David, Stalin had a big gulag. Russians knew about it. If he had closed half of it down, I think most would have thought themselves better off, as the odds of their imprisonment would decline. I don’t think they’d be thinking, “Gee, the gulag is now acceptable because it’s half the size it used to be.”
Many Americans already accept the TSA as normal, just as they accept government generally as normal. Others do not. Many in both groups can now become better off. As Laurence Vance reminds me, better does not mean good, right, just or acceptable.
I think it’s true that if the TSA moderates its searches, it will lower resistance to itself and enhance acceptance of itself as an organization because fewer people will be on the receiving end of their searches and they’ll be able to board more easily. But, as I noted before, we can still push for abolition. We can still point to the rights violations, the x-ray dangers, and the assaults. We can still push for more people to get expedited entry. We can still push for enlightened procedures to screen people in order to reduce these medical risks, these senseless inconveniences, and these outright crimes. If the TSA were reduced by such changes to a shadow of its former self, we’d be winning.
Voting is irrelevant to this discussion of the TSA, because voting is my choice and what the TSA does is the TSA’s choice. I elaborate below. But since you ask about voting, I’ll say the following.
I don’t vote. In 50 years, I may have voted twice. I recollect voting against some bond issues once. When I was 18 or so, I once voted for a neighbor (Ozzie Amireault) who was running for Sheriff. I think I once voted the libertarian ticket around 1984. I’ve expressed my opinions on voting several times in LRC. The first essay was here in 2008 (Why I Do Not Vote). The second essay was recently.
Voting for the lesser of two evils is not the same as saying that people are better off being robbed and tied up than being robbed and murdered. In the former case, there are several arguments against voting, one of which is that your vote is meaningless to begin with. The odds of it shifting an election are infinitesimal. Furthermore, with voting you have another option, which is not to vote. In the latter case or that of the TSA, we’re talking, not about voting or a personal choice, but whether or not you’ll be better off if the robber or the TSA reduces its coercion. There is no logical connection between these two scenarios, one involving a choice we control fully and the other involving a choice that the TSA controls fully. Their only similarity is that there are two paths, one being less evil than the other.
The closest I can come to making these two different things similar so that the lesser of two evils in voting somehow is pertinent to one’s attitude toward the TSA’s procedural change is to point out that a flyer has an option to fly or not. It’s the option not to fly at all and not get involved with the TSA at all. The costs of not flying can be very high, however, so that most people keep on flying despite the TSA. I personally don’t fly anymore. Is this like not voting? Somewhat. In both cases, I’m opting out of the system.
I’m on record somewhere here on LRC as saying something like the following, and if not I’m saying it now. If a party came along that was focused on liberty and the personal right to secede, which overlaps panarchy and voluntaryism, and if it could get something like 10-20% of the vote, I’d vote for it, because the choice would be clear and mean something. If people can vote on meaningful single issues, their vote means more than in the existing system where an individual vote connects to nothing discernible. If Russians could have voted yes or no on the existence of the gulag, voting the lesser of two evils would have made a lot more sense than voting in a typical election.
3:35 pm on October 21, 2012
