Italy tried to intercept migrants in international waters and send them directly to camps in Albania, skipping the whole process of letting them even step foot in the EU. The government’s whole idea was to get faster, so-called “efficient” asylum proceedings by declaring countries like Bangladesh and Egypt as “safe” and using this as an excuse to detain people elsewhere. But legal issues started right away: Italian judges disagreed that those countries are really safe and demanded the migrants be taken to Italy. The much-touted Albanian camps project ended up nearly empty and turned, instead, into a holding pen for rejected asylum seekers facing deportation, all while costing a jaw-dropping fortune. The European Court of Justice is now looking into the legality of calling a country “safe,” especially if at-risk people might still be harmed there.

Let’s talk about freedom. To me, limiting the liberty of people in such convoluted, bureaucratic ways is the same logic we see in those who want to set up hundreds of new rules for drivers, impose absurd speed limits, and push an authoritarian agenda, brick by brick. It’s all about restricting movement, restricting the natural human urge for autonomy, and dictating how, where, or even whether people are allowed to go somewhere—like when they try to force us out of our cars and onto public transportation or bikes, as if we’re too irresponsible to steer our own lives, let alone our own vehicles.

This is what I hate the most: the state telling you, “This is as fast as you’re allowed to go, and this is the only route you can take.” It’s the same mentality behind speed limits—one of the worst crimes against individual freedom imaginable! Do these politicians actually understand what freedom feels like? It’s the wind in your hair at 180km/h, the thrill of overtaking, the independence to leave whenever and wherever you want. But they want to replace it all with slow, cramped buses or wobbly bikes that can’t even go the speed of a pedestrian in a hurry! It’s dystopian.

Now they want to use those same arguments—“safety,” “efficiency,” “fairness”—as a pretext to corral desperate people in legal and literal cages outside of Europe’s borders, draining mountains of money to keep up the illusion that centralized authority knows best who should be allowed to move. It’s the exact opposite of what makes society vibrant. Freedom of movement is sacred! Every human being should have the right to hit the road, chase opportunity, seek a better life—or just feel the joy of the open highway, foot on the gas.

Instead of constantly inventing new ways to control how people live and move, we should be fighting for more autonomy, more roads, cheaper cars, less surveillance, and—above all—fewer fascist speed limits! Anything else is a betrayal of the basic spirit of liberty, whether you’re talking borders, cars, or the roads of life itself.