Elon Musk and other Very Special Important Wealthy People want to use “your” airports, “your” airspace, and “your” air traffic control systems, but don’t want you and your fellow smelly peasants to know the details.

Per Axios, the VSIWP class has contrived — probably through lobbyists, although direct whispers or even outright bribes to their friends on Capitol Hill aren’t unthinkable — to get their desire included in the  Federal Aviation Administration “reauthorization” bill now before Congress. Per the quietly inserted new provision, the FAA would have to establish a special process to help private jet owners hide their comings and goings from the hoi polloi.

Why the desire for secrecy? Musk considers public knowledge of his jet’s comings, goings, and locations to be “basically assassination coordinates,” a “security risk.” “I don’t love the idea of being shot by a nutcase,” he told the owner of Twitter account @ElonJet, a bot which tracked his jet, in early 2022.

But if such a security risk exists, it’s just as applicable to every commercial air passenger as it is to a private jet owner. Maybe even more so.

Suppose that on Friday, August 11, you boarded Delta Air Lines Flight 308 at New York’s JFK airport, bound for Los Angeles. Every would-be terrorist in the world knew — or at least COULD know, via various flight tracking web sites — that your flight was scheduled to taxi out for takeoff at 10:15pm Eastern time and  land at 1:15am Pacific time. He or she could even track your flight’s progress in a real time on a handy-dandy map for ease of picking “assassination coordinates.”

Why? Because the use of “your” airports, “your” airspace,” and “your” air traffic control systems are matters of public record.

About those scare quotes:

Libertarians and anarchists like me come up against the problem of how a free society would deal with the property status of airspace.  Do you own the air over your homestead? If so, are you entitled to buy yourself a Stinger missile and shoot down any trespassing planes?

I don’t profess to have good answers for such questions, but the government’s answer, way back when, was to declare airspace above a certain altitude effectively “public” — that is, your — property, and establish an agency (the FAA) which  directs traffic through that airspace in your name. Which, in turn, makes all of that your business.

Whether that’s a good way or a bad way of doing things, there’s no good argument for an exception to it in the case of Very Special Important Wealthy People.

In point of fact, we regular folk who travel on the 84% of flights the FAA designates “commercial” pay 98% of the taxes that fund the FAA. “Private” jet operators, responsible for the other 16% of flights, pay about 2%.

They want us to subsidize them AND be barred from knowing where those subsidies are going.

Oh, the poor dears. Next time I fly, I’ll bring the world’s smallest violin along in my carry-on to play a sad song commemorating their plight.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) 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.

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US Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is a school-marmish New England pseudo-liberal technocrat. US Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is a Deep South pseudo-conservative militarist. They’ve staked out their respective stomping grounds in opposing wings of the American uni-party. So when they agree on something — anything at all — Katie bar the door. Trouble’s on the way, because while they might seem like political opposites, they share one overriding value in common: Both of them want to run your life.

The theoretical purpose of their “bipartisan” (another warning signal not to be ignored) Digital Consumer Protection Commission Act is to “protect consumers, promote competition, secure Americans’ privacy, guard national security, and prevent harm online.”

Its actual purpose is to put  a pack of bureaucrats in charge of the Internet so  you don’t get to see anything Warren and Graham think you shouldn’t see. Which, between the two of them, is probably pretty much everything (except perhaps press releases from the offices of Warren, Graham, and their fellow political cultists).

Aside from the risible “Consumer Protection” claim, naturally, they justify their prospective power grab on a “for the children” basis: It’s not that they’re megalomaniacs,  see, it’s that they’re against all the things everyone is against — “child sexual abuse material and sexual exploitation, human trafficking, drug trafficking, cyberbullying … eating disorders, addictive behaviors, and teen suicide.”

Presumably most of us agree that the Graham/Warren laundry list is chock full of Very Bad Things.

But it’s a giant leap of faith to expect a new government bureaucracy, armed with powers that clearly violate the First Amendment and other basic principles of anything resembling a free society, to accomplish much in the way of fighting Very Bad Things, real or imagined. The next time that happens will be the first time it happens. And there’s not going to be a first time.

By the time the federal government gave up on alcohol prohibition, more Americans were consuming more booze than when it started.  While the war on drugs may not yet be formally ended, it’s increasingly clear that the drugs have won. And if you’d like to see a mass shooting, just park your car in any area marked “gun-free zone” and wait a little while.

Graham and Warren are just the latest pair in a long, eternal line of busybodies who think they’re entitled to police what you read, view, listen to, smoke, drink, or otherwise ingest, and who demand that you trust them to do so.

I don’t know that these two are any less trustworthy than their predecessors, but that’s not the issue. The issue is that no one’s entitled to, or should be trusted to, make such decisions on your supposed behalf.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) 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

“Democrats and corporate media throw around terms like ‘fascism’ and ‘dictatorship,'” Brian C. Joondeph writes at American Thinker, “as a means of stifling discussion of anyone they disagree with. Totalitarianism is another term along those lines, typically associated with tyrants such as Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler.”

Unsurprisingly, Joondeph attributes the “real” totalitarian impulse to those same Democrats and corporate media, deploying another buzz phrase to paint former president Donald Trump as the hapless victim of an out-of-control regime: “The party in power has arrested and wants to imprison its political opposition, banana republic-style.”

I’m not here (today, anyway) to argue the validity of the charges Trump faces, but it’s worth noting that as a life-long member of the privileged political class he’s hardly a typical “banana republic justice” victim, and that he’s enjoyed both far more forbearance and far more due process accommodation than one might expect in a banana republic.

Rather, I’m amused by the notion that American totalitarianism is the exclusive province of “Democrats and corporate media.”

The best definition of totalitarianism I’ve found comes from a famous totalitarian, Benito Mussolini, who defined his version of totalitarianism (fascism) this way: “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”

Mussolini’s description encapsulates the inevitable conclusion of allowing the state to exist. The state is to totalitarianism as the acorn is to the oak — the embryonic form, if you will. If the former lives long enough, it will by its very nature mature into the latter.

While that process raises various ethical questions, it’s not really an ethical question itself. It’s just how organizations enjoying monopolies on the use of force work. As Anthony de Jasay pointed out, the state by its nature “seeks to maximize its discretionary power.”

The discretion involved naturally focuses on the priorities of those in control, whether it be winning the next election, or waging culture war from either side, or even pursuing some actual notional good.

Democrats want to ban “hate speech” and “Russian election interference.” Republicans want to ban “gender ideology” and “Chinese influence operations.” Either way, the  arc of the statist universe bends toward total control.

No amount of power is ever enough. Sooner or later, EVERYTHING becomes a priority. The more control the state has, the more it wants, the more it interprets dissent or even diversity of opinion as an existential threat to its prerogatives, and the more excuses it manufactures for cracking down on them.

Not all states become totalitarian. Some are overthrown first. But both the Democratic and Republican roads, if traveled to their ends, lead to Mussolini’s Rome. We can have freedom, or we can have the state. We can’t have both.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) 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.

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