Glenn Reynolds’ recent book gets a bad review over at Government Executive (what a shock…).

He cites the actions of the passengers on Flight 93 on Sept. 11, who used cell phones to find out what had happened at the World Trade Center and improvised their own heroic form of resistance to the terrorists on their plane within 109 minutes. “Against bureaucracies,” he concludes, “terrorists had the advantage. Against civilians, they did not.”

In those limited circumstances, that might be true — although one would assume a planeload of bureaucrats, under the same conditions, would have made the same decision as the civilians on Flight 93.

That’s amusing, and irrelevant. Because they wouldn’t be acting as bureaucrats in that situation–they’d be acting as passengers on an airplane, just as the…ummmm…passengers on an airplane acted.

It’s useful to note that when people criticize big government (at this website, the target is often NASA), it’s not (necessarily) criticism of the people who work for the big government. People, good people, respond to the situation in which they find themselves, and they also respond to the incentives inherent in that system. I’ve noted in the past that many NASA employees, once freed from their bondage from the agency, will say “how could I have made that decision?” As if awakening from a strange, and frightening dream. (I should add, with respect to the link, that I get a certain amount of gratification from the knowledge that the number one link for “emergent stupidity” on the search engines seems to be mine…)

So people on the plane, regardless of what they do at their day jobs, are going to do what people on the plane will do. It’s not about the people–it’s about the system in which they operate (something that I’m not sure that Mike Griffin, the new NASA administrator, understands…)

So his point in fact has no point.

I also find it interesting, and revealing, that he made the error of mistaking Glenn’s employer. While (based on some recent commenters here) leftists (I refuse any more to dignify their beliefs with the term “liberals,” which rightly belongs to classical ones) or “progressives” (another term I hate–it’s kind of like Bolsheviks, in that it begs the question) hate the south, of which Tennessee is definitely a part, they seem to reserve special scorn and vitriol for Texas (perhaps because Bushitler and Halliburton come from there). If his eyes were impinged by the word “Tennessee” and he saw the other “T” word, that says something about his outlook, to me. But perhaps there’s a more innocent explanation.