When I served in Congress, I was regularly lectured about how the people needed big government to keep them safe and secure, whether it was 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 when it comes to 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 who 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 get their budgets increased when they fail, whilst the 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.