Christians in Alabama and Georgia are stepping forward to defend undocumented immigrants against harsh new laws aimed against them. The new Alabama law—widely considered the nation’s most restrictive state law against illegal immigration—prohibits, among other provisions, providing transportation to illegal immigrants, requires schools to check the immigration status of students and report their findings to the state, and allows police to check the immigration status of anyone during a routine traffic stop or other interaction, and jail without bail those lacking proper documentation.

Leaders of the United Methodist Church, the Episcopal Church, the Lutheran Church and the Roman Catholic Church all have criticized the law as running counter to biblical teachings about caring for neighbors, helping visitors and showing hospitality to strangers.

Church leaders in Georgia actively opposed the recent passage of a similar law there, and a federal judge has blocked key provisions of the act.

In Birmingham, a crowd of 2,000 marched in protest against the law, and 100 United Methodist ministers signed an open letter to the governor criticizing the law.

Christians compare biblical instructions to welcome strangers and love others with the law’s restrictions against knowingly assisting undocumented immigrants by helping them secure a place to live, a job, health care other than for emergencies and even a ride to the store.

A first-hand witness of that harshest of restriction against the free movement of individuals, the Iron Curtain, Pope John Paul II wrote in his encyclical Laborem exercens, “Man has the right to leave his native land … in order to seek better conditions of life in another country.”

Well-meaning Americans tend to frame their objection to illegal immigration in terms of its illegality. What they either do not know or cannot comprehend is that it is “illegal” because of a change in law and quotas—the rules under which our own forebears immigrated no longer exist.

Americans’ demand for immigrant labor falls mostly into two distinct groups: unskilled labor: agricultural, etc.; and highly-skilled: primarily hi-tech skills this country fails to produce in sufficient numbers due to our abysmal education system. While the H-1B visa covering specialty occupations helps provide a legal supply of the latter, the annual quota for these high-skill-level visas has in recent years been completely filled on the first day they are made available each year.

For unskilled labor, there is no such visa quota available, meaning that the vast majority of those with nothing to offer but a willingness to work hard have no legal means available to them to do so in America.

As detailed in the Independent Institute’s Open Letter on Immigration, immigrants come to America for its promise of freedom and opportunity—attributes we used to celebrate. Immigrants as a group are if anything arguably more representative of the so-called American ethic than our native-born: religious, family-oriented, and desiring to improve the lot of themselves and especially their children. As Independent Institute Senior Fellow Ben Powell points out:

The post-1965 immigrant wave IS different than prior immigration waves. It is partly distorted by government policy that prevents Europeans and others from coming, but it’s also different, NOT because the immigrants are fundamentally different, but because OUR culture is different than before.

Before, immigrants assimilated into a culture of hard work and self-reliance. Those who failed here often had to go home. Few go home today because of failure. Instead, they are taught to assimilate into a system of government reliance where failure and laziness are not punished. The post-1965 immigration wave is the first that has come once we had a welfare state in place. Unfortunately, that welfare state not only makes them less productive, it also teaches them to undermine our old culture that made America successful.

It’s wonderful to see church leaders stand up for what’s morally right in a war against immigrants for whom legal entry is all but impossible. Instead of enacting laws that criminalize the desire for a better life, breaking up families and driving illegal immigrants into the black market where they are more likely to be victimized and exploited, concerned Americans should be fighting the real cause of the deterioration of our society and economy: government entitlement programs that disincent the formation of families, sap human dignity, and undermine self-reliance.

For further on this issue, Independent Institute Research Director Alex Tabarrok explores Economic and Moral Factors in Favor of Open Immigration in depth in this talk, and Senior Fellow Benjamin Powell provides his video response to the Top 3 Myths About Immigration, here.

Of capitalism’s condemned features, perhaps leftists complain most of all about the profits, seemingly growing without relent, accumulated in the hands of an established corporate elite. The rich get rich and the poor get poorer. Putting aside the second part of the last sentence, the concept of the rich getting richer is especially striking. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that this is a bad thing. It is still no small matter that those who are vastly rich today may be replaced tomorrow by those who are not so rich as of now. Indeed, this is a commonplace in capitalism, and in particular when it is unmolested by state interference.

Several years ago book stores like Borders were  the subject of leftist animus. How dare they crush the smaller competition. Little book stores of all sorts were being pushed aside as these gigantic buildings that featured all sorts of titles, new and old, were being introduced into the strip-mall landscape, town by town, neighborhood by neighborhood. Surely these corporate giants, undercutting the competition from mom and pop shops, would dominate the sector forever, having consolidated their share of the market and defeated the poor small stores forever.

