Above: Unrepaired “washboard” road damage in Colorado on I-70 near the Kansas border (2023). Driving over it rattles the entire car.
Here’s I-70 on the same day, just over the Kansas border:
A version of this article was first published on August 25, 2025 in Complete Colorado.
Well, here we go again.
Just in case you can’t remember anything beyond last week, leftist public policies don’t work. Ever. In fact, the BBC reports that socialism has killed the economy of yet another country. Add it to the list of casualties in my June 16 column on the subject.
It seems that after nearly two decades of socialist government, Bolivia is (predictably) a mess. There are all the usual signs: shortages, higher food prices and other kinds of inflation, demoralization, the works—or, rather, the not-works.
But Bolivians—just like Argentinians two years ago—finally got smart. They threw the lefty bozos out. Both of the presidential candidates who made it to the final election round are pro-free market.
Thus far, Colorado voters have not been so smart. We continue to torture ourselves by electing leftists to run the state and some of our largest cities.
Trash & more
Have you noticed recently how trash-laden the Denver-area highways have become? It never used to be that way. It’s a sign of social and governmental breakdown. The last time I saw anything like it was in Greece in 2015 when the country was in the midst of a debt crisis brought on by socialist overspending. The last time before that was in Oklahoma in the mid-1980s, when government corruption coupled with an oil price crash devastated the state’s economy.
Colorado started on a pretty high plane, so thus far the rot is not as visible as in Bolivia, or as it was in Greece or Oklahoma. But the incipient signs are everywhere. First, of course, soaring taxes—oops, I mean soaring “fees” and “enterprises” (labeled that way so the people don’t get a chance to vote on them). Drugged-out zombies wandering around. Unsafe schools, with teachers who don’t dare to enforce discipline. Crumbling roads and traffic jams from projects that seem to take forever—projects of repair and showcase schemes of “progressive” virtue like the ongoing Colfax Avenue mess.
No wonder stores in Wyoming are selling bumber stickers that announce: “COLORADO — WYOMING’S MEXICO!”
If you have any doubts about how bad Colorado’s roads are, drive from our state into Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, or Utah. (I haven’t been to New Mexico or Arizona recently.) Once you are over the border you actually can drive around smoothly. Your teeth don’t rattle and your tires don’t fall into potholes. It’s really nice.
When I told a lady at the Kansas Welcome Center that their roads were a lot better than those in Colorado, she responded, “That’s the most common thing we hear from people who just left Colorado.”
And did I mention the highway trash? Oh, I see that I did.
On the lefty bizarro world that is now Colorado, all that squalor is just fine. Because we now have:
- all-day kindergarten (i.e., state supervision of kids);
- lots of late-term abortions, subsidized through taxes and insurance premiums (make those pro-lifers pay for what they hate!);
- a nutty law against plastic bags that makes shopping less convenient and even unhealthy (reusables are not clean, but at least the law keeps plastic away from Colorado’s seacoast); and
- plenty of obstructions to discourage driving.
You have to wonder about the last. It was not that long ago that loading the streets with obstacles would have been viewed as insane or sociopathic. Today it’s “progressive” policy to squeeze three-lane roads into two-lane roads, two-lane roads into one-lane roads. Take valuable, heavily trafficked pavement and convert it into mostly-vacant bike and turn lanes.
There also are the usual signs of fiscal stress. The Denver budget situation is one example. And at the state level, the repeated legislative special sessions. What ever happened to all that money Colorado government was raking in?
Corruption
Merriam-Webster defines “corruption” as “dishonest or illegal behavior especially by powerful people (such as government officials or police officers).” We like to think of Colorado officials, even leftist ones, as non-corrupt.
But Merriam-Webster offers some other definitions as well: “a departure from the original or from what is pure or correct” and “decay, decomposition.” Sound familiar?
During America’s Founding Era, when the Constitution was being debated, “corruption” had a broader meaning. The 1785 edition of Samuel Johnson’s famous dictionary offered as the first definition, “spoiled, tainted, vitiated in its qualities.” His second definition was “unsound, putrid.”
And in public life, when people spoke of a government decision-maker being corrupt, they didn’t necessarily mean that the person was on the take. Someone who violated his public trust by serving special interests or ideological fantasies, was “corrupt.”
In that sense, even the most abstemious leftist officials are corrupt. They can’t just do their jobs—fill the potholes, fight crime, run the civil justice system, and manage the money. No. They have to order us around, force on us their crack-pot notions, take ever-more of our hard-earned cash, and make us pay for their fun.
The inevitable result is that everything goes to the pits. Ask the Bolivians. Or the Argentines. Or the Cubans. Or the Venezuelans. Or the Russians. Or, pre-Margaret Thatcher, the Brits.
Hell, if things don’t change soon, ask the Coloradans.
