If you want someone from Connecticut to get all riled up, drive extra slow in the passing lane. Connecticutians are very particular about that. The right lane is for traveling, the left lane is for passing. If you’re in the left lane for any other reason than passing, you are a jerk.
So if you really want to ruin someone’s day, drive in the left lane at about 50 miles per hour. They will be grumpy for three days straight, I assure you.
I was telling this story to one of my South Carolina friends—how upset people from Connecticut get about this, and how people from South Carolina basically drive however the hell they want—and he said ruefully, “Freedom…”
He’s a guy who perhaps likes lots of rules to organize society, and perhaps he’d rather live in a world where some law governs how you conduct yourself in every aspect of your life, including how you drive. I tell you what, after growing up in Connecticut and then spending the last six years in the South, I’m enjoying the freedom, even if it means I occasionally get stuck behind some idiot.
These days I’m very skeptical of anyone who calls him- or herself a utopian, a person who subscribes to the idea that you can somehow nudge people into doing this or coerce them into doing that and create this ideal society where nothing bad ever happens.
Remember the movie Minority Report? You can create a world without crime, but what would that world look like? It would be horrifying. You can make the argument that there is actually an optimal level of crime. I would rather have a little crime than the oppressive law enforcement it would take to get zero crime.
Bill De Blasio recently lowered NYC speed limits to 25 miles per hour in an effort to lower traffic fatalities to zero. He called it Vision Zero. Have traffic fatalities been reduced? Actually, I haven’t checked. But there are tradeoffs with everything. People get to where they’re going much slower, which has an economic impact—that nobody talks about.
There will always be car accidents. There will always be deaths from drug overdoses. There will always be crime. People will suffer and die because of stupid stuff and because they are stupid. The world is not a perfect place—in fact, I prefer it to be a bit untidy.
Economic Frrrreeeeeddoommmm
There have been some startling developments in the past few months. Like, did you hear the talk about getting rid of $100 bills?
It’s not just C-notes. 500EUR notes in Europe, 1,000CHF notes in Switzerland—everywhere people are talking about getting rid of large-denomination bills, because… some people use them to evade taxes or to commit crimes. You don’t pay your drug dealer with a credit card. So the thought is, get rid of the large-denomination bills and crime goes away.
This is scary. Part of economic freedom is the ability to transact anonymously. Take the extreme example where cash is eliminated altogether. Everything goes on a credit or debit card. Your whole purchasing history is stored on the Internet. Well, if you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide, right?
Part of freedom (including economic freedom) is the ability to do bad things. Do you want to eliminate the option for people to do bad things, or do you want to give people the choice to do the right thing? All morality is meaningless if people are given no choice of whether to behave or misbehave. This is a deep philosophical issue.
Again, some people think a perfect world is a world without crime, but that’s not true. A perfect world is where people have the ability to commit crimes, but don’t.
But this talk about large-denomination bills is really gaining momentum, and honestly, I think it is at least half responsible for the run up in gold prices over the last couple of months.