But today Borders is on the verge of collapse. It seems the business model is losing out, especially to online sales at Amazon.com.

At this point a note is necessary. Was Borders’ success a free market phenomenon to begin with? My guess is that the answer is yes, but not purely so. Of course customers love the novelty of being able to buy all their books in once place. There is much enjoyment to be had in perusing a location like this. I have spent many hours at these stores, but my failure to buy much might have something to do with their ultimate failure.

I’ve been to a few economics conferences in Europe the past few months, and it has given me the opportunity to talk with some European economists about the Greek bailout.  I only talked with a few people, and they were all economists, so I wouldn’t generalize to say they are representative, but I did find them interesting.

One Greek I talked with felt that Greece was more or less trapped by circumstances beyond their control.  It would have been difficult for them not to join the Eurozone, but now as members, they are not in a position to devalue their currency to escape their liabilities.  They could exit the Eurozone (not a good option in his opinion), they could default on their debt obligations (also not a good option), or they could accept an EU bailout, that was coming with strings attached, and greater EU control over Greek fiscal policy (again not a good option, but preferable, in his opinion, to the other two).

I talked with several Germans.  One held an advisory position with the German government, and his view was that Germany had to participate in a bailout to prevent contagion, because a default in Greece would lead to downgrades and eventual defaults in other EU countries.  But every other German I talked with thought the bailout was a bad idea, and that the problem should be dealt with by Greece, not Germany or the EU.

Why was Germany involved, then?  The most common answer was “German guilt.”  The Germans still carry collective guilt over WW II, and if they didn’t intervene to support Greece, they would not be acting European.  Most Germans I talked with thought that the combination of German guilt and European unity forced Germany to step up, even though they are reluctant to do so.

I talked with a Portuguese economist who thought that the creation of the EU and the Eurozone essentially obligated the larger countries to step up and support the smaller ones.  If contagion from Greece’s problems led to a downgrade of Portugal’s debt, Portugal’s interest costs would rise, putting them in more of a financial bind, which would lead to their default.  His view was similar to the one German I talked with who was concerned about contagion.  His solution was to have the EU issue debt, rather than the individual countries, making everyone’s bonds as solid as Germany’s.

I noted that his solution would turn over some of Portugal’s sovereignty to the EU, and he viewed this as a good thing.  It would make Europe even more united.  He marveled at how Europe, which for centuries had fought so many destructive wars among themselves, were now more united in peace under the EU, and viewed it as a positive development if Europe became even more united, and if national sovereignty gave way to more of a United States of Europe.

I certainly can’t claim that these views of a few individuals are representative of their countries.  They are all academic economists, and I doubt economists’ views are representative anywhere.  But these different impressions are interesting: the Greek view that the country is a victim of circumstances beyond their control; the German view that because they are a part of greater Europe they have to support Greece, despite being reluctant to do so; and the Portuguese view that a sacrifice of national sovereignty for greater European unity is a good thing.

I did “joke” with some Germans (I put “joke” in quotation marks because I see some truth in it) that although they failed to take over Europe in WW II, now they are finally doing so through their control of EU fiscal policy within the European Union.  The Germans strenuously objected to that comment.  I took their objections to be another manifestation of that German guilt.

If there is any American principle I have taken for granted since I was a little boy, it is freedom of religion. And indeed, this is one area where the United States comes close to living up to its professed values. Most of the world has state-sanctioned religions and churches. In the United States, ever since the American Revolution and even before, the doctrines of religious liberty have animated the nation’s political ideals. Notably, Thomas Jefferson’s grave does not mention his presidency, yet it boasts the man’s involvement in securing the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom.

Yet something nasty has happened in this country, particularly since 9/11, and it became worse recently. I’m referring to a growing threat of intolerance against Muslims. We saw it in the controversy over the Cordoba House in downtown Manhattan—the so-called “Ground-Zero Mosque” debate. The Bush administration was careful rhetorically to oppose the demonization of Muslims, thus neutralizing the most vociferous religious bigots partisan to that presidency and holding their discontent beneath the surface. No longer restrained by the desire not to gainsay a president they favored for political reason, the peddlers of this ugliness have now been unleashed. Under Obama one can more easily claim to oppose the president and accuse him of being insufficiently anti-Muslim. And we see the hatred now in the musings of a presidential candidate being seriously touted by many conservatives as a potentially great alternative to Barack Obama, or other Republicans.

