Consider the massive waste on display here. Money was spent on all of these stolen items, and money was spent to pay goons to steal it. This picture was taken by an employee who was on the clock. And the same happens at every airport in the US, every week. The one concept of sinful behavior which the nuns successfully planted in my unconscious brain is that wasting resources, especially resources which could’ve been used to help the needy, is a serious sin; many of my generation joke about the phrase we heard so often, “There are children starving in {some famine-stricken country} who would be glad to eat that!”, but the amount of waste any individual person can achieve recedes into utter insignificance beside the scale of pointless, stupid waste perpetrated by government, especially the US government, as the volume of a toilet bowl compares to that of the solar system. My reaction to a picture like this is like that of a prohibitionist seeing a porn pic, only without the hypocritical secret masturbation and demands for more government violence against peaceful citizens; I find it shocking, appalling, disgusting, and an argument for minimizing the size and power of government in and of itself.
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The Sin of Waste
October 10, 2022 by Maggie McNeill
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Well said.
As you realize, the issue bigger than the cost and waste of all those items is the utter stupidity it represents and the illusion that collecting someone’s water bottle is somehow making us safer, when the real gaps in our security are so big one could drive a water truck, not a water bottle, through them.
We have this tendency in this country to go after symptoms or the obvious, which targets the vast majority of people and keeps them under the heavy hand of government while root issues or realities go unaddressed. If anyone thinks government is there to help them, I have a boatload of water bottles to sell them.
The big problem with the TSA is not what it steals, whether the stuff gets wasted or not. The problem is that they are engaged in useless security theater — and they know it — for the real purpose of conditioning the public to accept outrageous restrictions on our liberty. Remember it when they start herding us off to camps to be forced to undergo deadly “vaccination” or some new outrage. They will keep expanding their impositions until we push back hard enough to make them stop. You cannot comply your way out of tyranny.
Another example of A) The inherently totalitarian and invasive nature of Stop-and-Frisk, and B) the Slippery Slope often isn’t a fallacy. (For those who defend the former, are you familiar with, “No Search or Seizure Without A Warrant?”)