antisemitism in a cooperative and constructive manner.” Harvard does not object when administrations impose ideological goals it agrees with, such as the many DEI initiatives like the requirement that grant applicants submit “diversity plans”; it only objects when it disagrees with the government’s ideological goals.

But universities cannot get around the fact that federal grants by their nature selectively fund certain ideas at the expense of others. The government picks intellectual winners and losers among private citizens, which is the opposite of intellectual freedom.

How was Harvard awarded the billions of dollars that the Trump administration is now threatening to withdraw? Federal employees at agencies such as the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and the National Endowment of the Humanities look through tens of thousands of grant applications every year and decide which private researchers will receive federal grants and which will not.

Even in the best-case scenario, when federal bureaucrats try to proceed conscientiously, such a system creates increased conformity within an academic field. The bureaucrats will tend to defer to recognized experts in the field, which means established theories and methodologies are much more likely to receive federal support, making it difficult for intellectual minorities and innovators to compete. This plays out across the entire university, which is strongly incentivized to hire researchers likely to receive federal grants.

In worse scenarios, bureaucrats actively pursue an ideological agenda, deliberately rewarding some viewpoints and penalizing others. This is a major cause of how DEI swept through the universities. And this is now what the Trump administration is nakedly claiming the power to do. Tellingly, in its latest harangue the administration says it is punishing Harvard for crudely political reasons, including that “Harvard hired failed Mayors Bill De Blasio and Lori Lightfoot, perhaps the worst mayors ever to preside over major cities in our country’s history.”

Intellectual freedom is the principle that all individuals have the right to think for themselves, to express their convictions on any subject, and to give their support, financial or otherwise, only to the ideas they choose. When government coercively seizes your money and uses it to subsidize some research program or viewpoint for any reason, it is violating your intellectual freedom. This is the injustice inherent in all government research grants. It is this that private universities like Harvard should now name and challenge.

Instead, they fight for “academic freedom.” Academic freedom is the opposite of intellectual freedom. It asserts the right of universities and professors to teach, write and research whatever they see fit — at your, the taxpayer’s, expense. Trump’s measures only replace “academic freedom” with a worse, more authoritarian form of the same injustice: the license not of universities and professors but of the executive branch to dictate which ideas you will be forced to subsidize.

The threats to Harvard and Columbia should be a wake-up call for private universities and for all who care about intellectual freedom. The right path forward is neither to defend the Trump administration nor to demand a return to the pre-Trump status quo, but to phase out, gradually and impartially, all federal grants and subsidies. Make private universities fully private. Let each of us as individuals decide which universities we will frequent and fund.

A version of this article was first published in The Hill on May 29.

Sam Weaver

Sam Weaver, BA in English, is an associate fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute and a recipient of the Conceptual Education Fellowship.

Onkar Ghate

Onkar Ghate, PhD in philosophy, is a senior fellow and chief philosophy officer at the Ayn Rand Institute. A contributing author to many books on Rand’s ideas and philosophy, he is a senior editor of New Ideal and a member of the ARU faculty.

1. The DOJ is seeking to break up Google for its “illegal excess” of market power in internet search and advertising.

2. By facilitating finding useful information on the internet, Google created immense, unprecedented value for billions of people and incentivized individuals and organizations worldwide to populate the internet with even more valuable content.

3. Because Google solved the problem of internet search, it was uniquely positioned to spot and solve another search-related problem: connecting buyers and sellers via online advertising.

4. Google’s market power is the result of its virtue in creating ingenious solutions to internet problems—solutions that people freely choose to use.

5. The real threat in this case is not Google’s market power, but the U.S. government’s political power—the legalized force it now wields to punish a company not for wrongdoing, but for its productive achievement.

The Department of Justice has successfully prosecuted Google in two separate antitrust suits, with the latest decision against Google announced April 17. The DOJ is now seeking to break up Google for its “illegal excess” of market power in internet search and advertising.

These cases reflect the basic premise of antitrust law: the notion that “excessive” market power is harmful and must therefore be restricted. But this premise is totally unjust. Google’s market power should be celebrated, not reviled or curtailed. Google has earned it by continually providing the world’s most excellent solution to one of the central problems of the internet age and by creating a stunning amount of value where none existed before.

