Public security

The False Trade-Off Between Security and Liberty

One dramatic example makes the point: Between 1996 and 1997, U.S. Vice President Al Gore chaired a commission on improving aviation safety. Among the recommendations: harden cockpit doors. That advice went unheeded. Airlines complained about its cost, and Congress declined to adopt it.

What if Congress had accepted the recommendation? Hardened cockpits would have made impossible the 9/11 attacks in the form they took. If so, instead of being grateful to the Gore commission, we today might well mock hardened cockpit doors as a classic example of government waste—of looking in the wrong directions for threats that never came. The better security works, the less we appreciate the need for it. The more effectively we are protected against harm, the less gratitude we feel to our protectors.