The Denver budget mess has become too ominous even for the liberal media to ignore. A June 9 article in the Denver Post reports that the city faces a $250 million budget shortfall and furloughs and layoffs.

It seems that under “progressive” Mayors Mike Hancock and Mike Johnson, Denver has “added about 4,000 employees and expanded both programs and the purview of city government.”

In addition, between 2022 and 2024, the city diverted nearly $100 million for programs that (1) cater to the idle and (2) make life easier for illegal immigrants, thereby aiding and abetting their defiance of federal law.

Crime also is up, as almost invariably happens under “progressive” governance. This makes people reluctant to shop in Denver, especially downtown. And while the Post doesn’t mention it, people also are deterred by the traffic tie-ups caused by Denver’s permanent and temporary lane closures and by the eternal construction projects.

Among these construction projects, few are more damaging and idiotic than the Colfax Avenue Bus Rapid Transit project. It has been constraining traffic and forcing local businesses to close, and will continue to do so for at least another two years. All these factors have depressed tax revenue.

In “progressive” governance, budgetary fudging is routine. So it also is unsurprising that the city has been drawing down its rainy day fund.

No doubt Denver would be in even worse condition if the “progressives” didn’t have to balance their budget and live within the (tattered) limits of the hated Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR).

Déjà vu all over again

To quote Yogi Berra, “It’s like déjà vu all over again.”

Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck once said rent control (the quintessential leftist policy) is “the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing.” (It is not true, as sometimes is claimed, that Nobel laureate Gunner Myrdal said it. But he agreed.)

It would have been just as accurate to say that leftist policies generally are, next to bombing, the most efficient way to destroy a city—or a state, or a country.

Here’s the political lesson, Colorado: Socialist and other leftist policies screw things up. Free market policies make life good. It seems to be a law of nature, like gravitation.

For example:

• The Cuban economy used to be one of the most prosperous in Latin America. Socialism destroyed it.
• The Venezuelan economy used to be one of the most prosperous in Latin America. Socialism destroyed it.
• Under the last Czar the Russian economy was coming out of its long slumber and beginning to join the developed world. Socialism destroyed it.
• Detroit used to be one of the world’s great cities. Under “progressive” policies, it went bankrupt.
• New York State used to be—on a wide range of economic measures—truly “the Empire State.” Big government, beginning with the disastrous regime of Governor Nelson Rockefeller (1959-1973), almost sent the state into bankruptcy. New York has continued to bleed population and businesses ever since. Now California faces a similar decline, and for the same reasons.
• As for Colorado—well, Gazette opinion editor Wayne Laugesen recently chronicled in detail the ghastly economic and social damage “progressives” have inflicted on the state since 2018. It is a lengthy and irrefutable indictment, and a damning one. Every Coloradan should read it.

The other side of the coin

It works the other way, too: Relatively free-market policies enrich even places without appreciable natural resources: Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan are among the wealthiest places on earth.

Particularly dramatic is the history of how nations and states wasted by leftist policies and other causes of destruction recovered under free market policies of privatization, deregulation, and government downsizing—particularly when the necessary reforms came fast: To cite only three: The German economic miracle after World War II. The United Kingdom under the care of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. And New Zealand during the 1980s under the guidance of Finance Minister Roger Douglas.

Probably the most unreported recent economic story is what President Xavier Milei’s aggressive free market program has done in Argentina: Only 19 months into his term of office, the long-lasting hyper-inflation is down, the country is out of recession, and Argentina now has a balanced national budget. Previously, Argentina had balanced its budget only ten times in the last 123 years.

During my quarter-century in Montana, I lived through another case history. The state had become an economic basket case under the high-tax and big-government policies pursued between 1970 and 2000. I helped turn things around. It took several elections to get rid of the politicians responsible for “progressive” nonsense, but the state has been prosperous ever since.

There are less dramatic examples at the federal level. Perhaps the best known is the Reagan recovery from the economic malaise of the Carter years.

Why do voters keep electing leftists?

The biggest question for me is why these facts aren’t better known. If they were, people like Mike Johnston and Mike Hancock (and most of the Colorado legislature) wouldn’t get anywhere near the levers of political power.

After all, the record of their kind of politics is crystal clear. And the basic reasons aren’t obscure: First, even when government is not corrupt (as it often is), it simply cannot allocate resources as well as the private sector. Second, while freedom and personal responsibility make the human spirit soar, control and compulsion crush it.

I do not have an authoritative answer to this question. But I think it has at least three components:

• Although economics, like reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithematic, should be an element in the basic education system, it is not. As a result many people hold beliefs that are simply economic nonsense. (Example: “The way to balance the budget is to raise taxes on the rich.”)
• Most of the educational system is run by government, and government has a strong incentive to downplay facts inconsistent with government power.
• The dominant media have incentives to cozy up to politicians and bureaucrats—or even to serve as propagandists for them. Thus, they are unlikely to report stories of how free markets outperform governments.

Do you have any doubt about the role of the media? If so, when was the last time you saw a mainstream media report on Milei’s free-market record in Argentina?

Robert G. Natelson, a former constitutional law professor, is senior fellow in constitutional jurisprudence at the Independence Institute in Denver. He authored “The Original Constitution: What It Actually Said and Meant,” of which publication of the fourth edition is now pending.