The United Airlines CEO was another in a long list of business executives who have had to appear before a congressional committee of mostly lawyers who have never run anything. The inquisition is always the same: Executives have to prostrate themselves before the arrogant, self-righteous inquisitors as they accept full blame for whatever went wrong, apologize profusely, and vow that it will never happen again.

It is telling that the reverse never happens. Members of Congress who have done far, far worse are not hauled before a committee of citizens to explain their actions and apologize for the far greater harm they have done.

In the United case, a passenger was dragged down the aisle of an airplane, primarily because in the aftermath of the 9/11 fevers, airline goons and airport storm troopers had been given the authority to manhandle passengers.

In the case of Congress, tens of thousands of soldiers have been killed or maimed in needless wars sanctioned by Congress, an equally high number of civilians are serving time in prison because of the war on citizens known as the War on Drugs, millions of people lost their homes and the economy almost tanked due to profoundly stupid congressional housing policies, Congress eventually will renege on its promises to tens of millions of Americans regarding Social Security and Medicare due to robbing the trust funds, future generations will be stuck with not only these unpaid bills but also with the gigantic national debt and with crushing tuition debt resulting from Congress showering colleges with free money, much of the industrial heartland has been devastated by economic policies that only lawyers in Congress could hatch, and Chicago and other cities have become killing zones due to decades of destructive social and economic policies concocted in Congress.

Going back further in history, Congress looked the other way when blacks were purposely infected with syphilis in grossly immoral medical experiments, when experiments were done on soldiers to see the effects of Sarin gas and LSD, when soldiers and civilians suffered radiation poisoning in the careless development of nuclear weapons, and when, starting about 70 years ago, the government began destroying a consumer market in medical care/insurance.

Members of Congress were not hauled before a congressional committee on any of this—or better yet, were not hauled before a tribunal of the people. Instead, statues have been erected in their honor, public buildings and highways have been named in their honor, and to this day, the masses cheer and swoon in their presence. Then after the responsible parties retire from Congress with rich pensions, they get even more lucre by joining lobbying firms or by being on corporate boards. And the very same scoundrels who have wreaked havoc on the country are sought out by media ignoramuses to give their opinion on problems facing the country.

What accounts for the glaring double standard of executives and ordinary citizens being treated one way and Congress being treated another way? The propaganda ministry of public education.

By definition, public education is part of the government. As such, it is statist, bureaucratic, inefficient, unaccountable, captured by rapacious interest groups, increasingly centralized in Washington, and very careful not to bite the political hands that feed it. But it excels at one thing: at programming citizens so that their brains automatically block normal questions about government from forming.

A normal question would be why members of Congress never lose their seats when a flight is overbooked. If this question were asked, the answer would be that they are treated like privileged plutocrat by the airlines they regulate.

Americans won’t be truly free until they see a corrupt and incompetent member of Congress being dragged down an airplane aisle by airline goons and thrown out a cabin door at 35,000 feet.