Rather than establishing a giant bureaucracy with the authority to impose a one-size-fits-all protocol for security on all airports, the government could merely require that airlines pay the full costs of another 9/11-type disaster. The government wouldn’t have to oversee the methods that airlines implement to weed out terrorist threats. On the contrary, the government would simply verify that the airlines had the ability to pay huge damages in the wake of an unlikely but catastrophic security breach.

Robert P. Murphy