Costly Signals

An article from Weekly Standard on our silly airline "regulation."

The BEST explanation, as I claim on the second page of the story, is that this might be explained by the idea of "costly signals": If we are doing all this idiotic sh*t, just think of all the smart stuff that we did first. That is, we have pushed the margin way out into diminishing returns.

That's not true, of course. In fact, any guy who wants to set his shoes or underwear on fire can just walk on the plane, even if his dad calls the authorities and says don't let him on. Our solution has been to "interview after the flight."

I'm afraid the reason that TSA makes us so miserable is simply because it can