By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, December 11, 2023
One of the things that gets people all torqued up about
air travel is that it is one of the few places in American life where we are
forced to be open and honest about the one thing that everybody pursues and
nobody talks about: status. At the airport, there are aristocrats
and there are peons, and no doubt is left about who’s who.
Hence, the very carefully manicured outrage directed
at CLEAR,
the security-expediting service.
CLEAR has some fancy high-tech hoo-haw on the front
end—biometric scanners and whatnot—but what it really offers is an officially
sanctioned way to cut in line. CLEAR customers check in with an agent who then
escorts them to the front of the security line, where the usual TSA procedures
take over. Once TSA PreCheck really started to take off, the emergence of
services such as CLEAR was inevitable: In airports ranging from DCA to DFA to
LAX, there are so many TSA PreCheck flyers now that the PreCheck line is often
longer than the standard one. This is the opposite of a network effect: Whereas
things such as email and social media become more useful as more people sign up
for them, services such as CLEAR become marginally less valuable every time a
new client signs up. The ideal number of CLEAR users is the same as the ideal
number of passengers on an airplane: Whatever the number is that keeps
everybody else out of my way. If CLEAR gets popular enough, there will be some
kind of bigger, better, more expensive super-CLEAR for those who want to avoid
standing in line—and I’ll probably sign up for it, if I can afford it.
Flying is cheap, but flying in a way that is reasonably
comfortable and dignified—in a way in which you are treated like something
other than livestock—can get stupid expensive pretty quickly. DFW to Hong Kong
is a long, long flight, and you don’t want to do it in economy—but it’s about
$8,000 for business class and $25,000 for first. That’s not chump change—that’s
fightin’-over money.
Like every other upcharge in air travel, CLEAR is simply
a way to exchange money for a better experience. Air travelers already pay for
better seats, early boarding, food and drink, Wi-Fi, expedited handling of
checked baggage, and many other conveniences and comforts. TSA PreCheck is a
way of doing the same thing when it comes to the security line, and so is
CLEAR: If TSA PreCheck is economy-plus, then CLEAR is as close to first-class
as the security-screening process gets. Other than the nifty security screening
offered to Virgin’s first-class passengers at Heathrow (you pass through a
discreet little passageway into a private chamber that makes you feel like
James Bond), it’s the best option on offer. People standing in line will
sometimes scowl when a CLEAR customer swans past them, and a few will mutter
under their breath about liquidating the kulaks as a class, but the fact is
that CLEAR will sell a membership to anybody. And CLEAR isn’t a little club for
rich guys—the basic service is $189 a year (or effectively free with an
American Express platinum card, which is $695 a year), a relatively small
investment for people who travel a great deal. It is a heck of a lot less than
choosing business or first over economy on a single long flight.
Sure, there are some people who can’t afford $189 a year
to avoid the security line. Being poor is inconvenient, and always has been. I
remember those $79 Southwest flights between Austin and Amarillo. It is
tempting to write that you get what you pay for, but, very often where air
travel is concerned, you don’t: If there is an American airline (or an American
Airline) that can keep a schedule, I haven’t discovered it. I had a flight out
of Washington a couple of months ago delayed by six hours because American
Airlines couldn’t get a crew to the airport—like I was on one of those
“surprise!” flights that nobody can plan ahead for.
“A
profit-seeking entity has no place in a federally mandated process,”
thunders some Slate headline writer who has apparently never
been to an airport, without ever really bothering to explain why. Of course,
profit-seeking entities participate in all sorts of government processes,
including the most mandatory of all: The IRS routinely uses private collection
agencies to help collect unpaid taxes. Police, military, and intelligence
agencies rely on private-sector support ranging from contractors who drive
trucks to sophisticated services such as Palantir Technologies, Peter Thiel’s
spooky data-analysis outfit. Slate’s David Zipper complains that
CLEAR pays commissions to airports where it is allowed to operate, but these
payments are a way (one way among many) in which relatively well-off travelers
subsidize other flyers: Without CLEAR fees, that revenue would have to be made
up somehow, almost certainly through fees charged to all travelers or to
airlines that will pass these expenses along to customers—and probably not to
their favorite frequent flyers!—or to their employees, vendors, and other
business partners. There’s a pretty well-trod product-development path by which
high-income consumers end up subsidizing the consumption of lower-income
people, as things that begin as millionaires’ extravagances, once production at
scale is up and running, work their way down the price tiers to become ordinary
items of consumption, some of them regarded as necessities. There was a time
when people scoffed at air-conditioning in cars (and in houses) as a
practically Neronian extravagance. The same with electric lights—and, more to
the point, with air travel, the formerly exclusive character of which still
survives in the English expression “jet set,” two words that must sound very
funny indeed to somebody who has only flown Spirit.
The anti-CLEAR stuff is pure Kulturkampf, but
it is being gussied up as an issue of safety and efficiency.
CLEAR executives have been hauled into Congress because a
couple of would-be flyers managed to sneak past the velvet rope with false
identification. But CLEAR doesn’t do the actual security screening—that is done
by the esteemed ladies and gentlemen of the
TSA, who, when they are not
busy stealing from flyers’ carry-on bags, have
a failure rate of about 80 percent when their security protocols are
put to the test by undercover examiners. For CLEAR critics such as Democratic
Rep. Wiley Nickel of North Carolina, this is nothing but class war. “We’ve got
a real problem with wealth and income inequality in America,” he tells Slate.
“Airport security is an essential government function, funded by taxpayers. We
should level the field to let everyone travel as quickly as possible,
regardless of whether you have the extra money to push to the front of the
line.” Another way of saying that is: A hypothetical system that works halfway
decently would be better for everybody—hypothetically.
But it wasn’t CLEAR that made air travel in the United
States the ghastly mess it is—that was the TSA, the FAA, the local airport
authorities, Congress, state legislatures, and a host of other malefactors,
whose collective incompetence (and, at times, corruption) created the market
for CLEAR. Rep. Nickel and other critics get the direction of causality exactly
backward: You can’t fix the airports by getting rid of CLEAR—but, if you fixed
the airports, services such as CLEAR would be a lot less attractive, and might
not be viable at all.
But we’ll never find out, because Rep. Nickel and his
fellow geniuses in government are not going to fix the airports.
CLEAR is yet another enterprising private-sector firm
used as a whipping boy by progressives discomfited by the predictable systemic
failures of the public-sector model they want to force people to rely on for
everything from travel to health care. Rather than dealing with the real
problem, progressives would rather kneecap one of the companies that is trying
to make things a little bit better at the airport—and, amazingly enough, doing
so while turning a profit rather than operating as a bottomless pit for
subsidies.
Heaven forbid the TSA and the airport operators take the
opportunity to learn a thing or two from a company that has figured out how to
give travelers something they want at a price they are willing to pay.
I don’t expect that there will be a bespoke political
party set up to attend to the priorities of Kevin D. Williamson, but I have to
imagine that a lot of the non-obviously-hot-button issues that interest
me—traffic congestion in the cities, housing regulation, air travel, etc.—might
be of some interest to a fair number of voters and potential voters.
Economics for English Majors
With reference to the section above, the economics of
mass production is pretty interesting—and a very big part of how we have
managed to achieve a standard of living under which guys who work at 7-Eleven
have better shoes, food, and dental care than Renaissance princes typically
did.
A thing I learned in the daily newspaper business: It
costs something like $10,000 to print one copy of a newspaper. The 55,410th
copy, on the other hand, costs about 2 cents. (I haven’t worked in a
press-facing capacity in a while, so I am sure my numbers are out-of-date, but
you get the idea.) To print one copy, you’ve got to set up the press, make the
press plates, and do a lot of labor-intensive stuff (even with the marvels of
modern technology) to get things up and rolling. But, after that (assuming no
one runs in and yells, “Stop the presses!”), you don’t have to do very much, at
least as far as the press is concerned. Those of you who are print newspaper
readers may notice that there sometimes are little stars at the top of some of
your pages—these indicate that a page has been “remade,” i.e., that
something has been changed and a new plate put on the press. Every time a page
is changed (this was the custom, anyway) another star goes on, supposedly a
remnant of a time when a lot of press operators couldn’t actually read the
matter they were printing. Some newspapers still do multiple editions, meaning
a substantial overhaul of the newspaper from one printing to the next. In ye
olden days, a rushed-out first edition was known as the bulldog, as in, “Well, hooray for the bulldog.”
The evening Princess Diana was killed in that car crash, we stayed up remaking
the front page six or seven times, putting the last one to bed around 7 a.m.,
as I recall. In our digital era, there is a lot less reason to do that.
For some products, such as software or e-books or digital
music, the cost of production falls nearly to $0.00 after the first unit is
produced. For some more physically rooted products, there is a long drawdown of
a sort. When Tesla started making cars, the company basically started from
scratch (not entirely, but I’m simplifying), having to build whole new
factories, assembly lines, etc. When Ford comes out with a new car, it doesn’t
have all those same expenses, but it will have to acquire or reconfigure machinery
to make the new model, a long and expensive process which is one of the reasons
most “new” car models have so many parts and pieces in common with their
predecessors.
Even when advertised as “the all-new” Mustang or Buick
Enclave or whatever, it is rare for a car to be, in fact, all-new. From light
switches to engine parts, there are common components between car models
because of the same economics that describes the production of cars themselves:
Once somebody has figured out how to make a good windshield-wiper engine, there
isn’t any reason to invent a new one from scratch every time you come out with
a new model of Honda Civic.
Understanding the relationship between investments in
productive assets (including intangible assets) and the value of the things
produced are part of what we try to accomplish with the accounting concepts
of capitalization, amortization,
and depreciation.
If a company buys a case of Champagne for the Christmas party and drinks it,
that’s an expense; but if a company spends $100 million on a new
factory from which it expects to derive economic benefits for many years in the
future, that is a capitalized cost. Amortization and
depreciation help a company spread out expenses related to a productive asset
over time for accounting and tax purposes, so that the books don’t have to take
the hit for the upfront costs of a 20-year project all at once. This is
important because while it is a lot cheaper to manufacture the 1 millionth
widget than it was to manufacture the first—or, rather, because the per-unit
costs of the widget will tend to decrease as more of them are made—firms have
to be able to commit to making a whole lot of widgets without incurring
prohibitive initial expenses. People who scoff at the financialization of
the U.S. economy don’t really understand how things get made: You don’t get
those wrench-turning jobs without the guys on Wall Street and in the CFO’s
office doing their part.
Words About Words
Bespoke doesn’t mean nice, refined,
or expensive—it means made to specifications. Bespeak,
from the Old English besprecan (speak about or against,
complain) has had a variety of connotations over the years, some of them
near-opposites, as you might expect from the root: to request vs. to
oppose. Bespoke being used to refer to custom-made suits and
shoes dates back to at least the 19th century, and, from
that meaning, bespoke took on a more general sense of custom-made or special
ordered. Because bespoke clothes tend to be expensive and of good quality,
the word bespoke sometimes is used simply to mean that, e.g., this
guy explaining that a certain piece of photographic gear feels “very
bespoke.” Very bespoke is illiterate—as with the related word unique,
something either is bespoke or it isn’t—there is no middle ground.
Elsewhere
Check out my video series, “How the World Works,” here. Recent guests
include Klon Kitchen, George Weigel, Bryan Caplan, and, coming soon, some
cranky guy named Jonah. “How the World Works,” a project I’m doing in my
capacity as a writer-(occasionally)-in-residence at the Competitive Enterprise
Institute, is, broadly speaking, about jobs and working. If you have somebody
with an interesting job who might like to sit for an interview in Washington
and talk about what he or she does all day, hook us up.
Oh, Is That What He’s Doing?
Breaking news:
Putin to Seek Another Term as
Russian President, State News Agencies Say: The announcement was long expected
after Russia’s Constitution was amended in 2020, effectively allowing Vladimir
Putin to stay in power until 2036.
In the same way that we should avoid using the euphemisms
of totalitarians and murderers—“ethnic cleansing,” etc.—we should not pretend
that Vladimir Putin is just a workaday politician seeking another term in
office, like he’s Dwight Eisenhower in 1956.
In Closing
Here is a
real headline from our time: “Tomato lost in space by history-making
astronaut has been found.” As stupid as our politics can be, don’t let anybody
tell you that we do not live in an age of wonders.
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