My daughter Katie was 20 years old.
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, Illinois, 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 man responsible for 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 politics: 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 individual liberty.
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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.
History proved his concerns were not theoretical.
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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 since Katie’s death.
Many of the politicians who championed policies 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.
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Instead, the discussion often shifts away from victims and toward defending the system itself.
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 politics increasingly treats certain policies as morally untouchable. To question them is considered insensitive. To discuss their costs is viewed as disloyal.
The result is that real people become invisible.
Katie becomes a statistic.
Families become anecdotes.
Victims become inconvenient reminders that public policy has consequences.
That is not compassion.
Compassion begins with recognizing the inherent value of every individual life. It requires acknowledging when policies fail. It requires admitting mistakes. It requires leaders who care more about truth than protecting their reputations or preserving political narratives.
The lesson of the 20th century is not simply that some socialist leaders were corrupt or cruel. It is that systems requiring the concentration of economic and political power inevitably attract and empower those most willing to use force, coercion and compulsion. The tragedy is not merely bad leadership; it is that the structure itself creates incentives that elevate rulers while diminishing the freedom and dignity of ordinary citizens.
Just as troubling, such systems often reshape how society views the individual. When the collective becomes the highest good, individual lives are increasingly measured against larger political objectives. Human beings are no longer valued primarily for who they are, but for how their circumstances fit within a preferred narrative.
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That is why societies organized around collective outcomes often struggle to honestly confront the human cost of their policies. Admitting those costs can threaten the political project itself. Victims become unfortunate exceptions. Losses become regrettable but necessary tradeoffs. Human suffering is contextualized rather than confronted.
This is why Katie’s story matters.
Not because her death proves a political ideology, but because the response to it reveals a deeper moral question: Are we willing to stop and account for the life of a single young woman when doing so forces us to confront uncomfortable truths about the policies we support?
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Katie was not a statistic.
She was not a tradeoff.
She was not collateral damage in service of any political objective.
She was a daughter, a student, a friend and a human being whose life possessed inherent worth and dignity.
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A free society worthy of the name begins with that recognition. Not with the collective. Not with the state. Not with political narratives.
With the individual human being.
The 20th century taught us what happens when societies elevate systems above people, power above principle, and collective objectives above individual dignity. Katie’s story is a reminder that the price is never paid by abstractions. It is paid by real people, real families, and real futures that can never be restored.
Because when a society loses sight of the value of one life, it eventually loses sight of the value of all of them.
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