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Americans are rightly proud of the inventions that built this country, and yet we’re watching pieces of that hard-won ingenuity traded like luxury handbags at high-end auctions. Forbes recently ran through a string of remarkable sales showing how collectors are willing to pay top dollar for artifacts that symbolize American grit and invention.
Take basketball’s original 13 rules, penned by James Naismith and sold at Sotheby’s in 2010 for about $4.3 million — a sum that tells you someone still values the roots of American culture more than a bureaucratic plaque ever could. That sale didn’t happen because government declared the rules important, it happened because private citizens and philanthropists stepped up to preserve history.
A bright red Model T marketed as serial No. 2 brought roughly a quarter-million dollars at auction in 2022, proving that the market still prizes the machines that put America on wheels and made mobility attainable for the masses. It’s fitting that the free market recognizes the worth of Ford’s innovation, because mass prosperity came from entrepreneurs and consumers, not from central planners.
Even the scrap of a Wright Flyer propeller that Neil Armstrong carried to the moon fetched hundreds of thousands of dollars, a bizarre but beautiful testament to American achievement in both first flight and lunar landing. Those sales remind us that our nation’s daring experiments in technology and exploration have real value — monetary, historical, and moral.
And consider the Apple I that once sat on Steve Jobs’ desk: it sold for $945,000 in the Paul Allen collection auction in 2024, a brutal but truthful nod to the crazy risk-taking that sparked Silicon Valley and transformed the world. There’s a delicious irony in a Microsoft co-founder stewarding such an artifact, but the bigger point is simple — innovation creates wealth and wonder, and the market ultimately judges its worth.
Of course, not everyone will like seeing artifacts move into private hands and private museums, and there’s a healthy debate to be had about access and stewardship. Conservatives should champion private stewardship and philanthropy — the very institutions that have rescued countless pieces of our heritage — while opposing heavy-handed government seizure or impractical mandates that would strip owners of their rights.
Hardworking Americans know the truth: prosperity, innovation, and preservation flourish when free people and private institutions act, donate, and collect. Let those who can buy these symbols of our past do so responsibly, display them proudly, and inspire the next generation to build the next great American invention.
