This constant harangue about airport security pat-downs has long become tiresome for me. FOX news seems to be leading the charge, but all the other news sources are fast on their heels in the outcry. This whole dust-up is frustrating for many reasons, not the least of which is that I’m just tired of listening to it.
Here is my biggest issue with this issue: hypocrisy. As usual, people (usually liberal-minded people, mind you) piss and moan about one thing or another and when they finally get their way, in spades, they piss and moan that they got what they wanted but not how they wanted it. In this case, Americans, who have long valued their privacy and the fundamentals of the free market, all of a sudden are clamoring for their privacy to be invaded and are ignoring a basic principle of the free market because they are being inconvenienced at the airport . . . for security purposes. Was 9/11 really that long ago? What’s more, are these same people watching the same news outlets that pump them up about getting mauled by a giant black man wearing a TSA badge when they report the many, many foiled terrorist attack attempts?
Just like anyone else, I don’t really care to be frisked like an arrestee just because I need to take a red-eye to Milledgeville for business or to visit a sick cousin in Ogallala. But what’s worse than an invasion of my virtue? How about my privacy? What I hear most disgruntled passengers clamoring for is some form of background check. Okay, so you don’t like the giant black guy probing your hind end with the back of his hand but you have no problem with the federal flipping government probing your entire life and then sharing that information with myriad transportation agencies, airlines, customs officials, Interpol (just a guess but they have jurisdiction inside our borders now), and God knows who else? Now to find out just how far your hypocrisy goes, ask yourself whether or not you were against the Patriot Act?
Another idea to cut back on overdone screening is to profile. Okay, now this is reasonable but profiling to any sort of finite degree is foolish. Profiling should be used to rule out the most obviously non-threatening passengers and that’s it. Our enemies can and will recruit and use anyone of any ethnicity and gender and age to carry-out attacks. If I were an Al Qaeda leader and knew that the TSA would never think to check a blind ninety-year old woman with no legs riding in a wheel chair, I’d do my damndest to recruit a blind ninety-year old woman with no legs riding in a wheel chair to blow up a passenger jet in mid-air. And when all those passengers are falling from thirty-thousand feet and are either in a million little pieces or covered in burning jet fuel, I wonder if they would have preferred to stand in line for a dozen extra minutes so the big, black TSA guy could manhandle them.
The last point I’ll make is along economic lines. I love the free market. I think it is the most perfect system and there is no close second. It’s fair: everyone who participates in it in the right way will always benefit significantly; only those who fail to follow market principles suffer. Well, the lazy and stupid suffer but I also am a survival-of-the-fittest type. The free market is super cool and one reason for that coolness is the power of the consumer. When people talk economics, the discussions always revolve around the corporations; but, that’s only half of the picture – the supply half of the picture. The demand side is just as important and, for our purposes, just as powerful. Simply, if literally no one purchases red shoes for even one month, how many pairs of red shoes can you expect to see on the shelves next month? Or, if even a large minority of people refuses to pay $15 for those red shoes, you can bet that the price will drop. Why? Because in the free market the corporation is obligated to chase the dollar and, in this last example, they have to actually lower their price on red shoes precisely so they can profit from them. Everybody wins. It’s a beautiful system.
If the consumer at large decides that the product provided by airlines is not worth the retail price, then the power of the consumer needs to be wielded heavily. There are quite a few courses of action, not the least of which is to simply stop flying. To effect change, for good or ill, just shut off the demand portion of the equation. Too easy.
“But, the federal government, in the form of the TSA and Homeland Security, has a monopoly-like chokehold on all airlines,” you say. Alright, fine. Just as consumers, as citizens you, we, have the power to change our government. I’ll concede, that’s a big and time-consuming task. Still, for a government respectful of your liberty, you must vote accordingly in the long term. In the short term, your power as a consumer is the best weapon.
My hands have slid up and down the sweaty nether regions of many a filthy Iraqi man. And I had to use more than just the back of my hand. Thank God for gloves and hand cleaner with pumice. Maybe because I have actually employed most of the TSA’s pat-down techniques they don’t seem so harsh to me. Then again, maybe my experience gives me insight to which most others are ignorant. The consequences for me in Baghdad and the next time I board an airplane, after all, are the same. And in the end, I think that the federal government knows too much about me already and I would rather be inconvenienced by the TSA’s security checks than have Janet Napolitano investigating me and then sharing all that information with just about everyone.
No comments:
Post a Comment