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NOTE: The following guest opinion was submitted by Wil Franklin, director of the North Coast Small Business Development Center.

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Every Fourth of July, we celebrate with freedom. This year, I heard a television commentator argue that defending freedom also means defending free enterprise. I agree, but with an important qualification that has occupied some of history’s greatest philosophers for centuries: freedom has never meant the absence of all limits.

John Stuart Mill argued that liberty should be protected until it harms others. Immanuel Kant believed that true freedom exists only when it respects the equal dignity and rights of everyone else. John Rawls argued that a just society protects individual liberty while ensuring that its institutions benefit everyone, especially those with the fewest advantages. While these thinkers often disagreed on many issues, they shared a common understanding that freedom and responsibility are inseparable.

That lesson is just as relevant to our economy as it is to our democracy.

Free enterprise has been one of America’s greatest strengths. It rewards innovation, encourages risk-taking, creates jobs, and has produced remarkable prosperity. But businesses, like individuals, do not exist in isolation. Every company depends on public roads, educated workers, functioning courts, reliable infrastructure, stable financial markets, and communities healthy enough to support commerce. In other words, businesses succeed because they operate within a society that makes success possible.

When discussions about capitalism become framed as a choice between unrestricted markets and democratic socialism, we risk missing the more important question: What kind of economy best serves both individual opportunity and the common good?

History suggests that neither extreme provides the answer.

An economy with excessive government control can suppress innovation, investment, and personal initiative. But an economy with too little oversight can also produce harmful outcomes, monopolies that stifle competition, financial crises that damage entire communities, environmental costs shifted onto the public, or levels of inequality that weaken social mobility and trust.

The purpose of reasonable regulation and fair taxation is not to punish success. It is to preserve the conditions that allow markets to remain competitive, communities to remain strong, and opportunity to remain broadly available.

That principle is neither anti-business nor anti-capitalist. In fact, it is one reason American capitalism has been so resilient. Our most successful economic periods have generally combined vigorous private enterprise with investments in education, infrastructure, scientific research, and rules that promote fair competition.

Today’s growing debate over democratic socialism, sparked in part by political figures such as New York’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, reflects real concerns about affordability, housing, health care and economic inequality. Whether one agrees with his proposed solutions or not, dismissing those concerns as simply an attack on freedom misses the deeper conversation many Americans are trying to have.

Freedom is one of our nation’s highest ideals. But freedom has always existed alongside obligations, to neighbors, communities, and future generations. The same principle that limits one person’s freedom to harm another also applies to our economic institutions.

Individuals are not islands. Neither are businesses.

The challenge before us is not to choose between free enterprise and the common good. It is to recognize that they depend on one another. Markets flourish when people flourish. Communities prosper when opportunity is broadly shared. And freedom becomes stronger, not weaker, when it is exercised with responsibility.

That may be the most enduring lesson we can carry with us long after the fireworks fade.

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Wil Franklin is the director of North Coast Small Business Development Center where he combines his teaching and entrepreneurial past to help build a connected, diverse, and equitable economic base in our region.