As America turns 250 years old, it’s important to remember that freedom, not top-down communism, created our prosperity, Security and Exchange Commission Chairman Paul Atkins said in a speech at the New York Stock Exchange Tuesday morning.

The SEC chairman’s speech about “Revitalizing American Markets” comes a month after New York voters elected socialist Zohran Mamdani to lead the city.

Atkins highlighted the benefits of the American economic and financial system, explained its origin in a longer English tradition, and warned about the dangers of the SEC weaponizing disclosure rules to promote a social agenda.

Chairman Paul Atkins is delivering remarks on @America250 at the @NYSE. https://t.co/EGKlQ9t5UE

— U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (@SECGov) December 2, 2025

In his remarks, Atkins said the American 250th anniversary deserves serious reflection.

“In seven months, [the American] story will reach a rare milestone when our Republic marks its 250th year,” he said, noting that the creation of the U.S. was a special moment because the Founding Fathers stood for the idea that rights were “neither permissions to be earned nor privileges to be revoked.”

The attitudes of the Founders were shaped in part by what came before them in the Old World and the New World, Atkins said. The SEC chairman said that before the U.S. was a nation, it was an “investment.”

“The first English settlements in this hemisphere were financed through joint-stock enterprises that allowed people to pool together and share in the risk and the reward of a very uncertain venture,” he said.

He said that New York, once named “New Amsterdam,” also began as an investment project, foreshadowing its future as the major center of global finance.

Atkins noted that a long English legacy of restrained government power, the preservation of property rights, and predictable rules rather than “royal whim” allowed for market and human flourishing. The Founding Fathers inherited that worldview, he said, then “forged a more perfect union.”

The SEC chairman pointed to Alexander Hamilton, buried in nearby Trinity Church, as a man who understood that “markets, structured properly, can unleash the might of American dynamism as no monarch or government ministry possibly could.”

It was the commercial nature of the American people, Atkins said, quoting Hamilton in Federalist 11, that so greatly defines the country and creates an “inexhaustible mine of national wealth.”

Atkins said freedom and dynamism produced remarkable prosperity for the American people. In the 20th century, other regimes tried to create a top-down model of growth, he said, but these proved disastrous in comparison to the free system of the United States.

“The Soviet and communist system of central planning, coercion, mass murder, seizing private property, and suppressing private enterprise, for example, collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions,” Atkins said. “While the American approach empowered its citizens to innovate, to invest, and to build wealth within predictable and enforceable frameworks.”

The message from this larger set of historical examples is clear, Atkins said.

“Across this long sweep of innovation, a pattern emerges with clarity: The great leaps of American life were always produced by a willingness to tolerate and accept risks within a system that rewards those who take those risks,” he said. “Our prosperity is no accident of history—nor is our primacy assured in the future. The 20th century was a triumph of economic freedom over doctrines that sought to constrain it.”

Atkins warned that “principles do not preserve themselves.” He said that freedom is not a “relic” that we inherit, but a responsibility we must assume. In recent years, “our regulatory frameworks have veered from the founding ideals that helped the United States to once stand without peer as the world’s destination for public companies,” the SEC chairman said.

There were over 7,000 companies listed on the U.S. stock exchanges in the mid-1990s, Atkins said, but that number had fallen by “40%” in recent years. He said this was the result of “regulatory creep” that had stifled the path to “public ownership.”

He said these changes are important because all too often in recent years, “special interest groups, politicians, and at times even the SEC itself,” have “weaponized” disclosure requirements to “advance social and political agenda that stray far from the SEC’s mission.”

“One of my priorities as chairman is to reform the SEC’s disclosure rules with two goals in mind,” he said. “First, the SEC must root its disclosure requirements in the concept of financial materiality. Second, these requirements must scale with a company’s size and maturity.”

With these changes, Atkins said he could set the SEC on a better path to fulfilling its original mission as a benign steward of financial markets.

“So as America’s 250th anniversary approaches, the question before us is not whether our entrepreneurs have the capacity to reinvigorate our capital markets, but whether we, as regulators, have the will,” he concluded. “In this new day at the SEC, and under President [Donald] Trump’s leadership, I am pleased to report that we do.”

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