With the holiday travel season approaching fast,
public anger at the federal Transportation Security
Administration’s (TSA) increasingly invasive airport passenger
screening procedures - full body scans and pat downs - seems to be
growing louder by the day.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano argues that these
measures are necessary to maintain an adequate level of security
for the nation’s air travel.
Indeed, some types of safety measures, including passenger
screening, are needed for air travel safety. The problem with the
current security regime is its structure. In a way the TSA can’t
help annoying travelers with petty, intrusive rules. It is in its
nature, as a top-down, government regulatory bureaucracy. By
design, it’s good at promulgating and enforcing rules, not so much
at turning on a dime to react quickly to potential threats, which
have an annoying habit of turning up unexpectedly and be ever
shifting.
Hopefully, the public anti-TSA backlash can lead to greater
public debate over the nature of government institutions and the
incentives they face, compared to those in the private sector. At
Forbes,
Rhodes College economics professor Art Carden launches a strong
early volley in this debate, arguing for abolishing the TSA.
But won’t that compromise safety? I doubt it. The airlines have
enormous sums of money riding on passenger safety, and the notion
that a government bureaucracy has better incentives to provide safe
travels than airlines with billions of dollars worth of capital and
goodwill on the line strains credibility. This might be beside the
point: in 2003, William
Anderson incisively argued that some of the steps that airlines
(and passengers) would have needed to take to prevent the 9/11
disaster probably would have been illegal.
This makes me wonder, as I often have, of what exactly goes
through the mind of Naderite self-styled safety advocates when they
advocate some new “safety” requirement. Do they really believe that
companies have no economic self-interest in helping protect the
safety of their customers? An auto manufacturer whose vehicles
can’t withstand accident impacts or a restaurant where people
routinely get food poisoning won’t stay in business for long.
That kind of failure to account for incentives underlies a lot
of economic fallacies. It also distorts the political debate, by
making possible the notion that taking an activity out of the
marketplace somehow obviates any self-interest surrounding it. In
fact, government intervention simply shifts self-interest from the
voluntary exchange of the market to the coercive functions of
government. The TSA debate is no different, as Washington Examiner
columnist and former CEI Warren Brookes Fellow
Tim Carney notes.
If you’ve seen one of these scanners at an airport, there’s a
good chance it was made by L-3 Communications, a major contractor
with the Department of Homeland Security. L-3 employs three
different lobbying firms including Park Strategies, where former
Sen. Al D’Amato, R-N.Y., plumps on the company’s behalf. Back in
1989, President George H.W. Bush appointed D’Amato to the
President’s Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism following
the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. Also on Park’s L-3 account is
former Appropriations staffer Kraig Siracuse.
Finally, as David
Henderson notes at EconLog, in his discussion of Carden’s
article, private responses to terrorist threats can be as valuable
as government-directed ones.
The clearest cut success stories we have are of other passengers
using their local knowledge to thwart the shoe bomber, the
underpants bomber, and the United flight #93 bombers. Of course,
there’s a huge difference between my first two examples and the
third. In the third case, all the passengers died. But, as I said
to a flight attendant when I traveled on a Boeing 777 from LAX to
Boston on September 22, 2001, on a nearly empty flight that United
had offered to let me out of with a full refund, “The reason we’re
safer now is that we passengers are never again going to think
about a hijacking the same way. We’re not going to sit passively as
the FAA told us to.”
The TSA isn’t probably going away any time soon. However, the
backlash can bring about some needed changes, in addition to
introducing more questions about the role of government into the
public debate - all the while air travel becomes even more
unpleasant.