Before Google, the internet was a chaotic sprawl of poorly indexed pages, clunky search engines, and primitive web directories that felt more like library catalogs than useful tools. And because accessing the internet was so inefficient, users had populated it with far less useful knowledge than it has today. Even in its relatively infant state, the internet was history’s greatest store of knowledge. But because it was not searchable, most of that value lay dormant. The true potential of the internet would only be realized when people could intuitively and reliably access the information it held.

This was Google’s breakthrough. At Stanford, Larry Page and Sergey Brin devised a groundbreaking algorithm called PageRank, which ranked websites not simply by keywords but by how useful they had been to previous users searching for the same terms. For instance, if someone searched “intro to economics,” Google would surface the pages that other users had found most helpful, as judged by factors like time spent on the page and links clicked. It was a revolutionary shift in how information was retrieved online. Suddenly, users could type what they wanted in natural language and receive pages that were proven to be useful.

The result was a tool so effective and intuitive that it quickly became indispensable. The value of Google to users compared to competitors like AltaVista or Yahoo was so obvious and immediate that it rapidly began to dominate the market. In 1998, when it was founded, Google served 10,000 search terms per day. In 1999, it served 3.5 million. Six months later, it served 18 million. By the early 2000s, its dominance was so complete that “google” even became a verb. Google wasn’t just one way to search the web, it was searching the web.

The easier it became to find useful information, the more worthwhile it became to upload useful information. Users began to expect that if they needed an answer, Google was the place to find it. In turn, creators, companies, and institutions began flooding the internet with information designed to be useful, relevant, and discoverable in the hopes of showing up in a Google search. Google didn’t just unlock the internet’s existing value, it also rewarded the creation of even more valuable content on the internet.

Among the most valuable types of content people searched for was advice on what to buy. Many search terms — “cheapest hair dryers,” “best laptops under $1,000,” “top-rated hiking boots” — amounted to variations on the question: “Which product should I get?” Recognizing and further incentivizing this behavior, in 2000, Google introduced AdWords (now Google Ads), allowing businesses to pay to appear alongside relevant search results. At launch, the platform served just 350 businesses and generated $7 million in revenue, but by 2013, it had over a million advertisers and was generating $50 billion in revenue.

Google’s ad service eventually became so valuable that Google developed an interconnected auction system linking together advertisers with publishers selling ad space. These tools were so successful that advertising accounts for over 70 percent (over $300 billion) of Google’s revenue.

Google earned its market power by creating the front door to what was already the greatest store of knowledge in human history, providing it for free, and, almost as an afterthought, developing one of the most effective systems in history for matching advertisers to buyers. These were unequivocally good things. Google revolutionized how people acquire knowledge and products — and its founders, employees, and shareholders profited exceptionally in the process.

It is for these virtues — for being an unprecedented source of knowledge, products, and wealth — that Google has now been condemned.

The DOJ officially charged Google with maintaining an illegal monopoly in the internet search and search advertising markets. In the search market, its primary offense has been its $20 billion per year deal with Apple making it the default search provider on their devices. According to the court, these “exclusionary” contracts substantially alter the character of the search market, making it more difficult for competitors such as Bing and DuckDuckGo to gain market share. In the advertising market, Google’s offense has been conducting “monopolistic” practices by centralizing all aspects of digital advertising — buying, selling, and matching — into their core business. This, according to the courts, prevents other ad-exchange services from operating competitively. As a result, the courts decided, Google possesses an illegal degree of power over these markets.

Without a doubt, Google possesses a form of “power” over internet search and advertising. But consider the character of Google’s power compared to the political power under which it now suffers.

Google possesses what is commonly called “market power,” which is the ability to make economic offers to large numbers of people. If those offers are excellent, then people accept them en masse, and if not, they don’t. Market power means only that Google has an unmatchably good proposition to offer. This has been the case with Google since its founding, and essentially continues to the present day.

