Like many of us, I work a 9 to 5. Or a 7 to 4, to be precise. Most mornings, I get to work keeping to the posted speed limit. OK, I tend to go a little bit over... and it seems to seal the driving time in at about 40 to 42 minutes. On the drive home, it's closer to 75 minutes. Of course, the time of day and the demand for roads peaks in the afternoon when most people want to head home and turn on Netflix or CNN. Paying for the drive is expensive enough, with gasoline prices driven some percentage higher here than elsewhere due to the state's prestigious environmental minutiae.

But that's not the main point of this post. Follow me down a free road that connects to a toll road and also, it's reverse. As I said, the drive in the morning is acceptable. Traffic moves and while there are numerous dangers, this is typical driving. On the drive home in the afternoon, well, there is a significant and awful physical danger. The toll road I use flows freely from both directions, the drive is pleasant with the exception of idiot drivers. But then, close to its end, it essentially stops, but only in the right two lanes. This leads to a speed delta between the second and third lanes that basically destroys all confidence in safe driving in that third lane. And let us go with the typical response. The toll roads didn't design properly, didn't account for traffic volume, toll roads and free enterprise are a danger, blah blah blah.

Consider this. The toll road only stops at the entrance to the FREEway (non-toll) or about a mile before. We have all experienced such congestion or at least seen it somewhere. Now, which design is responsible for this serious infraction to safety? Well, logic dictates that if the bottleneck is moving at the same speed as the downstream FREEway, and that the bottleneck is not due to the demand for space on the actual ramp (i.e. speed on the ramp is less than the speed on the FREEway) then the cause of the creeping speed is the downstream FREEway. Don't believe me, empiricist? Then can you explain why a previous interchange (all toll) experiences zero traffic?

My point is not just to argue for toll roads - a legitimate argument itself - though perhaps a tired one for those who heard about them before reading Atlas Shrugged. But my point is more of an allegory as to what transpires in the interaction between economics (toll road) and government (FREEway). At any interchange between the two, it is the slow, the inefficient, the creeping that takes over. And THAT is dangerous. Look at any exchange between the two. Its simple, one produces, the other restricts, regulates, taxes, and loots.

So many people believe in cooperation between government and economics, as if the government's checks and balances system was devised somehow to protect customers ("consumers") from faulty products, whether drugs, or airbags, or roads - rather than to protect individual rights such as, well, freedom to choose a service over a competing "service". These people seem to believe that the government somehow gets those lazy incompetent workers, engineers, and businessmen off their asses to contribute a "fair" product or service. Really? Is that why I have to deal with 0 mph next to 65? Or is it the other way around?

Of course, it is government that slows progress, and progressives who stop it.

To wrap up my drive, I take lane 4, the fast lane, to get home when I am done putting in an honest day's work. Not because I am a speed demon, not because I want to cruise oblivious to those behind me, and not because I think I am better than those stuck in the miserable abyss 50 feet over, but because I know objectively it is the fastest, safest, most efficient way to travel. Objectivism is like that. So when anyone tells me that the cronies take advantage of government, I say yes, that is what a crony is. But when someone tells me that capitalism doesn't improve lives equally, that the government should regulate to achieve a desired effect, that it should tell others to follow their personal whim, please stay clear. Because I, as an Objectivist, am in the fast lane, and all the others who want to be equals, who want to suffer the consequences of enforcing their whim on others, well, they can all go slow together. And when they curse each other and the sky as minutes and hours of their lives pass by, the lights going dim "spark by irreplaceable spark", I can laugh openly. Because I know where I am going and why.