One of Dr. Bylund's leading points throughout *The Seen, the Unseen, and the Unrealized,* is the idea that everything is connected. This fact is something I spend a significant amount of time thinking about normally, but I haven't looked at it from an economic perspective until reading Dr. Bylund's book. As I mentioned in my question response, traffic regulations/laws are one kind of regulation that I believe is a must have in society. But how do the consequences of these regulations affect everything else? When someone receives a ticket for disobeying a regulation set by the state, they receive a ticket. For most people, their next step would be to pay the ticket they have received. Without excess thought, this exchange doesn't seem to carry much gravity, but look at it this way. The average speeding ticket cost in 2021 was $150. On average, 3.5 million people receive a speeding ticket every month. If you do the math, that means $525,000,000 are being paid for speeding tickets every month. In translation, that means there's $525,000,000 that is being paid for tickets and not being spent to buy goods and services in the economy. It's impossible to know what each individual consumer would have spent that $150 on, but we do know it would have been something other than the speeding ticket. That money not entering the economy like it would have originally is due to the regulations that were put in place by the government. While, again, I absolutely believe that the regulations are a necessity, it would be idiotic to ignore the fact that those tickets do have an effect on the economy. The lack of money in a consumers hand kept a business from receiving that $150 for something, which meant the business made $150 less in profit, which meant someone didn't quite meet their quota to get their bonus, which meant they couldn't put a bonus in their savings account, and so on. The ripples could continue as long as you wanted to follow them. The hard truth of the economy is that everything matters and everything is connected. As we've seen for years and years, speeding tickets don't cause the market to crash, but they do effect it. Every altercation to money circulation, whether that be by the government's hand or by the consumers choice, has an effect on the economy as a whole.
This fact is not one to be simply overlooked. If speeding tickets have an effect on the economy in the way they do, consider the hypothetical of if the government decided to set a price for a product. The effects of any alteration to the natural flow of the economy will send ripples throughout all of it.