Market power is neither gained nor maintained by coercion. The only kind of power that could allow Google to have a truly unassailable market position is a government enforced monopoly, which Google in no way possesses. Google’s lack of serious competitors in the search and advertising markets comes not because it has “prevented” other companies from competing — it outcompeted many — but because it has created a service that billions find superior.

In an ironic demonstration of the fact that Google does not “prevent” competitors from arising, Google’s long-term dominance is now coming under serious threat from AI-based search services, such as ChatGPT and Perplexity.

Google has provided decades of evidence that its search engine is a fantastically good service. From the profit and reputation of its revolutionary product, Google contracted with Apple, a revolutionary company in its own right, to become their default search engine. If Google were a less productive company, users would increasingly flock to superior secondary engines and Google would have not been able to afford Apple’s (staggering) $20 billion yearly fee for this privilege. If Google were no longer the best search engine available, Apple would also have increasing incentive to replace Google as its default. Google’s influence over Apple’s users is a form of power, but it is one earned and kept by means of productive virtue, and one which crucially plays to the benefit of all: Apple, Google, and their billions of satisfied users alike.

The same is true of Google’s advertising platform. As Google itself sparked the explosion of content on the open internet, it was uniquely positioned to be its central ad exchange. If Google were less excellent at understanding how and when to deliver advertising, their services would be quickly replicated and forgotten. As in the search market, Google does possess vast market power, but it is a power earned and kept by means of virtue.

In a free market (which digital search and advertising mostly are), people should celebrate, not revile, market power. Producers earn it by creating more value than their competitors, and they inevitably lose it if that changes. Market power is a good thing. Companies possessing it deserve to have their freedom protected, not restricted.

The DOJ, however, empowered by antitrust laws, possesses a very different form of power: “political power.” Political power means the capacity to direct the use of physical force in society, i.e., the power of legalized destruction. In this context, the DOJ has the power to dismantle Google and any other company that violates the dictates of antitrust law. Political power is what must be carefully reined in, so as not to violate individual rights. Failing to do so unleashes destruction on one’s own country and on the world.

And destruction is precisely what the DOJ promises to inflict on Google. The DOJ and the courts have determined that Google must be “broken up,” which means it will be scrutinized in order to determine which elements of its business contribute most to its market power, and those elements will be ripped from it. It is not yet clear what Google’s specific punishment will be, but the intent is clear: remedy by force the “evil” of Google’s excessive value-creation.

There are many different flavors of injustice in the world: one can minimize another’s virtues or exaggerate or invent their faults. But I can think of no injustice deeper or more sinister than casting virtues as vice. This is the character of the antitrust suit against Google. It is not an indictment of excessive market power, but a demonstration of unchecked political power targeting a company precisely for its success.

Marek Michulka

Marek Michulka, a B.A. in physics from the University of Chicago, is a participant in the ARU Honors Program.

In an effort to stand up for the rights of aggrieved small businesses, two recent lawsuits argue that the executive orders lack statutory authority. They argue that the law Trump invokes, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, does not mention the power to impose tariffs (a power delegated by the Constitution to Congress). Also, the trade deficits the tariffs seek to eliminate cannot reasonably be construed as an emergency as they have existed for decades.

It may be prudent for businesses facing closure to seek relief from these tariffs by asking the courts to overturn the executive orders as lawless. But in truth, the IEEPA itself is lawless at its heart. Its key provisions are ripe for the abuse of tyrants opposed to individual freedom.

The IEEPA empowers the president to “deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat . . . to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States.” For a law that extends extraordinary powers, this is unusually, deleteriously vague. It not only leaves “unusual and extraordinary” undefined, but sanctions sweeping emergency powers to deal with anything that loosely “threatens” the economy.

As commander-in-chief of the armed forces, the president arguably needs to have discretionary power to respond to imminent military threats without a congressional declaration of war. This would include the power to impose trade embargoes and blockades on hostile nations, as Kennedy did during the Cuban missile crisis.

