Jason Richwine of the American Enterprise Institute asks all the wrong questions:
Full-body scanners, invasive pat-downs, harsh carry-on restrictions—has the Transportation Security Administration gone too far? Critics and defenders of the TSA tend to talk past each other, so I propose a new approach to answering the question. Let us imagine there were a major airline that could opt out of all TSA regulations. Call it “Liberty Air.” Liberty Air openly advertises that it takes zero safety precautions when it comes to screening passengers and baggage. Would you fly on this airline? …
To bolster the argument, imagine that Liberty Air actually employs a little bit of security. Let’s say it checks IDs against a government database in order to prevent people on a terrorist watch list from boarding. For those of you previously wary of Liberty Air, would you fly it now? Maybe Liberty Air also bans knives and guns from flights. How about now?
… And when you ask the wrong questions, you’re most likely to get the wrong answers. Granted, the guy’s just doing a thought experiment and it seems his heart is in the right place. At least he’s questioning How Things Are Done, and that’s something.
But when you posit that it’s either TSA “security” or zero security, you’ve already departed from Planet Reality. And it doesn’t help one bit when you then posit that a “government database” or disarmed passengers constitute “security.” Both premises assume it’s either business as usual or no business at all. Nowhere in the discussion Richwine’s attempting to start is there any room to consider innovation — that is, actual improved security conducted by airlines on their own behalf and for the safety of their paying customers, using techniques that might actually, you know, work.
If this is where your thought experiment begins, you have nowhere to go but around and around in the same old maze. You can’t get out of the box. You keep coming right back to the same false dichotomy: that you must surrender freedom if you want security.
Well, that’s the way the American Enterprise Institute is: Sometimes well-intentioned, but always invested in the status quo. (This reminds me of a post I’d like to write one of these days — the eternal conflict between reformers and revolutionaries; but that’s for another time.)
Real change always begins with asking the right questions. But asking real questions upsets the apple cart. The powers that be, and even their best-intentioned reformers, have a vested interest in making sure the real questions, the ones that lead to real change, are never asked.
Here’s another example that (she says self-promotionally) I used in The Bad Attitude Guide to Good Citizenship: Nearly everybody in government, media, think tanks, and interest groups wants us to all to be either “for” or “against” legalizing gay marriage. Virtually nobody in any part of the mainstream, right or left, ever raises the real question, which is, “Why should government be involved in our relationships at all?”
I’m convinced that nearly all journeys toward freedom begin with a realization that not only is the truth out there, but that it can be found only by stepping outside what everyone else commonly defines as reality. It’s not a choice between government schools or blithering ignorance. It’s not a choice between government cops or lawlessness in the streets. It’s not a choice between government social security and old people dying in the gutter. It’s not a choice between government delivering the mail and no mail at all — and so on. But in each case, powerful people and useful idiots have a vested interest in making you believe it’s so, and most people go along with it because most people don’t like to think. You know what I mean.
So what were some of the out-of-the-box questions that sent you on your journey? Or what are some of the questions you’d like to see others open their eyes to?
I was raised to believe the following things: If you want vegetables, you grow ’em. If you want meat you hunt it down and kill it, clean it, and prepare it. If you want water you find it and pipe it into your house. If you want power you figure out how to generate it.
The only other alternatives are to trade for those things with the things you do have.
Everything else? Luxury that can and sometimes must be done without.
Then I go to school and I’m told that’s all a bunch of lies: that the government is supposed to guarantee all those things, that growing veggies and hunting meat is primitive and savage. That being denied unlimited power and network television is ‘abuse’. That trade itself is suspect and exploitative.
So, as a child, I’m presented with two views of the world. One of them is the way I’ve lived (quite happily and cheerfully) for my entire life. The other is a fairy-tale far more unlikely than the science fiction tales I love to read.
I made a choice.
It stuck. 🙂
You get enough people who don’t think, who don’t know what to think and can’t make a decision, toss in a dash of laziness (those looking to find an easy or non confrontational) way out, add a few false leaders into the mix, and suddenly we have government with their fingers in everything….where it started is harder to pinpoint, since so much has been subtle and in hiding until the media explosion….
But if I had to guess, it started when people began to not take responsibility for their lives and not paying attention to what’s going on in the lives of the powerful people….for me, personally, the original 2 questions came as “What gives “them” the right to tell me what to do when they don’t even know anything about me” and “how in the hell do I get out of/away from this inflicted mess”……
Two of the first questions I ever asked were “Why?” and “How do you know?” They involved religion and how truth is obtained. For a kid, this was rebellious thinking.
