Government and the media bombard us with examples of real or often just imagined threats and expand them so that they become as big as our worst nightmares. As more of us buy into an overblown story, it takes on a life of its own and often becomes the accepted truth.
Is there an alternative to this Big Brother approach to managing homeland security? I think there is: private defense agencies offering competitive services on an open market.
It's not as if TSA officials had said all along, since 2001, that they needed full-body scanners in order to do their jobs properly. Had they said that in the beginning, then the public probably would've protested enough such that the "small-government" George Bush wouldn't have nationalized airport security.
The national furor over the TSA's new procedures has elicited the typical response from the bureaucracy and its apologists. These invasive scans and "enhanced pat-downs" are for your own good. You don't want another attack, do you?
If it were not for the police, lawlessness and chaos would rule; therefore, we owe our safety, our civilization, our very lives to the selflessness
If it were not for the police, lawlessness and chaos would rule; therefore, we owe our safety, our civilization, our very lives to the selflessness and dedication of the police; thus, police are our "heroes." So we were told, and so we believed.
The wave of bombings and assassinations perpetrated by anarchists during the 1890s was largely a fiction. To some extent, it was frankly invented by sensation-mongering writers who hoped to sell newspapers.
Nonetheless, by reflecting further on Etienne de La Boetie's key insight about the politics of authority, the will to bondage, and the eager embrace of voluntary servitude, and by devising an ingenious test for their influence on the ordinary individual, Stanley Milgram made an important contribution to the libertarian tradition.
