One of America’s greatest strengths is not merely its system of government, its Constitution, or the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence. It is also the entrepreneurial spirit that has shaped the country since before the thirteen colonies declared independence from Britain: the conviction that Americans are innovative, creative, and resourceful people, willing to take risks, solve problems, who always emerge stronger on the other side.
Conservatives rightly seek to preserve the founding ideals of self-government, ordered liberty, and individual responsibility. But they also have a duty to defend the entrepreneurial spirit that makes those ideals real and long-lived. A commitment to economic liberty, a free market that rewards initiative, and a country that looks toward a future of hope, growth and opportunity rather than managed decline.
Steve Forbes, chairman and editor-in-chief of Forbes Media and an avid Trump supporter, put that hope on full display in an interview earlier this month with Dennis McCusiton on Perspectives Matter. Forbes encapsulated the view perfectly: Yes, human beings create problems. Americans create problems, too. But for nearly 250 years, Americans have also solved them. As long as the country remains an entrepreneurial society, one willing to innovate, take risks, and confront challenges directly, no problem is too difficult for Americans to tackle.
What makes Steve Forbes the most optimistic guy in economics?
— Free To Choose (@FreeToChooseNet) August 25, 2026
On Perspectives Matter, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of Forbes Media Steve Forbes tells Dennis McCuistion it's not naivety — it's history.
From the 1890s to the 1970s malaise, he points to a country that's hit rock… pic.twitter.com/uIQaE71ot8
"People can create problems. People can uncreate problems," Forbes said. "And so we've had challenges in this country before. It doesn't mean we'll continue to do it. So I don't want to be Pollyannish and say everything's going to be nice. But we've been through terrible periods. In the 1890s, people wondered where this country was going. 1930s, Great Depression. 1970s, when we had this terrible inflation, America looked like it was declined. Malaise was the word of the day. And then a period in recent times when it looks like we're not growing very well. We had a bout of inflation. Bad guys are rising up in the world."
"But those things in an entrepreneurial society, it's not that you don't make mistakes, but in a free society, you can correct things," he said. "You're much less brittle than other countries that get overregulated, get stuck in their ways. You look at Europe today. Why Europe, the European Union, thing as big as, almost as big as the United States. Why is our growth rate about 50 percent higher? Why of the 50 top tech companies in the world, only four come from Europe?"
At our core, Americans are innovators. We build our lives around solving problems, not only to make a profit, but because we are drawn to challenge, invention, and the satisfaction of making something work better than it did before. That is as true of a local mom-and-pop shop as it is of a Big Tech CEO; as true of a lawn-care business owner as it is of a massive corporation. Both embody the American spirit. Both identify a problem in the world and work to solve it.
That is the spirit worth defending, and worth instilling in future generations: the freedom to build, compete, create, and take a chance on an idea.
America’s future should not belong to those who see every challenge as proof of inevitable decline, who seek to replace individual creativity with the backward policies of an overbearing government, or who believe politicians can improve upon the messy, dynamic innovation of free people. It belongs to those who believe they can improve their corner of the world, and are willing to build their lives and livelihoods around that belief.