Herman Cain was asked to clarify his position on local prohibitions on mosques. He reiterates that communities have the right to enact such bans, out of concern that an increased Islamic presence will bring Sharia law into their neighborhoods. He has also confirmed he would be uncomfortable with Muslims in the cabinet.

This notion of his that American Islam represents an institutional threat to liberty is particularly dangerous, and its growing popularity should disturb us all. First of all, the notion that Islam itself is inherently legally prescriptive and its growth in the United States will bring with it a hijacking of the legal system is a misunderstanding. The fear of Sharia is also, in itself, misguided, as it does not always take on the medieval character often associated with it, any more than the common law is always bound by the punitive measures common in England in the Middle Ages. Sharia law looks different in every nation. Even if it somehow grew in the United States, it would not resemble what is seen in Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan. In fact, the existence of religious legal institutions is not in itself a threat to freedom, but can to the contrary be compatible with liberty, coexisting with a secular legal system so long as it is adhered to voluntarily and the principles of subsidiarity are respected.

Yet this is all beside the point, since Mosques are not the same as Sharia law in the first place. Any attempt at any level of government to ban places of worship of any kind are at least as much a threat to freedom and the American way of life, insofar as this is a noble, admirable thing, as is any plot concocted in the name of Islamist extremism. Such attempts run counter to property rights as well, and for that reason too should be adamantly resisted.

Religion is a deeply intimate and profound part of people’s lives, and freedom and toleration are absolutely fundamental to any free civilization. The reason the United States has done so well compared to the Old World in respect to its various religious factions—the reason religious peace characterizes America whereas religious sectarianism and strife plague much of the world—is that the American tradition is one of religious freedom, toleration, and separation of church and state. Efforts to prohibit the practice of Islam are not only counterproductive, pushing religious practices underground, radicalizing Muslims and leading to increased animosity; they are an evil in themselves. That a presidential candidate who so openly rejects the grand American heritage of religious liberty is so passionately favored by large portions of the electorate marks a very disturbing trend.

This past week the governor of California signed a law that requires the teaching of gay history in textbooks used in government schools. That’s bad, but not for the reasons so-called “conservative” groups imagine.

Government schools in California and Texas determine what is used in textbooks nationwide. The textbook boards in California lean toward fashionable “lifestyle liberalism” and Texas leans right toward “traditional values.” The result of this politicization of content? The killing of history as a subject that is alive with controversy and where the “good guys” and “bad guys” can’t be reduced to cartoon characters. This latest move is just the latest of Left and Right battering history in government schools until it is a tasteless pulp lacking any flavor, punch, passion or debate. Instead, it is a limp noodle of sympathetic characters and noncontroversial “bad guys” demanded by innumerable pressure groups.

The immediate reaction is to say “why shouldn’t they teach about homosexuals in history?” Indeed. Ever since I started teaching at The Ohio State University, I included a discussion of gays and lesbians in a lecture on the Long Sexual Revolution. But prescribing what I must teach and how I must teach it keeps me from saying things like “Alfred Kinsey’s reports shocked America with their high counts of extramarital sex and homosexuality [sounds good to us ‘moderns’] but, I note, Kinsey was a pervert even by our standards—he demanded his students swap wives, he circumcised himself to note any difference in sexual feeling, and he practiced erotic asphyxiation. Moreover, his ‘science’ was unrepresentative because he relied on prison populations and prostitutes—hardly a cross-section of America in the late 1940s and 1950s.”

You see, that complicated part would have to be reduced to something that was “teaching tolerance” (see above story) and “teach students to be more accepting of gays and lesbians.”

The first rule of Political Correctness (Left or Right) is to know what will make your “diverse” audience feel affirmed, accepted and so on. Try to teach yourself out of that box. And you can never be PC enough: I still recall a GLB (Gay Lesbian Bisexual) student activist complaining that I had noted gays made up 10% of the population (actually, Kinsey claimed they did) and I did not give them 10% of a survey on U.S. history! (Campus groups have created “10 Percent Societies” and even Facebook groups. Example; see this link)

But how did we get to the point of prescribing that gay history be taught (yes), the Holocaust (yes), Irish potato famine (yes), Creationism (maybe), etc. At least in the case of gay history, one might imagine that teachers know little about the subject and have to be forced to teach that part of history. Too bad college history majors now lack the teaching of legal, economic, constitutional and military history. History is the New Sociology: all social-cultural, all the time. This is only a slight exaggeration in terms of specialties—check the job ads or Directory of History Departments in the United States and Canada. You will find professors listed as specialists in those fields with the title emeritus after their name (retired)!

