Thomas L. Knapp is a director and senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism, where this was first published. He lives in north central Florida.
From here on out, Americans can annually celebrate July 8 as “Freedom From Compulsory Podiatric Nudity Day.” That’s the day the Transportation Security Administration stopped requiring air travelers to remove their shoes while waiting in line to get ogled and felt up by government-employed pervs before boarding their flights.
Government rule reform tends to move at a glacial pace.
It took five years for TSA to adopt the “shoe removal” rule after Richard Reid’s comically unsuccessful “shoe bomb” attack on American Airlines Flight 63 in 2001.
Then, it took 19 more years for them to finally admit that the rule, in addition to being annoying and time consuming, provided no benefit whatsoever to anyone but badged foot fetishists.
Number of terror attacks prevented by the rule: zero.
Cumulative amount of time passengers spent unshoeing and reshoeing, according to Slate’s Henry Grabar, using a conservative estimate of one minute per passenger per flight: 250,000 years. Yes, years.
To put it in economic terms, at the U.S. federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, the TSA should have to cough up about $16 billion in wages to air travelers for their time.
Instead, those travelers (and everyone else) fund the administration to the tune of more than $10 billion per year.
It’s time to defund and disband the agency entirely.
It hasn’t prevented “the next 9/11” and wouldn’t have prevented “the first 9/11” if it had existed prior to Sept. 11, 2001.
Obviously, the preexisting airport/airplane security system didn’t prevent the first one either. It did, in fact, happen.
But, if that preexisting system — funded and managed by airlines and airports based on their assessments of security needs instead of bureaucrats’ and lobbyists’ desire for new regulatory power and cash cows — had remained in place, it would almost certainly have delivered better security going forward, at lower cost and with less annoyance and discomfort to travelers, than TSA has.
According to an American Airlines survey, 90% of Americans have flown at least once in their lifetimes. An entire generation of those travelers has never known an air travel paradigm that didn’t entail spending hours in airports awaiting constitutionally prohibited searches and creepy “pat-downs” by haughty government agents. They probably hear about those bygone days from their parents, but they’ve never lived the experience for themselves.
We should bring that golden age back for them. Not as a conditional “gift” but as the one debt we owe to their generation and future generations: freedom.
Reader reactions, pro or con, are welcomed at civiltalk@iniusa.org.
