Whenever the state provides a product or service, it will always tend to provide more of it — need it or not, want it or not — as an excuse to increase spending. As I predicted in my upcoming book, The Truth About Liberty, once the state maxed out air travel security it would soon look to other modes of transportation. Sure enough, here comes Sen. Chuck Schumer demanding “better rail security.”
Naturally, the latest scare is based on “intelligence” seized during the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden just in time to distract US citizens from the terrible approval polls of the Obama government.
There’s never been a product or service that didn’t benefit from a competitive market. It we were really interested in security, we would privatize it. Competing security providers would give us the highest quality security for the best price.
But this is really about power and money. More security means more government jobs. More government jobs means more votes for the politicians and more taxes for us.
Whenever the state profits from any condition or activity, it will promote it. Because of welfare programs the state benefits from poverty, and so we have more poverty now than ever. Because it monopolizes criminal justice, the state profits from crime, and so we have the highest drug use and incarceration rates in history.
If the state profits from threats to our security, you can be sure it will never actually reduce them.