At airports across the US, Transportation Security Administration agents have been “working” — that is, impeding, harassing, ogling, and groping air travelers — without pay since Valentine’s Day due to a congressional feud over funding for their parent department.

Well, some of them, anyway. Several hundred have quit; quite a few are calling in sick more often.

On March 27, US president Donald Trump directed the Department of Homeland Security to start paying TSA employees again, using “funds that have a reasonable and logical nexus to TSA operations.” They may start getting paid again as soon as Monday.

They should also STOP getting paid again as soon as possible. Permanently.

The very existence of the TSA has been a costly 25-year mistake. Now, with the DHS funding dispute still in full swing, it’s time to correct that mistake by abolishing the agency, sending its workfare clients back into the productive sector, and returning airport security responsibility to airports and airlines.

Let’s do a quick cost-benefit analysis:

Cost, part 1: While TSA doesn’t have its own budget line — its operating costs are part of the larger DHS appropriation — its estimated costs of operation come to about $9 billion per year.

That’s about $27 per year from every man, woman, and child in the US, whether that man, woman, or child travels by air or not.

Cost, part 2: The government doesn’t offer official statistics on wait times in TSA “security” lines,  but estimates put average wait times at 20-30 minutes, and passenger “screenings” per year at 750-800 million.

That’s somewhere 250-300 million hours spent standing in “security” lines at airports: At the US federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, around $2 billion worth of air travelers’ time wasted.

And I’m low-balling that number, because the actual wait time isn’t the only time travelers waste on TSA. They spend extra time packing in “TSA-friendly” ways. They arrive at airports extra-early just in case the lines are long.

Now, for the benefits:

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TSA doesn’t even pretend its screenings have verifiably stopped so much as a single terrorist attack since its founding in 2001.

Is it possible the existence of TSA has had some kind of undetectable, unmeasurable deterrent effect? Sure, but probably less so than could have been achieved by the prior systems adapting and improving their screening techniques after 9/11.  Nation-wide uniformity makes it easier for terrorists to know what they’re up against; decentralized responsibility and variety makes planning attacks more difficult.

Why was TSA created in the first place? As Rahm Emanuel once said, in a different context, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste …. it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”

Authoritarian politicians saw the 9/11 attacks as an opportunity to increase their control over American travelers –and to bill those travelers for the imposition. It was a mistake to let them exploit that opportunity, and now is a great time to tell them to knock it off and restore a measure of freedom and sanity to US air travel.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

In 2004, a few years before K.G.M. — a pseudonym, because now you don’t even have to reveal who you are to get taxpayer-funded courts to hear your frivolous lawsuits — was born, three guys gave the world something called “MySpace.”

It wasn’t the first instance of “social media” on the Internet, but it was the first one to get global buy-in, with around 100 million users by 2008.

MySpace kicked off an era in which nearly two out of three humans on the planet use social media platforms to connect with others, share opinions and content, and, yes, sometimes scroll obsessively through everything on offer.

You or I may or may not like social media.

You or I may or may not use social media.

And, even though it’s pretty much the unique distinguishing development of the 21st century (everything else, including perpetual war, is just variation on eternal themes), you and I don’t HAVE to use social media.

Nor was K.G.M. forced to use social media.

But on March 25, a California jury awarded her $6 million in “damages” — half “compensatory” and half punitive —  from Google (which owns YouTube) and Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram), because she allegedly suffers from anxiety and depression and blames social media for those problems.

It’s really all punitive, because there are no “damages” to compensate for.

Google and Meta provided services which K.G.M. was free to use, not use, or use as much or as little, and in whatever ways, she pleased.

The availability of those services neither, as Thomas Jefferson might put it, picked K.G.M.’s pocket nor broke K.G.M.’s leg.

Since I don’t know K.G.M. personally, I can’t say whether she came up with the idea for this frivolous lawsuit or got conned into it by ambulance-chasing lawyers who thought they could mine moral panic for a big payday.

But the lawsuit was, in fact, frivolous and the verdict and “damages” award are, in fact, insane.

