Showing government groping

I really hope the Denver Post got permission from the people depicted in these photographs.  It's one thing to be groped by TSA.  It's quite another to have the groping appear on page one.

And when they came for the yuppies, I said nothing, for I wasn't... oh, wait.

I'm seeing and hearing a rash of complaints about elevated airport security measures.  And I'll admit these sound pretty bad.  Probably the most detailed complaint I've heard comes from this blog post.  I fully agree with the author that sexually molestation at the hands of a government employee should not be a precondition for flying.

But can we not get carried away with this?  Too many people seem to be following the lead of the first commenter, who praises the author's resistance to TSA by saying, with all apparent sincerity,

Rosa Parks would be proud.

Airport security theater does deserve some pushback, and I think it would be great if passengers simply refused to comply with gross violations of their privacy that do nothing to make air travel safer.  I doubt too many people will resist, though, since not flying is usually not a realistic option for people who have places to be and have already packed and schlepped everything to the airport.  TSA has us, literally and figuratively, by the balls.

That said, this is not the great civil rights battle of our time.  Passengers are not being hauled out of their homes or tortured or placed in prison without access to legal counsel -- things that actually have happened to American citizens in recent years in the name of security.  Nor are people being turned away from the polls or told they can't unionize or being beaten by police officers -- also things that have happened to real live Americans in recent years.  What's going on in the airports is simply a form of government humiliation that has hit the professional class.

Updates: This post seems to have generated quite a few links and comments, so I thought I'd elaborate a bit.  I am certainly not defending enhanced TSA screenings -- I just don't think they are nearly as egregious as many other things our government has done in the name of security in recent years.  Yet the level of public outrage seems to be disproportionate to the egregiousness of the government action.  Here's a scatterplot featuring data that I entirely fabricated:

Why the outsized concern over TSA's activities?  Because those activities disproportionately hit a wealthier and whiter population, i.e.: people with an outsized voice in American politics and journalism.  That doesn't mean that air travelers are all yuppies, but those who are in the airport on any given day not near a major holiday tend to be of the professional class.

Adam Serwer makes this point nicely:

The amount of freedom Americans have handed over to their government in the years since the 9/11 attacks is difficult to convey. We've simply accepted the idea of the government secretly listening in on our phone calls and demanding private records from companies without warrants. Many shiver at the notion of trying suspected terrorists in civilian courts, and even at the idea of granting the accused legal representation. The last president of the United States brags openly about ordering people to be tortured, and the current one asserts the authority to kill American citizens he believes to be terrorists overseas.

But most of these measures are either invisible enough to put out of mind or occur outside of what most Americans can imagine happening to them. As long as it's just Muslims being tortured and foreigners being detained indefinitely, the price we pay to feel secure seems all too abstract. The TSA's new passenger-screening measures just happen to fall on the political and economic elites who can make their complaints heard. It's not happening to those scary Arabs anymore. It's happening to "us."

This story will likely get even more interesting next week as a broader demographic group flies for Thanksgiving.

Smart cars will save us all

The Denver Post's Chuck Plunkett has a habit of getting bamboozled by the Cato Institute's Randall O'Toole on transportation issues.  Last year, Plunkett bought into O'Toole's argument that private cars were more fuel efficient than light rail.  Today, he repeats O'Toole's claims that mass transit is dying and that hyper-intelligent driverless cars are the answer to our problems.  Let me just address a few points.

Plunkett:

Despite claims that ridership at new transit lines is rising, per capita use of transit has been getting smaller for years.

That's a silly use of statistics.  If ridership is rising, it's rising.  If per capita use is declining, that simply means that the area's population is growing faster than light rail ridership.  That's hardly an indictment of light rail.  It just means that the areas near light rail stations are probably harder for new residents to move into because they're expensive because, you know, people want to live near light rail stations.

Then Plunkett goes on to extol the virtues of driverless cars:

Using the lightning-fast reflexes of robots, driverless cars would shoot along at high speeds, instantaneously avoid slowdowns and thereby revolutionize existing roadways to quadruple their capacity — even during rush hour.

Okay, let's just stipulate that the technology that can steer a car and make judgments to avoid accidents and is affordable and trustworthy enough for people to buy it will be available within the next thirty years.  (I doubt it, but okay.)  Would such a technology actually be better than a human driver?  Do we really have traffic jams today because people aren't skilled or self-interested enough to avoid slow-downs?

More:

DP: But the first time there is a glitch and there is a big pileup, no one will trust them.

RO: There wouldn't be a pileup. The first car might have an accident, but all the others would detect it and go around it.

How is that different from what human drivers already do?  And we still have traffic, by the way.

And then O'Toole explains the problem of mass transit -- upkeep costs:

Look at New York City and Chicago. They're looking at spending tens of billions of dollars to rebuild their systems. In most cases, that's money they don't have. Almost all the transit accidents you've heard about in Washington, D.C., have been due to maintenance problems. In 2002, they projected they would need $12 billion over the next decade to refurbish, and they only got like $1.5 billion.

Yes, mass transit is costly, unlike cars, which are free.  No, wait, roads cost money, too, don't they?  And cars cost money and require lots of maintenance, only those costs are borne directly by consumers.  And transit accidents?  How many more accidents are caused by private cars?  Who pays those emergency room costs, especially when the drivers don't have health insurance?

So why not intelligently plan some communities where people don't really need cars to get around?

Polls show that about 20 percent of Americans want to live in a LoDo [lower downtown Denver], and so you make that available, you're going to attract those kinds of people. They will drive less. But once you saturate the demand, what cities have had to do is start subsidizing [the extra capacity]. Once you start subsidizing it, then the people who start moving in to these transit-oriented developments are not the kind of people who want to live car-free lives. So it's really important that you have lots of parking in these developments, or the vacancy rates are really high.

WTF?  Why do cities have to subsidize anything if demand is saturated?  Why can't it just be a popular area with high rents?  I have no idea if what O'Toole is describing is true, but if it is, it's pretty bizarre, and it sounds like an argument for better city planning rather than just building more parking spots for intelligent cars.

One other quick point: It's kind of weird for someone who keeps writing books and giving interviews about how inefficient, costly, and dangerous mass transit is to then complain than not enough people are using it.