The perpetual tug-of-war between the political right and left is always “alive and well” in Colorado. For example, voters’ adoption in 1992 of TABOR, the taxpayers’ bill of rights, was cleverly sabotaged eight years later when voters adopted Amendment 23. TABOR was an effective brake on overall growth of government spending; Amendment 23 grabbed for government K-12 schools their own share of permitted TABOR increases plus an additional share of everyone else’s. The result was predictable (and exacerbated by a cyclical drop in public revenues) – a squeeze on other state-funded institutions leading to adoption in 2005 of Referendum C. Ref C gutted TABOR for at least five years, but left the government K-12 schools with their Amendment 23 loot (along with their advocates’ standard posture that government schools never have enough money).

Elsewhere, on civil rights, the left wants it both ways. Most thought government discrimination on the basis of race would be finished as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Subsequent Federal civil rights legislation (e.g., The Civil Rights Act of 1964) also appeared to bar discrimination on the basis of race. Overturning Brown or repealing civil rights legislation would (properly) be anathema to the left, yet it strongly supports quotas in employment and elsewhere that are quite simply discrimination on the basis of race required under the general heading “Affirmative Action.” The left prevailed when, in 2008, Colorado voters narrowly defeated Amendment 46 which would have prohibited various government practices that are racially discriminatory (but, of course, discriminatory in ways favored by the left).

There is a long, growing, list of policy disputes between left and right in Colorado. Rocky Mountain Foundation will leave political action to others, but it will work to provide intellectual “horsepower” favoring individual liberty, the limited government that is its prerequisite, and the sound economy that is its product.

 

“The legitimate object of Government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do at all, or cannot so well do, for themselves in their separate and individual capacities.  But in all that people can individually do as well for themselves, Government ought not to interfere.”

--- Abraham Lincoln