Principled business in Austin

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The view from my hotel room in Austin was majestic – a giant hole in the ground. When I arrived for the 3rd annual Principled Business Summit, I was able to behold a huge construction site and dozens of workers building the next big thing in the city. In addition to the office and apartment towers that make up the city’s modern skyline, the city block across the street was full of steel, cement, and construction equipment. It was a good sign, and a metaphor for the productive energy that the conference attendees were there to celebrate.

Principled Business is the non-profit brainchild of founder Alexander McCobin, also the founder of Students for Liberty in 2007 and later CEO of Conscious Capitalism, the non-profit created by former Whole Foods CEO John Mackey. This new organization, launched in 2023, is based on the premise that “Too few capitalists understand, implement, or stand up for the principles of capitalism.” That may seem like an odd claim, given the cultural stereotype of every business owner and investor as a sort of rapacious Scrooge McDuck/Gordon Gekko character of pure avarice. But it has been a sadly common experience for generations of people working in the liberty movement, including the late Competitive Enterprise Institute founder Fred L. Smith, Jr., who often lamented exactly that phenomenon.

Getting people – even business owners themselves – to stand up for the moral value of free enterprise is thus a perennial challenge. The Republican lawyer who later became a Supreme Court Justice, Lewis Powell, Jr., famously warned his fellow liberty activists in 1971 of the danger of capitalism coming under political – and especially cultural – attack. Powell conceded then, in the heyday of radical politics, that there had always been anti-capitalist extremists who had sought to abolish the voluntary economy. But what worried Powell, in particular at the time he drafted his memo, was that corporate America itself seemed to have been captured.

He wrote: “One of the bewildering paradoxes of our time is the extent to which the enterprise system tolerates, if not participates in, its own destruction.” Anyone familiar with the rise of net-zero climate pledges, environmental, social, and governance theory (ESG), and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) hiring mandates will no doubt see the connection to today’s business world, over half a century later. My colleague Iain Murray and I wrote a re-appraisal of the Powell Memo in 2023, echoing his warnings and sharing his vintage bewilderment.

The vibe of the Principled Business Summit, fortunately, was considerably less dour than Powell’s Nixon-era pessimism (or even Iain’s and my Biden-era exasperation). Not only was it full of positive energy, but it was also a heterogeneous, big-tent environment that is rare among conferences in 2026. Lots of political events and networks thrive in an oppositional dynamic of us-vs-them (or, as I recently wrote for Civitas Outlook, David-vs-Goliath). But, as headliner John Mackey emphasized early on, this event was about creating win/win/win interactions with a wide variety of potential partners, in business and in life in general.

Where else would you find venture capital partners, crypto trading CEOs, and advanced defense tech engineers alongside talk of universal love and understanding, meditation seminars, and natural healing? People were worried about overregulation but also seed oils and myofascial release. Bold leaders were out to challenge every competitor in their industry, but also to hug their employees and treat them like family. It’s a gathering of capitalists that would likely be unrecognizable to anyone raised on socialist assumptions about the for-profit economy, but they were there all the same.

It was also an interesting mix of libertarian and conservative politics and practical business world topics like workforce management and corporate public relations. The former can be seen in the panel on digital privacy, “Technology for a Freer Future,” moderated by Atlas Network CEO Brad Lips and featuring great commentary by privacy advocate Naomi Brockwell of the Ludlow Institute. Brockwell emphasized that modern digital communications technology on its own is value-neutral and can be used for good or bad, so we shouldn’t fear it just because it could be used against us by governments.

She encouraged attendees not to believe the frequently repeated mantras along the lines of “Online privacy is dead, get over it.” She said that attitude is a psy-op we should all reject, insisting that “We’ve never had such amazing privacy technology as now.” This was an impassioned argument that would very much be at home at a libertarian conference like FreedomFest.

On the other hand, there were also panels with business owners talking about issues that are much closer to the average CEO’s day-to-day concerns. In a panel titled “Doing Business by Doing Good,” Mark Bailey of The Original Pancake House and James Colquhoun of the media company Gaia, Inc. talked a lot about hiring, training, and retraining the best team members as key to a healthy and growing company.

Bailey emphasized that enlightened team management has to be based on actions rather than simply asserting company values: “You can’t lie, cheat, or steal your way to making people feel that they’re cared for.” Both had ventures that went through severe dislocations during the Covid-19 pandemic, and they compared notes on retaining staff during downturns versus needing to make strategic cuts in order to safeguard the long-term viability of the enterprise.

In addition to main-stage panels that were watched by the entire group, the Summit also broke up into several concurrent sessions for a couple of time blocks to cover more territory. Some of those were especially relevant to the owners, founders, and CEOs who are the main targets for Principled Business membership, like “When Government Stands in Your Way: Fighting Back” and “How to Tell Your Principled Business Story.” Others were more topic-specific and revealed the top concerns for the attendees in general, like “The Energy Race: How America Will Win,” “Critical Resources: Mining Is Back,” and “Space: The Next Frontier.”

Given the overall mix of attendees – mostly founders of small and medium-sized businesses rather than Fortune 500 executives – and the host city of Austin, it was not surprising to see plenty of interest in topics like crypto, AI, VC deals, hackathons, and pitch challenges. But the deep questions of moral legitimacy and the role of capitalism in a free society were always at the forefront of the conversation. That was encouraging, and a strong sign for the future of the network.

There was also none of what I’ll call “chud activism” – the arrogant and resentful style of right-wing identity politics that seems to have flourished in the age of Donald Trump. There were no white nationalist dog whistles, no rumors of pet eating in Springfield, Ohio, no references to the developing nations as “shithole countries,” and no shaming people who were not already successful for being poor or disadvantaged. That, too, was reassuring.

I also knew it was a good crowd on a personal level because I saw so many people who have been guests on my podcast, Free the Economy, such as:

Finally, I can recommend the chicken salad from Royal Blue Grocery at 301 Brazos Street, along with an array of delicious upscale snacks. They’re even open until midnight.