We all discuss our freedoms: speech, religion, association, etc. But one of the freedoms I think we take for granted is the freedom of movement. Let’s dig.
In the past, people the world over didn’t travel much. It was too difficult, too dangerous, and most of their friends and families were within a short distance from where they lived—also because it was harder for THEM to travel. Prior to the early 1900s, to travel any real distance required aquatic sailing or livestock-pulled wagons. Automobiles were in their infancy, confined to the very wealthy, and air travel was just a dream. A few notable inventions changed the world, and much of its demographics. Henry Ford devised the production line, making autos more affordable to the average working man. The 1950s and up started a trend of cars being COOL, and the vagabond trend began. The Wright brothers started the cascade of air travel—but it would be decades before such was applicable over oceans or even long distances. It took quite a while for technology to catch up to that dream.
In the United States, prior to the 1960s, driving was quite the challenge, since quality roads were inconsistently available. The Interstate Highway System did much to solve that problem, even though that wasn’t the primary purpose of it—President Eisenhower wanted a better method to move military material and troops nationwide. With the IHS, quality, safe, paved roads connected all parts of the country to the others, limiting unpaved roads to the very beginnings or ends of long-distance travel. Add the nationwide network of gas stations, and you get something approximating freedom of movement. For maybe the first time ever, people could relatively easily relocate to some other location: where the jobs are, where distant relatives live, or maybe just where the climate is preferable. Up until then, it was quite common for someone to live their entire lives within a few miles of where they were born. It was even considered a big deal for someone to move to ‘the City’, whichever city of any size was near. Now, it didn’t take a stagecoach trip to move from one coast to another. Technology also impacted air travel, as airplane ranges made distance travel quite possible. Now, air travel from or to anywhere in the contiguous US is measured in hours, not days. Want to move from middle-of-nowhere to CA, NY, or FL? A few hundred dollars and a few hours, you’re THERE, able to potentially start a new life in your new location. In present times, there are cities nearly entirely populated by people from somewhere else—transplants outnumber the natives by quite a large margin. In some places, natives are so rare as to be an oddity.
Another great facet of the United States: it does not require any documentation at all to cross State boundaries. No visa, no passport, no permissions required of any kind (yes, there are some folks in one part of the legal system or another—children, felons, those on probation, etc.—that do not have that freedom). If you have gas money, plane or train fare, or the time to walk, you can go wherever you want. But this freedom is under a bit of an attack. Let me explain.
Big government planners, those that want to run most of your lives, envision a US where the majority of the population lives within its large cities, or suburbs of them. Where personal transportation isn’t needed or desirable. Movement is limited to public transportation methods: bus, commuter train, trolley, subway, etc. Under the guise of ‘lowering carbon emissions’, these folks would love to limit autos (and maybe even plane travel) to the very important and very wealthy (them). The ability to go where you want, whenever you want, just isn’t confining enough for them. And public transportation only goes to and from where large numbers of folks want to go. There are people secretly cheering for the rise in the price of gasoline, just because it will limit how much people will drive! Oh, they say it is to force the transition to an as-yet-unknown technology that can be ‘cleaner’, but I truly believe their intent is purely controlling in nature. What if the price of fuel gets so high as to prevent all but essential travel? Affordability has been a given for the last hundred years or so, but it is not a given. The freedom of movement can be curtailed with economics, rather than legislation. Our current Transportation Secretary recently bemused that to avoid the high cost of gas, just drive an electric car! That the average American does not have the resources to buy the typical EV, which averages North of $60,000, never dawned upon him. And that outlet that charges said EVs, that is part of our power grid. Not only will our existing power grid not handle the needed expansion of EV numbers, but that power grid is currently powered predominately by coal and natural gas power plants (for those not near hydroelectric facilities)—not the ‘clean energy’ panacea they desire. Those same environmentalists are those that fought converting such plants to emission-free nuclear energy for decades. Wind and solar are simply not in the picture at all for personal travel, or even to power EVs.
So, this latest rise in gasoline prices, and all of its cascading increases in shipping of every product, may be the intentional plan of some—or at least they greatly approve of such increases. It has yet to be explained to me how farming and food shipment can be performed via public transportation. Anyone? In summary, our freedom of movement may not last into the very near future (wealthy excluded). But the results of increased fuel prices are a major driver of the current inflationary trend, along with printing quantities of currency (with no productivity to back such printing) never before seen. If we continue the current course, everyday people will continue to have declining purchase power, with an endpoint too scary to contemplate. Buckle up, folks—even if it isn’t a seatbelt in your personal car.
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