Something happened in Colorado politics this summer that’s worth the attention of anyone who cares about how communities pay for the things they value. Our governor, a Democrat, spent several weeks publicly making the case for capitalism.

Jared Polis put it plainly. He supports universal health care and a strong safety net, and he argued that the only way to fund them, as he said history has proven, is through the free-market system and the prosperity it creates.

You can agree or disagree with where he’d set the safety net. The underlying point is harder to argue with, and it’s one worth sitting with regardless of party. Prosperity has to be produced before it can be shared. The wealth that funds a hospital, a school or a pension doesn’t arrive by decree. Someone has to create it first.

That sounds obvious. It turns out to be the central economic question of the moment, and several countries are being forced to answer it the hard way.

Look at the United Kingdom. This July, the Office for Budget Responsibility, Britain’s official and independent fiscal watchdog, released its annual sustainability report. Its conclusion was blunt. In nearly all the scenarios it examined, British government debt eventually moves onto an unsustainable and ever-rising path. Debt sits near 100 percent of the economy today and, on current trends, is projected to climb toward 270 percent or higher over the next fifty years. The drivers aren’t mysterious: an aging population; a state pension that grows faster than the economy; and health costs rising as the population gets older.

France is further down the same road; public debt has reached roughly 114 percent of GDP. The government already collects more than half of the entire economy in revenue, among the highest levels in the developed world, and analysts across the spectrum note there’s little room left to raise taxes without hurting the very growth that generates them. Meanwhile, the pension system runs a widening shortfall, because more people are drawing from it and fewer are paying in. When a government tried modest reforms, the politics proved so difficult that the reforms were suspended and a prime minister resigned.

Britain and France aren’t cautionary tales about socialism as a slogan. But they are cautionary tales about the welfare state as it was built, a bargain in which the government promises a growing pool of retirees more than a shrinking pool of workers can produce. The demographics are what’s tipping it now, fewer people paying in, more people drawing out. Underneath the demographics, though, is the design itself, a welfare model that assumed the producers would always outnumber the promises.

But that assumption is exactly what’s failing. When a system owes more each year to people who’ve stopped producing than it collects from the people still working, the promise eventually comes due and there isn’t enough behind it. And the people who get hurt worst are rarely the wealthy. They’re the ones who depended on the promise.

Which is why the other side of this story matters. Two years ago, Argentina had inflation above 200 percent, a poverty rate over 40 percent, and a government spending far beyond what it collected. The reforms that followed were painful and remain controversial: deep spending cuts; deregulation; hard fiscal discipline. Reasonable people still debate the human cost of how fast it was done. But the results are not in serious dispute. Inflation has fallen from around 211 percent to roughly 33 percent. The economy grew 4.4 percent last year. Poverty dropped to its lowest level since 2018 (28.2 percent). A country that had been managing decline is, for now, producing again.

The lesson isn’t that one country’s medicine fits every patient. It’s that you cannot distribute what you haven’t produced, and no amount of good intention repeals that. A safety net is only ever as strong as the economy holding it up.

The demographic squeeze straining those pension systems isn’t a foreign problem. It’s ours, too, and it’s arriving here. Colorado’s birth rate has fallen sharply over the past several years, among the steepest declines in the country. Our labor force has been shrinking. The state’s own projections show fewer young people entering the workforce for years to come. That means the ratio every prosperous community depends on, people producing value versus people drawing on it, is tightening right here, in Colorado, not just in Europe.

We can’t set national tax policy or reform anyone’s pension system from Grand Junction. But we can decide, locally, to be a place that produces. That means taking seriously the businesses that generate real value here, the ones that make things, grow things, build things and employ people at wages a family can live on. It means treating entrepreneurship not as a nice-to-have, but as the actual engine that funds everything else we say we care about, from schools to parks to the services we want for our neighbors. And it means being honest that a community, like a country, has to create wealth before it can share it.

That’s not a partisan position. A Democratic governor and a rural business advocate can arrive at it from opposite directions and land in the same place, because it isn’t really about left or right. It’s about whether the promise is backed by anything.

The parts of the world confronting that question honestly, whatever their politics, are the ones with a future they can actually pay for. The parts avoiding it are quietly borrowing that future from their own children. Western Colorado gets to choose which kind of place it wants to be, and we get to choose it one business, one job and one produced dollar at a time.

Prosperity has to be produced before it can be shared. Everything else we want depends on getting that order right.

Dalida Sassoon Bollig is chief executive officer of the Business Incubator Center, 2591 Legacy Way, Grand Junction.