Who maintains the scaffolding of freedom?

People in business, especially tech, love progress and innovation. They believe they’re the ones dragging the world forward while everyone else clings to the past. But for decades, they’ve been too narrowly focused on their own projects, on funding a new battery, or coding a new app, or building a better venture capital business. The most successful people become so good at one thing that they forget about the broader conditions that make progress possible in the first place.

But now we, and they, are finding out that the background matters more than anyone thought. Try starting a company that depends on global supply chains when trade wars flare up overnight. Try convincing the best machine learning researchers in the world to join you when immigration policies make it nearly impossible for them to get visas. Try raising a billion-dollar round when investors can’t predict what the government will do next week about taxes, tariffs, or regulations. Suddenly, the things they assumed were fixed, like the rule of law, fairness, and open markets, look less like constants and more like fragile variables.

“How did this happen?” they ask. “We were just building our business.”

What happened is that they confused the game with the rules of the game. The game was building their business. The rules were the scaffolding of ideas - like you can trade freely across borders, hire the best people regardless of where they’re born, expect contracts to be enforced, not determine commercial practices on the whim of a dictator, and get clear regulatory guidance.

This worked for many decades, especially between the 1980s and the global 2008 financial crisis. Global trade expanded. Immigration, at least for skilled workers, got easier. Most industries could grow without much regulatory interference. If you wanted to build something ambitious, the biggest constraint was usually your own capability, not external barriers, and in the US, it was rarely regime or regulatory uncertainty.

The prosperity the western world enjoyed for decades was the result of ideas, specifically classical liberal ideas about free trade, individual rights, limited government, and rule of law. They created the conditions under which innovation flourished in the US. But ideas are like infrastructure. If you don’t maintain them, they decay.

It’s worth remembering just how urgent and contested the intellectual climate was post WWII. In the 1950s and 1960s, communism seemed not just plausible but ascendant: the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, promised full employment, and exported a coherent ideological alternative, often dubbed utopian. By the 1970s, Western democracies were reeling from stagflation, oil shocks, and industrial decline. Long lines at gas stations in America, with inflation spiraling into double digits. Britain’s “Winter of Discontent,” when strikes and uncollected trash piled up in London streets. All these individually and cumulatively created a visceral sense that markets and liberal institutions might be failing. But a small group of business leaders and philanthropists were committed to classical liberal institutions.

They funded programs that supported classical liberal scholarship and built an ecosystem that nurtured Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and the Chicago school. These funds and institutions enabled scholars to not just indulge in abstract theory. These intellectuals were answering a deep civilizational challenge: how to show that free exchange, open societies, and the rule of law were not just morally defensible but practically superior in an era when entire publics were flirting with socialism or outright state planning. That clarity gave their investments the force of survival, not mere preference.

Today, once again, the faith in the broader liberal order is under threat. It was battered by crises that made entire communities feel abandoned. Former industrial hubs in the Midwest and North of England, places that once believed in upward mobility through steady work, saw factories shuttered through the nineties and never return, leaving workers facing long-term unemployment or precarious service jobs. The 2008 financial collapse was not just about banks. It hollowed out entire towns as foreclosures ripped through neighborhoods, pensions evaporated, and trust in institutions collapsed. The COVID-19 pandemic then reinforced the sense that globalization’s promise was brittle, as supply chains broke down and even basics like protective equipment or housing materials became scarce.

For younger generations, the market increasingly looks like a machine that drives housing costs out of reach in cities where they want to build startups or pursue the arts, while offering them gig work instead of careers. Each shock accumulates, making what was once an implicit background faith in markets look instead like a gamble stacked against them.

But as a community and a country, we underinvested in understanding the changes that led to some of these crises while preserving and improving the global liberal order. Without a loud and clear call to protect the institutions required for markets to function, even the best ideas shrivel. For decades, the people who cared about progress poured their energy into their own pet causes: clean energy, AI, biotech, rockets. They gave generously to foundations, research labs, and startups. But they neglected the soil all of those things grow in: individuals working on a broad, classical liberal order that protects property rights, enforces contracts, limits arbitrary government action, and keeps borders and markets open.

