"You can’t professionalize if you don’t federalize”

Tom Daschle, just preceding the unanimous vote to federalize and ultimately unionize private airport security, now know as the TSA

Before TSA was created, private contractors paid airport inspectors not much more than minimum wage. They weren’t very good. Now we spend five times as much, and they’re still not very good.

Today even the TSA knows that private security is better. In one of its own tests, its screeners in Los Angeles missed 75 percent of explosives planted by inspectors. In San Francisco, one of the few cities allowed to have privately managed security, screeners missed 20 percent.

In a reasonable world, the government would disband the TSA and move to a private competitive system.

But we live in a Big Government world.