Last week, Atlas Network’s Tom G. Palmer, a contributor to The UnPopulist, and our editor-in-chief, Shikha Dalmia, traveled to Lodz, Poland, to speak at the Freedom Games. Billed as the largest festival of ideas in the region, the three-day event boasts 700 speakers and 4,000 attendees, including businesses, NGOs, public officials, citizens, and journalists from all over the world. Devoted to the principles of freedom of choice, economic rationality, culture, and dialogue, it was headlined this year by Salman Rushdie.
This year’s theme was Tech for Humanity. Palmer delivered a stirring speech noting that technology has historically improved the human condition in free societies but needs to be kept out of the hands of authoritarians and totalitarians. Dalmia participated in a panel in which one of the questions posed was whether AI and other modern technologies can deliver widely shared prosperity. Not to play spoiler, but her answer was yes—if we can prevent techno-oligarchs from helping elect strongmen and dismantling the institutions of liberal democracy.
Their remarks are published below.
Tom G. Palmer:
To those who disparage the positive impacts of advancing tech, I have one word: Dentistry. I remember frightening childhood visits to the dentist, and I, for one, am very glad for the advent of pain-free dental technology. When I think of tech for humanity, that looms large in my consciousness.
With regard to human freedom, tech is a two-edged knife. It can be used to liberate us, or to enslave us. Decentralized publishing and communication liberate us. High-tech surveillance, on the other hand, enables state violence, while Beijing’s innovative social credit system slowly dissolves freedom in a rain of micro-incentives, little carrots and sticks, to obey state directives.
We—those who favor freedom—cannot leave tech to the new totalitarians.
Because I came to Poland from my home in Kyiv, where we experience daily bombardments with ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and jet-powered drones that murder people in their beds and children in the parks, you will understand that I am very focused on the use of tech to defend against the Kremlin’s use of tech to extend its evil empire.
I believe that our common dream of a Poland free, independent, peaceful, and prosperous is only possible if Ukraine is free and independent, peaceful and prosperous. We in Ukraine stand between you and Russian tyranny, because the Russian World—Русский мир—is coming for you, too, if it is not stopped in Ukraine.
And defense tech is a key to stopping it. I’ll be honest. Poland has made great steps toward being ready to deter the Russian totalitarian menace, but there is still much more to be done to make your defense sector more agile, less monopolized, more entrepreneurial, more innovative, and readier to defend Poland and Poland’s allies against the new kinds of warfare we are experiencing in Ukraine. Tech is also important to counter Russia’s malevolent disinformation, which disarms Poland in advance by empowering extremist groups, factions, and Kremlin proxies.
I cannot express in mere words how terrifying are the missile explosions, the drones that incinerate motorists in their cars and cut down children playing in the parks, the bombing of residential buildings, maternity wards, publishing houses, and even schools while the children shelter underground. I do not want those horrors to be visited on Poland. I encourage you to resist the Russian World with an entrepreneurial, nimble, dare I say—Ukrainian-inspired—defense tech industry. Be ready. Because if you are not, the Russian World is coming to you, too. And remember that every Russian invader stopped in Ukraine, every Russian missile shot down over Ukraine, is one you will not have to see in Poland. Helping Ukraine is vital for the defense of life and freedom in Poland. Moreover, you face a clear choice: Innovate in defensive tech or suffer what Ukrainians are suffering and worse. Tech for humanity must include tech against tyranny.
Shikha Dalmia:
Whether technological progress yields broadly shared prosperity depends on whether we can stop our political system from being further captured by powerful tech oligarchs. They control enormous wealth, and the wealthy have typically used their wealth to buy political power and become more wealthy. But now some of them are using it for another purpose: to impose their views and ideology on us not by the normal political processes or funding programs and universities but simply buying politicians.
Economists have a term for the rich and connected using their influence to rig the rules of the marketplace: rent-seeking, or profiting not by serving customers but by buying favorable rules or government contracts. But now they are going further and not simply rigging the rules but capturing the state itself. In this sense, they are taking us backwards not forward.
The most extreme example from the past of this is the East India Company. Britain chartered this company in 1600 and handed it a monopoly on trade with Asia to advance economic mercantilism, whose core belief was: exports good, imports bad, and trade a zero-sum contest for gold. But the Company didn’t just trade. It raised its own private army. In 1757, at the Battle of Plassey, Robert Clive defeated the Nawab of Bengal after bribing the Nawab’s own commander, Mir Jafar, and then installed Mir Jafar as a puppet ruler. By 1765 the Company had won the right to collect Bengal’s taxes, and it used Bengal’s own revenue to buy Bengal’s goods for export, so it no longer had to ship silver to pay for them. It was pure exploitation.
