Thursday, December 6, 2012

How Much TSA Abuse Is Enough? (Part 2)

Chris Rossini has an important post up today on the TSA, here.

Be sure to view the Adam Kokesh video at the post to get a sense for people's views on the TSA. In seeming frustration, Chris asks, "How much TSA abuse is enough?"

The sad answer is probably a lot.

For the Henry Hazlitt Lecture that I will be delivering in March at the Mises Institute Austrian Economics Research Conference 2013, I am conducting research on the collapse of the Soviet Union. I am stunned at the amount of abuse Soviet citizens tolerated. They seemingly held an attitude not much different than that of those tolerating TSA abuse.

Writes Vladimir Shlapentokh, former Senior Fellow, the Institute of Sociology, Moscow:
...most Russians were dissatisfied with several aspects of their lives, such as shortages of goods (and in particular the lack of meat and fish, as well as fruits and vegetables), the unending lines, as well as the low quality of consumer goods...Many Russians hated the local authorities and blamed them for several of the deficiencies in their lives. However, they rarely assessed the whole system based on concrete negative facts. The dual mentality mentioned above permitted the Soviet people (as it does in any society) to combine seemingly opposite views on 'reality.'...The coping mechanism isolates people from facts which can be unsettling to them. This is how most Russians continued to stick to official images of life in the USSR despite the flow of information from the West.
The view only changed when  the elitist lives of Soviet leaders became clear to the Soviet people  and sudden changes occurred in the Soviet economy which caused people to re-asses their situation.

1 comment:

  1. Government creep begins in small incremental steps. For the US, it began with Washington leading troops against whiskey distillers for refusing to pay taxes on whiskey. Then we had the Alien & Sedition Act, which was much like the so-call Patriot Act. The constitution is basically useless.
    For me, the end of individual liberty really escalated with the 16th amendment where the government was able to tell workers what portion of their earnings they were allowed to keep.

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