If examples of government inefficiency were drops of water we would all be drowning in a sea of incompetence. The latest tsunami of TSA complaints was to be expected. Stack up the 4th amendment arguments, the sexual harassment arguments, and the common sense arguments and you find yourself asking, is this really the best we can do? The government has never and will never find the best way of doing a given task and the reason is simple. It’s not because they are evil people that want to ruin the world. They are simply people acting within a system prone to corruption laced with bad incentives and void of creative pressures.
When our government decided it was on the hook to protect private airline companies planes and it’s passengers and cargo (No one stopped to ask, why won’t the airlines do this themselves? They have more incentive than the government does to keep their planes from blowing up, and they have the additional incentive to do it in a way that maximizes customer satisfaction and reduces costs) the best answer they could come up with is treat every potential threat (that’s you and me) equally. This way we don’t ruffle the feathers of that all powerful god of political correctness (i.e. not dealing with the hard realities of life). Is there any serious thinker out there that believes there is NO better solution than this? The real question is WHO is incented to discover the better way?
Now, imagine what Google would do if given the same problem of identifying possible threats to airline safety. Already they have created a formula for indexing and prioritizing all the content on the internet which at the current time is estimated to be around 20 billion web pages many of which are changing on a daily if not hourly basis. Type in any sequence of words and Google returns astonishingly accurate and relevant results in less than half a second. Considering the complexity and variety of the content being searched this accomplishment is amazing. Amazing and repeatable, not just by them, but by other enterprising entrepreneurs. For examples look at the history of the marketplace in the United States. I am talking about the free marketplace; the oven of innovation from which the breadbasket of prosperity comes.
Wisdom dictates that we use all the available information we have as intelligent beings to solve our problems. How foolish are we if we ignore certain details when solving a puzzle. Every jigsaw owner knows that to solve the puzzle in the most efficient manner you start with the edges and work from there, then we use patterns, colors, and other clues to come to our conclusion. We build a profile and filter possible matches based on that profile. We say the word profile and red flags of racism, intolerance, bigotry, and political correctness begin raising in our minds. But a profile is not one dimensional. It’s not just about race, or gender, or age, or religion – an effective profile would have hundreds of attributes and properties. Travel habits, credit score, relationship data, purchase history, reading preferences, all sorts of things. Yes there are privacy considerations and we can have that discussion as well. But to handicap ourselves into acting like and treating each other like automatons is the ultimate demonstration of foolishness.
There are better answers; will we act free and brave enough to find them?
