The English business newspaper City A.M. just published an op-ed by David Sokol, CEO of Teton Capital, titled “Free Enterprise Will Crumble If We Fail to Make the Moral Case for Capitalism.”

THE BIRTH of free enterprise more than 200 years ago fuelled the greatest advances in human prosperity and happiness the world has ever seen. Life before capitalism was, as Thomas Hobbes might have said, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Today, people in capitalist countries live longer than those in Third World countries and twice as long as their ancestors. Most of today’s poor have access to goods and services that the rich for most of human history could only imagine.

Yet while the free enterprise system has made life better in all respects, it is increasingly under attack. Regulators shackle businesses with controls. High taxes inhibit growth and innovation. Critics charge that the system is “unequal”, even while they adopt policies that make success dependent not on production, but on political pull. The result is today’s economic malaise, the decline of the middle class, and many nations facing financial ruin.

Read the whole thing here.

On November 3, Mr. Sokol will also give a talk titled, “Atlas Is Shrugging: Why We Must Act Now to Defend Free Enterprise,” at the Adam Smith Institute, in London, U.K.