Fun At The Airport

Well, it’s been quite a while since I’ve written anything. I apologize but I just had to get away from it all. I took a two week vacation to Florida to visit my parents. It was very relaxing and it was great to be around family. It’s great waking up late with nothing that has to be done and no plan of what to do for the day. Now that I’m fully recuperated I can get back to real life.

My brothers and I had a frustrating experience at the Orlando airport on our way back. I guess that’s to be expected whenever one has the pleasure of dealing with the federal government’s Transportation Security Administration. Dealing with any branch of the government is never much fun (just think of standing in line at the post office,) and the TSA is no exception. These fine folks are always happy to provide agonizingly slow service and plenty of unnecessary harassment. After all, that’s what governments are for right?

We got in line at the security checkpoint an hour and 10 minutes before our flight was supposed to leave. The line was a little long but from past experience I judged the wait to be about 25-30 minutes. An hour later we finally arrived at what we thought was the front of the line only to find out that it was just an unnecessary bottleneck where a man on a stool checked our ID and boarding pass and then directed us into another line that wound it’s way slowly to the metal detectors. There another person checked our ID and boarding pass, just in case we had morphed into terrorists in the ten minutes since the last guy looked them over. Or maybe the first guy really couldn’t read and was just a decoy, I don’t know.

I was directed to a metal detector and there was no one directly in front of me, but I had to wait while the lady working the detector harassed a 70+ year old lady who had just passed through without setting the thing off. The TSA employee thought that the woman and her 80 year old husband had made some sort of contact with each other as they passed through the detector and that was unacceptable. The TSA lady was yelling at the elderly woman, telling her “you can’t make contact,” but the woman was totally confused.

She just stood there shaking her head, looking back and forth between the woman yelling at her to come back through the detector and the man waving her forward to the secondary screening area. What shocked me was that there were no polite requests and no friendly assistance provided to help resolve this obviously benign situation. Instead there was irritated yelling and frantic hand waving as if the whole thing were a clip from some tense episode of 24.

Finally the yelling woman gave up (maybe she realized how ridiculously pathetic the whole thing looked,) and turned her attention to me. I had to walk through the detector twice and take my shoes off before I was finally cleared to go. I gathered my scattered belongings, put my shoes back on and was finally free to miss my flight. Actually we didn’t miss the flight. We ran as fast as we could and got there just before takeoff.

What made the whole experience even more enjoyable was the fact that while standing in line, we were surrounded by giant plasma screen monitors that kept telling us how TSA was proud to be protecting our freedoms and liberties and keeping “the homeland” safe. In between these shots of propaganda they also displayed helpful little hints like “In order to shorten your wait time, please remove your laptops from your bags”, or “please have your ID and boarding pass in hand.” Rather than shortening our wait time, the monitors seemed to divert peoples’ attention away from the fact that the line in front of them was moving, which made the line disjointed and even slower moving than before.

Now some people will say this is all just petty complaining and they would be right. They may say that this is a small price to pay for keeping ourselves safe from terrorists and other nutcases, and hypothetically they’d be right there too, but that’s just the problem. It is precisely because the government is doing what it is doing at airports that we should feel more unsafe. The parties that bear the direct financial and legal responsibility for airplane security do not control their own fate.

If airplanes crash or are hijacked and are used to perform terrorist acts, the airline involved would face massive losses in both profits and market share. Customers would see them as unsafe and would choose other carriers instead. There is plenty of incentive for airlines to do everything possible to make sure that their passengers are safe. It is possible that airlines would take differing security measures, which would be known to the public allowing them to choose based on a combination of price and feelings of safety and security. The combination of market incentives and private innovation in airport and airplane security would tend to make these services and procedures both more effective and more efficient.

As it stands now, the government bears the responsibility for what happens in airports and on airplanes throughout the country. Their incentives are not financial but political. The government itself does not bear any direct responsibility for anything. It can never go out of business because of its poor decisions. Only individuals within the government can be removed or punished. When things go wrong we can expect whatever officials feel threatened by the incident to try and cover it up, to lie, to point fingers and to provide the public with scapegoats, all to protect themselves and their careers.

Under such circumstances it can be extremely difficult to find out who is really responsible and to avoid punishing innocent parties. Investigating the government is tricky business. Since it is the government that always does the investigating it is difficult to have any confidence in its impartiality and effectiveness. If private companies were allowed to investigate themselves, would you have confidence in the results?

In a world where airlines provided their own security, ultimate responsibility would always fall on the firm itself. There would be none of the circus style, political witch hunts like those that follow virtually every government failure or scandal. The state itself is never in danger of losing its monopoly of control and in most cases the crisis is used to expand the state’s role and increase its power. We cannot opt out of this system in favor of something better.

Aside from all this, the government’s intense fixation on airports and airplanes as a major security threat requiring unusually large amounts of time and money is also disturbing. This is exactly the type of backward thinking that protects us only from past disasters while leaving us wide open for future disruption. What can be done with a hijacked airplane can be done with large vans or trucks, only much more easily. There are an infinite number of ways in which determined terrorists can inflict harm on innocent people, yet airports continue to receive Unnecessarily large amounts of media and government attention.

Over the past two weeks it seemed like every time I turned on the news or picked up a paper there was some story about and “incident” at an airport. Any type of strange or “suspicious” behavior that has anything to do with flying or airports is breaking news these days. And then you have the Rigoberto Alpizar shooting, which Sean Hannity, speaking on NPR, held up as an example of how we are safe from terrorists and how the 911 commission is wrong about our vulnerability. I guess that makes sense if you think that unarmed, law-abiding U.S. citizens whose only crime is that they suffer from bi-polar disorder pose an imminent threat to this country.

The government’s version of the incident does not match that of eyewitnesses who are saying that Alpizar never claimed to have a bomb and seemed to have been shot for no reason. Something else is going on here but we’ll probably never know what really happened. And what are air marshals doing with shotguns on an airplane anyways? Using a short-barreled shotgun that sprays bullets all over the cabin doesn’t seem like my idea of safety. Whatever happened to handguns? And I’m sure all the passengers on that flight who were yelled at, forced to the ground and had guns pointed at them felt really safe and secure. Under a private system, this type of behavior and mistreatment of passengers would never be tolerated. When government officials make these kinds of mistakes it is brushed under the table and we are told to go about our business as if nothing happened. Private companies could never get away with something like that.