We don’t need government for airport security
Throughout the blogosphere and the, um, facebookosphere, I've seen often in recent weeks the claim that we simply HAVE to have the government keep us safe by molesting airline customers. When I've pointed out that shopping malls, restaurants, and schools might be easier targets for terrorists and actually cause more terror (since virtually everyone visits such facilities and on a regular basis) and that they should then be arguing for airport-like scans and pat downs at all such facilities, they respond that airliners are 'more important' to protect for whatever various reasons, so the government's limited resources should be used in that area.
Setting aside, for the sake of argument, my contention that the "government's resources" are actually NOT the legitimate property of the state since they're taken without consent from millions of innocent people, the key error in their thinking is that they (or the government) have the ability to correctly allocate resources to achieve a certain goal. I argue that they have no such ability. Here's what Murray Rothbard had to say about the related case of police in For a New Liberty:
How shall the police allocate their funds which are, of course, always limited as are the funds of all other individuals, organizations, and agencies? How much shall the police invest in electronic equipment? fingerprinting equipment? detectives as against uniformed police? patrol cars as against foot police, etc?
The point is that the government has no rational way to make these allocations. The government only knows that it has a limited budget. Its allocations of funds are then subject to the full play of politics, boondoggling, and bureaucratic inefficiency, with no indication at all as to whether the police department is serving the consumers in a way responsive to their desires or whether it is doing so efficiently. The situation would be different if police services were supplied on a free, competitive market. In that case, consumers would pay for whatever degree of protection they wish to purchase. The consumers who just want to see a policeman once in a while would pay less than those who want continuous patrolling, and far less than those who demand twenty-four-hour bodyguard service. On the free market, protection would be supplied in proportion and in whatever way that the consumers wish to pay for it. A drive for efficiency would be insured, as it always is on the market, by the compulsion to make profits and avoid losses, and thereby to keep costs low and to serve the highest demands of the consumers. Any police firm that suffers from gross inefficiency would soon go bankrupt and disappear.
It's the same problem for government-run airport security. It's not possible to allocate resources properly or efficiently in the absence of consumer choice. Some people might want Israeli-style psychological profiling at the airport. Some might like the current scan-and-fondle system. Some might want security that consists of nothing other than allowing passengers to carry handguns with airplane-safe ammo onto the plane. Each airline could set its own security policy, with some using more invasive measures and others going a more customer-friendly route.
As with other spheres of peaceful, voluntary association, someone who has an irrational fear of his flight being hijacked and blown up by terrorists (1 in 25 million chance) could seek out the airline with the most absurdly degrading and invasive security procedures available, and the rest of us would be free to patronize airlines more accommodating of our preferences. And this would also address the allocation of security resources among the different potential terrorist targets in society (e.g., malls, theaters, restaurants). Consumer choices will result in businesses allocating optimal resources to security and doing so in optimal ways. Both the crazy people and the rest of us are able to vote with our dollars to choose our preferred level of security. It's simple, it works, and it doesn't require any government action.
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