While business leaders were building companies, the intellectual foundations supporting free markets were weakening. Universities moved away from classical liberal values. Think tanks got caught up in partisan warfare. The case for free trade, which seemed obvious in 2000, started seeming less obvious to people who hadn’t lived through the alternative.

Meanwhile, the beneficiaries of this system didn’t invest in maintaining the ideas that made their success possible. They assumed someone else was handling that. This was like assuming someone else would maintain the roads while you work on a better gearbox.

When business leaders finally recognized that political ideas and politics mattered, many made the problem worse. Their instinct was to dive straight into politics. But they did it the way they approach startups: fast, improvisational, tactical.

They jumped into political battles without understanding the deeper issues. The result was predictable. Instead of shaping the environment that progress depends on, they got swept into the churn of partisan politics. They ended up chasing personalities, reacting to news cycles, or funding causes that looked useful in the moment but did nothing to secure the long-term conditions for innovation.

What they didn’t do was build the deeper foundation: a network of thinkers they trusted, a policy space that could generate liberal ideas and correct illiberal ones, or even a clear understanding of the principles they were supposed to be defending.

You can see this in how policy gets discussed now. Trade policy becomes supply chain optimization for the “high priority” sectors. Climate regulation becomes technological disruption management. When it is a singular problem for a singular firm, it can be resolved by gaining exceptions for their “critical” infrastructure. Immigration becomes a talent acquisition problem. They mistook firefighting for a long-term fireproofing.

These framings aren’t wrong, but they miss the point. A smarter algorithm might make moderation fairer and reduce censorship on X. But no code can stop people from censoring themselves when the government is punishing dissent or regulators are swinging too wide. Software can fix a feed, but it cannot create the conditions for free speech.

There is a deeper reason business leaders failed to invest in ideas, and it reveals something about how success can create blindness. The same period that saw this institutional decay also saw a data revolution. Companies got much better at measuring everything. Marketing became attribution driven. Operations became metrics focused. Strategic decisions got tied to KPIs and ROI calculations.

This data-driven approach worked brilliantly for business operations. But it created a mental model that everything worth doing should be measurable and attributable. When business leaders started thinking about philanthropy and civic engagement, they naturally applied the same framework.

They funded causes that fit their measurement mindset. Medical research with clear outcomes. Educational programs with test score improvements. Environmental initiatives with quantifiable impact. These were good causes, but they shared one characteristic: you could track results. When they were failing, you could pivot and hack the problems. They prioritized projects, not principles.

Supporting the intellectual infrastructure of liberal democracy doesn’t work this way. You can’t draw a straight line from funding a political philosopher to protecting property rights. You can’t measure the ROI of supporting a think tank that develops policy frameworks. The benefits are real but diffuse, long-term, and hard to attribute.

American business leaders have underinvested in unmeasurable but crucial infrastructure. They funded research laboratories but not policy institutes. They supported STEM education but not political economy. They donated to hospitals but not to the institutions that maintain the ideas underlying free markets that ensure the integrity of scientific research.

This created a dangerous asymmetry. While business leaders were applying venture capital thinking to their civic engagement and looking for scalable, measurable impact, their opponents, especially those steeped in politics and culture, were playing a different game entirely. They were investing in ideology, talent identification, narrative, and long-term cultural change. Things that are hard to measure but ultimately more powerful.

The result is that when policy crises hit, there weren’t enough people who understood both the practical requirements of business and the intellectual foundations of free markets. The think tanks were either too academic or too partisan. The academics didn’t understand policy. The policy experts didn’t understand industries. The industry experts didn’t understand policy.

You can see this in how badly business leaders have handled recent regulatory challenges. When dealing with trade disputes, they lobbied for specific exemptions rather than supporting intellectuals who could articulate why free trade benefits everyone. They treated these as discrete problems to solve rather than symptoms of deeper intellectual confusion about the role of markets in society.

