In Colorado, we are pretty good at creating things that people want.

World-class skiing. Great restaurants. Boutique hotels. Mountain bike trails. New businesses. Careers. Experiences that bring millions of visitors to Colorado every year.

We are considerably less good at making it easy to build, operate, or afford those things.

That tension gets to the heart of a much larger debate happening across America: What happens when our instinct to solve problems increasingly becomes an instinct to regulate them?

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce calls it “The New Fight for Free Enterprise.” Its concern is that leaders in both parties are growing more willing to let government pick winners, restrict competition, and decide how businesses operate.

Every time a local business decides whether to hire another employee, try a new idea, or open its doors, public policy can either make that decision easier or put another obstacle in the way. That matters because there is an increasingly solution to every difficult problem: regulate it, mandate it, or ban it.

Don’t like natural gas? Eliminate it. Someone thinks something (say, plastic bags, bottles, or tobacco) is bad? Ban them. A new technology (say, AI) makes us uncomfortable? Regulate it before we understand it.

The problem is that government is rarely as nimble as the people it regulates. The State of Colorado is an especially good example. We live in one of the most expensive and complicated places in America to build, operate a business, and house a workforce. We have limited land, environmental constraints, infrastructure challenges, and extraordinary demand.

There are legitimate reasons for regulation. But every regulation has a cost. Every additional restriction, fee, mandate, or prohibition changes the economics of a decision. Sometimes that is exactly what we intend. Sometimes it produces consequences we never anticipated.

The lesson isn't that regulation is inherently bad. The lesson is that good intentions don't eliminate unintended consequences. Free enterprise gives us something government often cannot: millions of individual decisions happening simultaneously.

A restaurateur figures out what customers want. A contractor discovers a cheaper way to build. An employer finds a better way to recruit and retain workers. An entrepreneur sees an opportunity that nobody in a government office anticipated.

Some ideas fail, and that's okay because failure is part of how markets learn. The alternative is to assume policymakers can identify the right answer in advance and then require everyone to follow it. Sometimes they can. Often, they can't.

This isn't a partisan argument. Free enterprise isn't a Republican idea or a Democratic idea. It is an American idea that both extremes have increasingly abandoned. It is the idea that an individual with a good idea should have a chance to pursue it. That a small business should be able to compete with a large one. That consumers should have choices. That entrepreneurs should be allowed to take risks. And that success should attract competition rather than punishment.

Colorado needs smarter standards, and before we reach for another mandate, ban, or regulation, we should ask four simple questions:

What problem are we solving? What will it cost? What unintended consequences could it create? And is there a less restrictive way to accomplish the same goal?

Our greatest asset isn't government-mandated rules and regulations. It is the creativity, determination, and entrepreneurial spirit of the people who live and work here. We should trust them a little more.

Let’s remember, our towns and country were built by people willing to take a risk. We shouldn't let government mandate that spirit out of existence.

Chris Romer is president & CEO of Vail Valley Partnership, 3-time national chamber of the year. Learn more at VailValleyPartnership.com