Source: Bet On It
by Bryan Caplan
“Three months after 9/11, ‘Shoe Bomber’ Richard Reid tried to blow up an airplane with his footware. Soon afterwards, TSA started ‘recommending’ shoe removal during screenings, though as far as I recall the ‘recommendation’ was universally mandatory from the get-go. Since 2006, shoe removal has been required both de jure and de facto. Now, without a government apology — or even an official explanation — TSA is ending this innumerate security policy. … The average number of air travelers in the US over this period is about 700M per year, implying the destruction of roughly 15 billion minutes of time in the U.S. alone. That’s almost 30,000 years of life. If you figure the average American has about 30 more years to live, that’s 1000 lives destroyed. The cost? One lifetime in prison for Richard Reid. 1000:1. That dwarfs the immediate kill ratio of the 9/11 bombers, which was about 160:1.” (07/08/25)