So, Texas textbook board can scrub extended discussion of evolution, California can have gays included. Any one familiar with the textbook market knows that those two states’ approval process determines what is included in the high school textbooks of major publishers. For a detailed account of how language and history get destroyed in the process, read Diane Rivatch’s The Language Police (2003). Yale Review of Books has this to say about Ravitch’s study of textbooks:

The chapters on literature and history, entitled “Literature: Forgetting the Tradition” and “History: The Endless Battle,” are the only ones besides the impassioned final pages in which we can find any hint of a solution. In a book about what children can’t and don’t read, the strongest sections are certainly those on what children should read. It is in departing from her catalogue of the sins of Christian fundamentalists, feminist language butchers, and timid publishers that Ravitch finds the voice to say exactly what curricula are missing and why this is a problem. The lack of any content whatsoever, real or imagined, bleeds children’s imagination, and destroys their ability to encounter anything beyond their direct realm of experience (momentarily ignoring the powerful inputs of popular media). Ironically, in trying to expose children to nothing but ideal conditions, educators have probably eliminated their ability to move toward that ideal by failing to develop the skills that allow them to encounter and understand “the other.”

Succinctly, [Ravitch] says, echoing Thucydides, “by expurgating literature, we teach [schoolchildren] that words are meaningless and fungible.”

There is no discussion of religion in the textbooks reviewed by Ravitch but sometimes the politically-approved groups use a church building as a civic center where nothing actually religious occurs! I wish I were making this up but the Language Police are always one step ahead of my non-transgender brain.

To students entering college (or not), History is just “one damn thing after another.” Nothing more and often much less. Funny how Hollywood see history as a “grab bag of good stories” to tell (think how many epics history has handed Hollywood) but students don’t even get that satisfaction K-12.

But why read when you can learn many of these lifestyle-embracing choices by simply watching this 2 minute “Museum of Tolerance” clip from South Park.

Disclosure: my campus, like most others, actually does have an annual “Tunnel of Oppression” like the one in South Park.  College certainly is a learning experience!

For more reading, see:

Richard Vedder, Can Teachers Own Their Own Schools? (2000)

James Tooley’s The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey into How the World’s Poorest People are Educating Themselves
(2010)—an inspiring account of how poor people are “doing it for themselves” by opting out of government schools that are mere “attendance centers.”

Laurence Vance, “Gerrit Smith: A Radical Nineteenth-Century Libertarian,” The Independent Review (2009): Smith was an abolitionist and nineteenth century liberal who warned that government schooling would teach to the lowest common denominator and destroy the soul of educating the mind and the spirit. He thought that religion was equally as important as the other content and character forming courses. However, history had shown that government could not be trusted with religion, and we know it can’t be trusted with just about any other subject. While education reformers dither with futile reforms, Smith urged abolition not just of slavery but of government schools. That’s a radical notion but one that some of us have actually practiced by opting out of The System.

[NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY: “Queer” is now a respectable term and “queer studies” is an academic discipline taught at many universities. Proponents “search for queer figures and trends in history that queer studies scholars view as having been ignored and excluded from the canon.” In other words, they have joined the many other groups seeking sympathetic representation in K-12 textbooks]

If we credit the reports coming to us from the mainstream news media–and I am certainly not suggesting that we should–the Democrats and the Republicans are locked in a fierce struggle over whether to increase the government’s statutory debt limit. The administration and its supporters in Congress insist that taxes be increased as part of the deal, whereas congressional Republicans insist that taxes not be increased and that substantial spending cuts be made to trim the future stream of budget deficits (i.e., additions to the federal debt). Negotiations have been tense, we are told; the president recently waxed petulant and stalked out of a meeting. Heavens!

Despite the seeming impossibility of resolving this conflict, an easy solution lies at hand, and as a public service, I feel compelled to divulge it, so that the entire matter may be resolved at once and the acrimony put, as they say, “behind us” as we march stoutly toward the Brave New World that awaits us.

