The most libertarian governor might be a Democrat

The Colorado Governor is devolving decision-making to parents and trying to lower the income tax to zero.

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Jared Polis, the Democratic governor of Colorado, talks to Reason about his approach to mask mandates. Polis' approach of devolving decision-making seems to be working: Colorado has one of the lowest COVID death rates in the country.

And its population is growing, while California and New York shrink. Florida is also ascendant, but Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is becoming a culture warrior in ways that are likely to backfire. Polis, on the other hand, is bringing an unmistakably libertarian flavoring to the Centennial State. His embrace of letting people decide extends to other areas, too, such as child rearing.

"It's very reasonable to raise your child in different ways. Some parents are helicopter parents, right? Where they watch your kid every moment at the playground," he tells me. "Other parents want their kid to go two blocks [away from] their home, play on the playground, and return home by dinner. The government shouldn't be telling you how to parent."

Polis championed and signed the Reasonable Independence For Children bill, a free-range parenting law designed to stop state overreach when it comes to things like letting your kids play outside. He says the law will allow Child Protective Services to focus instead on serious cases of harm.

The 46-year-old Polis, who is openly gay, married, and a father of two, says he got his laissez faire sensibility from being raised by ex-hippies. Polis started two charter schools, recently signed a law guaranteeing a woman's right to choose in Colorado, and he's relaxed laws on occupational licensing. Back in 2014, as a member of Congress, he was accepting bitcoin for campaign contributions while his congressional colleagues were calling for it to be banned. A serial tech entrepreneur who amassed a fortune estimated by ProPublica to be "in the hundreds of millions" before entering politics, Polis is committed to a strong economy and says the proper state income tax rate should be zero.

He's a strong supporter of free speech and wants to keep the government from regulating social media as a public utility, an increasingly popular cause among progressives and conservatives.

"The government needs to tread very, very lightly when it comes to any speech-based regulation of tech or any other industry," Polis says. "I would say federally there is a role for anti-trust law. Now we can have a whole discussion on that. You don't want to overdo that. I would argue it's a very competitive space when you're talking about social media in general. If somebody offers a better service, they'll get there. There's a number of viable different services. If somebody has a better search than Google, there's nothing to stop people from going over and using that."

What are the limits of online speech? Polis says "the only real actionable items should be the same as a direct threat, right? I mean: I will kill so-and-so. That is actionable, is illegal. But other speech…should be refuted if it's misinformation or disinformation. There's not a government role in that."

In a highly polarized country, he is succeeding by governing mostly from the middle and is hopeful that polarization will recede in the years to come. The country will be 250 years old in a few years, he observes, which he likens to reaching an "awkward adolescence."

"I think it's a time for rediscovering who we are," he says. "The left is right [about] coming to terms with legacies of slavery and racism that absolutely existed; pretending that they didn't doesn't serve anybody. And the right [is correct in] understanding that there's not some collective guilt today for what might've happened 100 or 200 years ago. It's important to be honest about it, but being honest about what your great-grandfather might've done doesn't mean that you have culpability…. We don't believe in blood guilt in our country."

Polis thinks that the conversations we're currently having—however divisive, "hurtful," and ugly at times—will yield "a higher level of understanding," one in which "we preserve the tenants of liberal democracy and our rights and free enterprise."

For the longer conversation with Polis from which the above is taken, go to

Written and narrated by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Regan Taylor.