I am frequently stopped on the street and asked for directions. In my volunteer stints I quickly establish an easy rapport with the diverse people with whom I come in contact. I get warm returning smiles in shops and restaurants. In short: most people apparently view me as non-threatening. It has thus been surprising to learn that in the eyes of the TSA I am viewed as but a common criminal, and may be treated accordingly, with impunity and without recourse.

My adult stepson and I traveled together last week to the Midwest. As we made our way through security at the Oakland airport, I was directed towards one of the new, “enhanced” screening machines. Being aware of the health concerns these untested machines have raised—especially given my having undergone medical X-rays earlier in the week—I refused. As the TSA agents held me in waiting for the “female assist,” for the “pat-down,” I advised them that they might, in the interest of their own health and safety, want to investigate the dangers of working near the machines.

My stepson had preceded me through security through the regular screening machine, and as I was ordered to “assume the position,” took out his camera phone to record the proceedings. A TSA Officer told him to stop, and when my stepson asked on what authority, was told that it is against TSA “procedures.” I advised my stepson to not argue with the agent and he quit recording. Meanwhile, from the moment I was stopped to go through the enhanced screening machine, throughout the “pat-down,” and as we left the area, I carried on an extremely loud, running verbal protest against the proceedings as invasive and unconstitutional, attracting the attention of other passengers in the area—most of whom looked uncomfortably away.

Once “cleared,” my stepson and I went to the boarding area, then boarded our flight and settled down in our seats near the rear of the plane. Ten minutes prior to take-off, a blue-uniformed TSA Supervisor, accompanied by two men wearing brown uniforms (21st-century Brownshirts?), and a man in a plain suit came down the aisle and told my stepson he had to go with them. I explained that he had simply been trying to provide loving support as I resisted being treated as a criminal, and outlined the urgency of our trip. The plain-suited official told the TSA Supervisor that all they needed was name and flight information, so I handed him our boarding passes, bearing both. The TSA Supervisor officiously insisted we had to leave the plane with him. With take-off time growing ever closer, we accompanied the four agents to the jetway, where a large, second plain-suited man and an airport/airline employee who looked like a baggage handler also waited. Both left as I launched into a protest of the proceedings.

The four men who had boarded the plane encircled us on the jetway just outside the plane. The plain-suited official reiterated that all they needed was name and flight information—which they had in hand—but the TSA Supervisor insisted he needed our drivers licenses. As he recorded our information from these on his clipboarded form, I recorded the names of the officials present from their ID badges: the blue-uniformed TSA Supervisor Darrel Robinson and plain-clothed Supervisory Transportation Security Officer Michael Simmons.

After Supervisor Robinson had returned our drivers licenses, I asked if we were free to reboard, to which he gruffly replied “In a minute.” After a few more moments, we were “released,” and reboarded the plane without further ado. As I later learned, this constitutes being under arrest, and I guess time will tell to what extent I now have a “record,” since I was advised of nothing, provided no information as to why we had been summarily ordered off of our flight, or to what use our identification information was going to be made.

Yet the entire incident made absolutely no sense: following our having cleared security, my stepson and I had spent at least 25 minutes in the waiting area of the small Oakland airport, on a day with few passengers travelling, and thus could have been easily approached well before we boarded the flight. We had already been cleared—even through their enhanced security techniques—and had thus established, by their own standards, our innocence and the safety of the other passengers. We had violated no laws: TSA’s own website says:

TSA does not prohibit the public, passengers or press from photographing, videotaping or filming at security checkpoints, as long as the screening process is not interfered with or slowed down.

My stepson was sitting, 6 feet away from where my person was being violated during the “pat-down,” and turned off his cell camera when told to by a male TSA agent not involved in the procedure—if this slowed down their process it was by their discomfort with having their actions recorded, not our interference.

Yet this uniformed contingent chose to board the plane after all of the flight’s passengers had been seated, to make an extremely public show of escorting us from the plane, enacting proceedings heretofore understood to be those reserved for suspected criminals, in front a captive audience.

What other possible purpose, then, than a very deliberate, public show of force making it clear to all witnessing the spectacle that those who will not submit quietly will be made examples of?

But such bullying is not the least unpredictable. Investing petty clerks with arbitrary and unchecked powers always leads to their visiting ever-increasing humiliations and violence on the politically impotent. As this past 10 years of escalating “homeland security” well confirms, thuggery not resisted grows ever more bold. Tunisia’s recent uprising may have been sparked by a young man who set fire to himself after being harassed by a low-level government official, as Egypt’s was by three policemen killing a young man posting evidence of their petty corruption on YouTube, but the fuel for each had been built up over decades of tyrannies small and great. The only question here is how far down the road we blessed with a heritage of security in our own persons and property will quietly submit before turning on “our” Brownshirts and saying “No. Go.”

