“In the long run, freedom is what makes the system worth trusting. And trust is what the world still buys.”

There’s a story I heard years ago that I haven’t stopped thinking about. A woman crosses the U.S.–Mexico border every day on a bright yellow bicycle. The border agents search her basket, her bags, her coat. They’re sure she’s smuggling something. But every time, they find nothing. This goes on for years.

Eventually, one of the agents—long retired—runs into her again and says, “Okay, you have to tell me. What were you smuggling all that time?”

She smiles. “Bicycles.”

It’s the kind of story that sticks because it flips everything. We spend so much time looking for the wrong thing. We build systems to monitor noise, control risk, and measure what we think matters most—without realizing something more important is moving right in front of us. Quietly. Every day.

In markets, we’ve been trained to focus on speed and scale. Capital flows. Growth rates. Policy announcements. Tariffs. Most recently, the headlines returned to Trump’s tariff plan—a topic that makes half the country feel protected and the other half feel punished.

That’s the kind of tension you only find in free societies. Where disagreement is not just allowed, but expected. Where policies can be challenged, lawsuits filed, reporting published, leadership changed.

That tension is often mistaken for dysfunction. It’s not. It’s the feedback loop that keeps the whole thing alive.

Compare that to a closed system like China’s. Controlled. Coordinated. Efficient. But inside that efficiency, dissent disappears. Visibility narrows. When something breaks, it breaks quietly—and then all at once.

The market doesn’t always reward freedom in the moment. It rewards systems that survive uncertainty over time. And the only systems that can survive uncertainty are the ones built to adjust.

Freedom makes adjustment possible. That’s the yellow bicycle. It’s the thing we stop looking for when we’re too focused on control.

Later this week I’ll share how this shows up in portfolios—and what I worry we’ve begun to forget as allocators. The system isn’t fragile because it’s noisy. It’s durable because it’s free.