The mechanic retired after forty years. Nobody replaced him — not because the town didn’t need one. The remaining shops are booked weeks out and don’t have the staff or facilities to handle the extra load. When customers drive to the next town, the tax dollars follow.
Nobody could afford to start. The licensing, the EPA compliance, the liability insurance, the equipment, the property tax — the cost of opening a one-bay garage prices out anyone who’s good with their hands but short on capital.
The restaurant owner threw in the towel the same year. Her feet gave out. Her hips gave out. She missed her daughter’s graduation, her son’s first game, a dozen anniversaries.
The grocer closed because a three-percent margin couldn’t cover what the bank wanted. The bar owner couldn’t swing the insurance. Every small business owner knows one of these stories. They gave everything they had, and when they stopped, the town lost something it couldn’t replace — not because nobody was willing to step in, but because the cost of entry locked them out.
Insurance runs five figures before the doors open. Licensing takes months. Equipment costs what a house used to. HCA’s Land Use Code series documented how county regulations add cost and delay that fall hardest on small operators.
Banks won’t fund a three-percent-margin business. Credit cards charge thirty percent. Every financing option demands fast profits — show growth this quarter, hit the numbers by year one.
A restaurant needs two to three years to build regulars. The money runs out before the business finds its legs.
So government steps in. Grants go to nonprofits and economic development corporations that pick winners with other people’s money. Chaffee County business owner Vince Phillips documented the pattern in his recent HCA opinion piece — 432 tax-exempt entities in a county of 20,000, and an EDC that subsidizes new businesses in direct competition with the tax-paying ones that fund it.
When the federal government shut down in late 2025, the SBA froze $170 million per day in small business loans. The agency tasked with saving Main Street couldn’t write a check.
There is another way. It does not require a single tax dollar.
People retire to Colorado’s high country with money — 401(k) rollovers, savings, pension income. Americans hold $48.1 trillion in retirement assets, most of it in equity funds — stocks of the same corporations building on the access road and buying each other. A retiree doesn’t need twenty percent by next quarter. A steady five to seven percent over five years, secured by equipment and a building, beats a CD and does something real.
That’s patient capital — money willing to wait while a business grows. Wall Street won’t offer it. Government won’t offer it. A community can.
The money is already accessible. Anyone past 59½ can withdraw from a 401(k) or IRA with no penalty, pay the tax, and lend directly to a local business on a promissory note. No custodian. No middleman.
Those who want the tax advantage can roll funds into a Self-Directed IRA, which has allowed investment in private loans and local real estate since 1975. The major brokerages never mention it because they don’t earn a commission when your money leaves Wall Street.
The structure is simple. At the Wednesday prayer meeting, the veterans organization, the book club, the coffee shop — wherever the community gathers — people decide what the town needs. Not what a county EDC thinks it needs. A mechanic, a grocer, a daycare.
They pool money into a lending fund structured as a partnership or LLC. Fair interest, real collateral, terms that give the business time to grow. The investors are the customers. They show up on opening day because their money is behind the counter.
The law allows this today. Investment clubs operate as partnerships. Intrastate offerings are exempt from federal SEC registration. The JOBS Act opened crowdfunding to unaccredited investors.
Regional stock exchanges did this after the Civil War — areas with one saw 175 percent manufacturing growth. New Deal regulations killed them. The template is older than the income tax.
Every new for-profit business generates what no government-subsidized nonprofit ever will: income tax, property tax, sales tax, and purchases from other local businesses that keep money circulating. That revenue funds roads, schools, and fire departments.
No one has measured the businesses displaced by government-subsidized competition. A community lending pool doesn’t have that problem. The investors and the customers are the same people.
The money is in the room. The woman who ran that restaurant for forty years ended up with bad hips and a business nobody could afford to reopen. Somewhere in town, a retiree’s 401(k) sends money to the same corporations that put the chains on the access road.
The law already allows them to redirect it. The infrastructure to do it has existed since 1975.
What’s missing isn’t money or law or talent. It’s the habit of looking across the room instead of down the highway.
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