We were told that because of the extremely deep recession — which according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, ended in June 2009 — the federal government needed to take extraordinary measures to stabilize the economy, including running massive budget deficits.  So, because the recession will be more than two years in the past when next year’s federal budget year starts in October 2011, you would think that the president’s proposed deficit would be substantially lower than last year’s $1.4 trillion deficit.  But, you would be wrong.

President Obama has unveiled his proposed $3.73 trillion budget, which includes a $1.65 trillion deficit, so his proposed deficit for the upcoming year is 18% larger than the current deficit, and more than 10% of GDP.  We’ve seen Greece do it, so now we will try to do it ourselves!

The president’s budget does forecast smaller deficits beyond 2012, but how realistic is that?  His health care plan doesn’t start spending until 2012, so that will add to the deficit, and with the Federal Reserve keeping interest rates at historic lows, interest on the debt will start ballooning when interest rates inevitably rise.

On the one hand, it would seem almost obvious that if we manage our federal budget the way Greece has managed theirs, we will end up in the same situation.  Is there any reason to state the obvious?  On the other hand, when our president proposed this budget, he defending it by saying, “”We can’t sacrifice our future.”  It appears to me that if we pass anything resembling this budget, that is exactly what we would be doing.

With President Obama’s new proposal for a massive, new federal plan for $53 billion in pork subsidies for high-speed rail, Independent Institute Research Fellow Gabriel Roth recently participated in a forum on public transit sponsored by the Mobility Choice Coalition. At the event, Bill Lind, director of the Center for Public Transportation affiliated with American Conservative magazine, pushed for government subsidies for rail transportation. But as reported by DC.STREETSBLOG.org, “Lind met his match in the form of Gabe Roth, a conservative transportation economist from the Independent Institute.”

“We love train travel but not the costs,” Roth said. The cheapest Amtrak fare from Washington, D.C. to New York that he could find on a given day was $76 one way; $139 for a higher-speed Acela. But there are multiple bus companies competing to give you a seat for under $20 – and without a public subsidy.

Part of the problem, Roth contends, is that there’s not enough competition in rail. Railroads don’t carry competing rail companies’ trains, whereas highways don’t pick favorites among bus carriers.

But more importantly, Roth said, rail requires its own dedicated right of way and can’t be packed as full as a freeway. “A high-speed train requires miles of empty track in front of it because a steel wheel on a steel rail cannot stop quickly,” he said. “But you can have buses every 10 seconds on the road and you would not think that road is over-crowded.”

Even Lind acknowledges that “high-speed rail is killing us.” It’s “icing without a cake,” he said. “What we need is a much denser network of intercity buses and passenger trains so you can go from anywhere in America to anywhere else in America without flying, without driving, where the buses feed the trains.”

“Buses have to be more than just a feeder network to a rail vision that’s 20 to 50 years and hundreds of billions of dollars away,” said Hoff of the ABA.

Anne Canby of the Surface Transportation Policy Partnership took some of the heatedness out of the debate with these words of wisdom: “There are very different markets. I have a grandchild who takes the bus wherever she goes. I take the train.”

Both/and, not either/or. Now, people, was that so hard?

Mr. Roth is editor of the Independent Institute’s award-winning book, Street Smart: Competition, Entrepreneurship, and the Future of Roads.

Hard on the heels of his speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in which he jawboned the owners of private businesses to increase hiring in return for federal tax breaks and other subsidies, President Obama has included in his budget request for fiscal year 2012 a proposal to make a $8 billion down payment on a six-year, $53 billion taxpayer-financed “investment” in high-speed rail.

The president’s budget proposal is a bad idea for at least two reasons. First and foremost, the public sector has little or no incentive to spend the taxpayers’ money in ways that maximize the ratio of benefits to costs. What is more important, no public transit system in the country, with the possible exception of New York City’s subway, generates passenger revenues sufficient to cover operating costs, let alone capital costs. All others gush red ink year after year.

Passenger fares on public transit modes typically are set at rates below full cost in order to maximize ridership and to “prove” that transportation via bus or rail is a worthy public service.

It may be reasonable to assume that high-speed rail transportation in the Northeast corridor, linking Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, New York and Boston, could pay its own way, but that conclusion depends on the relative cost of rail versus air and automobile travel among those same cities.

The social benefits of publicly financed transit options seem to have been accepted broadly, although no hard-nosed economic analysis supports it. Should we be surprised that President Obama, who has time and time again demonstrated his ignorance of the principles of economics, thinks spending tens of billions of the taxpayer’s dollars on a pie-in-the-sky rail system will allow America to “grab the future”? Meanwhile, our highways and bridges are crumbling….

