Colorado’s Free Enterprise Report – 2023 Edition

December 13, 2022

Colorado faces a crossroads as it emerges from a long economic winter and works to reopen businesses, support job creation, and regain a sense of normalcy for its residents. As restrictions loosen and people return to their everyday lives, Coloradans must grapple with how best to steer the state forward and continue to grow. The answer is the same as it has always been: embrace the principles of the free enterprise system. In times of immediate crisis, people naturally look to lawmakers for decisive action and leadership, but as the country moves onward, one constant throughout history has been that individuals working to provide for their families as well as businesses striving to meet the needs of their community—together, and free from intrusive oversight—lead to fuller bellies, bigger paychecks, and greater economic prosperity. A return to those principles can help lead the state through the challenges ahead and back to its full potential. 

At its heart, the free enterprise system is one in which people are free to make choices about what’s best for their own particular circumstances and needs. Individuals are free to work in roles that play to their strengths, businesses can compete to provide goods and services that cater to their customers, and markets are able to bring people together to transact. Those countless decisions and interactions, when taken collectively, make up the free enterprise system, which has proven to be the greatest economic engine in history and has lifted billions of people out of extreme poverty.

Recognizing the power of that system, the Common Sense Institute was founded in 2010 to champion Colorado’s economy and to be an educational resource for Coloradans, providing rigorous research on the impact of policies, initiatives, and laws that ultimately shape their lives. CSI’s mission is to provide Coloradans with the resources they need to make informed decisions about the future of their families and the state by helping to ground policy discussions with sound fiscal and economic research.