Recently I had to replace motorcycle tire, it was simply well past its tread wear. These off road Duro tires are made in Taiwan, in fact they are commonly seen in that lesser known Russian Ural motorcycles. These tires are known to be puncture resistant, and more importantly they look pretty good on a Triumph. My side-mirrors are from CRG, handle bars from British Customs, and engine/crash guard from SW-MOTECH. This is not an advertisement, but just an illustration of my ability to make choices.

Making choices for customizing motorcycles is not so different from general life choices. We pick vendors, and parts which are most suitable to our purposes and palette. Just like how we pick our grocery stores, or movie place or restaurants or investment plans. We build life and systems around us based on our choices, those who make better choices build better systems. That freedom to make choices deserves a bit of an appreciation.

Last week I was watching this TV series called “The Man in the High Castle”. It details an alternate reality where Axis powers won the war. And the US is split in half between the Reich and Imperial Japan. The series also brings in the concept of multiverse, where there are parallel realities with different outcomes. In a certain universes Axis powers rule, in others it’s the Allied forces. So, in the story Nazis realized this and decided to build this machine to travel to alternate realities, obviously to conquer them! More than scary it sounded foolish.

Even if by some random stroke of luck Hitler wins the war, they can’t hold a candle to the Allied forces in the parallel universe. So, most likely outcome would be they lose their current reality to Americans from those alternate universes. Interestingly, even here successful outcome comes down to that simple ability to make productive choices.

German Reich is forced to make choices based on meaningless criteria, while Americans make choices to build efficient systems. While Reich has to pander, Americans make choices which can deliver results. Nazis artificially limit their resource pool, while Americans allow winners to emerge from anywhere. Americans simply produce exceptional results because of their ability to make rational choices while learning from their mistakes. Over a period of time it allows best of the ideas to emerge and artificial discriminatory practices to be discarded, this eventually benefits everyone. So, one criterion to measure a legislation would be its impact on broadening choices, seems like that’ll tell whether it’s taking us closer to the Reich or to Americana.