Whenever a writer composes anything more elaborate than a grocery list and allows it to be published, even on the Web, he bears a certain resemblance to Christopher Columbus in the navigator’s voyage of 1492. Which is to say, he knows where he wants to go, but he is not sure that the course he follows will take him there. Moreover, when he does reach land, it may not be the India he sought, but a miserable Caribbean island whose inhabitants are not especially pleased by his arrival.

To consider the most recent such voyage of mine, we must go back about three years. At that time, the Independent Institute had just begun to publish at its website a group blog called The Beacon, which was (and still is) overseen by my colleague Anthony Gregory. I have never had a personal blog; nor have I wanted one – my attitude was, and should have remained, that nobody had an interest in my rants, so I might well spend my time more productively or enjoyably in alternative employments. However, Anthony prevailed on me to join the group at The Beacon, and eventually I did so, although I warned him that I probably would not contribute much.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the State of Michigan will soon make practicing massage without a license a felony.

In the age of Yelp, why the explosion of state licensure? After all, if a masseuse is no good, word will soon get around, and it’s difficult to comprehend, in any event, just how much harm an unlicensed masseur could inflict—outside of harm covered by existing law—that would justify jail time.

Economists and others have for years been exposing the fallacy of licensing professions. In his dissertation—later published as Income from Independent Professional Practice—Milton Friedman analyzed the correlation between “purposeful interference” with ease of entry into professions and the rise of incomes within those professions. In our book, American Health Care, Shirley Svorny showed that removing licensure requirements for health-care providers would lessen the medical labor shortage without sacrificing the quality of service. In asking “Does Physician Licensing Serve a Useful Purpose?” she also points out that:

Access to information and incentive to act on it create a strong force in the market, increasing private monitoring efforts.

President Obama, in his current cry to review regulations, would thus do far more for access to health care by eliminating medical licensing than ObamaCare would ever achieve.

The pro-establishment, neocon line on the tremendous revolutionary events in Egypt has essentially been as follows:

“Sure, Mubarak might be a brutal strongman, but he ensures stability. This is why the U.S. government has favored him—as a lesser of evils. Those trying to oust him from power have employed violence, and many in Egypt are fearful that they will lose everything to any major political upset. Those seeking to displace Mubarak’s rule do not have liberty in mind, but Islamist radicalism or even chaotic anarchy. They oppose the dictatorship because it is secular. And with him gone, will the Egyptian people actually enjoy liberty? Or will we see the rise of Muslim extremists in the flavor of Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979.”

Oddly enough, the arguments offered above applied many times over against the neocons’ pet project of the last decade: The Iraq war.

Saddam Hussein was indeed a brutal strongman who was favored by the US government for decades for being the lesser evil. The many factions fighting on the side of the US government against Saddam’s regime included domestic socialists and Muslim radicals who saw Saddam as a secular apostate ruler. The war against Saddam’s government also employed violence—but rather than mostly coming from the disenfranchised public and largely directed against those in power, the violence of the Iraq war involved the dropping of millions of pounds of explosives all over neighborhoods populated by everyday denizens of the country. Hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis have died in America’s war. And what replaced Saddam’s regime? Not liberty, but the rise of Muslim extremists exactly in the flavor of Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979. Yet through it all, partisans of George W. Bush’s foreign policy, and not a few left-liberal warmongers to boot, have echoed the same line: But isn’t the world better off without Saddam Hussein?

Yet they do not speak the same language regarding Mubarak. Won’t the world be better off with him out of power? And if his ouster comes internally from the populace, rather than externally from the largest military in the world, isn’t that a bit more in the spirit of the American Revolution, which nearly everyone on the right side of the spectrum, and the pro-war side of the debate, idealizes? Do we really think the “collateral damage” in Egypt will rise to the level it did in Iraq? Will whatever replaces Mubarak be any worse than what has replaced Saddam Hussein?

The main difference between the two dictators? One was a U.S. client up until 1990, when the U.S. turned on him. The other was a U.S. client, defended by U.S. politicians, even a week into the revolutionary zeal that overswept his subjects and threatened the stability of his reign. A lot of the loudest American voices calling for blood in 2003 promised that after Shock and Awe, revolutions would follow all throughout the Muslim world. Now that one is happening, they side with the dictator.

President Obama spoke to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce today (February 7), to try to encourage the CEOs of American businesses to do their share to reinvigorate the economy by investing, hiring, and matching what his administration has done through its various stimulus programs.  In part, the president said, “As we work with you to make America a better place to do business, ask yourselves what you can do for America. Ask yourselves what you can do to hire American workers, to support the American economy, and to invest in this nation.”

The bottom line (and, I mean that literally in this case) is that businesses are not charities.  They need to make profits to survive.  If they see an opportunity to invest that they expect to lead to profit, they will take it without any presidential prodding.  If they see an opportunity to hire more workers that they expect to lead to profit, they will take it without any presidential prodding.

