 Roads are basically the most evil and destructive thing that exists in the world right now. In fact, I wish I were a libertarian, so I wouldn't have to even believe in roads. I wish they did not exist. We would all be better off if they did not exist. But it's not the kind of thing you really think about, because roads are never really in your face. You don't really think about the social consequences of them, but there are lots of them. Now, right now, I will say, I originally was going to do this video like a year ago. I remember mentioning in some live stream about how much, how terrible roads are. And people are asking me, what's wrong with roads? I'm glad I waited until now, because at least there's this coronavirus thing. And people in the back of their mind, they're sort of thinking, well, maybe the interconnectivity of the world is bad in some general way. But I'm not going to say that roads are bad just because viruses can go on them and stuff like that. That is a legitimate reason why they are bad, but it goes even deeper than that. Because although roads, let's go ahead and concede all the points you redditors are going to make. Here's what a redditor would say. Actually, roads are nice because they can get goods cheaper, move to other places, and there's Ricardians comparative advantage and blah, blah, blah. Okay, everyone knows about that. Roads get things to your house cheaper. You have to pay less for all these goods you're importing and stuff like that. That is true. Even goods that are grown relatively in the same region, they are cheaper. Roads superficially make things cheaper. But what are the actual consequences of roads? Now, let's start out now. The best place to start out is, of course, Uncle Ted's Manifesto. And he makes a very hot take about roads and cars in general. He says it used to be that having a car was optional. It was a cool freedom you can have back when cars first came out. Because we had societies, we lived in cultures, in cities that were built for humans, not for cars. So you could walk to the store. So you could pretty much walk to work. You could do, I don't know, anything you could walk to get to, or traveling was not that difficult. Pretty much everything was in some kind of distance that was comprehensible by a person. Now, of course, having a car was a benefit. It's a cool thing to have a car to get places quicker. It's also a cool thing to be able to go to a foreign city. Or foreign city. I mean, I really just mean a distant city that's 100 miles away. You could do that within a day. That's a cool thing. Cars are nice because of that. Roads are nice because of that. But one thing that happened after cars and roads started becoming popular and funded partially by the government. Of course, roads are basically always built by the government nowadays. Now what happens is that people, you basically have to have a car. Because, oh, well, if I'm Walmart, I can say, well, I could build this Walmart right next to people. But most of them have cars. So I might as well build it 20 minutes away. And so now that's going to be where the grocery store is. And of course, especially if it's something like Walmart, it's going to beat out all of its competitors. All the old stores that people used to be able to walk to, they don't exist anymore. They're having 20 different shops that people could walk to from their homes, all different places. You have one big store that you've got to drive 20, 30 minutes to get to. Where I live, I have to drive 20, 30 minutes. And even though I'm in a rural place right now, even when I was in a city, it took around that time to drive just because, you know, traffic is worse and stuff like that. So now it is required to have a car. It is required to use roads. And in addition, cars aren't just something that fall out of the sky, of course. And you have to pay for a car, okay? So you either buy one cheap that might be partially broken, like a used car, and take that risk. Or you buy a new car and you basically have to always go into debt to pay for it because they're so expensive. So if you're going into debt, well, that means you have to make a whole bunch of other life plans. You have to set aside tens of thousands of dollars to pay for it. Often you make life decisions based on how you're going to pay for your car. Now, it used to be, again, 100 years ago when people were walking to the store, or maybe at the most they were taking a carriage together to go to the store. Well, nowadays you need a car to get to the store unless you're going to take a bus system, which is honestly, they're just nearly just as bad, but maybe for different reasons. But now you basically have to have a vehicle to do stuff. You need to have a tens of thousands of dollars costing device in order to get bread from the store, or meat from the store, or anything basic. You now have to have insurance. You now have to not get killed on the road. There are all these basic things that come with having a car. Now, you might, here's, I think, for people who are road defenders, right? I think here is going to be your biggest problem. And that is a lot of people look at our society as it is now, and they hear me saying, oh, well, not having cars or roads. That would be terrible. Look how far away everything is. And, well, duh, they're far away because that is the society that our technology has produced. Our society, how it is arranged, where things is located is based on the technology that we can use. And in every, you know, if you go to some rural tribe or even a small town 100 years ago, of course, things aren't going to be hundreds of miles away because, of course, everyone needs to walk to them, right? So now we live in a world where, superficially, it looks like we have this cool freedom. Oh, we can drive a car somewhere. Oh, we can take a road. Wow, this is great. And sure, I mean, there are some times where, even when it's not interfering with your real life, let's say you want to visit relatives 200 miles away. Back in the old days, that's a pretty difficult thing to do. But with a car, wow, that's pretty sweet. But now we have a society where you have to have car payments. You have to have insurance. You have to have a license. You have to have all these different things. Just so you can do something basic. And that forces you, most importantly, it forces you to be dependent on quote, unquote, the system. Okay? It's hard to live independently. You have to rely on technology that you might not necessarily know how to fix or that you don't want to pay for. So the reason people are working from cradle to the grave is because they have to pay for this kind of stuff. Right? I mean, the costs of living are always going to be increasing if our technology is increasing. Even if technology is decreasing in how much it costs, because we're constantly adding extra complexity to the things you have to have. Just a very basic thing I was complaining about the other day. I lost one of the keys to my car. Okay? It used to be back in the day. You just have a simple metal key. You can go get it duplicated at a hardware store for $3 or something like that. If you lose one and you can always have all the keys you want. There's no problem. You can have lots of keys. Well, back in the, then