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Authoritarian Regimes
There's nothing like visiting a foreign country like China to get an appreciation of what it's like to live under an authoritarian regime. I was reminded of this when I arrived home and found that the TSA had rifled through my baggage.
Posted by Alex Tabarrok on July 2, 2008 at 07:15 AM in Law | Permalink
Comments
Maybe they saw your nose hair trimmer on X-ray and it looked like a box cutter.
Posted by: Andrew at Jul 2, 2008 7:44:17 AM
I've found America one of the most authoritarian places I've ever visited. Officialdom reckon they're the good guys so its OK to treat you as badly as they like.
Posted by: Ken at Jul 2, 2008 7:51:54 AM
You were lucky. They could have seized your laptop.
WASHINGTON - Bill Hogan was returning home from Germany in February when a customs agent at Washington Dulles International Airport pulled him aside. He could re-enter the country, she told him. But his laptop could not.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents said he had been chosen for "random inspection of electronic media," and kept his computer for about two weeks . . .
Full news item here:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/business/investing/bal-bz.ml.laptops29jun29,0,3324276.story
Posted by: Jay Livingston at Jul 2, 2008 9:03:24 AM
So, going through ones belongings in an airport is something that would never, ever, happen in China?
Posted by: Bill Nelson at Jul 2, 2008 9:09:21 AM
The U.S. is under an authoritarian regime also. The TSA goes through bags; the government is allowed to tap phones without permission; Hurricane Katrina victims still haven't received full help; and I could go on and on.
From, a U.S. citizen living under the U.S. authoritarian regime.
Posted by: ph2072 at Jul 2, 2008 9:25:51 AM
"The U.S. is under an authoritarian regime...Hurricane Katrina victims still haven't received full help"
I know I'm not all that bright, but I'm having trouble connecting the dots here.
Posted by: bartman at Jul 2, 2008 9:37:44 AM
Imagine you work at a widget factory. Some contamination gets into a few of the widgets making them bad widgets. Maybe the bad widgets tear easily. We'll call them tear-a-widgets.
You know when they were made. You know what line they come from. These particular widgets are brown and not all are.
Now, how much sense does it make to test all the widgets randomly to find the bad ones?
How much would you have to spend to test enough to find a good number of the bad ones?
Could this money rather be spent on ways to find all the bad ones?
Have we EVER found a bad widget with random searching?
Posted by: Andrew at Jul 2, 2008 9:42:07 AM
If you were really living under an authoritarian regime, you wouldn't be able to make the statement you just made.
Until we don't have the right to complain, and submit our cause to independent adjudication by an impartial judiciary, and the right to remove our leaders if we're unhappy with the laws that direct how our causes should be adjudicated, I'd say we're not living in an authoritarian regime. Unless you define "authoritarian" as any regime in which coercion and authority are used by officials to achieve any goal.
Posted by: Bandwagon Smasher at Jul 2, 2008 9:45:08 AM
Wow, Andrew, how subtle.
The point of random searches is not to find something. Indeed, if they never find anything, they will have beeen successful. The presence of the random search is designed to change behavior before the fact, just like sending people to prison does not undo a crime, but (theoretically) reduces the frequency of commitment of that crime in the future by others.
The random search is also there to give the people the illusion that "the authotrities are doing something."
Posted by: bartman at Jul 2, 2008 9:50:13 AM
What a brilliant post. Usually one has to go to the comments section at Daily Kos to get such thoughtful commentary.
Posted by: dzot at Jul 2, 2008 9:56:57 AM
So, bottom line, don't complain about authoritarianism until you can't. Nice.
Not trying to be subtle. I've learned you can pound otherwise intelligent people over the head with the blaringly obvious asininity of what we are doing in the name of closing the barn door after the horses have left and the best you'll get is the occasional "you make an interesting point, but we have to do it this way."
"The random search is also there to give the people the illusion that "the authotrities are doing something.""
That's all they exist for. Well, that and patronage now that they've created a bureaucracy.
"The point of random searches is not to find something. Indeed, if they never find anything, they will have beeen successful." How convenient. Failure is impossible.
So, to extend your logic from random TSA searches to crime in general, we should randomly investigate innocent people. I agree, random searches will ensure that people who weren't going to hijack planes board them with contraband chopsticks and hairspray. Beyond that, it's a bad analogy.
Posted by: Andrew at Jul 2, 2008 10:11:04 AM
But why stop there? How about: "There's nothing like visiting Auschwitz to get an appreciation of what it's like to live under a despicable dictatorship with no regard for human life. I was reminded of this when we executed Tim McVeigh?" Or you could have gone with the shorter, more popular version: "Bush=Hitler". Could have made such a wonderful bumper sticker!
Posted by: bushequalhitler at Jul 2, 2008 10:21:19 AM
Well, you DO write a blog called Marginal Revolution. I would search your bags too. lol
Posted by: Trent at Jul 2, 2008 10:46:50 AM
Bush isn't fit to carry Hitler's luggage.
