FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED OCT. 10, 1999 THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz Let's launch an 'all-armed, all-smoking' airline A number of readers wrote in response to my column of Oct. 3, about bored functionaries "randomly" rooting through my laundry and personal effects even after my bags have cleared our now-standard metal detectors and X-ray machines. Many noted that private airlines have a right of private contract, which should allow them to set any such requirements they please, since we passengers always have the right to patronize another airline. I'm familiar with the argument for freedom of voluntary contract. In this case, it's purest steer manure. Suppose I raised $100 million and proposed to start AirGanja, "America's only all-armed, all-smoking airline"? I'd beef up my on-board air conditioning so I could advertise that our air quality is better than our competitors' even if the passengers on either side of you choose to chain-smoke cigars. My "flight attendants" would hand out free marijuana in First Class once airborne, and politely offer each boarding passenger a metal magazine (or revolver speed-loader) full or any caliber ammo they choose, urging them to reload their weapons for the duration of the flight with my special color-coded frangible rounds, designed to blow the head off any hijacker without penetrating our pressure cabins. (Needless to say, "controlled" drugs could not be used until we're airborne, at which point we're out of the jurisdiction of any local prohibitionist deviants -- the precedent already having been set by the fact that no airline today will refuse to sell you a cocktail while they're passing over the dry counties of Texas or Tennessee.) Of course, I'd charge a 15 percent premium for these improved services. Either I'd grow rich -- forcing my competitors to start offering some of the same options and services -- or, if my idea proved unpopular with the paying public, I'd go bankrupt. That would be a free market in air travel, and you would indeed remain free to choose a "non-smoking, no guns," strip-search airline (if that somehow makes you feel safer) instead of mine. Chance the FAA would allow me to launch such a competing service? Pinch yourself; you're dreaming. If such suggestions now sound absurd, it's only because we've forgotten what it was like to live in a free country. The average train passenger in 1912 could easily have found herself seated opposite a fellow passenger armed with a loaded revolver (concealed or otherwise), smoking an Indian hemp cigarette, and carrying a hip flask of laudanum. In fact, your great-grandmother would probably have felt somewhat more secure under such circumstances, knowing this fellow American was prepared to resist any attempted train robbery, as well as to provide a sip of cough syrup should the baby (your grandfather) grow fretful. The fact that we find it unthinkable today that an airline might be allowed any such options only means we have grown used to living under a burgeoning variety of fascism, an economic system in which private corporations are allowed to keep private title to their properties and extract certain after-tax profits (providing they don't grow large enough to attract the attention of the "Anti-Trust Division"), but where all substantive decisions about routes, "security," and so forth are actually made on a "one-size-fits-all" basis by unelected government functionaries. To argue any part of the current scenario is a true "voluntary, free contract" between passenger and airline is like saying the Todt Organization's slave laborers in various cannon works in Nazi Germany had no right to blame the government for their plight, since they'd entered into a "voluntary contract" with their employer. ("Volunteer for this labor contract, or go to the death camps. Choose quickly.") "Voluntary contract," indeed. I'm free "to not use their service" -- and try to find a passenger train with regular service from Colorado Springs to Las Vegas? And how long do you think we'll be free from having our luggage searched and being require to show our "government-issued photo ID" on the trains and highways? Whoops. "Random highway checkpoint" stops are already part of the War on Drugs, aren't they? And reporter P.L. Wyckoff of The Newark (N.J.) Star-Ledger reported this week: "They haven't attracted the attention that drug searches on the New Jersey Turnpike and other highways have. But charges of racial profiling are being leveled on another busy battlefield in the drug war -- the nation's trains and train stations. "Larry Bland, a black Bethesda, Md., resident, says he had just walked off a train in Richmond, Va., in July when police told him they needed to search his bag because drugs were coming through the station and he 'fit the profile.' "Carlos A. Hernandez, a former Newark, N.J., policeman, believes he was singled out for a tense drug search of his Amtrak sleeper cabin coming back from Miami that same month simply because his name is Hispanic. ... "Civil libertarians and attorneys say that, whatever the truth for Bland and Hernandez, such cases are widespread. ... 'That is really just a sliver of what's going on out there,' said David Harris, a University of Toledo law professor who prepared a national report for the American Civil Liberties Union on racial profiling on the highways. "Train searches 'have been going on for a long time,' agrees Georgetown law professor David Cole. ..." Vin Suprynowicz, assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, is author of the new new book, "Send in the Waco Killers," available at 1-800-244-2224 or via web site http://www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html. ************************************************************************** Subscribe to Freematt's Alerts: Pro-Individual Rights Issues Send a blank message to: freematt@coil.com with the words subscribe FA on the subject line. List is private and moderated (7-30 messages per week) Matthew Gaylor, (614) 313-5722 ICQ: 106212065 Archived at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fa/ **************************************************************************