On a February evening at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, the Fine Arts Center filled with students, business leaders and community members who had come to hear a familiar name deliver a familiar argument – and to explain how it still applies in an unfamiliar world.
The event, hosted by the Scott L. Probasco Distinguished Chair of Free Enterprise, carried a title as declarative as its speaker: “How Free Enterprise, Not Government, Made America Great.” At the podium stood Steve Forbes, chairman and editor-in-chief of Forbes Media, two-time presidential candidate and one of the country’s most consistent advocates for capitalism as both an economic engine and a moral system.
Forbes began not with tax rates or tariffs but with what he declared to be a foundational truth.
“Socialism is an idea that has never worked,” he said. “It’s misery. The more socialism, the more misery.”
It was a stark framing. But the larger case Forbes built that night was not against something but for it: an understanding of American exceptionalism rooted in voluntary exchange, human ingenuity and the conviction that prosperity is created, not distributed.
If free enterprise built America, Forbes argued, it can still renew it – if it’s allowed to.
An inheritance of belief
The argument began generations earlier, in the story Forbes often tells about his immigrant grandfather.
His grandfather, B.C. Forbes, a Scottish immigrant, founded the business magazine that would become Forbes. In the early days, B.C. was ambitious and unconventional, even working for two competing editors under different names to secure opportunity.
The Great Depression nearly destroyed the fledgling enterprise. It was a defining moment in the family’s internal mythology – proof that success could evaporate and that markets were cyclical and unforgiving.
From Steve Forbes’ father, Malcolm Forbes, came a warning that’s stayed with him ever since: “If you think you’ve arrived, then you’re ready to be shown the door.”
Forbes repeated the line in an interview with the Hamilton County Herald before his presentation. Success, he then added, is never permanent. Institutions harden, markets shift and complacency invites decline.
“Every organization should ask itself, ‘What is our purpose?’” he said, paraphrasing management theorist Peter Drucker.
“If you do that, then you don’t get quite as hung up on when the means of achieving your goals change.”
That lesson would become essential when the digital revolution upended publishing.
Adapt or disappear
Forbes magazine, once a biweekly print publication, faced the same existential question as every legacy media brand in the 1990s and early 2000s: What are we, if not paper?
Forbes’ answer was to clarify the mission. The goal was not ink and distribution trucks but to chronicle and analyze enterprise.
Today, Forbes operates as a vast digital platform with roughly 1,500 contributors producing tens of thousands of articles annually. The scale is unrecognizable compared to its print past.
Forbes contrasted that adaptation with a cautionary tale: Eastman Kodak. Kodak recognized digital photography early. It even invented critical pieces of it. But it failed to change its business model decisively enough to survive the shift from film. Recognition without decisive adaptation, in Forbes’ view, is fatal.
“Nothing stays the same. Everything changes,” he said during the interview.
The line serves as both warning and reassurance, Forbes insisted. Markets change and technology disrupts, but the underlying logic of free exchange remains constant.
The moral case
During his presentation, Forbes returned repeatedly to an idea that has defined his public life: capitalism is not merely efficient; it is also moral.
“How do you succeed in a free market?” he asked. “You succeed by providing or creating a product or service that somebody else wants. But they don’t have to buy it; you have to persuade them.”
In other words, Forbes continued, transactions occur because both sides believe they benefit.
“Real wealth is not things, it’s human ingenuity,” Forbes said. “The human mind creates wealth that moves civilization forward.”
He illustrated the point with stories rather than statistics: Margaret Rudkin baking what would become Pepperidge Farm bread; A.P. Giannini building what would grow into Bank of America by lending to immigrants others ignored; Malcolm McLean inventing the shipping container, transforming global trade by standardizing how goods move.
These were not elites extracting value, Forbes said, they were unlikely individuals solving problems.
“Free markets always turn scarcity into abundance if allowed to do so,” he said. “So today’s luxuries become tomorrow’s commonplaces.”
The pattern, he argued, has repeated for 250 years – from colonial self-governance to industrial expansion to the digital age. Since 1776, he noted, global extreme poverty has plummeted from roughly 90% of humanity to around 10%. And that arc, he said, coincides with the rise of the American economic model around the world.
The obstacle
If the moral system works, what threatens it?
Forbes says excessive government intervention.
