How Many Constitutional Violations Does It Take to Keep Our Planes Safe? (original) (raw)

As Ken Anderson has already noted, I’ve been attending the “We Robot 2014” Conference down at U Miami Law School the last couple of days – a truly eye-opening experience about what Ken describes as “the social life of things.” I hope to have some thoughts about what I’ve learned here on the blog soon – but that’s not what I want to talk about at the moment. Traveling down here from DC, I had my usual angry reaction, when standing on the TSA security checkpoint line at Reagan-National airport, at what has become the norm: special treatment for First Class and other “priority” travelers. You don’t have to be an Occupy Wall Street-er to find this entirely outrageous. I get it that money can buy many things, and that that’s not an inherently bad thing – but one thing it should not be able to buy is improved government service. We have a word for that: “bribery.” If passengers could pass $100 bill to the TSA agent on duty in order to get moved to the fast lane, we’d all condemn that heartily. Why it’s somehow OK when air passengers pay the extra money for First Class tickets and thereby get into the fast lane escapes me. What’s next? A special line at the DMV for luxury cars (no waiting!! open 24/7!! )? A special, secret phone line for high earners connecting them to the Social Security Administration that will get their questions answered more quickly than the hoi polloi? It’s deeply anti-democratic and destructive, and if it’s not unconstitutional, it should be.