But the IEEPA appears to give the president virtually unfettered power to become commander-in-chief of the economy. It gives him the power to “regulate . . . any . . . importation or exportation of . . . any property” of any foreign national by any U.S. citizen. This may not use the word “tariffs,” but “regulate” is sufficiently vague to include them along with draconian national economic controls for undefined periods of time. And all because, in the president’s economically illiterate estimate, we somehow suffer from importing more goods than our manufacturers export.

The president’s constitutional role is to execute the laws passed by Congress and thereby to protect the individual rights of the nation’s citizens. But a notoriously vague law like the IEEPA constitutes an unjustified congressional delegation of its powers (in this case, to impose tariffs) to the president. Because it delegates this power on the dubious grounds of threats to “the economy,” it invites the abuse of collectivist statists who pretend to speak for the “greater good” of a nation’s economy as a whole.

Trump is far from the first president to abuse emergency powers. In 2023, the Supreme Court rightly struck down President Biden’s use of obscure emergency provisions of the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act to forgive student loans during COVID. But Trump’s tariffs represent an even more disruptive and expansive abuse of emergency powers. The court should not only overturn his executive orders, but overturn as unconstitutional the law that opened this Pandora’s box of authoritarianism: the IEEPA itself.

The timing could not be better. Of late the court, in a series of cases beginning with Gundy v. United States in 2019, has begun to revive a dormant but crucial doctrine: that laws may be voided for vagueness on the grounds that they unconstitutionally delegate powers constitutionally vested in the legislature to the executive, thereby violating the separation of powers. The recent lawsuits draw on this doctrine and there is some hope the court may rule in their favor.

For much of the 20th century, the court was willing to “void for vagueness” local ordinances that allowed police to exercise arbitrary discretion and thereby threaten personal liberties of citizens. Trump’s authoritarian abuse of vague laws to throttle the lives of businesspeople and the rest of us who trade with them should now underscore that personal and economic liberties form a unity. The court should revive the “void for vagueness” doctrine and give it the status it enjoyed in the early 20th century when it saw separation of powers as an indispensable guardian of personal economic liberties as well.

Only through such legal discipline may our lawmakers learn the value of objective law for the preservation of individual liberty. As Ayn Rand remarked: “An objective law protects a country’s freedom; only a non-objective law can give a statist the chance he seeks: a chance to impose his arbitrary will — his policies, his decisions, his interpretations, his enforcement, his punishment or favor — on disarmed, defenseless victims.”

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According to a popular view on the political left, businessmen want to control the government and our lives in service of their profits. So when a businessman like Donald Trump becomes president, it might seem to confirm their worst fears about “plutocracy.”

But since Trump assumed office, not many CEOs resemble plutocrats. If anything, they’ve been treated as pawns, not kings.

And don't miss a recent podcast discussion of this topic between Bayer and Onkar Ghate, where they discuss:

• How CEOs’ silence in the face of Trump’s destructive tariff policies debunks the myth of plutocracy;

• How threats from the Trump administration instill fear in America’s top producers;

• How attacks on Zuckerberg and other CEOs reveal that business has no allies;

• Why businessmen are not the rulers of the system but the pawns;

• The urgent need for business leaders to stand up for themselves.

Picture this scenario: a black activist is assassinated in cold blood by a white supremacist. Following the heinous crime, there is an outpouring of malice for the victim, and of admiration for the perpetrator. The white supremacist becomes an internet sensation and a meme. People rush to victim-blaming: “Well, he’s black, and we all know what such people have done.” More moderate commentators are quick to assure us that every murder is to be condemned, but point out that the lack of sympathy for the victim highlights a widespread rage against black criminality.

How would you react to the above scenario? As a decent human being, you would feel disgust at what makes such sickening sentiments commonplace. You would wonder what has brought us to this moral decadence, and how to fix it. Well, you do live in such a society. Whitewashing the murder of a black person because he is black has, thankfully, become shameful in the West. “Black Lives Matter” was shouted by millions of voices in 2020. But it turns out that there is one group whose lives do not matter: the rich, the CEOs of big companies, the “1%.”

