What then? I don’t think we’ve thought about this deeply enough. Let’s say, speaking hypothetically, that every US intelligence agency and law enforcement agency received a fax the previous day about Mr. Abdulmutallab, his plans, and his underwear bomb.

Given the current climate, in which the President and Attorney General appears to be vastly more interested in prosecuting as many US intelligence agency personnel as possible, and even wishes to intervene personally and demand disbarment by fiat of any and all lawyers who did not give sufficiently PC answers when consulted about waterboarding by the previous administration, what do you really think they would have done?

Abdulmutallab is:

a foreigner
non-white
member of a religion known to be very prickly about perceived slights

Who wants to bet that the CIA, FBI, NSA, DHS, Michigan State Police, etc., etc., etc., down to the county dogcatcher, would peel the fax off the machine, read it, re-read it, look at the picture, then think “well, it’s probably only talk, and it’s not worth my job,” “Obama and his bunch make it painfully obvious that their sympathies are with these people,” “I can’t risk that this could be a fraud or a false accusation or a prank,” “well, you know, most anonymous tips we get turn out to be false anyway,” and silently throw it away?

I find it impossible to believe that a great many people in a position to do something about the attack didn’t know everything there was to know about Abdulmutallab, given that he was already on the soi-disant “no fly list.”

I find it very easy to believe that every single one of them pondered the matter, remembered the current POTUS’s penchant for saying “the police acted stupidly,” and decided he did not want to be sued personally by Abdulmutallab’s high-powered defense attorneys provided by CAIR, and did not want Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam picketing his home.

One wonders whether Roman officials around 460 AD were likewise more afraid of lawsuits than of the Huns, more concerned about My-Career than about the lives of the taxpayers for whom they putatively work.

I think the public is displaying a classic case of Caplan’s rational irrationality. I wrote about it last week here ( http://modeledbehavior.com/2010/01/01/how-to-fight-terrorism-despite-the-publics-rational-irrationality ) and linked to a paper of yours on terrorism futures markets as a suggestion of policies people might demand of they weren’t rationally irrational.

Given how long it took Russia to topple (being way left) and if we agree that the US is becoming increasingly totalitarian in action, I wonder how much longer it will take the US to fall from grace…or will certain states continue to be haves while others remain nots…with widening disparity.

Question I’d like answered using a market: When will China take the “big stick” from the US?

Related: In a libertarian world do more people swear off all drugs and alcohol completely?

Airlines in America are absurdly safe when compared to other forms of travel. All that money put into airline safety could safe lives in other fields, reducing the cost of flying and letting more people fly instead of using other, less-safe forms of travel. Much of this cost isn’t monetary, as agencies like the TSA simply aggravate people into flying less.

I don’t consider this a government failure as much as a human one; people are just paranoid about flying accidents. It seems like free airline markets would over-invest in airline safety as well, though not to the extent the government is.

If all this did was create the same level of security and error while shifting costs from the general public to the unluckily profiled, this would be… more just.

How’s that again?

Under the compromise that prevailed up until Congress started fiddling with health care, patients didn’t have to confront questions of whether their lives were worth saving, and neither did doctors. Rather, the hard decisions got farmed out to health insurance firms, which then could be treated as scapegoats. Now . . . we’re looking at turning the job over to a government bureaucracy, while swathing its decisions in the comforting rhetoric that surrounds all government bureaucracies.