During his interview, Forbes cited estimates that regulatory costs in manufacturing average roughly $29,000 per employee annually. He referenced stories of small businesses navigating thousands of rules – even an apple orchard subject to 5,000 separate regulations, including requirements about tarps covering fruit in transit from the tree to the washing station.
“That rule ignored the fact that the apple had been growing on a tree for six months,” he said with a laugh.
The burden, he argued, falls hardest on smaller firms – the very enterprises most likely to generate new growth.
During his presentation, Forbes was equally sharp in his criticism of the Federal Reserve.
“They assume prosperity causes inflation, which is preposterous,” he said. “You doing well does not cause inflation.”
For decades, Forbes has advocated a stable dollar and criticized monetary policies he believes distort long-term investment. Inflation, in his view, stems not from growth but from currency mismanagement.
He also warned of what he sees as a looming danger: government-issued digital currencies. Private stablecoins could enhance commerce, he argued, while a central bank digital currency could undermine privacy and economic freedom.
Throughout, Forbes’ theme remained consistent: when government overreaches, it substitutes coercion for persuasion.
Health care and the consumer
If there’s one policy arena in which Forbes believes the United States has failed to embrace true markets, it’s health care.
“What is going to evolve in the next decade, I think, is a real consumer market in health care where the patient controls the money, not a third party,” he said during his interview.
He pointed to Singapore as a model – a system in which individuals manage their own health savings accounts, purchase catastrophic coverage and make decisions more directly. The result, he argues, is universal coverage, strong outcomes and costs significantly lower as a share of gross domestic product than in the United States.
Forbes said the problem is built into the system itself. When the government or an insurance company pays most of the bill, patients don’t see the true cost of care. If you don’t see the price, he argued, it’s harder to shop around or demand better value.
And when large bureaucracies set the rules, doctors and hospitals have less freedom to try new approaches or compete on cost and quality.
Forbes believes a consumer-driven system would restore accountability and drive costs down.
Whether discussing health care, regulation or monetary policy, Forbes’ framework rarely changes: the closer a system aligns with voluntary exchange, the more effective it becomes.
Politics and perspective
Forbes entered electoral politics twice, running for president in 1996 and 2000 on a platform centered on a flat tax and economic reform. Although he didn’t win, he speaks of those campaigns without bitterness.
“Life isn’t a dress rehearsal,” he said while reflecting on setbacks during his interview. “You move forward.”
The campaigns cemented him as a public advocate rather than merely a publisher. Yet even after electoral defeat, his mission remained steady: promote free enterprise as the organizing principle of prosperity.
Before his UTC lecture, Forbes sounded less like a partisan and more like a custodian of a tradition.
“We see entrepreneurs not as scoundrels,” he said. “We see them as heroes – flawed sometimes, but as people trying to do real things.”
The AI moment
No contemporary speech can avoid artificial intelligence, and Forbes didn’t try.
He described AI as “a great tool, but also humbling.” Like every technological wave before it, it will disrupt, eliminate some jobs and create others, he said.
To Forbes, AI is not a repudiation of free markets but evidence of their necessity. Adaptation – the lesson of his grandfather, of the Depression and of the digital pivot – applies again.
Businesses that define themselves too narrowly might fade, while those that clarify purpose and adjust methods could thrive.
The optimist
Forbes closed his Chattanooga remarks not with warning but with optimism.
He spoke of medical breakthroughs on the horizon – blood tests capable of detecting dozens of cancers before symptoms appear, personalized treatments tailored to individual biology and the possibility of growing replacement organs.
He framed these not as miracles of government planning but as products of ingenuity unleashed.
“We’ve done it before, and it might take a little time, but we’re going to do it again,” he said.
It’s a familiar cadence from a man who’s spent decades making the same essential case: that prosperity arises when individuals are free to experiment, create and persuade.
In a moment when debates about capitalism and socialism have reemerged on campuses and in politics, Forbes remains unambiguous. The American story, as he tells it, is not primarily about natural resources or bureaucratic design but about minds at work.
This ethos echoes his grandfather’s gamble, his father’s warning and his own career across media, politics and policy. Nothing stays the same. Everything changes.
But Forbes still believes the underlying mechanisms of American success – persuasion over coercion and innovation over regulation – remains intact.
The task, as he sees it, is not to invent a new system but to trust the one that turned scarcity into abundance – and to allow it to work once more.