President’s Message: Free Enterprise is a Foundational American Value

This year our nation turns 250, and I find myself thinking less about the specific number and more about its founding value. Freedom. The plain, radical notion that a person has the right to build a life on their own terms. I believe in that idea, and I believe free enterprise is how we keep it real.

When those first Americans declared the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, they made a promise. The pursuit of happiness was always the goal, and never a guaranteed outcome. It was a guarantee of the freedom to try. Free enterprise is what turns that freedom into something tangible, and defending it is one of the few callings that can still unite people who agree on almost nothing else.

Free enterprise doesn’t belong to a single political party. It is a foundational American value and the engine behind this country’s rise to the strongest economy in the world. At its heart, the American Dream has always been less about following a single path and more about climbing a ladder of upward mobility. That climb cannot only reach the people who have already made it. It has to keep expanding to the young person just starting out, the single parent working two jobs and the entrepreneur with an idea but no connections. When prosperity stops expanding, the Dream stops working.

There is an argument running through the country right now that asks you to pick sides. Are you for business, or are you for people? This is a false choice, and Utah is the proof. You are the proof. The businesses that make a significant impact here are those that have succeeded alongside their employees and communities. That is the Utah model. We believe in helping each other, lifting others and paving a better way for those who come behind us.

Utah’s thriving economy and our reputation for opportunity are the product of people who believed freedom and enterprise belong together and acted on that belief. As we mark America’s 250th year, my challenge to each of us is to keep building the ladder and to keep reaching behind us to give the next person a hand up. A rising Utah lifts every Utahn.