CAMPOS: TAKING THE RISK FOR LIBERTY

In the year since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks cigarettes, guns and
automobiles have killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, while
terrorists have killed none. If the logic of the war on terrorism were
extended to these other threats to homeland security, our government would
institute a totalitarian police state, that would attempt to seize all
cigarettes, guns and cars, and that would imprison anyone suspected of
smoking a cigarette, driving a car, or possessing a handgun.

Why do we tolerate the carnage inflicted by such things? The answer is
almost too obvious to state: Americans would rather incur the inevitable
costs of having some freedom to smoke, to drive and to bear arms than live
in the sort of totalitarian society that could come anywhere close to
eliminating those costs.

Naturally this doesn't mean we accept every risk created by an unlimited
freedom to drive, smoke and own guns. We try to stop 14-year-olds from
driving and smoking, we require waiting periods for purchasing handguns,
and so forth. An economist would say that, as a society, we accept that the
"optimal" number of annual deaths caused by cars or cigarettes or guns is
far above zero. The optimal number of deaths from X is whatever number
reflects the appropriate balance between limits on freedom that minimize
the damage done by X and that damage itself.

While it's obvious that Americans don't completely agree on just how many
deaths from cigarettes, cars and guns we ought to tolerate, almost everyone
agrees that any cure for the damage caused by these things that involved
attempting to eliminate cars or guns or cigarettes altogether would be far
worse than the disease. Why then is the war on terrorism being fought on
the assumption that the optimal number of American deaths from terrorism is
zero?

This is exactly the logic of the War on Drugs. In the 1980s, Congress
enacted a number of laws on the basis of an explicit commitment to make
America "a drug-free nation." That this was a certifiably insane goal has
not stopped us from putting a much larger proportion of our population in
prison than any other developed nation in the world. Nor has it stopped us
from wasting untold billions of dollars, in the course of pursuing the
lunatic strategy of eliminating drug use by making the continent of North
America inaccessible to drug smugglers.

The biggest irony of the war on terrorism is that it is precisely our
unwillingness to accept the inevitability of terrorism that gives
terrorists almost all the power we grant them. This doesn't mean that we
shouldn't take prudent measures to appropriately minimize the risks of
terrorism. But appropriately minimizing a risk is not the same thing as
minimizing that risk as much as possible.

Terrorists have power to the extent, and only to the extent, that we are
afraid of them. In the last year, we have tolerated serious incursions on
our civil liberties, on our right to privacy, and on our enjoyment of the
simplest pleasures (try taking a backpack into a ball game) because we are
terrified. And why are we so afraid? Even if it were true that taking a
less fanatical view of what "homeland security" requires would increase our
risk of being victims of terrorism to one-tenth the risk we run from cars
and cigarettes and guns (and practically speaking, it's unlikely that the
risk will ever be that high), shouldn't we take that risk, given the price
of not taking it? Isn't it better to take a slight risk of dying on one's
feet, if the alternative is the certainty of living on one's knees?