Dope.
Let's talk about airport security.
Not a hot issue for yours truly, until recent unpleasant events sort of put it right under my nose. And yours. We all got a deep whiff of it.

I interviewed Adam Gopnick yesterday, for a Chronicle profile. In the course of the interview, we agreed that one of the ironies of the WTC assault was that it might signal the end of privatization. The irony, here, is that will to privatize is reaching its limit, and perhaps retreating, under a president who is more committed to privatizing the commons than any president we have ever had. Or at least any president since Herbert Hoover.

Economists are peculiarly prone to hubris. The Keynsian school in the sixties were vocal in their claim that they could micro-manage the national economy with little more than a slide rule (remember slide rules?) and up until 1969 this looked to be the case. The neo-liberal school of the nineties were making the same claim of mastery. This time the idea was confining political intervention in the economy to whatever Alan Greenspan decided was the case. And privatize electricity, water, transport, prisons, and just, hell, all government services. In both cases, what broke the back of the claim was the neglected political side of political economies. As the stock market slips away from the New Economy dream of Dow 30,000! - ah, James Glassman's bestseller, a true nineties monument! -- we have two great events in the field -- the California Power Crisis and the hijacking of four planes -- which seem to mark a moment.

But the politics of each event is confusing. In the case of the hijackings, the kneejerk reaction of the Bush Whitehouse -- the plan to shuffle money to the airlines -- is starting to have, I think, a subliminal political effect, because it is an extension of the 90s exception to the party line that free markets are self-regulating, in line with Greenspan's doctrine of "too big to fail." While the airlines throw their employees out the window without parachutes (reserving the golden parachutes for their management), Washington has been throwing public money at the airlines. So what does the public get in return? Does it get safety, at least?

No. The short answer is no. The long answer is that the security at airports and on airlines is still in the hands of the cheapest solution -- the temp guards, and the absurd proposition that pilots not only do the flying, but operate as tackles for any passenger problem as well.

Here's the NYT story:
Bush Differs With Bill Over U.S. Role in Screening

Two grafs that limn the politics of the thing:
"The federalization bill was drafted by Senators Ernest F. Hollings of South Carolina, chairman of the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, and John McCain of Arizona, the committee's senior Republican. Mr. Hollings said today that he was not likely to back down.
"When the president privatizes the Border Patrol, air traffic controllers and the F.B.I.," the senator said, "then I will privatize screeners."

But in its draft, the administration argues that federalizing all or most passenger and baggage screeners would require the government to create a "new federal entity, in excess of 20,000 employees." The Senate legislation "would create insurmountable transitional difficulties that would further threaten and possibly ground the aviation system," the proposal says."

Now, Senator Hollings is being rather hypocritical, since he was the New Democrat's new democrat, and has never before made a fuss about, say, privatizing prisons -- which is at least as dangerous as privatizing "the FBI" (and the record of the FBI is such that I wouldn't hold it up as a shining example of a successful government organization). But the emotion, which had never before been injected into the issue, except by the Free Marketeers, is now present on the other side.
For the best article on the shabby state of airport security, see this New York magazine piece, by Robert Kolker.