Open roads
On highways, comparative wealth, and the conditions that make them possible
America's enormous prosperity is so vast and such a part of the background of ordinary life that we don't often have the ability to see how much it pervades even the smallest aspects of our national experience. This can ultimately be hazardous, especially if it causes us to become disengaged from the sources of that prosperity.
â– Take, for example, the incredible network of four-lane highways that connect so much of the country. Roads have been important to commerce for as long as humans have gathered in settlements, and four-lane divided highways are basically the pinnacle of what a road can be: Fast, useful, and comparatively safe.
â– America has so many of them that some go lightly traveled. In places, a motorist might have a whole lane to travel with no other vehicles around for a mile or two ahead or behind, even in broad daylight. But while those highways are so common as to be seemingly everywhere to an American, there are US counties with more four-lane highway miles than entire nations abroad.
â– Even the Trans-Canada Highway, which one might expect to be the biggest and widest in its country, still contains segments of only two lanes. (And Canada is one of the rich countries!) Meanwhile, there are multiple four-lane routes across mid-sized states like Iowa, built at typical costs of around $10 million per mile.
â– When prosperity seeps into every aspect of life experience like that, it can become hard to notice without intentional focus. That is in many ways a blessing, but it also means we have to be on guard against the blissful ignorance of the conditions that make prosperity possible: Trade (mostly free), standards (wisely set), and competition (lawfully maintained), among others. These goods don't appear merely by accident.
