We all get to spend more time than we want to on the roads. While waiting at yet another roundabout, or in a traffic jam, we would do well to ponder how much all these people waiting so patiently are costing an economy that would rather have all its human resources working flat out.

For roads are not just the shortest distance between Point A and Point B. They are also a model lesson on the state of the economy.

Of course, this is a small country with a correspondingly small economy. Yet we also have the highest percentage of cars on the road, the highest car density in the world, and we also have an economy based on a multitude of small companies, all buzzing around and eager to go, if they are given the chance.

Precisely. Because one finds different levels of obstructions on the road mirroring the same kind of obstructions one finds in the economy.

To start on a personal level, one always finds this Sunday driver or laden truck hogging the outer lane as if it owns the road and keeping all traffic moving slowly behind it. Just as one always finds someone else opening a shop having exactly what you have for sale within months of opening your own shop.

But that’s the least of the problems. The problems get more complicated when the obstructions are caused not just by the odd driver, but by a collectivity of drivers, or the collectivity of the State acting, it says, on behalf of the other drivers.

Let’s stay on the roads for the time being. People in Malta usually think they know how to drive and that driving here is not so bad because we all get there, eventually. So who’s complaining?

But once we get a chance to drive on the continent, we find, and relish, the real pleasure of driving, which is not, or not just, driving fast, but also driving safely, cutting down on the time of travel, driving in comfort and paying to have the opportunity to cut down on the time you spend driving. This is a wholly new, different, experience one would never know about unless one experienced it.

The same with business. We think that just because we get there in the end that everything is OK. Just as we seem to think that just because we may make a small profit at the end of the year, that’s OK too. But that’s not OK at all if we were to see how infinitely better the alternative could be.

Here as well, it is the State, the collectivity, which gets involved and slows down the whole process. Just as we have all those roundabouts that block traffic and reduce it to a snail’s pace from one roundabout to the other, so too we get taxes, red tape, permits, authorities and the like to slow down progress and growth and which keep us lurching from one election to the next: we start, we accelerate, we brake, we slow down; over and over again.

Swimming in our little pond, we have no idea what goes on out there in the big wide world, nor how things could be simpler and easier, nor how we can achieve a far higher rate of growth than we are getting considering all our efforts and pain.

Over the years, enterprising people have been leaving Malta and making their mark out there in the big world, a mark they could never have made here, both because this is a small pond and there are no economies of scale but also, and more importantly, because “out there” they do not come up against the same kind of stifling officialdom we have here.

One just has to hear those who left Malta and relocated, say, to Tunisia, or Bulgaria, or Romania, to see what could have been done here without a State that imposes a roundabout at every crossing (and more snakes and ladders that one can imagine).

Government spokesmen are gloating because Malta has turned around the deficit figures as well as the debt figure, and because growth has slowly inched upwards to European averages. We will undoubtedly hear more of this as Budget Day draws near.

But what they conveniently forget to tell us is how better the growth figure could be if we removed all the roundabouts and allowed those who want to speed ahead full freedom. This is a kind of national eye-opener exercise that we so sorely miss. We do not see it because we do not even know it is there in the first place.

So this is how the coming Budget must be measured: by how much it frees business to allow it its head. Or, in other words, how many obstacles it removes which impede growth. And how smooth, safe and simple it makes it to grow, grow, grow. (And, to add a corollary, how many self-important authorities it knocks into shape instead of allowing them free rein over the poor, improvident, impotent citizens).