Adam Smith saw this clearly. In The Wealth of Nations he demolished mercantilism and called the government of an exclusive company of merchants perhaps the worst of all governments. He argued that fair, voluntary exchange between nations would make Britain richer and far less morally ruinous. The same principle applies within nations. Wealth comes from serving customers in open markets, not from political favor. And contrary to Marx’s prediction that capitalism would immiserate workers, the spread of freer enterprise made ordinary people dramatically richer.
But now a single tech oligarch has a fortune larger than the GDP of 174 of the world’s 195 economies. He spends it to destabilize the politics of entire countries. We may be staring at a neo-mercantilism, in which powerful capitalists don’t just lobby politicians to rig the rules but outright buy politicians and dictate the rules they want to them.
The parallels with Clive are uncomfortably close. Clive didn’t conquer Bengal head-on. He destabilized it from the inside, finding a corrupt and opportunistic local figure to topple the Nawab and then ruling through him. Musk is running the same play. In America, his Mir Jafar is Trump. Musk spent more than $290 million to help Trump win the White House, and he has now poured $446 million into the midterms to help Republicans. And just as the Company played rival princes against each other across India, Musk has been recruiting would-be Mir Jafars abroad. He endorsed Germany’s AfD before its election, and he told Tommy Robinson’s London rally that Britain needed to dissolve Parliament and change its government. He may not always get the outcome he wants, because strong democracies with strong institutions can push back, but there is no doubt that his political interference is destabilizing countries and fueling extremist politics.
Why do oligarchs like to elect strongmen? Because they are awfully easy to capture and control compared to a government with accountable rulers and checks and balances. Strongmen consolidate power by tearing down the courts, independent agencies, and the free press. And once power runs through one man’s personal favor, you don’t need to persuade a democracy; you only need to win over the man.
We don’t want politics to influence money or how capital is invested. But we also don’t want capital or money to influence politics to privilege itself or its designs.
Musk’s answer is that none of this matters because AI will generate so much surplus wealth that governments will simply send everyone checks, which he calls universal high income, and work will become optional.
But we already know what happens when a country’s populace depends for its wealth not on its own work but on a single resource: look at the petrostates. When a government can just write checks to its citizens based on the sale of a resource it controls instead of creating institutions to unleash their animal spirits, what you get is not shared prosperity but shared dependence on the state. And dependent people don’t hold their rulers accountable. That is why so many oil states are corrupt and authoritarian. It’s called the resource curse.
So the real question is not whether AI will create wealth and toss some of it to citizens to make them quiescent. The question is whether citizens can maintain their grip on governing institutions to set the rules AI companies play by, or become subject to the arbitrary will and dystopic designs of the techno-oligarchs. That means keeping markets competitive so that a few tycoons don’t control the bulk of the technology, preventing them from electing their preferred strongman by illicit voter-buying schemes, and defending the courts, independent agencies and press that strongmen dismantle.
Getting large checks but losing self-governance isn’t shared prosperity so much as shared bondage.
© The UnPopulist, 2026
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The East India Company comparison is a great point. It reminded me of how Japan basically stopped developing the gun for two hundred years, which it could only pull that off because the Samurai class held all the force and the country was closed to outsiders. That sounds a lot like the capture you're describing.
I would argue that competition alone might not save us. Vaudeville was a wide-open market, and it pulled diverse audiences into the same room because the box office paid for broad appeal. Our media market is just as open, but it pays for loyalty and outrage, so everyone drifts into their own corner. I wonder if that's part of what makes capture so easy now. A would-be strongman doesn't have to win over the whole country, just his corner of it.
The resource curse point hit home too. If people stop practicing self-government, I don't think they keep the habit for long.
Curious whether you two see the fragmentation as a cause of the capture or more of a symptom.
After turning Ukraine into a 1970 Vietnam to “save” the West from being conquered by Putin-Mao, next we are responsible for making Poland into another Ukraine/Israel through debt our children will never be able to repay??? I agree with so much here minus the war-complicity that has infected mainstream American thought via endless propaganda.