This appalling prejudice became evident in the aftermath of the murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. The alleged perpetrator, Luigi Mangione, received an outpouring of support, lionized by many on the internet. Four in ten young people found the assassination “somewhat” or “completely” acceptable. A professor at an Ivy League university rushed to remind us that the real victim is not the murdered CEO, but the thousands of people who die every year, allegedly because of the greed of the likes of the deceased. Senator Elizabeth Warren characterized the assassination as a “warning to everyone in the health care system.”

Notice that in all this public vitriol, no specific allegations were made against Thompson, no purported criminal behavior that could at least generate some legitimate sympathy for Mangione appointing himself Thompson’s judge, jury, and executioner.

Thompson’s crime was his work: as UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, he ran a profitable health insurance company. Today, both aspects of his achievement count as sin.

Everyone else in today’s economy is permitted to seek his own profit, be it a fast food worker lobbying for an increase in the minimum wage, a software engineer resigning from his job for a better offer, or Taylor Swift making hundreds of millions from her Eras Tour. But not CEOs of big businesses. They are smeared as exploiters and victimizers, whom the government should control and shackle.

We hear the objection: Thompson’s sin is not that he was CEO of a large company, but CEO of a health insurer. However, the idea that Taylor Swift is creating a valuable product, worth a ticket in the hundreds of dollars, but health insurance companies, which charge significant premiums to provide much needed medical coverage, are not, is laughable if it were not so dangerous.

Do health insurers deny some claims? Of course. One reason is that some claims fall outside the contractual agreement. Another reason is the amount of fraud in the system. The government puts fraudulent COVID-19 claims, for example, in the billions of dollars. No company should pay recipients money they are not entitled to. Unfortunately legitimate claims are sometimes denied in efforts to combat fraudulent claims. For this there are dispute resolution mechanisms, including, ultimately, civil courts to settle the obligations of a contract. Another significant reason is government control of the industry. Any setup like ours, in which prices are absent — our healthcare providers cannot tell us in advance how much a service or procedure will cost and we neither ask nor shop around, because we expect a third party to foot whatever bill arrives — is not a real market. Further, government deprives health insurers of the full freedom to decide what coverages to offer at what price, which can create an adversarial relationship with customers. Not a recipe for exemplary customer service.

But none of this detracts from the overall value health insurance companies and their leaders provide. As a long-term customer of UnitedHealthcare, our employer and its employees have enjoyed a high level of care for years. The idea that Brian Thompson is our exploiter is perverse.

The job of a CEO of a large enterprise is complicated and demanding. Few people can do it successfully. This is one reason people like Thompson are paid well. The CEO’s role is somewhat equivalent to the manager of a sports team, though more complex: CEOs have to come up with the strategy, tactics, and long-term vision for the company, while managing a diverse group of people who need to be inspired by that vision. They need a bird’s eye view not only of the company they run, but of the whole industry, which is often global. They have to keep an eye on the future, and try to predict shifts and trends while being ready for unforeseen changes. When CEOs do this successfully, they produce enormous value, which is the basic reason they are paid well.

And Thompson, as CEO of a health insurer, deserves a special kind of respect. Most of us have heard of brain drains across borders, such as when productive people flee Castro’s Cuba or Maduro’s Venezuela for freer countries. But there are also brain drains within countries, as productive individuals flee more controlled industries for less controlled. One reason Silicon Valley attracts many of America’s best minds is that, at least up until now, it is perhaps America’s freest major industry. Health care, by contrast, is one of the most controlled. The number of government edicts and bureaucrats one must deal with in health care is difficult to fathom. Who wants to work in such an environment? But many productive people — doctors, nurses, hospital managers and CEOs of health insurers — continue to do so because they love the work. They keep an unhealthy system from further degenerating. We should be grateful for their work and actually cheer them on, as many of us cheered on nurses and doctors operating in difficult working conditions during the pandemic.

In Thompson’s case, specifically, we should acknowledge that literally millions of customers have benefited from his work by paying for coverage from UnitedHealthcare.

