By Michael A. Hancock | Commentary, Substack
There’s a difference between dreaming big and hallucinating. Colorado’s progressive legislators have yet to figure that out.
Once a beacon of frontier grit and entrepreneurial promise, Colorado is drifting into a twilight of self-imposed stagnation. This isn’t the result of some unforeseeable external shock. No. The decline is being engineered — brick by legislative brick — by a political class more interested in social signaling than in fostering economic vitality.
The question isn’t whether Colorado faces a reckoning. The question is whether we will admit the cause before we hit the wall.
Let’s start with energy, the lifeblood of any serious economy. Colorado holds a wealth of natural resources—oil, gas, coal, and uranium— all of which can power its future. But instead of leveraging these resources to fuel jobs, industry, and growth, the legislature has adopted an almost theological hostility to anything that predates a solar panel. In the name of “climate justice,” lawmakers have erected a regulatory maze designed not to guide development but to strangle it.
Permitting delays for oil and gas development in the DJ Basin are measured in years, not months. The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, whose name now feels like a cruel joke, functions more like a Soviet planning ministry than a steward of responsible extraction.
The result? Billions in private investment are being shelved or shipped to friendlier states like Texas and North Dakota. Jobs that would have gone to Colorado families are going elsewhere. Tax revenues that could have built schools and fixed roads are evaporating.
This is not climate policy. This is economic vandalism.
And if oil and gas are being targeted for political extinction, nuclear power — the most potent, scalable, carbon-free energy source we possess — remains mired in hesitation and delay. There is no meaningful urgency to match the scale of our energy needs.
Colorado was once home to the Fort St. Vrain nuclear facility, a pioneering effort in high-temperature gas-cooled reactor technology. But instead of building on that legacy, the state now treats nuclear energy as if it were radioactive in more than just the literal sense.
While other states — Wyoming, Utah, and Alaska — are racing to explore modular reactors and revive nuclear as a cornerstone of grid reliability, Colorado’s legislature has responded with the urgency of a sloth on sedatives.
Proposals to study, pilot, or discuss nuclear innovation are routinely shelved, smothered in committees, or buried under performative environmental hearings. It’s as if the legislature is more afraid of upsetting activist donor bases than of watching the state’s power grid collapse under the weight of unreliable renewables.
Nuclear could be Colorado’s ticket to a prosperous, high-tech, clean-energy future. Instead, the state is sleepwalking toward scarcity — a future of rolling blackouts and soaring utility bills, all while pretending that virtue signaling on windmills will light the homes of 6 million people.
And it doesn’t stop with energy. Consider housing. With sky-high home prices and a shortage in the tens of thousands, one might expect the legislature to unleash the market, reduce regulatory burdens, and encourage private development. Instead, lawmakers are enamored with price controls, density mandates, and rent regulations — policies that have failed spectacularly everywhere they’ve been tried, from New York to San Francisco.
The result is tragically predictable: fewer units, slower construction, and higher costs.
Ask any developer trying to build in Colorado, and you’ll hear a common refrain: the process is broken. The cost of entry has become prohibitive between environmental impact statements, zoning gauntlets, and the ideological landmines buried across local councils.
This is not how you grow a state. This is how you fossilize it.
Then there’s the question of labor. Colorado has one of the country’s most aggressive regimes of mandated wage hikes and employer mandates.
Every year brings a new round of workplace experiments — paid leave, scheduling mandates, “equal pay” litigation traps — all designed to show how deeply the legislature cares about workers. Except they never stop to ask what happens when employers leave. Or don’t hire in the first place. Or automate. Or move to Wyoming.
Progressivism, once a movement that claimed to champion the working class, now treats employers like enemy combatants.
The economic consequences are predictable and visible: small businesses shuttering, investment slowing, and families leaving. Yes, people are voting with their feet — and increasingly, they’re voting “no” on Colorado.
And what is the state spending its growing tax haul on while driving the engines of growth into the ditch?
Ideological vanity projects. DEI bureaucracies metastasizing across government agencies. Public school curricula saturated with sociopolitical indoctrination instead of academic rigor. Homelessness initiatives spend hundreds of millions annually to subsidize dysfunction while criminalizing the enforcement of public order.
What we are witnessing is not just the mismanagement of a state. It is the transformation of a dynamic society into a managed economy — one centrally planned by progressive ideology, executed through bureaucratic sprawl, and funded by an ever-shrinking productive class.
This is how prosperous states collapse: not with a single bad law but with the accumulation of countless petty restrictions, layered over time, driven by a belief that government knows best.
Once a model of balanced governance and economic possibility, Colorado is morphing into something far more familiar and dangerous. A state where incentives are warped, success is punished, and virtue is measured in press releases, not results.
But here’s the thing about reality: it always reasserts itself. No state can out-legislate gravity.
At some point, the lights flicker, the budget buckles, the headlines change from “visionary” to “crisis.” The only question is whether we come to our senses before or after the blackout.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Colorado has the assets to boom: a talented workforce, vast natural resources, world-class universities, and an enviable geographic position.
What we lack is political leadership that trusts in the ingenuity of free people more than the dictates of central planners.
The choice is ours. Boom or blackout.
And the clock is ticking.
Hancock also publishes on Substack. You can check out more of his work here.
Michael A. Hancock is a retired high-tech executive, visionary, musician, and composer, exploring diverse interests—from religion and arts to politics and philosophy—offering thoughtful insights on the intersections of culture, innovation, and society.
Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.