by Matt Barr

Your papers.

This seems like a great way to make a point. (Setting aside whether it's a good point.)

A Keene Libertarian who tried to board a flight carrying nothing but a Bible and a copy of the Declaration of Independence was arrested yesterday at Manchester Airport.

Russell Kanning, 35, was arrested after refusing to comply with security screening procedures and refusing to leave the screening area, according to the Rockingham County sheriff's department. He was charged with criminal trespassing and was being held at the Rockingham County jail.

Kanning's wife, Kat Dillon, said her husband has refused to have his bail posted and will remain in jail until his arraignment tomorrow. She said sheriff's deputies were very kind in handling the incident.

"He went in with his Bible and his declaration, and when he refused to be patted down and all that, the sheriffs led him off and arrested him," she said in a phone interview yesterday afternoon.

Kanning, an accountant and staunch Libertarian, said last week he hoped his actions would highlight what he considers overly burdensome state intrusion.

Rarely missing an opportunity to call pie-in-the-sky libertarians clowns, the Q and O'ers beg to differ.

[Y]ou don't have a "right" to transportation. Transportation is provided privately and when you buy a ticket on an aircraft, for instance, you agree to the conditions of that sale, one of them being the requirement to show some form of identification and, if necessary, be searched in your person for weapons and contraband. If you buy a ticket knowing the conditions of sale and then refuse to comply with those conditions, the transportation company has every right to refuse you service.

Now if you don't want to do such things, well, drive. No one requires you to fly. And you can drive with all the "dignity" you can muster. No one will ask you for identification (unless you're caught breaking a traffic law), no one will search you.

Secondly, although you declare it, no one knows if you're the "peaceful" person you say you are. Identifying yourself helps make that determination, at least as it pertains to air travel.

Lastly, its a bit of overreaching to say the government is intruding when you made the choice to fly knowing full well what that involves. Sure we'd all like to have it return to the good old days, but 19 highjackes killed the good old days as well of thousands of Americans. Until it can be determined to be safe again, this is an inconvenience all of us must endure when we travel by air....

The bottom line is this is a poor battle to pick for this sort of demonstration. While I admire his spirit, I question his judgement. Whenever there is a choice, there is no coercion (he could have driven to his destination or chosen another means of transportation).

Whenever the requirements are known well before the choice, there is no coercion if one willingly transacts the business. It would be like refusing to pay sales tax in a retail environment. He may desire not to pay taxes, but he's not going to get the product if he does so, and should he try to take it, he'd be arrested for theft. He simply chose to force his desires, and desires aren't principles.

Its another in a long line of examples of self-declared libertarians shooting themselves in the foot. Pick your battles, pick them wisely and, as we saw in the '60s, other Americans will join the fight.

No, you don't have a right to transportation, but I don't think that was the point. Kanning's wife, in a phone interview, threw away the line, "We want people to think about it: Do you want to give up all your rights and live in a police state?" which McQ siezes on. It's a non sequitur.

That said, it's a strange tack for a liberty-lover, which McQ genuinely is, to take: If you don't like laws requiring you to submit to search, identify yourself, take your shoes off, be patted down... don't fly. As pro-market as I am, I still wouldn't make that argument. If the airlines themselves set identification and search policy, not the TSA, the most successful airlines would probably have more rigorous searches. The fact is, it's not the business setting the terms of its service.

And anyway, if I don't want the FBI reading my e-mail, I can use the phone, and if I don't want the police searching my home, I can live somewhere else... none of those work. Why does "so don't fly"?

The point about identification helping prove you're "peaceful" fails on two levels. No one meaning any harm is going to fail to identify themselves as a "peaceful" person upon boarding an airplane. The idea that showing your papers helps rat out the terrorists is as silly as arguing the old question "did you pack your own bags?" ever caught anyone with a bomb.

The shot about civil disobedience also seems misplaced. "Civil disobedience is fine if you're willing to pay the consequences of such action, that is, going to jail." Isn't that preceisely what Kanning is doing? Why tut-tut him as though he isn't sitting in jail right now? In an update to the post, McQ acknowledges Kanning was trying to get arrested. So why the shot about taking your medicine if you want to engage in civil disobedience?

In short, I'm not sure I see "pick your battles" as the moral of this story. Russell Kanning is not Rosa Parks, and the goal of flying without removing your shoes isn't like desegregation -- to say the least -- but I think the same argument could have been made about blacks in the south sitting at segregated lunch counters and hotel lobbies in 1961.

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