Lesson Plan

In the wake of the failed Detroit bombing, David Henderson reminds us that this latest attack was foiled by the same sort of decentralized safeguards that worked on 9/11, even as the US government failed at virtually every possible level: Failure to "Get" Hayek

Three good things happened on that awful day, September 11, 2001 and all involved decentralized information. One was that various people in the World Trade Center towers, although told by a central authority that everything was safe and that they should stay in the building, instead acted on their own hunches and information and got out, thus saving their lives. Remember the original estimate of the death toll: in the first few hours, it was about 20,000 and then down to 7,000 and then finally under 3,000. That was because of all the people who got out.

The second was the decision of the FAA to ground all the planes over U.S. airspace, something that was done successfully in about two hours. The decision was centralized, but the seat-of-the-pants methods that FAA air controllers used to hand off planes from one area to another were decentralized.

The third was the case of the passengers on United Flight #93. They broke the law by turning on their cell phones and then found out that the "payoff matrix" from this particular game was different from what they had thought. Instead of getting a free trip to Cuba, with a great story to tell their grandchildren, they learned that, if they didn't act, they wouldn't be around to talk to grandchildren and that the intended targets in, probably, Washington, D.C., wouldn't either. So they acted on the decentralized information they had. Of course, they did die, but they almost pulled it off, and they prevented the deaths of others.

And, as with 9/11, we are applying the wrong lessons in the wake of the Detroit bomber:

Instead of the lesson being that the people on the planes can react to the situation and handle the problem, as they did with Richard Reid, the government is discussing further intrusions on our liberty, such as not letting us sit with anything on our lap for the last hour of the flight. Because of Richard Reid, the government now makes us take off our shoes. Because of the Nigerian passenger, we might soon have to twiddle our thumbs for the last hour.

The point of all these pointless rules is to create the illusion of safety, not safety itself, and everyone knows this. It's infuriating to go through the delays and hassles of airport security, knowing that somewhere, sometime a guy with a pants-bomb (or whatever) will get through despite his having absolutely no business being on an American-bound airplane. In the spirit of the season, I am not going to point fingers, but I will point out that my political philosophy does not demand that grandma be searched with the same rigor as a young Nigerian male who recently spent time in Yemen.

And, not to be Johnny One-note, but this is yet another reason why the Democrat's top-down progressive health care reform bill is such an abomination. The federal government has been failing at many of its appointed tasks over the past 10 years, yet the bill creates yet another monopoly of decision making for DC-based bureaucrats. It directs the decisions of drug companies, doctors, insurance companies, employers, and patients from on high, with orders issuing from the intellectual equivalents of Janet Napolitano, Max Baucus, and Barbara Boxer.

The fact is, no matter how many rules they make - no matter how many procedures they create - no matter how much they try to standardize airport security - you can't escape the fundamental fact that catching terrorists before they do harm mean someone has to use their brain at some point, painful as that might be. It is a peculiarity of this era of instant information, decentralized knowledge, and the army of davids, that we remain in a state of enforced passivity.