But we shouldn’t have to pay for health care, many people claim. Health care is a right. It should be free. Never explained is who will waive their magic wand and provide for free the enormously complex achievement that is modern health care. But pound into people’s heads the idea that health care is our right, and we will view any denial of coverage by a health insurer as a crime. This is the philosophic idea that explains Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s widely shared viewpoint in the aftermath of Thompson’s murder. Murdering a CEO is never justified, she said, but we must understand that those whose claims are denied by health insurers experience such events as violence too. If you are being deprived of what is yours by right, you are being coerced.

It is for this fantasy that Brian Thompson had to pay with his life.

Those of us who understand how great the work of business leaders is, are the ones who need to stand up. First, tell them you appreciate their work and admire their achievements. And when they are unjustly maligned, defend them, as you would defend any other unjustifiably accused group of people. Justice requires us to say it loud and clear: CEO lives matter.

January 28, 2025

Dear producers at Google,

For years, you have been a prime target of antitrust persecution. Both private companies and government agencies have sought to strip you of your right to run your business as you see fit, whether it’s internet searching, advertising, or an app store. This has culminated, so far, in the Department of Justice asking the court to forcibly take parts of your business away from you.

Your chief legal officer, Kent Walker, has rightly called out the DOJ’s “radical interventionist agenda” of breaking up Google. “We wish we were making this up,” Walker said, recognizing the devastating nature of DOJ proposals to force Google to sell Chrome or impose a technical committee to micromanage Google’s technologies.12 These would destroy the spectacular achievement that Google is.

Walker is right to be alarmed, yet the DOJ’s demands are more than legal overreach. It is vital that you, and every other productive American, realize that you are victims of a profound injustice. Like IBM, Microsoft, and many other successful companies before Google, you are being subjected to a witch hunt.

Antitrust enforcers accuse you of exercising “monopoly power,” a deliberately vague and undefined notion. The only rational meaning of “monopoly power” is when a government grants to business, say an airline, the exclusive privilege to operate in the country, sealing the business from competition by legally prohibiting other companies from entering the field. Obviously, Google has been granted no such privilege.

To fend off the accusations that you wield some undefined “monopoly power,” you laid out a mountain of evidence demonstrating that you have earned and continue to earn your success, even in the face of immediate and constant competitive pressure.3 You discussed the “emergence of other search competitors,” explaining that your market share is not due to the lack of rivals.4 You argued that even when your ad auction prices are higher than those of competitors, they “yield the best ROI [return on investment],” which your customers willingly pay for. You showcased how you “repeatedly outcompeted [your] rivals . . . on the basis of . . . superior quality and monetization,” and your superior “business acumen,” like anticipating increased demand in mobile search and investing in it early. And you showed how users go above and beyond to switch back to Google when it is not the default search engine, proving their voluntary commitment to your products.

You hoped that laying out the facts of your competitive business environment and your foresight within it, of which the above is only a small sample, would disarm your attackers. Yet they are undeterred. Do you know why?

All the facts in the world that demonstrate your virtues—your long-range planning, your innovation, your calculated risk-taking, your enormous productivity—will not fend off the antitrust attacks, but attract them. In his opinion damning Google as a monopoly, Judge Mehta basically admitted so: “Google is not wrong. It has long been the best search engine. . . . But these largely undisputed facts are not inconsistent with possessing and exercising monopoly power.”5 Even when you proved that your exclusive agreements to have Google preloaded as the default search engine on smartphones and browsers are a legitimate, voluntary business practice, you were denied equality before the law: “[I]n the hands of a smaller market participant it might be considered harmless, or even honestly industrial,” the judge said, referencing a prior court decision. But in the hands of a large, successful firm like yours, it suddenly isn’t.

It is not any misconduct that put you on the antitrust “most wanted” list. The court readily acknowledged that your success rests on, as your VP of Regulatory Affairs summarized, “building the best search engine and making smart investment and business decisions,” the result of which is that “people don’t use Google because they have to—they use it because they want to.”6

It might be hard to wrap your head around this reality, but antitrust victimizes you precisely because of your ability, productivity, and success.

