Because the regime won’t negotiate reasonable restrictions on its ICE paramilitaries, a partial government shutdown has hit not ICE but TSA air travel security operations. With agents unpaid, many skip work, causing long lines at airports.
The regime’s answer is deploying ICE to airports. Just the thing to reassure travelers! While most ICE guys are standing around there doing nothing.
Here’s a better solution:
Abolish TSA. Or, at least, greatly curtail its role, eliminating security lines and all that X-raying. Like at customs checkpoints — allow travelers to walk right through, with some agents stopping only ones who seem suspicious.
What TSA does instead has been called “security theater,” because rather than providing any actual safety, its true role is to create an illusion of it.
There was always something fundamentally bizarre about this picture. Airplanes are a near-miraculous triumph of human technological rationality. Accompanied by a huge system to keep people from deliberately crashing them. Huh? (As if the latter system did that anyway.)
It’s been a quarter century since 9/11. In all that time, there seemingly hasn’t been a repeat, or threat of one. You might suggest TSA is the reason, making another 9/11 impossible. But surely that’s not so. The TSA system is full of holes. Test runs have shown much gets through, and clever determined terrorists can presumably foil it. Moreover, the idea of hijacking planes seems an archaic chimera today. Hacking into computer systems, or using drones, would be better terrorist options. Making TSA’s security theater all the more irrelevant.
So why does it still exist?
One reason is simple human inertia. Doing what we’ve always done, because we’ve always done it. We’re so accustomed to TSA we just don’t stop to question its continuing logic.
We even still have to remove our shoes because decades ago one pathetic schlub put explosives in his (but couldn’t even manage to detonate them).
We have trouble rationally assessing risks against costs. Life is full of risks. Of course we should do everything reasonable to minimize them; but “reasonable” includes consideration of cost. Would you spend $1000 to avoid a 1% chance of breaking a finger? In fact we do the equivalent all the time.
Suppose TSA did in fact prevent one 9/11 every decade. A 9/11’s costs are certainly large, including the value of lives lost. (Society does implicitly put a dollar value on a life; that’s what the 9/11 victim compensation scheme did.) But what does the prevention cost us? How much taxpayer money? And that’s far from the only cost. Billions of hours of people’s time wasted in lines has a cost too. And missed flights. Et cetera. The total cost of preventing that one episode surely far exceeds what the episode itself would cost us.
If that sounds callous — in fact we blithely accept far greater tragedies. Car crashes are not even a theoretical risk but a certainty. Killing about 38,000 Americans annually (far more than 9/11). There are things we could do to greatly reduce that carnage. Probably a better bargain than TSA security theater. But we don’t do them.
In 1973 I had a blind date to Mexico. I’d previously bought the ticket, with a different name on it; the airline didn’t even care. You just showed the ticket and waltzed onto the plane. No security theater. Remember those days?
Let’s have them back.
