To recap, this is a three-year old girl getting the full TSA treatment at the airport. And mistermix is dead solid perfect when he says:
The oldest cliche in the pundit arsenal is to say “let’s do it like the Israelis do it”, and it is true that the Israelis do an excellent job with airport security. They use a combination of profiling and screening implemented by multiple layers of highly-trained security personnel to implement a high-quality, fast security process. That’s because they take it seriously. We don’t.
If we took airport security seriously, the Democrats wouldn’t have used it as an opportunity to hire an army of low-paid, soon-to-be-unionized federal employees who are more likely to vote Democratic. The Republicans wouldn’t use every terrorist scare as an opportunity for a big contract for some donor that makes screening equipment of dubious value.
If being an airport screener was something taken seriously by all sides in this country, it would be different. We would have professionals who wanted to protect America instead of rent-a-cop Blackwater thugs who enjoy power-tripping on little kids and harassing women in body scanners. Neither political party is willing to provide the money to employ actual professionals. Hard to get political favors that way. But Dems get the votes for the union jobs and Republicans get to own the contracting companies, so everyone's happy that counts.
Except, you know, anyone who has to fly a plane in this country. Ever.
And people wonder why America's filled with cynical assholes like me. This is why, incidentally, I have such strong inclination towards improvement of national rail travel, because it's difficult to plow a train into a skyscraper, enough so that they probably won't require body scanners for trains for a while longer yet.
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1 comment:
People are generally only interested in forming a union if their employment conditions and compensation suck donkey parts. Otherwise, why go through the hassle, just to have to pay dues.
If you're working a goverment job, it's practically guaranteed that you can't charge "consumers" directly for the service (since its either impractical to do so, or it needs to cover all, regardless of willingness to pay - such as the police and prisons). So goverment is going to have to compensate you somehow.
Therefore, if you work for the government (and you don't get to vote your own pay rises or need to be a millionaire to get the job), your salary is essentially determined by voters who would routinely vote to cut your pay regardless of your performance. And since every job is understaffed, the public feel happy to abuse you non-stop for the miserable experience they've essentially voted for - their services run by the lowest bidder.
It's no wonder that practically every government worker is in a union.
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