The antitrust system gives its enforcers this power through vaguely written, undefinable, inherently non-objective laws, which Ayn Rand aptly called the “rule of unreason.”7 Charge high prices? Get accused of monopoly pricing. Charge low prices? Get squashed for predatory pricing (like Microsoft, persecuted for giving a browser away for free). Match competitors’ prices? “Collusion!” In your case, the issue of exclusive agreements should make clear the arbitrariness of the law: such deals are perfectly legal, unless antitrust enforcers decide that, if Google employs them, they are not.

The most violent criminals know, or at least can know, objectively and clearly, when they are violating the law. You, on the other hand, produce life-furthering values on a global scale, but have to live in fear, unable to know if or when antitrust enforcers will descend upon you, declaring your business practices illegal.

Such persecution has no place in America, the only country in history built on the fundamental recognition of the individual’s right to live, produce, and trade in freedom, under the rule of law. Americans used their freedom to innovate and build unprecedented wealth. The more some excelled, however, the more some responded not with gratitude but with animosity. Increasingly, as Rand observed, instead of being left free and protected, producers are “at the mercy of the whim, the favor, or the malice of any publicity-seeking politician, any scheming statist, any envious mediocrity who might chance to work his way into a bureaucratic job and who feels a yen to do some trust-busting.”8

Standard Oil was broken up for succeeding in selling the cheapest oil in the world and thus acquiring more than 90% of the market. Microsoft was dragged through hellish courts for succeeding in building a dominant software ecosystem and products like Office that became industry standards. As countless others who have faced the antitrust inquisition for their achievements, you have become the target for standing at the pinnacle of online search and advertising.

Though antitrust inquisitors might claim to pursue goals like “promoting competition” or “protecting consumers,” that can’t be their driving motive. If it were, they wouldn’t ignore every piece of evidence of your competitors continuing to strategize and devise new products, always ready to step in should you fail to satisfy your customers and partners, whose voluntary choice of your products is the only thing that keeps you at the top. Whether it’s to take your wealth, technology, know-how, and serve it on a silver platter to envious competitors, or simply to drag you down just because they can, destroying you is their driving concern.

Whether they admit it or not, the antitrust inquisitors punish the able for exercising their ability, the successful for achieving their success. Next time they announce that they stand for fairness in competition, remember that “fairness” for them means tying your arms behind your back while distributing the fruits of your work to your rivals.

What can you do in response? We are not lawyers and have no legal advice to offer you. But if, in the court of public opinion, you and others in your shoes defend yourselves in moral terms, you can help expose the antitrust laws for the evil that they are and help to relegate them, eventually, to the trash bin of history. Let everybody know that the antitrust system is inherently corrupt, that the case against you is profoundly unjust, and that you are proud of your business achievements, which call for moral admiration and celebration, not persecution. For our part, if Ayn Rand has taught us anything, she has taught us to value productive achievements and the individuals whose moral virtues fuel those achievements. The Department of Justice is supposed to represent the people. In persecuting you for your achievements, it does not speak for any of us at the Ayn Rand Institute. It is in the interest of every productive American publicly to proclaim the same. If enough of us do so, we can help end this injustice.

Onkar Ghate, Ph.D., Chief Philosophy Officer and Senior Fellow
Robertas Bakula, Graduate Center Associate
Elan Journo, Vice President of Content and Senior Fellow
Tal Tsfany, President and CEO

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) was sold as a way to empower your business by rooting out bigotry. Instead, you are under pressure as never before: to mouth slogans you don’t agree with, promote causes you don’t believe in, to introduce policies and practices that aren’t aligned with your company’s mission.

In the name of “diversity” you are ordered to hire people based on their group identity, especially on the basis of sex and skin color. In the name of “equity” you are ordered to redistribute power and resources to achieve equal outcomes for “oppressed” groups. In the name of “inclusion” you are ordered to police speech and behavior that offends “oppressed” groups.

This is no accident. DEI activists are motivated by a radical ideology opposed to business, capitalism, Americanism, and colorblindness. In their view, the world is made up of groups with power oppressing groups without power. Our capitalist system is designed to protect and reward oppressors; the solution is to transform and overthrow the system by redistributing power from oppressors to the oppressed. That starts in the boardroom. It ends in Washington.

