When I served in Congress, I was regularly lectured about how the people needed big government to keep them safe and secure, whether through welfare and regulations to ensure their economic security, the Patriot Act to protect their personal security, or forever wars to protect global security. Of course, the government’s track record regarding providing economic, personal, and global security proves that Ben Franklin was right, and my fellow representatives were wrong, about the dangers of trading liberty for security.
The best example of this is the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). The TSA is very good at treating law-abiding airline passengers as criminal suspects—but not so good at catching real threats to passenger safety. According to the polling company YouGov, “Homeland Security conducted an investigation in 2015 which found that undercover investigators were able to successfully smuggle mock explosives and banned weapons through TSA checkpoints in 95% of trials.” Responsibility for passenger security should be given to airlines that have an incentive to provide effective security that does not violate their passengers’ privacy and dignity. Private security companies would compete for the airlines’ business. These private companies would prove far more effective at providing safety than a federal bureaucracy like the TSA.
This is because the TSA, like all government bureaucracies, is immune from market competition and, thus, market discipline. This means they have no incentive to improve their operations. In fact, while failures to stop future attacks would cause a private security company to lose business, government services often increase their budgets when they fail, whilst federal employees and agency heads are rarely held accountable for their mistakes. The TSA’s monopoly on airline security also prevents the development of innovative ways to ensure safety.
While the TSA does not appear to be going anywhere anytime soon, my son, US Senator from Kentucky Rand Paul, recently helped to protect free markets with another national security matter—the National Public Warning System and Emergency Alert System, which are used to provide emergency alerts. He did this by drastically improving a bill known as the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act.
Police groups, attorneys general, and other public safety leaders have stated that AM radio is currently the only communications signal with enough reliability during storms and other emergencies to power the National Public Warning System and Emergency Alert System. Fair enough. During Hurricane Harvey, many of my fellow Texans had no other way of accessing this system as their cellphones and Internet remained out for days. But the problem with the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act in its 2023–2024 form was that, with no sunset provision, it would have frozen today’s AM-reliant system in place, disincentivizing private companies from ever developing newer, innovative ways to deliver emergency alerts over new technologies in the future effectively.
Rand blocked the bill in 2023. As he often does, Rand took a principled stand for liberty. Now, Rand’s efforts have paid off. To prevent the bill from being blocked again, longtime supporters of the legislation added a sunset provision to the AM radio bill when they recently reintroduced the legislation for consideration this year. The sunset provision incentivizes entrepreneurs to develop new ways to ensure all Americans can access emergency alerts.
The sunset provision makes it a vast improvement over the prior legislation. It’s evidence that even Congress can be convinced to better respect classical liberal principles occasionally, and that’s great news all around.
Ron Paul, the chairman of Campaign for Liberty, is a former congressman from Texas.
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