Thread by @RageSheen

If you watch the start of a professional car race, you’ll see something you never see when a red light goes green on an ordinary road. All of the cars head off simultaneously. There’s something very interesting about why this happens, and it’s a way to see . /1

This happens because car races are heavily regulated. The F1 rules for example are over 330 pages long. The drivers all know what the others are going to do at that start, because all of the driving they do on track is heavily regulated. /2

If you tried to do this at an ordinary red light, you’re going to be troubling your insurer pretty fast, for rear-ending the cars in front of you. Some may be fiddling with their in-car audio system when the light goes green, or arguing with the kids, or whatever. /3

There’s no coordination of all the different drivers. To jump straight to the key point here - to achieve a situation of maximum individual freedom on the road and competition requires heavy control and coordination. It’s only the rules that make competition possible. /4

That allows each driver to drive with maximum freedom, the fastest they can, while sharing a road with other cars. After so many years of politics telling us freedom and competition require de-regulation, here’s an empirical example of how wrong that is. /5

The boy racers who like to drive on public roads by ignoring rules, what they call ‘driving to the conditions’, are nothing like racing drivers. A racing driver who drove like that in racing would be either dead, or banned. You can see the smear thing happening with Covid. /6

The argument that public health measures are ‘restrictions’, the whole BS of phrasing quarantine as ‘locking down’. Public health was invented to create FREEDOM, to act in the constant presence of infectious disease. By regulation, and other controls. /7

Just like car racing. It’s not a binary between individual freedom and oppressive regulation. It’s regulation and restriction that creates the individual freedom. That standardises transactions enough to add predictability to them, to give people freedom. /end