Now that is a much more salient argument, and I'm going to venture out on the limb and say that that was the real point of the OP's post, not the argument about how many people die in car accidents or the value of lives. Rather, the TSA has spent a fortune on Risk Avoidance rather than Risk Management. We certainly could cut the risk of auto accidents by lowering the speed limit to 10 mph, but society has decided that the amount of lives saved is insufficient to offset the lost convenience. Yet we allow the goons in DHS to spend all of this money on terrorism because it is a much more shocking event that gets lots of good press coverage. Auto accidents? Been there, done that, seems to be the attitude.

Mike

According to the book, most road deaths involve sober drivers who are not speeding.

Although there are no perfect answers, I think that the money should go toward building safer roads and maintaining the roads we currently have. There isn't enough money to maintain our roads and therefore keep them safe.

But we're dealing with a failure in American politics and public health. Public and political interest--and therefore money--is being diverted to the items of greatest emotional interest, not the areas of greatest risk.

If I could, I'd slash the TSA into a much smaller, much simpler, much cheaper organization. Then I'd protect the safety of the "homeland" by building safer roads, ending tobacco addiction, and preventing the spread of HIV. But that just seems way to rational for Washington.

We regret to inform you that rational thought and ideas that aren't based on scaring the crap out of people aren't welcome here. But if you throw in some funds for "tasering people who talk on the cell phone while driving," I'll allow you to stay.

Mike

Plus you forgot to ask him why he hates America.

In an excellent paper by Ohio State political science professor John Mueller, "The Quixotic Quest for Invulnerability: Assessing the Costs, Benefits, and Probabilities of Protecting the Homeland," there are some common sense premises and policy implications.

The premises:

"1. The number of potential terrorist targets is essentially infinite.

"2. The probability that any individual target will be attacked is essentially zero.

"3. If one potential target happens to enjoy a degree of protection, the agile terrorist usually can readily move on to another one.

"4. Most targets are 'vulnerable' in that it is not very difficult to damage them, but invulnerable in that they can be rebuilt in fairly short order and at tolerable expense.

"5. It is essentially impossible to make a very wide variety of potential terrorist targets invulnerable except by completely closing them down."

The policy implications:

"1. Any protective policy should be compared to a "null case": do nothing, and use the money saved to rebuild and to compensate any victims.

"2. Abandon any effort to imagine a terrorist target list.

"3. Consider negative effects of protection measures: not only direct cost, but inconvenience, enhancement of fear, negative economic impacts, reduction of liberties.

"4. Consider the opportunity costs, the tradeoffs, of protection measures."


http://psweb.sbs.ohio-state.edu/facu...er/ISA2008.pdf

I also just finished the book, and it is very interesting and provocative. Vanderbilt says the term 'accident' is inaccurate; we have a system in which crashes (his word) are inevitable.

We are willing to spend money and give up rights to counter terrorism, but are unwilling to spend money or give up rights or change our habits to save thousands of lives (in the U.S.) each and every month.

If you're for ending AIDS, you must be for controlling the behavior of present and potential victims....in most cases, it's a behavorial disease.

What's the difference between telling a guy he "must" wear a condom to prevent AIDS or "can't" us IV drugs (which we already have outlawed) vs. telling a guy he can't bring a switchblade on a plane? Not much really.

Difference is, you can ensure compliance with one becuase you can monitor the guy bringing a switchblade on a plane and you can't monitor what the guy does in the bedroom.

And don't give me the "education" re:AIDS because everybody with an IQ over 40 knows how AIDS is spread - in the vast majority of cases they simply choose to ignore it and spread the disease anyway. Think about it - everybody "knows" how babies are made, but that doesn't change the alarming rate of unwed/unplanned pregnancies in the country today.

/soapbox

It's a great paper. It's been discussed heavily on here and posted on the blog as well.

Cargojon,
I was thinking of a vaccine.
But I understand your arguments.

I thought Mike already explained that sensible reasoning isn't welcome here -- in fact, the TSA should start screening passengers for logic, as no one but a terrorist would bring logic to an airport.

I'm certain that some knowledgeable FTer will advise on this: Have not some PDs gone from classifying "accidents" as "crashes" because of the above? IOW, there are no official vehicle "accidents", only "crashes."

You can monitor roads to see where the local accident blackspots are and improve them - on a road I used to live close to, there were a few very notorious points, usually close to junctions, which, because funding couldn't be found, they could not be made safe. (The only way to improve one was to turn an open junction into a bridge and flyover situation. The other likely would have needed to have the junction entirely realigned.) So the council had to accept that a few people would die at each of those points ever few years, until they could scrape together the funding.

Now, imagine being able to start throwing some serious money at road design and maintenance. Improve the driver training systems (getting a licence sounds suspiciously easy compared to what I went through). Bring in a comprehensive roadworthiness tests for vehicles to reduce the likelihood of critical failures causing accidents.

The fact that accident rates all over the world are variable and not fixed shows that it is entirely possible to reduce accident rates. It's not surprise that in Europe, Scandinavia has some of the lowest accident rates, since their driving standards are some of the highest in Europe and they have extremely good roads.