Cars are framed as freedom machines (think of all those empty roads in car adverts): a frame which emphasizes their advantages and ignores or down-plays their side effects. So you can happily buy one without worrying about any side effects it might have. Admittedly this framing goes with the grain of our thinking anyway. We don’t like having to keep thinking about how our actions might affect other people. It’s boring. Restricting. It’d be much more fun to live in a world where we can just do what we like, wouldn’t it? Of course, that’s a make-believe world. Actions do have consequences. In a make-believe world they might not, but in the real world they do. But we don’t really want to face up to this, and so we lap up a lot of framing about freedom. Freedom is a wonderful thing, but it cuts both ways. One person’s freedom to pollute erodes the next person’s freedom from pollution. It’s great to have freedom from being exploited; but what about someone’s freedom to exploit you: is that great too? Corporations want “free markets” for example: the freedom to operate without regulation and without having to bother about the pollution or other side effects they cause. But that’s denying us the freedom to protect ourselves from them. Again there’s a general pattern: framing tends to support the freedom of a few people to do certain things, but ignores the consequences, especially for others. The freedom frame often looks at one person’s rights, but the next person’s rights fall outside the frame and get ignored.