What they should have done was invest in the unsung and unsexy work of maintaining ideas. Fund talented individuals who understand both markets and policy. Economists who can explain why trade benefits everyone, journalists who can make the case for limited government, former officials who can bridge the gap between theory and practice. Support networks that connect these people across institutions and industries. Create fora where policymakers can learn from practitioners and vice versa. Build relationships between people in government, academia, think tanks, and business who share basic commitments to individual liberty and free markets.

If there is a lesson in all of this, it is that we need to rediscover the value of long-term investing not just in companies but in the conditions that make companies possible. That means shifting attention away from hacks and short-term fixes toward the fundamentals: rule of law, free exchange, reliable institutions, and the cultivation of civic trust. These are not glamorous investments. They don’t yield quarterly returns or splashy headlines. But like roads, clean water, or electricity, they are the invisible infrastructure without which no ambitious enterprise can function.

Principled investing means recognizing that some assets are not financial at all. Intellectual honesty, cultural trust in fairness, faith in open institutions. These are compounders whose value grows quietly but decisively over time. The philanthropists and entrepreneurs who understand this will see that supporting the maintenance of these principles is not charity but insurance. It is how you ensure that the scaffolding remains strong enough for the next generation to climb. This requires a mindset shift. Instead of asking, “What is the ROI of this grant in twelve months?” we need to ask, “What foundations will still be standing in fifty years because of this investment?”

Public good principles operate differently from market goods. Their returns are diffuse, shared across society, and only visible in the absence of crisis. You know they were valuable precisely because catastrophe didn’t arrive. The analogy to fundamentals in business is exact. Companies that chase short-term numbers at the expense of balance sheet strength or customer trust eventually pay the price. The ones that last are those that treated fundamentals as non-negotiable. The same is true at the level of civilization. If we want innovation to flourish in 2050 or 2100, we need to nurture the soil in which innovation grows today.

The hopeful news is that this is entirely within our capacity. We know how to do it because previous generations did it before us. The Volker Fund quietly seeded mid-century intellectual life by funding scholars who defended free markets and limited government. The Bradley Foundation built out a network of think tanks and policy shops committed to preserving constitutional order and economic liberty. The Earhart Foundation nurtured individual academics who carried forward traditions of property rights and personal responsibility. The Scaife Foundation underwrote institutions that advanced skepticism of centralized power and a defense of free enterprise. The Olin Foundation invested heavily in law and economics programs that reinforced the rule of law as the backbone of liberty. And the Templeton Foundation, while broader in scope, has consistently supported inquiry into the moral and spiritual conditions, like individual dignity and freedom, that sustain a liberal society.

But these were long-term projects, focused on a classical liberal network working on the foundational and practical questions, not ideas that would immediately result in more engineers or a smaller chip. Those byproducts were the result of getting the foundations right. They invested in ideas not because they were fashionable but because they were essential. They built networks of scholars, journalists, and statesmen who could defend free societies in the long run. They funded institutions that seemed obscure at the time but later provided the intellectual muscle to steer nations through turbulence. They demonstrated that slow, patient investment in the foundations is what keeps the edifice of progress upright.

One modern-day equivalent of a clear articulation of principles and values, not just a project or cause, is the “progress studies” movement that was first articulated by Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen. It’s a movement that aims to study the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advances that have improved standards of living over time, with the goal of understanding how to speed it up and sustain it. We need many more to join their tribe.

The entrepreneurs who built great companies in the late twentieth century had an advantage: they inherited intellectual infrastructure built by previous generations. The ideas justifying free markets had been developed, tested, and institutionalized. They could focus on execution.

Today’s business leaders face a different challenge. If they can recognize that the most important bet is not their next product but the principles that allow all products to exist, then the future is not bleak but bright. It will mean accepting that some of the most valuable work is not measurable, that the best returns may come decades later, and that the surest foundation for freedom and prosperity is principled, long-term investment in the public good.