The freedom to externalize your costs onto other people is not the kind of freedom that preserves human dignity — it’s the kind that purchases investor optimism on someone else’s tab. In “Freedom Is Worth the Risk”, published by National Review on June 5, 2026, David L. Bahnsen argues that free markets honor human dignity, that central planning is coercion, and that capital formation is an act of optimism.
I’ll grant what the speech gets right. Central planning has a grim track record. Human beings are not consumption units; we are made for agency, creativity, and responsibility. Work well done is a real source of meaning. The fusionist insight that a healthy society needs both free institutions and moral formation is serious and defensible. None of that is false.
Capital formation as an act of optimism. It sounds noble — until you recall that the optimism of a private‑equity buyer who loads a nursing‑home chain with debt, cuts the staff, and sells the real estate out from under it is also an act of capital formation. The optimism is real; the wreckage that follows is offloaded onto the residents, the workers, and the public‑health system. That’s the version of “risk‑taking” the speech never lets into the frame.
Notice the speech’s rhetorical architecture: it pairs “economic liberty” with “moral order” so that any challenge to the former sounds like an attack on civilization itself. That’s the fusionist frame at work — it shields the investor from accountability by wrapping his risks in the language of virtue. It never asks who absorbs the loss when the risk goes bad.
The suppressed variable is the externalization. The model works precisely because the costs are not borne by the people who make the decisions. A single Walmart Supercenter in Wisconsin, according to a 2014 analysis by Americans for Tax Fairness, cost taxpayers roughly $1.5 million a year in Medicaid, SNAP, and other public assistance for its underpaid workers. That is a direct subsidy from the public to the corporate income statement — freedom for the investor, a bill for everyone else. The same dynamic repeats across fast food, home care, and any sector where full‑time workers still qualify for public benefits. When the speech says capital and labor are partners, it omits that one partner gets to keep the upside and the other absorbs the shock. The tax code does the same thing: carried interest, the preferential rate on capital gains, and the stepped‑up‑basis loophole combine to ensure that the people who “allocate capital” often pay a lower effective rate than the nurses and mechanics who fund the roads and courts that make capital allocation possible. Then there’s the disruption the speech concedes is “painful” — but treats as a manageable cost rather than as a built‑in feature. The plant closes, the town hollows, and the “resilience” the speech admires is supposed to be supplied by the very mediating institutions — churches, families, local charities — that the speech elsewhere warns are being drained by centralized dependency. The cost‑shift is the architecture, not a glitch.
But what gets built instead? If human dignity requires real agency, then the economy should be structured to give people ownership over their work and a genuine stake in the decisions that shape their lives. Worker cooperatives do that. The Mondragon Corporation in the Basque Country runs an €11 billion enterprise with about 70,000 worker‑owners and a pay ratio of roughly five to one. It has competed in global supply chains for nearly seventy years, and it hasn’t produced a gulag; it’s produced a pension fund. In the United States, employee stock ownership plans cover 15 million participants, and the Democracy at Work Institute counts some 820 worker‑cooperative firms. These are not central planners. They’re private businesses whose ownership structure refuses the split between the people who get to be optimistic and the people who eat the downside.
Then there’s the floor that makes agency possible. The expanded Child Tax Credit cut child poverty by 46 percent in a single year — 2.9 million children lifted out of poverty — before Congress let it lapse. That’s not dependency; it’s the condition under which parents can take a risk, change a job, or start a business without betting their kids’ next meal on it. Sectoral bargaining, the kind that sets wages across a whole industry instead of firm‑by‑firm, does the same for workers: it lets them have a voice without having to win a trench‑warfare campaign at every individual store. Germany has it. Germany is still a market economy.
Bahnsen says the economy exists for the person, not the person for the economy. Agreed. But a market that loads the costs onto the people least able to bear them is not a market of dignified actors; it’s a machine for concentrating risk on the powerless while the allocators keep the upside. The catechism of the comfortable — the market is nature, the rich earned it, there is no alternative — is exactly that: a catechism, not an argument. The real question is who owns the thing, and who pockets the gains. The working alternative already exists, in Mondragon and in the credit union and in the electric co‑op in your county. The task is to demand that the system stop subsidizing extraction and start building the ownership structures that treat human beings as the agents Bahnsen insists we are.