Ruling New Jersey- Volume 2, Issue 5

The fastest highway in America opened opened for business today in Texas. I don't care about the speed limit, people can drive as fast as they want on a highway. You have to be an idiot and drive reckless on a highway to get into an accident. Sadly, there's plenty of those people. My problem is the $6 toll and why they built it. The road runs from Austin to San Antonio. It was built, with private money, because of constant traffic on the existing interstate highway. Now people can pay, and somebody makes money, for the luxury of avoiding that traffic. It's objectivism at it's finest. Ayn Rand would be very proud. A private highway making money for a corporation instead of the state.

When I see commercials for hybrid vehicles, where people are saying, "I only have to fill it up once a month" or "I never go to the gas station", I ask myself 'Are these the people getting crushed by high gas prices?' I find the people who could really use a hybrid could never afford one. A hybrid is going to run you anywhere from $23,000 to $35,000, and that's if you don't want a fancy one. The average American family is pulling in just under $50,000 a year, and that number seems to be dropping. And that only if you're white. Hispanic and black families are only pulling in 34k and 30k on average. So bottom line, no real American family can afford these cars right now. It's going to take about 10-20 years for prices to come down and for current hybrids to "trickle down" when rich people get tired of their current hybrids. But by then what kind of world will we live in?

Right now you got people with six-figure incomes driving around in hybrids saving even more money. The $100-200 they were paying at the pump wasn't hurting them anyway. I guess they can use that money to pay for their 'private express lanes'. Is that what we're going to have in 10-20 years? Traffic-filled, dirty, congested highways for the common person, and privately-owned wide-open, high speed highways you can ride if you can pay the fee?

There is a economics professor at Brown and his sell job on unfettered capitalism is that even the poorest in a capitalist country have it way better then the poorest in a different economic model, say communism. Guess what professor, no shit. Nobody is suggesting we give up the free enterprise system. Every person, like myself, who criticizes greed isn't a fan of Karl Marx and has a picture of Uncle Fidel on the wall. Greed is not good. Gordon Gecko is not a role model. It's not class warfare when I say, "When the rich get too greedy and don't pay enough taxes the whole system breaks down", it's me paying attention to history.