after that, people started adding in smart chips to them. This was around the, you know, 1990s, 2000s, stuff like that. Maybe in the 80s, I think they had them as well. And this basically makes it cost around $80 to get a key replaced. I actually got my key replaced the other week and it was a big pain. But nowadays, in order to get these little fob things replaced, you got to pay something like $500. Like $1,000. It's ridiculous. And this is what I mean. Although technology, if you look at computers and stuff like that, oh look, they're all getting cheaper. But the level of technology you need is always increasing. And the same thing is true with cars. Just in general. We have less and less of a choice in terms of what technology we are allowed to use. And that's why as much as I can, I voluntarily don't use all the technology. You know, I'm not never going to sign into something with Facebook. I don't have a Facebook anyway. But you know, if there's anything that requires you to sign up for something with Facebook or something like that, I'm not even going to bother. Because if it is optional now, it might become mandatory later. So that's why I don't like it. And just in general, one of the things that Rhodes have done is that they have centralized technology. They've centralized even things like the economy. You don't think about it. But when you're driving on a road and you're hungry, you want to stop to eat, when you stop, you're probably not going to stop at the local restaurant, you know, that you've never heard of. You're probably going to stop at somewhere familiar. Maybe you're going to stop at, I don't know, McDonald's or Starbucks or Chipotle. I don't know what people even eat at nowadays. But you're probably going to stop at some kind of restaurant that you sort of know about. It's not like it was decades ago where there were no massive chains that were just you could rely on being everywhere. You know, nowadays it's pretty much everywhere you stop. Oh, there's a subway. Well, I guess I'll get that. So what that means is now even something like a restaurant is more and more centralized just because, you know, you're being exposed. Here's, well, actually, I should say this reminds me of why I hate tourism. Okay, I hate tourism because most people who are tourists, they think that they're going out there, they're learning about the world or something like that, but really just they're going to a different place. They're experiencing the same things they experience at home and then comparing the most superficial things about it. I mean, imagine, I don't know, imagine going to some other state for a vacation and then going to the same chain restaurants and stuff like that. You know, getting a coffee from Starbucks the same day. It almost defeats the purpose. I will say when I am traveling in a car, when I'm driving through towns, as a rule, if I'm eating, especially if I'm eating alone, if I'm driving alone, I will never, ever eat at a restaurant I'm familiar with. If I stop, if I see some chain or something like that, I will never stop there just as a rule. That's just a personal thing. But what roads have caused is they've called it cause a massive centralization in that. And really what I mean by that is you no longer have the power to not have a car. You are constantly nudged to do things that are in common with everything else. And if you look at, one thing that I am actually reminded of, I used to live in Statesboro, which is a town in Georgia. It's a college town. And you know, there are a bunch of smaller towns around it that are basically all dried up and a lot of small towns are drying up. And if you ask the people why, they pretty much always have the same answer. And that is the roads. Well, there used to be a general store you could just walk to, well then roads came in, now people just drive to Walmart 30 minutes away, right? And here's the thing. Again, if you're a libertarian and not like an anti-roads libertarian, but if you're one of these libertarians who obsesses about comparative advantage and economic efficiency, here's what you say, oh, well Walmart, they give things cheaper. So of course people should use Walmart or some kind of business that can get goods to consumers cheaper. But my point is that is not the point because really the cost is still there, except for now people have to pay for cars. They have to have higher technology to get to this place. There's now one giant Walmart that has a good number of employees, but nowhere near as many that the multiple different small general stores used to have. And yes, they are more expensive. Yes, using small town hardware stores or whatever is going to be more expensive than whatever your massive country-wide businesses that move stuff from China all over the place. Now the biggest thing is, and again this is actually relevant to I guess the whole coronavirus thing, because again coronavirus is reminding us that how fragile the world is nowadays. And what's happening is that everything is shutting down and we're starting to realize, oh, we're actually not independent at all, right? Most people in big cities who have to rely on Walmart or some kind of similar big box stores, they are not independent in the decisions they make. If they are reliant on cars, they're not independent in the decisions that they make, the things that they do. And one of the things that's changed, even though in some respects we are richer than we were decades ago by some, you know, if you look at, you know, computer processing power or shiny plastic toys and stuff like that, sure we're richer in some superficial sense, but we are much more fragile. We have many more, there's a much greater amount of complexity of technology in society that we are reliant on. And when things start shutting down in crisis situations, like there are right now, people realize, oh, well I actually have nothing going for me. Oh, I don't actually, I don't even have food for the rest of the week, that kind of thing, because I always expect to be able to drive to the store and buy stuff. And that in general is why, now I've talked about a lot of things, and roads aren't the main problem, but roads are one of the best examples. They're one of the best examples of something that seems good. And man, I love, there's something picturesque about a road. Actually, look at all the roads that I'm putting on the screen. They look pretty, you know, there's something adventurous and independent about driving on this road, but it is making you enslaved, it's making you beholden to a technological system that you can try right now. Now of course we're, our societies that we live in are partially reliant on this technology, but you can always make steps to minimize your dependence on it in terms of where you live, how you actually commute, what you do, and so that's what I recommend. There have been many times in my life where I voluntarily go without having a car. I happen to have one now, I just got the cheapest thing out there, but I like to be as little dependent on society as possible. So the whole coronavirus thing has actually been lots of fun for me. I'm just having, you know, awful work, I'm just hanging out here. Anyway, those are some things to think about. I'll see you guys next time.