Individual Mandates in Health Insurance

See this weekend's SLTrib for some thoughts on individual mandates in Health Insurance.

Airport Security

So there's a lot of new concern about airport security after the recent incident on the Amsterdam/Detroit flight Christmas Eve.

Here's what I don't get about airport security --- Why aren't we using the good ol' fashioned profit motive to try to improve things?

I'm not a "privatize all government services" kind of guy (as many readers know), but airport security seems to me to be something that's extremely privatizable (if that's a word).

Here's my quick and easy plan for fixing our nation's airports without forcing travelers to arrive four hours early for their flights.

1. Auction the right to perform airport security checks to private firms.

2. Make the payments to these private firms a function of how effectively they prevent prohibited materials from getting inside our airports.

3. And how do we measure whether they're doing a good job? Have the government employ a staff of auditors. And what do the auditors do? They try to smuggle stuff into airports. That's right... government agents with liquids zipped into their underwear trying to get through security checkpoints. Every time the private firm stops a government agent... Boom $10,000, straight to bottom line.

I see a few problems with this system --- specifically, some ratchet effect issues once the security firms get really good at detecting liquids in somebody's shorts, and also some potential issues with getting the security agents to actually be nice to people. But in the meantime , don't you think that having money-motivated security agents would make our air travel safer?

Thoughts?