First, however, permit me to digress for a moment. For the past thirty years, I have been writing about the undeniable fact that the federal government has grown into a grotesquely bloated monstrosity whose size, scope, and power greatly exceed not only the limits prescribed by the Constitution, but also the limits of what men, women, and children can long endure. If this description was true in 1981–and it manifestly was–it certainly is true in 2011. So, it clearly would effect nothing more than a common-sense, morally compelling, and highly productive step if the government were, say, to reduce itself to its dimensions as of thirty years ago. My personal preference would be to return the government to its size, scope, and power as of 1929, as a first step toward further downsizing, but I do not wish to appear overly doctrinaire, and I am certainly willing to be reasonable. I am aware that some of my fellow Americans oppose such a large cutback, and, fortunately for the sake of compromise, a more generally acceptable solution lies readily at hand.

According to the government’s own budget documents, the government expects to take in about $2.26 trillion (in dollars of 2005 purchasing power) in fiscal year 2012. So, to avoid the necessity of raising the debt limit–and hence the necessity of quarreling about the matter–the government need only reduce its expenditure to that amount. Such a reduction can scarcely be described as draconian, because an expenditure of this inflation-adjusted amount would bring the government back, not to the level of 1981, and certainly not to that of 1929, but only to that of the government’s average spending in fiscal years 2002 and 2003.

All but the youngest children will recall that during 2002 and 2003, we Americans were thriving: the economy was growing, interest rates were dirt cheap, and people with only a faint pulse could secure a mortgage that covered the entire amount paid for a new McMansion. Those were obviously, in retrospect, the Good Old Days. Who can possibly object to going back only a few years, especially when we recognize how fabulously everything was humming along at that time?

This solution does not please me, of course: I much prefer that the government be cut back to the 1929 level, as a first step toward its total dissolution and privatization, in the public interest. But, again, I am not going to act childish in a crisis. The government can resolve its present impasse simply by cutting spending back to the real level it had reached–however outrageous that level might actually have been–just eight or nine years ago. I cannot imagine a more generous and eminently feasible plan, so I am hopeful that everyone will recognize at once its incontestable promise for restoring peace among members of Congress, and hence among all of the other creatures living on this green and gorgeous planet.

Mario Vargas Llosa admired the Cuban Revolution well into his writing career, but for more than two decades the 2010 Nobel laureate author has been the most famous exponent of classical liberalism in the Spanish-speaking world. Why did he forsake the radical collectivism of Che and Marx and embrace individual liberty instead?

In his autobiographical works, Vargas Llosa describes his political migration away from the left as a result of gradual disenchantment with ideology and fanaticism. He also conveys this disillusionment in his greatest political novels, The War at the End of the World (1981) and The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (1984), explains Julio H. Cole (Francisco Marroquín University in Guatemala) in his article for the Summer 2011 issue of The Independent Review.

Both novels shed light on the nature of violent social movements in Latin America. The War at the End of the World is a fictionalized account of a real event—a peasant uprising in northeastern Brazil in the late 1800s led by a charismatic preacher—but it can also be read as “a rejection of a false dichotomy that has plagued Latin America throughout the twentieth century: revolutionary violence versus military repression,” Cole writes. “Neither of these courses of conduct, Vargas Llosa had come to believe, is the solution for Latin America’s problems.”

The other novel, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, also deals with a real insurrection. Cole argues that it portrays the leftist cliques of Peru in the late 1950s as clueless and makes the case that revolutionary violence had been disastrous for Latin America. Both novels reflect Vargas Llosa’s close study, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, of the writings of historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin and philosopher of science Karl Popper. Vargas Llosa, according to Cole, viewed their works as antidotes to dogmatism and fanaticism, the two great enemies of liberty.

Mario Vargas Llosa: An Intellectual Journey, by Julio H. Cole (The Independent Review, Summer 2011)

Subscribe to The Independent Review. Get two complimentary issues when you purchase your subscription online!

Event: A Gala for Liberty, with Mario Vargas Llosa, Lech Walesa, and Robert Higgs (San Francisco, California, 11/15/11)

[This post first appeared in the July 12, 2011, issue of The Lighthouse. To receive this weekly email newsletter of publication summaries and event announcements from the Independent Institute, enter your email address here.]

Welcome to the next chapter in our continuing coverage of Police State USA. In a JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) opinion piece, the authors argue for taking “super-obese” children from parents and putting them in foster care.

Having just researched the dark side of well-intentioned “Progressivism” (early 20th century), I find this chilling. Even more chilling that the author thinks there is no need for any further laws to enable doctors to give children to foster parents? True (and sadly), they don’t need new laws but there are competing laws emphasizing unity of parent-child even when Momma is on meth. So the kids go in-and-out of our benevolent state-run foster care system. This is the same Government that gave us Social Security—an agency that GIVES YOU MONEY for being “morbidly obese.” This is the straight-thinking State that is going to seize children from parents? God help us.

