My daughter .
She was a college student. She had dreams, plans, friends and a future stretching out before her. On January 19, 2025, while visiting friends in Urbana, , she was sitting in the back seat of a vehicle stopped at a red light when an intoxicated driver slammed into it at nearly 80 miles per hour. Katie and another young woman were killed. Three others were seriously injured.
Every parent who loses a child asks why.
Over the last year, I have spent countless hours examining not only the actions of the crash, but also the policies and institutions that helped create the circumstances that made it possible. What I have discovered is not merely a failure of one individual. It is a failure of accountability.
More troubling, it reflects a broader trend in American : the tendency to prioritize systems, ideologies and political objectives over individual human beings.
The great political debates of the 20th century were never simply about economics. They were about power; how much government should possess, how much authority should be concentrated in the hands of political leaders and what happens when those leaders become convinced they know what is best for everyone else.
Economists are often portrayed as cold, clinical or detached; people who reduce human life to numbers, charts and equations. Yet some of the clearest and most profoundly human warnings about the dangers of concentrated power came from economists who understood that freedom, dignity and human flourishing are inseparable from .
Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell were not merely defending markets. They were defending the individual against the tendency of institutions and governments to subordinate human beings to political visions, collective goals and centralized authority.
Hayek spent much of his life warning about this danger. His concern was not merely that some leaders would abuse power. It was that systems built upon concentrated authority inevitably create incentives that attract those most willing to exercise it. In “The Road to Serfdom,” Hayek explored what he called the problem of “why the worst get on top.” His argument was not that every public servant is corrupt. Rather, it was that systems requiring extensive control often reward those most willing to impose their will on others.
proved his concerns were not theoretical.
The 20th century witnessed repeated examples of governments claiming to act on behalf of the collective while diminishing the dignity and freedom of the individual. Time and again, political leaders promised equality, security or social justice. Time and again, ordinary citizens paid the price.
Milton Friedman understood the same principle. He warned that “concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.”
That insight matters because political movements are often judged by their intentions rather than their results. Good intentions can inspire noble aspirations. They cannot eliminate the consequences of bad policies.
When leaders refuse to acknowledge those consequences, accountability disappears.
That is what has struck me most .
Many of the that reduced cooperation with federal immigration authorities, weakened safeguards or prioritized ideological commitments over public safety have shown little interest in examining whether those policies contributed to preventable tragedies.
Instead, the discussion often shifts away from victims and toward .
The question becomes how to preserve the narrative rather than how to prevent the next family from suffering the same loss.
Sowell spent decades warning about this tendency. He famously observed that there are no solutions, only tradeoffs. His broader point was that every policy carries consequences, every decision imposes costs and wisdom requires honestly accounting for both.
Yet modern pol