Despite his best efforts, Bush has been completely impotent in his efforts to start a world war. He's had to settle for third world snafus.
Posted by: Andrew at Jul 2, 2008 11:08:56 AM
If the TSA searched his bag because he blogs at Marginal Revolution, they were surely disappointed when they didn't find a huge cache of margarine.
Posted by: Andrew at Jul 2, 2008 11:14:03 AM
@Andrew and others: Let's say the failure rate of brown widgets is 0.01% and let's grant that the failure rate of non-brown widgets is zero. It might be reasonable for a widget consumer to respond by rigorous testing of brown widgets and no (or much less) testing of non-brown widgets. The widget factory, however, will inevitable start slipping the defects back into circulation by spray-painting brown widgets blue.
An advantage of truly random testing is that it cannot, by definition, be subverted by the widget factory.
Posted by: Lucas at Jul 2, 2008 11:45:24 AM
It's kind of sad to see people defending the authoritarianism that has overtaken the US. A country that was always the example to the rest of the world for rule of law, individual's rights, etc has turned into one indistinguishable from the rest. Where a comparison to some aspects of China merits a knowing nod, rather than a laugh.
And you don't seem to care. Really sad.
Posted by: foo at Jul 2, 2008 12:16:10 PM
Alex,
If you're still checking this blog, can you clarify for us non-cosmpolitans (i.e. those who have only been to Canada and Mexico) how serious you are being? Yeah, the US claims to be free, and so it is ironic that it isn't. But are you honestly saying things seemed freer in China?
Posted by: Bob Murphy at Jul 2, 2008 12:38:08 PM
A curious irony on this discussion is that it has just been reported
that the "interrogation techniques" the US has been using at Gitmo and
elsewhere are drawn directly from those used by the Chinese during the
Korean War to elicit false confessions from US POWs.
For anyone who has not traveled abroad much recently, in large parts of
the world the image of the US these days is of a guy in a black KKK type
outfit standing on a box with a bunch of wires coming off him. Maybe that
is unfair, but it is going to be a long time before that image is changed.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Jul 2, 2008 1:03:24 PM
Barkley beat me to it.
To clarify my previous post, I am not comparing Hitler to Bush. I'm contrasting them. Hitler was an adept micromanager. Bush just lets these things happen.
Lucas, okay, maybe my example was bad. The government chooses to paint all the widgets brown and then claim they are all equally likely to be bad.
Posted by: Andrew at Jul 2, 2008 1:32:04 PM
I suppose you might say it could be rational to test chickens for mad cow disease.
Foo, if you can't laugh about this nonsense, you'd cry.
Posted by: Andrew at Jul 2, 2008 1:34:44 PM
Here's the story Barkley referred to:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/us/02detain.html?_r=2&hp&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
This kind of thing just keeps trickling in. So, when are you Busheviks going to get over yourselves and admit you've made a huge mistake in supporting this kind of thing? Come back to America.
Posted by: Andrew at Jul 2, 2008 1:37:53 PM
So which candidate is going to abolish the TSA? OK. which one is going to cut their deployment and send them home as soon as possible? Do we have a choice?
Posted by: Cobb at Jul 2, 2008 1:44:20 PM
So, one person says:
"The presence of the random search is designed to change behavior before the fact,"
Then another says:
"An advantage of truly random testing is that it cannot, by definition, be subverted by the widget factory."
I'm sorry, but it can't be both.
Posted by: Andrew at Jul 2, 2008 1:46:53 PM
If you're still checking this blog, can you clarify for us non-cosmpolitans (i.e. those who have only been to Canada and Mexico) how serious you are being? Yeah, the US claims to be free, and so it is ironic that it isn't. But are you honestly saying things seemed freer in China?
China is more free on everyday issues, , the U.S. has greater political freedom. The difference is, freedom is increasing in China, decreasing in the U.S... China will overtake the U.S. very soon.
If you are going to compare the U.S. to Europe, both are very quickly losing freedom and will probably be worse than China in a generation or two. However, they are losing freedom in different ways (Americans are harassed at the airport, Europeans have abolished freedom of speech, for example). The difference is, restrictions on freedom happening in Europe are widely popular (i.e. censorship, gun-control, etc.) and don't really effect foreign visitors, where as restrictions in the U.S. are wildly unpopular (the TSA) and effect foreign visitors more than anyone. But it is fair to say that the West has abandoned liberal democracy and is becoming more of a popular dictatorship, although the European dictatorships are more popular in Europe than the U.S. dictatorship is in the U.S., as the average person doesn't exercise much freedom to be restricted but the average person flies in airplanes every once in a while.
In 20 years, Americans and Europeans will be emigrating to Asia for political freedom.
Posted by: Rex Rhino at Jul 2, 2008 1:50:29 PM