In the view of these Ivory Tower academics, The State sees something bad and swoops in to save the day. We normal human beings have been “Waiting for Superman” but Supermen already exist at the Harvard-affiliated Children’s Hospital and Harvard’s School of Public Health (the home of the JAMA authors)! Supermen and superwomen exist in DCFS agencies around the country. If only these angels ran the government, there would be no “super-obesity,” no anorexia, no bad behavior at all! Their strategy would eliminate “obesigenic environmental influences” (yes, “obesigenic” is jargon in their world).

Frivolous commentary on the US debt crisis (like this) attributes to opponents of raising the debt ceiling the view that “defaults don’t matter.” Sensible people recognize, of course, that default (and even repudiation) are policy options that have benefits and costs, just as continuing to borrow and increasing the debt have benefits and costs. Reasonable people can disagree about the relevant magnitudes, but comparative institutional analysis is obviously the way to go here. (Unfortunately, most of the academic discussion has focused entirely on the possible short-term costs of default, with almost no attention paid to the almost certain long-term costs of continued borrowing.)

I’m a bit surprised no one has brought up William English’s 1996 AER paper, “Understanding the Costs of Sovereign Default: American State Debts in the 1840’s,” which provides very interesting evidence on US state defaults. It’s not a natural experiment, exactly, but does a nice job exploring the variety of default and repudiation practices among states that were otherwise pretty similar. Here’s the meat:

Between 1841 and 1843 eight states and one territory defaulted on their obligations, and by the end of the decade four states and one territory had repudiated all or part of their debts. These debts are properly seen as sovereign debts both because the United States Constitution precludes suits against states to enforce the payment of debts, and because most of the state debts were held by residents of other states and other countries (primarily Britain). . . .

In spite of the inability of the foreign creditors to impose direct sanctions, most U.S. states repaid their debts. It appears that states repaid in order to maintain their access to international capital markets, much like in reputational models. The states that repaid were able to borrow more in the years leading up to the Civil War. while those that did not repay were, for the most part, unable to do so. States that defaulted temporarily were able to regain access to the credit market by settling their old debts. More surprisingly, two states that repudiated a part of their debt were able to regain access to capital markets after servicing the remainder of their debt for a time.

Amazingly, the earth did not crash into the sun, nor did the citizens of the delinquent states experience locusts, boils, or Nancy Grace. Bond yields of course rose in the repudiating, defaulting, and partially defaulting states, but not to “catastrophic” levels. There were complex restructuring deals and other transactions to try to mitigate harms.

A recent CNBC story on Europe cited “the realization that sovereign risk, and particularly developed market sovereign risk exists, because most developed world sovereign was basically treated as entirely risk free,” quoting a principal at BlackRock Investment Institute. “With hindsight, we can say . . . that they have never been risk free, it’s just that we have been living in a quiet time over the last 20 years.” Doesn’t sound like Apocalypse to me.

[Cross posted at Organizations and Markets]

Any day now I’m going to be accused of being a one-note blogger, but the TSA is just providing too much material to pass up. (Just for the record, I’m also known to post on Regime Uncertainty, education, the Census, and other issues.)

Case in point: the TSA’s own blog, where “Blogger Bob”—presumably the official internal apologist for the TSA—provides pronouncements on current TSA controversies that would be just plain hilarious if they weren’t coming from people who have the kind of power TSA wields. As Dave Barry used to say, I’m not making this up:

In response to reports on the stowaway who flew from JFK to LAX recently, Blogger Bob informs his fellow TSAers:

First, it’s important to point out that our approach is designed so we don’t depend on any single layer of security. Together, the 21 different layers provide a strong, formidable system that gives us the best chance to detect and prevent attacks before they occur. Every day we screen nearly 2 million passengers and utilize many layers of security to keep our nation’s transportation systems secure.

Further,

it’s important to note that this individual received the same thorough physical screening as other passengers, including being screened by advanced imaging technology (body scanner).

The one piece of information Blogger Bob does not convey is why TSA actually failed to prevent the Nigerian national from clearing security using an expired boarding pass in a name different from the ID he presented—not once, but twice. See Blogger Bob’s post, reassuringly titled “JFK – LAX Stowaway Was Screened By TSA,” here.