When I Fell in Love with Freedom and Capitalism

In the quiet moments

The word “love” gets thrown around a little too casually these days. Love is a valuation—the ultimate valuation. It’s a reflection of your most cherished values. Who and what you love is the true window into your soul.

I’ve always been a “freedom guy.” I was raised by parents who worked incredibly hard building a construction business. When I was young, my dad would come home at 6 for dinner and sometimes go back from 7 to 10 to “turn the job faster” so they could cash flow and stay in business. When I opened my first business in the mid-90’s, I worked 147 hours the first week (if you’re doing the math, I’d leave at 3am and get back at 6am). I backed off the second week to 138 hours.

Through both my parents’ experience and mine, I heard, saw, and experienced how government made things harder and more expensive while taking huge chunks of your and your employees’ time, money, and effort through fees, regulations, and a dozen different taxes.

I knew freedom was right, and I knew government intervention placed more burdens than benefits.

I still didn’t love freedom and capitalism, but I appreciated, understood, and respected it.

Thanks to brilliant thinkers like Milton Friedman, whom I encountered in 1984 in a high school economics class (thank you Mr. Nieber!) and later Ayn Rand in college, I absorbed the intellectual and practical/philosophical foundations for freedom and capitalism. I knew they worked, and they were morally right.

But did I “love” them?

Probably not.

Love is about our highest values, such as our spouses or children, or the objects of our passion whether our chosen work or great art that reflects a heroic life that touches our soul, or God in religious beliefs.

I understood early in the 1980’s and 90’s thanks to life and work experience and people like Friedman and Rand, and Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises deserves a key mention, that freedom was right in the most fundamental practical and moral sense.

I still didn’t love it, but I sure valued it. Highly.

I do remember, however, the moment later on when I truly loved it.

That moment was not in in 2004, but it started me on the road. That was a challenging year. On the morning of July 25, 2004, our first child was extremely ill. We ended up at Children’s Hospital that morning. His little body lay in the pediatric ICU while my wife and I, bewildered, trying to figure it all out, not knowing what it all meant or how it would all come out. We had the usual fears and tears—and I remember truly losing it in a flood of them when my older sister arrived at Children’s. The ultimate diagnosis was Type 1 Diabetes. At only 15 months old, my little guy was burdened by a lifelong autoimmune disease that would be his, and our, constant companion.

The technology and advances in medicine for treatment which have only improved since, and a private hospital supported by billionaires’ donations amongst others, is why he survived. I was and am thankful for that.

But I still didn’t “love” freedom and capitalism in 2004. But I sure appreciated it.

The Moment I Fell in Love with Freedom and Capitalism.

Some years later, in 2009, I was in the middle of a decision about running for the Colorado House of Representatives.

I remember the moment I decided to run.

It was the same moment I realized I loved freedom and capitalism.

One night late in 2009, at about 1:00AM, I sat outside the master bedroom in our home, as I often did in the middle of the night, in the dim light of a flashlight. I was preparing the “tester” (blood glucose meter) so I could test my son’s blood sugar. My wife and I did this every night; sometimes twice or more. When you have a young child with “T1D,” sleep is an intermittent concept for years on end.

When I had the tester ready, I went into his room and sat on the end of his bed, pulling his foot out from under the blanket to do a blood sugar test on his toe—toes were less likely to wake him—by pricking it with a “lancet” device to draw a small drop of blood for the testing strip. I always paused a moment when I did this and held his little foot. Much of the magnitude of the disease is held in those quiet moments of the thin lifeline of a blood sugar test.

As I sat there with his foot in my hand that night, the protective love I felt for my child was fully present as it always was. As I held that little foot, I was struck by the vulnerabilities this disease represents. Not just in any given moment from the risk of life-threatening low blood sugar, or over the course days or years from life-threatening high blood sugar. I thought about his vulnerabilities and how dependent his very life was on stability, progress, and civilization. War, shortages, economic or social upheaval? These things can be a death sentence. A Type 1 diabetic can go a few days at most without insulin before a very, very horrific descent into diabetic ketoacidosis, coma, and death.

That’s the moment I decided to run for office, to try and protect for him and everyone the peace, the certainty, and prosperity that only freedom and respect for individual rights can deliver.

Freedom and capitalism make it possible to plan for the future. They inspire competition and innovation to service people and raise the standard of living. They create the wealth to invest in better technology and possible cures.

Perhaps most importantly, freedom depends on property rights, and a legal system that protects them. Property rights provide for social stability by letting people know what they have and earn is theirs. That it can’t suddenly be taken away by the government or “society.” This leads to investment, innovation, and…stability. Predictability and the inevitable material improvement of our lives become commonplace; expected.

Freedom and capitalism promote and protect certainty and security.

Benjamin Franklin famously stated, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

I greatly respect old Ben, but this is flat-out wrong.

Freedom is an absolute requirement for safety and security. Freedom and capitalism put you in charge of your destiny. You get to make the decisions that control your life. Objective laws and processes of law that protect you and your property let you know what you’re dealing with. This makes not only day-to-day life more predictable, but individuals, entrepreneurs, and businesses can take risks and make long-term investments that improve quality of life with confidence.

One of the most persistent and false ideas is the idea that more government control, subsidies, and regulation makes people safer and more secure. The opposite is true. In highly centralized systems, your life becomes the subject of whim—the whims of politicians and bureaucrats who don’t know you, don’t care about you, and who won’t incur the costs of their own arbitrary decisions.

It’s only one example amongst millions—my son lost five different health plans after the passage of “Obamacare” and its tyrannical cartelization of health insurance and healthcare—that’s not certainty. It’s stress and insecurity.

It’s not a mystery that fifty years after the end of World War II, homes had not been repaired even from bullet holes in the Soviet Communist controlled east. While in the relatively free and capitalistic west, entire shining cities were built in short order in place of the rubble of war. Every time I see a mob of socialist agitators lighting cars on fire or looting and burning a Target store, I know what they are really trying to do is kill my child. I hate them for their threat to my highest values in the same and equal measure that I love freedom.

I fell in love with freedom and capitalism because my child’s life quite literally depends on it. It’s easy to see the dramatic effects of increased government power and control from gulags to concentration camps and the chaos and repression that reigns in much of the world today.

However, it’s easy to miss the small stuff. The quiet moments. Like holding a small child’s hand or foot as you test his blood sugar.

There are trillions of interacting variables every day. No amount of government planning can account for that. The free market is the greatest supercomputer ever conceived. It efficiently accounts for the endless subjective preferences of billions of people interacting seamlessly in real time, allocating resources to the highest and best uses on the fly with the dynamism only prices and profits can yield.

There is no greater security than knowing what’s yours is yours and won’t be seized, and that “the right stuff will be in the right place at the right time.” It’s not only the vulnerable who are protected by that certainty, but all people everywhere at all times. Only Freedom and Capitalism can protect my child’s life and prosperity in the maximum way possible.

That moment in 2009, holding that little foot, understanding that vulnerability, is when I fell in love with freedom and capitalism.