From here on out, Americans can annually celebrate July 8 as “Freedom From Compulsory Podiatric Nudity Day” That’s the day the US Transportation Security Administration stopped requiring air travelers to remove their shoes while waiting in line to get ogled and felt up by government-employed pervs before boarding their flights.

Government rule reform tends to move at a glacial pace.

It took five years for TSA to adopt the “shoe removal” rule after Richard Reid’s comically unsuccessful “shoe bomb” attack on American Airlines Flight 63 in 2001.

Then it took 19 MORE years for them to finally admit that the rule, in addition to being annoying and time-consuming, provided no benefit whatsoever to anyone but badged foot fetishists.

Number of terror attacks prevented by the rule: Zero.

Cumulative amount of time passengers spent un-shoeing and re-shoeing, according to Slate’s Henry Grabar, using a conservative estimate of one minute per passenger per flight: 250,000 years. Yes, years.

To put it in economic terms, at the US federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, the TSA SHOULD have to cough up a total of about $16 billion in wages to air travelers for their time.

Instead, those travelers (and everyone else) fund TSA to the tune of more than $10 billion per year.

It’s time to defund and disband the agency entirely.

TSA hasn’t prevented “the next 9/11,” and wouldn’t have prevented “the first 9/11” if it had existed prior to September 11, 2001.

Obviously the pre-existing airport/airplane security system didn’t prevent the first one either. It did, in fact, happen.

But if that pre-existing system, funded and managed by airlines and airports based on their assessments of security needs instead of bureaucrats’ and lobbyists’ desire for new regulatory power and cash cows, had remained in place, it would almost certainly have delivered better security going forward, at lower cost and with less annoyance and discomfort to travelers, than TSA has.

According to an American Airlines survey, 90% of Americans have flown at least once in their lifetimes. An entire generation of those travelers has never known an air travel paradigm that didn’t entail  spending hours in airports awaiting constitutionally prohibited searches and creepy “pat-downs” by haughty government agents. They probably hear about those bygone days from their parents, but they’ve never lived the experience for themselves.

We should bring that golden age back for them. Not as a conditional “gift,” but as the one debt we owe to their generation and future generations: Freedom.

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

“I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY,” US Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social on August 1, regarding Bureau of Labor Statistics  commissioner Erika McEntarfer.  “She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified. Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes.”

On August 11, Trump announced his nominee to replace McEntarfer: E.J. Antoni, chief economist and Richard Aster fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget.

Is Antoni “much more competent and qualified” than McEntarfer?

They both studied for, and received, doctorates in economics — she from Virginia Tech in 2002, he from Northern Illinois University in 2020.

They’ve both worked in the field, she for 23 years  in various data-centric government roles, he for five years at ideological “think tanks.”

On those metrics, it might make sense to conclude that no, Antoni is not “much more competent and qualified.”

Those, however, are not the relevant metrics.

“There are three kinds of lies,” Mark Twain wrote in 1907, echoing several prior formulations and (apparently incorrectly) crediting Benjamin Disraeli as the quote’s originator:  “Lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

I’m far from the first commentator to modify that final bit to “government statistics.”

The job of the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics is to make the current administration look good, even if that requires putting lipstick on a pig.

That’s why, at the end of his or her four-year term, a commissioner appointed by a Republican president can expect to be replaced if a Democrat is in office and vice versa.

McEntarfer replaced William W. Beach, appointed by President Trump, when his term expired and — mirabile dictu! — America’s employment reports started looking better for Joe Biden.

Previous presidents who inherited BLS commissioners from  presidents of another party — including Donald Trump in his first term — quietly groused about bad jobs numbers and waited for those commissioners’ terms to expire.

This time, Trump decided against waiting McEntarfer out and fired her to get the books  cooked in the direction he prefers instead of cooked to make him look bad.

What’s the true situation? Who knows? Government manipulation of data starts with deciding what information to gather, how to gather it, and who to gather it from. Then that information gets massaged to tell the story that the masseuse or masseur wants you to hear.

The process isn’t usually as brazen as the Soviet Union’s reports on the “successes” of Stalin’s Five-Year Plans, or Trump’s firing of McEntarfer, but it’s always there. The purpose of government reports is to elicit applause for the government.

I predict that Antoni will prove himself  eminently “competent and qualified” for that particular role.

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

On August 7, the Gainesville, Florida city commission voted to make three pedestrian crosswalks less visible, and the pedestrians using them less safe, under threat of funding cuts from Florida’s “Department of Government Efficiency.”

Why does Florida DOGE want to put Gainesville residents at higher risk of injury or death?

If you have to ask why, the answer is usually “money,” and saving money sounds like a reasonable focus for a “government efficiency” project. But that’s not the case here. The costs of painting the crosswalks were borne by a local non-profit. The costs of making the crosswalks less safe will be borne by the taxpayers Florida DOGE supposedly works for.

The real answer is “politics.”

The bright colors in question are the “rainbow” colors associated with the LGBTQ movement, and the local non-profit is the Pride Community Center of North Central Florida.

The Florida GOP’s approach to keeping its based mobilized often consists of currying various kinds of moral panic.

This is just a little opportunistic sprinkle of “OMG TEH QUEERZ ARE HIDING UNDER YOUR BED RIGHT NOW!!!” into the currently more popular “OMG TEH IMMIGRANTZ ARE HIDING UNDER YOUR BED RIGHT NOW!!!” potpourri.

In reluctantly giving in to the state’s demand, the city commission also voted to rename a local street for the late Terry Fleming, a local hero of the LGBTQ community and founder of Pride Community Center. Presumably THAT won’t run counter to the Florida Department of Transportation’s June 30 memo, cited in DOGE’s demand, falsely claiming that highly visible crosswalks jeopardize driver and pedestrian safety.

As of 2023, according to a column by John Henderson in the Gainesville Sun, the city had experienced more than 800 pedestrian and bicyclist injuries in the preceding six years and an average of seven deaths per year. Anecdotally, that problem seems worse around the University of Florida campus, especially at the beginning of school years when thousands of students come to an unfamiliar town and try to navigate unfamiliar streets.

I’m neither especially a fan nor detractor of, specifically, “LGBTQ art” in the public square, but brightly colored crosswalks seem like a cheap and practical way of attracting pedestrians to the right places to cross streets, while also making those crossings more visible to approaching drivers.

I think this might be one of those rare cases where a government program could make things BETTER. My proposal:

Invite local community organizations (not just LGBTQ — all charities, churches, arts programs, etc. welcome) to “adopt a crosswalk” for visibility enhancement with bright color patterns, just like they can now “adopt a street or highway” stretch for periodic cleanup. They pay for the paint and the city’s labor costs. No distracting text, just a little marker next to the crosswalk acknowledging sponsorship.

That would require FDOT and DOGE to get out of the way, and trying to get politics-driven government agencies out of the way is always an uphill fight, but one worth having.

Fewer dead people seems a lot more more important than owning the libs.

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