A tax increase? I expect gale-force Republican outrage!
Any… second now.
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Exactly. And for what…confiscating knives? Drugs?
What a fucking phenomenal waste of billions of dollars and individual freedoms. The TSA will never get better or cheaper – just more and more ridiculous. In a sane society, we’d end it tomorrow. Instead they double down on stupid and tell us that there’s nothing in the huge, bloated government that can be cut.
Unfortunately, it’s much easier to justify funding the TSA through fearmongering, than to justify funding the NSF (or public education, social services, etc.) through common sense. Wasting money on “security” or “defense” is going to cost America a lot more in the long run, and nobody’s going to come out the winner.
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I’m sure most of this will be spent on awareness campaigns, improving security measures, and yachts.
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Yachts with names like Security State Folie.
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Well everyone knows modern railroads are nothing more than a liberal socialist ploy to take away our cars.
Quickly, round up the rifled muskets and get those carronades moving! We have to rendevous with the Satsuma Rebellion to have any chance of stopping this technological menace!
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I disagree to some degree. The carriers depend on numbers to some degree to maintain profits. Running fewer flights at higher prices is something they’d already do if it were a profitable option. Less fleet to maintain, less staff to pay, less fuel used, less $ spent on airport fees etc…
And as far as the separation of corporation and state, I highly suspect that if airline profits started to drop dramatically due to said security theater, the outcry from the real owners of our government would prompt rule changes pretty damn quickly.
If you want the situation to change, you can directly petition your government and see just how far it gets you (or doesn’t), or you can hit the people who pay for/lobby the government where it hurts, in their pocketbooks.
Pardon me if I don’t take advice on enacting political change through economic destablization from Bobo The Chimp. 
And you regularly get a lot of logic and sense out of humans?
I want to hang out with the people you know then!
(is there an emoticon for sarcastic snark?)
Why snark? I was making a light hearted joke.
True, it was based in my hesitation to trust a random person on the internet’s advice on enacting political change indirectly through messing with markets, as if economics were both simple and predictable, and nothing bad or unexpected (or both) could possibly happen in the course of enacting such a plan, but it wasn’t snarky-worthy, I thought! 
Nah, not snark in regards to your joke, just sarcastic snark in that most humans seem pretty incapable of a high degree of logic/sense, and if you’re hanging out with a better crowd than that, I want to be invited to your parties.
And yeah, no comment on the idea that something bad/unexpected would happen if the airline industry were intentionally economically destabilized in order to try to enact progressive social change…
But, you know it’s not going so well right now, and though there may be trials and tribulations with any massive restructuring, would any other potential outcome be so rights violation-ey?
Whether it’s unnecessary and does it’s job poorly depends on your objectives. It you think it’s supposed to provide airline security, yeah, appalling.
But if your objective is to get the public to feel scared, and feel like the government’s trying to protecting them against Evil Terrorists, and feel like maybe the government isn’t doing ENOUGH to protect them against Evil Terrorists, and get anybody who doesn’t want to comply with unreasonable unwritten rules about putting their shoes and belts and jackets in the box to get yelled at by the obedient passengers behind them for holding up the line, and get the public in the habit of yelling at anybody who questions the TSA or Police or FBI or Homeland Security etc.? Then they’ve done a surprisingly good job, for a bunch of underpaid thugs led by a bunch of probably overpaid thugs.
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