Before I met up with libertarianism I was looking to break free from the political world — no matter where it led. The question I asked then was “What gives you the right?” This too was rebellious thinking.
These questions are still “out-of-the-box” for many people. Ask them.
(I found answers, BTW, in “For The New Intellectual” by Ayn Rand. http://www.amazon.com/New-Intellectual-Philosophy-Rand-Signet/dp/0451163087 )
The most important question I encountered as a child was my mother’s constant, “What are you going to do about it?” or “What do you think that means?”
She was a “libertarian” before the term was in use, and both lived and taught personal ownership and responsibility. When my sister and I complained about anything, or asked questions, she made us really think and analyze it ourselves first, before she contributed to the discussion. We had to ask the right questions.
And, whatever it was, she made sure that we understood where our responsibility, business and interests began and ended.
What a blessing.
I started asking “How does it work?” when I was a very small child. I asked it about everything – food, furnaces, telephones, lamps, candles, sewing machines, night clubs, nothing was exempt.
When I grew older I started asking that question about money, government, taxes, laws, police, wars, etc. These are areas where government schools are very careful never to ask about. The history of these institutions is taught in a simplistic and one-sided manner, but the how and why is never discussed.
What made me change to libertarianism is that it’s thinking outside the box, whereas the others are “good job thinking outside the inner cube, but staying inside the box”.
I don’t recall what started my journey, but hearing that Bush (and now Obama) are for killing american citizens without giving them a trial certainly pushed me to look at other avenues. That got me thinking, if people say that the USA should be the best country in the world, why shouldn’t people who are not american born get the “innocent until proven guilty” the american born people do.
Of course once I’ve read more, I’ve realized that “innocent until proven guilty” is mostly a myth and it’s a certainty that people who are called terrorists won’t get a fair trial if they were given one.
If you truly believe “innocent until proven guilty” then you can’t have someone arrested prior to a trial. Of course I question using jails altogether.
As a child, I asked “Why?” a lot-and usually got answers. My parents took the time to answer,and sometimes ask me why I thought something was done,or how. I learned to read before entering school because I wanted to know what Ironman was saying(I was given a stack of comics when I was 4). My parents took the time to teach me. They read a lot. We went places,and did things.
This sounds stupid, probably, but I really started thinking There Are Other Ways Of Doing Things in junior high school when I read an article on Volksrocket.
If your curiosity is encouraged as a child, you’ll keep it.
Charles Murray actually had a similar thought experiment in his book What It Means to be a Libertarian. He suggested that any business that didn’t want to be regulated would have to have prominent warning at their locations and on their products saying “UNREGULATED.” While at first the public might be scared of them, in a few years time the market would probably earn greater trust — precisely because they are free to make innovations.
DownsizeDC.org makes the same point in its campaign to abolish the TSA: https://secure.downsizedc.org/etp/campaigns/126
OK, here’s my bid for the “right question:” Why should anyone be allowed to fly over the property of others anyway? ‘In the old days’ it was assumed you owned the property within your boundary lines, from the center of the earth on up without limit. Then some weasel took a case to the Supreme Court, and they decided (in anticipation of air travel) that you didn’t anymore. Where was the compensation for the “taking?” Why did we meekly tolerate the loss of property rights just so some can travel quickly from one place to another?
Here is a specific out-of-the-box question about a current issue. People pushing for reform in health care ask what particular flavor of government involvement would get more people insured, and therefore be best. “Conservatives” push the health savings account concept, and leftists push for fully socialized medicine. They set up a Hobson’s choice of two different brands of government involvement. Try asking another question: Why should government be involved at all? Why can’t we “level the playing field” by removing tax deductibility for everybody, and lowering overall tax rates accordingly? Why should we want to prod people into insuring against low cost services in the first place? I’ve kicked the government out of my practice as much as possible, and it has worked great. If insurance is not involved, fees are low and service levels are high. Likewise in medical tourism. It was in medical school and residency where I realized the true nature of these issues, and became what I would call a constitutionalist. Prior to that, I too was a socialist.
Whose will pay for it? Volunteers, investors, or citizens by using force to make them pay?
My favorite question is – By what standard?