“In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there is within me an invincible summer.”
–Albert Camus
I’m a congenital optimist. I can’t tell you why exactly. Maybe it comes from my genes. Maybe it comes from figuring out early in life that if I didn’t have hope, if I didn’t have something to look forward to, I would have trouble getting up in the morning.
Today, I flew across the country, starting in Monterey and flying to Denver, and then from Denver to Washington Dulles. When I got on the flight in Monterey, the Canadair Regional Jet looked brand new. I turned on the overhead light and found my magazine flooded with a beautiful bright, white light that made the standard lighting in airplanes pale by comparison. I turned to the man beside me and commented on the light, which he had noticed too. “I love capitalism,” I said.
I had about 40 minutes between flights in the Denver airport. I overheard a woman with a small dog out of its carrier explaining to another woman why she had been delayed by TSA and had missed her flight to Hawaii. It seems that she had some small bottles of liquid medicine in her dog carry-on and that it had taken TSA crucial minutes to figure it out. The other woman said, “That’s ridiculous. It makes you start to wonder.” The first woman replied, “No, it doesn’t. There’s no need to wonder. We now know.”
She sat beside me and we got talking. The first thing she asked, before venting further, was, “Are you with the FBI.” “No,” I assured her, “but isn’t it a disturbing sign of the times that you thought you needed to ask?” I told her that I’m an economics professor who has thought and is writing about airline security and that the main lesson of 9/11, of the Richard Reid shoe bomb, and of the underpants bomber is that the passengers can take care of this situation. “If I had my way,” I said, “we would eliminate the TSA and have no screening.” I think she got it. On board the plane, I called my friend Charley Hooper and told him that I have slightly more hope for the United States.
On board the flight to D.C., I dug into my March 2010 Reason and liked virtually every article. I like the way the Reason people calmly, and with occasional humor, take on the state.
READER COMMENTS
RL
Feb 18 2010 at 10:42pm
DH,
I’m happy for your optimism, but from the example provided it appears your optimism is based on the view that more people see we’re being [engaged in coitus] by the government, rather than the belief the government is [engaging in coitus] us less…
So I have to ask: Is this the proper metric?
scott clark
Feb 19 2010 at 10:55am
Ah, RL,
Sounds like you are on the look out for a few moments of coitus interruptus for some sweet relief.
I, too, am happy for your optimism, DH, but I much prefer Albert Jay Nock’s pessimism at the end of Our Enemy, the State. He says he doesn’t expect his book to change any minds, and even if it does change minds, those minds won’t be able to do anything about the State’s inexorable aggrandizment either. He just thought he had something to say, so he wrote it down, and maybe one day in far future, the State just wouldn’t find it all that useful or profitable to engage in plunder anymore.
Kailer
Feb 19 2010 at 3:20pm
You’ve probably seen this already, but on the odd chance you haven’t I’ll post it, as it’s highly complementary to your above discussion.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UN0MpBQG3-E
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