Investing, and hiring, are not sacrifices.  They are risks businesses take in the pursuit of profits.  If the risk pays off, businesses benefit.  If not, businesses lose, and if they lose too many times, they go out of business, like GM and Chrysler.  (Whoops, those may not be good examples.)

Right now, many businesses are playing it safe, and understandably so, because of the regime uncertainty that the Obama administration has introduced into the economy, something my fellow blogger Robert Higgs has consistently emphasized.  President Obama does not seem to understand that investment and hiring mean taking on risk, and prudent CEOs weigh that risk against any potential return.

Increase the risk, or lower the return, and businesses will invest less and hire less.

The president’s call for CEOs to “ask yourselves what you can do for America” does not end there.  He goes on to say that under his administration, CEOs should not expect any investment and job creation to result in “greater profits and bonuses for those at the top.”

He’s telling CEOs they should take risks with their businesses for the good of their country, but that they should not expect any personal benefit if the risks they take pay off.  This strikes me as a message he would be better off not delivering.  He is saying to CEOs, you take a chance, with your business and your career, for the benefit of “the middle class,” but I will make sure you — the CEOs who take these risks — will not benefit yourselves.

The president says he wants to cooperate with the private sector to help the economy.  Is this the message he should be sending to those whose cooperation he is seeking?

My friend Angel Martín has alerted me to a disturbing affair in Spain, which involves a small religious group known as the Congregación del Olivo. More than six years ago, the Spanish legal authorities and police undertook to treat this peaceful group as if it were a terrorist conspiracy or similarly dangerous band, charging it with various crimes. The group categorically denies every charge made against its members. The media have reported on this affair in a completely one-sided way, not even bothering to solicit the views of the accused persons and repeating the claims lodged against them without confirming the truth of these accusations.

Martín, who has followed this story for some time, is seeking to bring greater public scrutiny to the matter, which on its face appears to involve oppressive state action against inoffensive people who have violated no one’s rights and who seek only to live in peace according to their religious convictions. The group has recently established a website, although at present the site has little content and not all of the materials posted there have been translated into English. The website is available at http://www.congregaciondelolivo.com/en/persecucion_sec_8.html .

If the authorities have acted as heavy-handedly as they appear to have acted, then it would serve the cause of justice if publicity were brought to bear on their actions and efforts were made to ensure that the Congregación del Olivo receives the just treatment to which all persons are entitled.

There is no Social Security trust fund, but it is a useful fiction.  For decades taxpayers have paid in more in Social Security payroll taxes than the program has paid out, and the excess payroll tax revenues have gone to pay for other federal expenditures.  The Treasury has issued bonds — IOUs — to its Social Security program, but those IOUs are just a claim one office of the federal government has against another.  The federal government has no assets to repay those IOUs.  You can’t create an asset by saying you owe yourself money.  The trust fund is a fiction.

It has been a useful fiction, however, because people talk about the program being in trouble because once the trust fund is exhausted the program will be broke.  The trust fund fiction causes people to think about ways to get the program’s costs under control in a way that does not exist for any other federal government program.

The trust fund is completely irrelevant to paying for Social Security.  Either Social Security taxes exceed payments, in which case those taxes pay for other federal programs, or payments exceed taxes, in which case money has to be diverted from income tax collections and bond sales to fund Social Security payments.  How much is in the trust fund has nothing to do with federal taxes, expenditures, or the budget in any way.

As long as the fiction of the trust fund survives, policy makers will look for ways to get the program’s costs under control, so that Social Security does not go broke.  That’s good, and it would be nice if there were similar fictions pushing to control costs for other government programs.

But sooner or later, the fact that the trust fund is a fiction that has never existed in reality will be brought into the debate.  Talk of needing to fix Social Security or the program will go broke will end, and Social Security will just become another claim on the Treasury.

I am quite confident that once the trust fund balance falls below zero, general revenues will continue to flow into the program to pay Social Security recipients, and the trust fund will just show a larger and large negative balance.  How much in revenues will be diverted to Social Security will depend on how much reform will take place before the fiction of the trust fund is exposed.

Exposing the fiction of the trust fund will naturally bring into the debate the fairness of Social Security payroll taxes.  Now, they are regressive, starting with the first dollar of income, but capped so that high-income people pay a smaller percentage of their incomes in payroll taxes than lower-income people.  This looks fair if it appears that those taxes are going into a trust fund to pay future benefits.  But when one realizes they are just another source of tax revenue for the Treasury, and there is no trust fund, payroll taxes are subject to the same fairness debates that now characterize income taxes.

The trust fund is like the emperor who has no clothes, and I am surprised that the fictional trust fund has not already become a part of the debate on financing Social Security.  Once it does, the nature of the debate on Social Security will change from reforming it so it does not go broke to deciding how much the nation’s working population should chip in to support its retirees.