DEI activists aim to use you and your company as tools to achieve their political and social goals. You have a responsibility—to yourself, your shareholders, and the team that you lead—to question those goals, to understand the threat they pose to your business, and to oppose DEI activism in a way that is principled but practical.

This guide for executives explains the theory behind DEI activism, how DEI initiatives harm companies, and the steps businesses can and should take to counter DEI activism. It also includes high-level messaging for companies that can reframe the debate and put DEI activists on the defensive.

TALKING POINTS FOR EXECUTIVES

We believe in individual choice and character.

• We believe that individuals are defined by their own character, choices, and actions—not by their group identity.

• Our commitment is to find the individuals who can make the best contribution to our company’s mission and pay them accordingly.

We believe in justice.

• We believe in rewarding individuals according to what they earn.

• We reject “equity” or any other goal that rewards or penalizes individuals for reasons other than their productive contributions to our organization’s mission.

• We reject as bigotry any call to discriminate against or in favor of individuals on the basis of characteristics such as skin color or sex.

• Our commitment is to identify and remove any barriers to fairness so that all of our team members can thrive.

We believe in capitalism.

• We believe that capitalism is the only system that allows individuals to pursue their own success and happiness by protecting their rights and freedom: the free market unleashes the power of the human mind and the entrepreneurial energy of every worker.

• We proudly support capitalism, which protects the inviolate right of every human being to cooperate with others voluntarily for mutual benefit or to chart their own course.

• We believe that historical injustices like slavery represent the failure to live up to capitalist ideals—they are not grounds for condemning capitalism.

• Our commitment is to champion freedom and use our freedom to create the best company and the best products we can.

Download the complete guide:

Standing Up To DEI Activism

1.44MB ∙ PDF file

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How? Our strategy, priorities and programs are informed by Rand’s distinctive view of what sets the direction of a society. It is not the latest election results or media celebrities but the philosophic ideas that shape men’s choices and actions.

To advance Objectivism, ARI focuses on areas that have a long-term multiplying impact on the direction of our culture — notably, education and policy debates.

The education system, from grade school to academia, conveys the basic ideas through which people try to make sense of their lives and the world. Engage students, educators, scholars — and you can achieve large scale and enduring influence.

Look closer at public policy, beyond sound bites and election cycles, and you’ll find fundamental moral ideas that frame crucial debates. Reframe those debates in line with the principles of rational egoism and individual rights — and you help lay the foundations of a free society.

The Atlas Circle is a collaboration between business leaders and intellectuals who believe…

• Business is a force for good

• The profit motive is noble

• Capitalism is the only moral social system

In today’s anti-business environment, where creators are smeared as greedy, capitalism is smeared as exploitative, and the regulatory state strangles production, it is vital that those who value prosperity, progress, and individual freedom speak out for the morality of business.

Above all, it is vital that business leaders stand up for themselves.

“As a group, businessmen have been withdrawing for decades from the ideological battlefield,” Ayn Rand observed in 1971. “Their public policy has consisted in appeasing, compromising and apologizing: appeasing their crudest, loudest antagonists; compromising with any attack, any lie, any insult; apologizing for their own existence.”

An initiative of the Ayn Rand Institute, The Atlas Circle exists to empower business leaders who recognize that it’s time to stop appeasing and apologizing for their work and their success, and who refuse to cede the ideological battlefield to their attackers.

Leveraging the power of Ayn Rand's moral framework, we provide business leaders with actionable guidance for tackling their most pressing intellectual challenges in the "ideological battlefield."

For a basic introduction to our framework, you can check out these key resources:

• Profit Without Apology by Onkar Ghate and Don Watkins (read the title essay here)

• “Sanction of the Victims” by Ayn Rand

• “Freedom and the Need for Business to Stand Up for Itself” by Onkar Ghate

• “What Is Capitalism?” by Ayn Rand

Those interested in a deep dive can explore the following books:

• Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

• Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal by Ayn Rand

• Free Market Revolution by Yaron Brook and Don Watkins

• Equal Is Unfair by Don Watkins and Yaron Brook

• Why Businessmen Need Philosophy edited by Debi Ghate and Richard Ralston