That insanity seems likely to become a trend (other such frivolous litigation awaits adjudication already), and the biggest costs won’t come out of the social media platforms’ bank accounts. They’ll come out of your freedom of choice.

Which happens to be EXACTLY what our ruling political class wants.

These platforms have opened the world up to examination and analysis. Not just by a few privileged insiders, by everyone. It’s harder for bad actors in politics, finance, etc. to hide.

These platforms have exposed their audiences to a previously unimaginable diversity of opinion. The heads of broadcast networks and publishers of newspapers no longer get to curate the viewpoints their audiences can hear, consider, and compare.

As platforms race to insulate themselves from liability to frivolous litigation, and politicians race to exploit the moral panic for control rather than mere financial benefit, our world is going to shrink back toward limited knowledge of, and enforced uniformity/conformity of public speech.

Now more than ever, we need decentralized — “ownerless” — social media platforms to make the rest of the 21st century censorship-proof … and judgment-proof.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

It’s “mow the yard” time again in north central Florida, which means it’s “Tom complains about lawn culture” time again for this column.

This year, though, my case against the whole idea of the “lawn” comes with a more compelling than usual news hook: War in the Middle East!

As you may have noticed, the price of one key lawn maintenance ingredient — gasoline for your mower — is way up lately.

As you may not have noticed yet, you’ll also be paying more for a second ingredient, fertilizer.

Both of those hits to your wallet result from war-related shipping woes (in particular, the partial closure of the Strait of Hormuz), and both are likely to drag on for some time even if the war comes to an end soon.

It’s always a good time to consider converting your surrounding green space from a carefully trimmed, lovingly landscaped “lawn” to a more natural (or, if water usage matters, xeriscaped) “yard.” But this year, it’s an even better time than usual.

Speaking of time: According to multiple surveys, the average American spends 150-175 hours a year on “lawn care.”

That’s basically a full week … and four or more “work weeks” out of every year that you COULD be doing something besides mowing, trimming, treating, raking, etc.

And then there’s the money. Americans spend $130 billion per year on “lawn care.” That’s an average of about $400 per person. “Do it yourselfers” spend less (at least in years when a mower doesn’t need replacement); people who can’t or won’t do it themselves spend more having it done. But even at the low end, you’re probably spending several days’ worth of your income every year on the matter.

Unfortunately, many of us HAVE to do that because of local laws requiring us to maintain our yards as “lawns” in the style of 17th century European aristocrats (who, of course, had slaves or servants to do the actual work for them).

By the 19th century, a “lawn” was a status symbol, a conspicuous consumption item that meant you’d “made it” and were no longer a mere peasant with just a “yard” for keeping some chickens and a garden.

Since the mid-20th century, with more general prosperity, the introduction of affordable gas-powered mowers, and the growth of suburban uniformity norms, it’s more and more become a social, and even legal, requirement.

And the costs aren’t JUST to your wallet and to the time you’d rather spend doing other things. There’s also the environment to think of.

I’m not one of those “radical environmentalists” who wants to forbid you to drive a gas-powered car or leave a porch light on at night, but the “lawn” situation is beyond silly.

Even as states and municipalities fight over water allocations from ailing rivers and strained aquifers, about 1/3 of US residential water use — three trillion gallons a year — goes to watering lawns. Yes, really.

Fertilizer runoff from lawns screws with our water supply, too — it leads to lower oxygen levels and algae blooms that harm wildlife, and contaminates human drinking water too.

Speaking of wildlife, our lawn fetish deprives critters of habitat, to their detriment and almost certainly to ours as well.

If all our lawns were consolidated into one patch, that patch would be larger than the state of Florida. We use five times as much land for lawns as we do for growing corn!

We’d all be better off — time-wise, money-wise, and environment-wise — if we abandoned “lawns” in favor of more human-, water-, animal-, and native-plant-friendly “yards.”

A necessary first step is getting governments and HOAs to let us abandon “lawn culture.”

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY