At airports in the United States, there are two very different kinds of experiences.
There’s yours: shoes off, laptop out, liquids in a tiny bag. You stand packed in line, inching forward, standing spread-eagle in the freedom microwave, hoping you don’t get flagged and groped for reasons no one explains.
And then there’s theirs.
Members of Congress don’t wait in those lines. They get to move through a separate system entirely. A truly “red carpet” experience.
It may seem like a small thing on the surface, but it reveals something much bigger.
Members of Congress are supposed to be public servants; they’re the people who work for you. Yet in practice, they’re treated more like celebrities than employees. They’re prioritized, protected, and given special privileges that insulate them from the very systems they create.
The TSA is one of the clearest examples of how that plays out.
It was created in the aftermath of 9/11, under enormous pressure to act.
(Somebody should do something!! There should be a law!!)
Sigh.
9/11 wasn’t even the kind of failure the TSA was designed to fix. It’s not like the hijackers bypassed advanced scanners or exploited some sophisticated screening gap. Of course that didn’t matter to fedgov.
The people demanded “safety”, and what is the government if not always willing to enlarge itself in a time of crisis?
What followed was a sweeping expansion of federal control over air travel (and by extension, our daily lives.)
Okay, so we traded some freedom for security. But we’re safer now, right?
They certainly want you to think that all the expense and inconvenience has kept us safe, but it turns out that’s just not true.
Internal tests have repeatedly shown that TSA agents miss the vast majority of weapons smuggled through checkpoints—sometimes failing up to 80–95% of the time. And after more than twenty years of operation, there isn’t a single clear, documented case of the TSA itself stopping a terrorist attack.
Not one.
I’m old enough to remember life before the TSA, when airport security looked very different. Before 9/11, security was handled by airlines who hired (usually local) contractors. That meant that each airport managed security using different companies, with different approaches. Companies actually competed to get (and keep!) the job, and if they failed, they didn’t get to keep their contract.
After 9/11, that system was replaced with a centralized federal monopoly.
One agency, one set of rules, and zero competition. Which of course translates to no meaningful accountability, and a terrible customer experience. Over time, it became something else entirely: not just a security system, but a permanent fixture of control, expense, and political leverage.
And of course, the petty tyrants who built this system don’t have to live in it the same way you do.
They move around it instead of through it. They’re quite literally shielded from the consequences of their own policies. And that means that they never feel the friction, the inefficiency, or the absurdity of what they’ve created. When the people making decisions bear no consequence for the decisions they make, then you have a very bad system.
Who pays the price when they get it wrong? You do. What can you do about it? Well, they’ll tell you to vote harder—but come on… It’s pretty obvious by now that, except a very select few, they are actually all on the same team, and that’s the team of more power and more control and their opponent is you and me.
In The Tuttle Twins and the Fate of the Future, Ethan and Emily learn about persuasion and coercion. They’re challenged to imagine what the world could look like if governments had to compete for our business—where we select our services based on who provides the things we need and want, and where those in elected positions actually answer to the people.
Imagine a world where politicians were treated exactly like what they are supposed to be: employees that serve the public. No special lines, special perks, and no special privileges. Just the same systems, the same rules, and the same experience as everyone else.
When power stops coming with status and perks, it stops attracting people who are chasing those things. Strip away the celebrity treatment, and the job becomes what it was always meant to be: service.
And the kind of person willing to take that job, under those conditions, looks very different from the kind of person drawn to it today.
See, systems don’t just produce outcomes, they attract people. And when a system creates status, it inevitably fills with people who want status. But when it demands service, it attracts people willing to serve.
This week, Delta Airlines announced that they would no longer be giving members of Congress the perks and privileges that they’ve previously enjoyed. They said they just can’t justify the extra cost when the system is under so much stress right now, and maybe that’s true, but I like to think that someone at Delta has decided that now is a really great time to give the political class a taste of their own medicine.
And I love to see it.
Imagine if more companies stopped rolling out the red carpet for people in power. No priority treatment, no special access, no privileges the public never sees—just the same experience everyone else gets.
The TSA is an easy place to see all of this in one frame because it’s a massive system built on the promise of providing something valuable but not operating effectively, delivering a terrible customer experience, and equally terrible results, all while the people responsible for it are living in a totally different reality.
Of course this isn’t really about airports. This is how centralized power always works.
And once you start to see it, you realize how often we confuse authority with effectiveness and status with merit.
That’s why the way we teach our kids to think about authority matters so much.
The public education system was designed to create a population of rule-followers and permission-seekers. By design, free-thinking and question asking was something to be squashed, rather than encouraged.
Thankfully, parents are fighting back by taking control of the narrative. They’re teaching their kids to question official narratives—to question the way things appear and instead find out what they actually are. To look beyond what is presented as truth and find out what is actually true.
We’ve built an entire library of resources to help parents like you do this important work, and starting today, we’re offering 20% off all of our best-selling bundles with code EASTER. If you’ve been waiting for the right time to start teaching these important lessons at home—this is it!
What parents like you are teaching their kids is that the world is full of systems that look important, and sound important, but that don’t actually hold up under scrutiny.
The TSA is just one of the easier ones to see, but I bet if you sat down with your family tonight at dinner, you could identify dozens more.
I’d love to hear what you come up with!
— Connor
