In autumn of 2026, one of America’s fundamental organizing principles—private property—confronts a two-pronged threat.
The first is a resurgence of collectivist sentiment which regards private ownership as evil. The Neo-Marxists seek not only to regulate property, but to subject it to their political control.
The second threat is the quiet but pervasive extraction of the proprietary advantages of individuals and institutions into AI systems without their meaningful consent or compensation. Among the advantages ceded: the competitive insights, institutional tradecraft, business methods, and specialized knowledge—collectively, the “alpha”—of the American people and their enterprises. This is occurring with little to no accountability on the part of the model providers.
One threat is ideological; the other is technological. One targets tangible goods, like land and housing, capital, and inherited wealth, while the other targets intangible property. But the underlying impulse is the same: both seek command over what belongs to others, with scant interest in the consent of owners.
The old-fashioned word for this is theft.
Successfully defeating it requires political leaders of skill who can thwart the combined machinations of both groups in both the public arena and the gray zone of the halls of power. It also requires the willingness of the American citizenry to back them in this fight.
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The relationship between protecting what people own and enabling the conditions for human flourishing is ancient. Though it certainly predates Sinai, expressions of this relationship can be found in the seventh commandment of the decalogue in the Old Testament: “Thou shalt not steal.” Aristotle saw that property encourages responsibility, generosity, stability, and civic peace. So did the Romans. Saint Thomas Aquinas later argued that people take better care of things when they are entrusted to them and, in an admittedly crude distillation of the Angelic Doctor, that good fences make good neighbors. This through-line continues with the English common-law tradition and the American constitutional order.
It is in the United States, however, that the relationship between property and flourishing has been borne out with the most miraculous outcomes. To the degree America’s innovative builders have been the wealth engines of the country, protection of private property has been their fuel.
Given this, a society-wide failure to protect private property would be a jarring injury to the country’s moral and political nervous system. It would be a kind of national civic brain damage. The country would struggle to act with the same coherence, confidence, and moral purpose. America would become poorer, which would inevitably weaken its military strength. Worst of all, America would not really be America anymore. It would be something else.
Communists in the Cold War knew this. Their descendants know it, too.
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The enterprises, institutions, and nations with the courage to align themselves with metaphysical realities, like the link between property and happiness, possess a structural advantage of integrity—contingent, precarious, but an advantage nevertheless.
In contrast, those premised upon lies about the human condition are inherently unstable. The raw expressions of physical and psychological force they require to maintain their edifices inflict catastrophic damage. (The institution of American slavery is one example; the Soviet Union is another.)
Neo-Marxism flatly rejects the inherited wisdom of the Old Testament, Aristotle, Rome, and Aquinas on property. Everything is defined in terms of power and materialism. Property is theft. Central planners know how people may apply their possessions, labor, and knowledge better than the individuals themselves. Families are not natural units of society but obstacles to proletariat flourishing that must be dismantled. There is no God. Love has nothing to do with anything.
Those favoring a strident collectivism ignore historical evidence of its failures. This is a record kept in the skulls piled in Cambodia’s Choeung Ek shrine, in the graves of millions lost in Ukraine’s Holodomor—the “murder by hunger”—and in so many other bitter chapters of human folly, too numerous to recount here.
And yet, proponents of the new collectivism decry Ameria as “an arena of supremacy.” Intended as epithet, the phrase is more revealing of their own attitudes towards this unique, imperfect, fundamentally good country: this land of 340 million souls is a battlefield where collectivists seek to impose their will over all others.
Therein lies the peril: in a society defined by the protection of private property, ownership is a consequence of creation. Under collectivism, ownership is claimed by conquest.
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A similar dynamic is underway in the technological sphere. The AI labs train models on the data of enterprises or individuals—on the unique insights earned over years of trial, risk, and investment by others—and rent those insights back to their clients. In their relationships with customers and in their public policy stances the model progenitors slot into the familiar role of the central planners. They “know best.” Steeped in effective altruism, they are the elites who have endowed themselves with supra-natural powers, among them the right to determine the destinies of others. Two such examples exist in Anthropic’s attempt to limit how the U.S. Department of War could use Claude earlier this spring and its recent call to “pace the frontier” of AI adoption via an unelected, supranational organization staffed by individuals of its choice.
And as with communism, the pseudo-religion of hyper-quantification is metaphysically unstable. What is best becomes, in the end, what they say is best. This is hubris, and it is also found in the Old Testament, in Genesis, where the same pride whispered in the garden, “You shall be as gods.”
That the AI lab effective altruists have come to prominence at the same time as Neo-Marxists in the political sphere presents a more serious threat to one of America’s foundational principles than would either group on its own.
Successfully resisting them requires political leaders willing to speak truth about the vital role property has played and continues to play in Americans’ material and spiritual well-being. But words alone are never enough. These leaders must have the ability to win tactical victories in the daily firefights of politics, culture, and especially the boardroom. These victories create the conditions for larger, strategic wins. These leaders must be unconfused about the role of property in the country’s success and about the nature of their adversaries. They must also have loyal lieutenants, individuals of personal fortitude and character who can win others to their cause, command respect, and inspire action.
Victory is entirely attainable, but it will not be assured unless American citizens recognize the danger and support these political leaders. This will demand personal courage from some of those citizens, but for most it will simply require a refusal to countenance untruth.
In his 1974 essay “Live Not By Lies,” Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who endured decades in the Soviet gulag, identified “personal nonparticipation in lies” as “the simplest, the most accessible key to our liberation” against a communist totalitarian state.
It was also, Solzhenitsyn added, the most neglected.
In the war for what’s yours, Americans should insist on the truth—that property is and has been deeply beneficial for their national happiness, and that those bent on the great take imperil both the nation’s material and spiritual well-being. Americans should leverage all the advantages of their society’s protection of property—and their courage—to fight this necessary political fight and defeat the thieves.
Bill Rivers works in the national security technology space. He is the bestselling author of the Vietnam War-era novel Last Summer Boys. Views expressed here are his own. Follow him on X at @riverswrites.
