who among us suspect-looking brown kids hasn’t been yanked aside for a full-cavity seach at the airport? no? not you?? but i always get…

hmmm.

anyway, after annie jacobsen’s bullshit article in Women’s Wall Street, airline security has been on a lot of people’s minds (and some of them weren’t even bloggers).

how DO you balance a genuine need for vigilance with respect for people’s dignity? how else do we solve ANY problem in this country? why, throw money at it!

this article from Steven E. Landsburg for Slate provides the details:

“Being detained and questioned is a burden; it’s inconvenient and it’s demeaning. But there’s no reason that burden has to be borne entirely by the detainees. To spread the burden, all the airlines have to do is give each detainee a $100 bill for his trouble. If Northwest had had a policy like that on Annie Jacobsen’s flight, it would have paid out $1,400 to the 14 Syrians. Assuming there were another 200 passengers on that board, they could have covered that cost with a $7 hike in ticket prices.”