OAN Commentary by: Theodore R. Malloch 
Tuesday, September 30, 2025

One of my mentors and a most profound thinker, Sir John Templeton, while being the value stock picker of the last century, was on a mission.

That mission was first and foremost, focused on the survival of free enterprise and the advancement of research regarding free markets in those countries, like America, where it flourished and had created such vast societal benefits.

In his 50-plus year career, Templeton, who invented mutual funds, became increasingly and profoundly concerned regarding the efforts of the so-called elites in America and the West to undermine and even shackle the very free enterprise system that made America great and successful.

Like almost all philanthropists who have given away their gigantic fortunes, it was Sir John’s life-long participation in free enterprise that produced the financial wherewithal to make his outsized donor status and generosity possible, some $6 billion in his case.

For him there was a noted and verifiable cycle to virtue. It began with responsibly earning and making profit, investing, saving, being thrifty, and in the end to acts of generosity, showing thankfulness for the gifts that had been entrusted to you by using them to benefit others.

The success of free enterprise, especially in its countries of origin like America, is critical to whether or not gift-giving foundations retain their ability to grow and create beneficial impact in the world. Those large benefits are seen in medical, educational, social, religious arenas and are reflected in the myriad ways any donor choses to recycle their wealth, be it large or small, in treasure, time, or and talents.

Secondarily, Sir John was also a very keen missionary of free enterprise as a solution to the world’s significant problems. He particularly wanted to seek and find ways to extend America’s model of vigorous, innovative and profit-based free enterprise to become the operating model for the world. He believed deeply in market forces and their benefits to all who participated in them. He opposed socialism and vented against governmental intervention in the market.

Sir John made the assumptions (because it was true most of his life) that the free enterprise he knew would always be strong in the West and that the resultant prosperity would provide a critical, increasingly integrated culture and system that fostered such enterprise, and thereby, the benefits that such a system can provide. He was wary of leftism in every form and the cost it extracted to human lives and society.

Early on he clearly saw that the erosions of free enterprise in the West, and especially in America, could profoundly undermine or threaten his vision of an integrated free enterprise system. Those threats included, that elites would increasingly convince the public that it is wrong to trust and value business and businesspersons. He feared the coming of an increasingly confiscatory state, one of over regulation, bureaucratic control, and excessive taxation such that wealth creation itself would be destroyed. He saw business control regulations shutting down America’s leadership and ability to do mergers and acquisitions and to ultimately restrict private property.

Templeton was most concerned in his era about totally unrestrained escalation, almost week-by-week, in taking on extraordinary levels of new (and almost assuredly, permanent) government debt and massive entitlement growth, both among states and federally. The result was clear that as he wrote, within only years, our children and grandchildren would inherit national bankruptcy.

Part of this massive growth in debt and obligations involved, not only a bailout of a growing variety of failed business models, and therefore a perpetuation of their failure, but also, the inclusion of a combination of government partial ownership of business and mandates telling management what they can and cannot do.

The ever-increasing need for revenue to pay for the actions of the state he believed would lead to a loss of productivity and a sharp curtailment of economic growth. Debt was not something he thought beneficial. It was in fact, he argued, a form of theft from future generations.

Templeton lived and believed in America’s greatness. He would not have been pleased to see its evaporation and diminution. Had he survived past his death in 2008, Templeton would doubtless have been forlorn about the rapid demise of America, its values, stature and patriotism.

So too, I believe he would be grateful about its restitution in the last year, and the third American revolution and renaissance-like Golden Age which is upon us. It is downright Templetonian!

(Views expressed by guest commentators may not reflect the views of OAN or its affiliates.)

THEODORE ROOSEVELT MALLOCH a scholar- diplomat-strategist is the author of the new book, GREATNESS: The Trump Revolution and the Coming Golden Age for America. He has authored 18 books and taught at Yale and the University of Oxford, served at ambassadorial level for the US in the United Nations Geneva during the end of the cold war, and been a strategist to governments and many corporations.

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