Lew, thanks for posting the article “When the Trucks Stop Delivering…” on LRC’s home-page. Given how essential trucking is, it’s no wonder Leviathan seeks to control every aspect of it.
One of the beast’s most egregious intrusions comes from the TSA and its disastrous TWIC [Transportation Worker Identification Credential. Wow, that may set a new record in Jargon! Four nouns in a row, all modifying one another!]. In essence, TWIC compelled truckers who deliver “sensitive” cargo to such “secure areas” as ports to obtain a special license from the TSA. I won’t belabor the obvious philosophical problems with this, such as the lack of any threat to ports, except from the governments that run them, or the tyranny in requiring any license, let alone yet another one on top of a plain old driver’s as well as a commercial driver’s.
Instead, let’s focus on the TSA’s spectacular logistical failures: 1) very few offices dispensed the licenses; truckers who already spend lots of time behind the wheel were frequently driving hundreds of extra miles to comply with this nonsense (where’s the EPA when we need ’em?); 2) there were lots of “false positives,” i.e., the TSA denied the license to truckers with no criminal record, effectively depriving these folks of their livelihoods; 3) truckers (or their employers) had to pay $135 per license. Think about the impact on a guy in business for himself; 4) that expenditure was a complete waste: the machines that were supposed to read these licenses and open the gates at ports don’t work.
Were Our Rulers as benevolent as they want us to think, they would keep their greedy, inept paws off trucking. Instead, the TSA is the enemy not just of aviation’s passengers but of all transportation–including that necessary for our survival.
11:50 am on July 13, 2015
